Your neighbors annoy you? Be glad you don’t live on the Street of the Bombardiers.
Well, she doesn’t do EVERYTHING. But Santa Barbara carries quite the sanctified payload, meaning no disrespect. I first made her acquaintance because she is patron saint and protector, among many other things, of the Italian Navy, and I have enjoyed the regata organized in her honor over the past 20-some years. As noted here and here. Now I discover she’s everywhere, even up to and including your hospital bed.
A quick review of her responsibilities, apart from the Navy, which would be a full-time job for most people/saints, reveals the special attention she gives to: Miners, firefighters, tunnelers, artillerymen, armorers, fireworks manufacturers, chemical engineers, prisoners (see: tunnelers?), and protection from lightning. Although they do not celebrate her special day, she is also the patron saint of the US Navy and Marine Corps Aviation Ordnancemen. As I summarize it in my own mind, protection against anything that goes boom. Hence lightning.
But these very specific dangers don’t stop with mere explosives. Barbara also offers protection from sudden death. Diseases that strike and escalate suddenly and are “intense to the point of lethality” are called fulminant (in Venetian, matches are called fulminanti, just to maintain the theme of flame). And while a number of diseases can appear in fulminant form, the worst for Venice was the plague.
Which brings me to the street of the bombardiers. If you turn down this short, narrow and dark street you will find not one, but two tablets carved in relief honoring Santa Barbara. I have not yet discovered if this street is so named because it was the site of their scuola — I can only hope it wasn’t the site of their storeroom. But where I went for bombs I discovered pestilence.
Morning is the only time you can make sense of this small masterpiece on what is a very gloomy street. We can discern a few of her typical symbols (three-windowed tower, where her cruel father imprisoned her for her faith; the palm frond indicating her martyrdom, beheaded by the aforementioned cruel father; the arrow representing lightning, as in the lightning that struck her cruel father dead). But the date above it surprised me: 1575, the year of one of Venice’s two worst plagues, the one that inspired the construction of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca. Between 1575 and 1576 some 46,000 people died, almost 30 percent of the entire population.Barbara earned a second tablet just a few steps further on down the street. No date on this one, so perhaps it was intended as a salute to the bombardiers rather than the plague victims. As for the depiction, I realize that the centuries have worn this away, and that nobody knows what she looked like because nobody can swear that she ever even existed. I can only say I’m sorry that the bigger tablet gives her a head that looks like Emperor Constantine on a beat-up coin, and this version brings the Elephant Man to mind. But no matter. If you’re a saint, nobody cares about these things. The point is what you can do, not how you do your hair. Non-saints could also keep this in mind.And then you exit by the sotoportego of the bombardiers and you’re back under the watchful eye of whichever saint you adhere to.
Turning from Barbara’s concern for disease and back to conflagration, consider the problem of gunpowder. It was kept in the Arsenale until two disastrous explosions (all it took was a spark!) — in 1476 and then 1509 — made it clear that it belonged out on some nearby islands instead. One still bears the name Sant’ Angelo delle Polvere (Saint Angelo of the Powder). On August 29, 1689, lightning struck the magazine there and 800 barrels of gunpowder exploded.
Faith in Santa Barbara remained firm, however, meaning no disrespect. Despite certain small derelictions of duty, as noted above, until the invention of the lightning rod in 1752 she was the best everyone could do.
Fun fact: The gunpowder storeroom on warships is called the santabarbara. Is that a somebody’s idea of a dare?
The chapel of Santa Barbara is on the island of Burano, next door to the church of San Martino. (The chapel is the beige building dead ahead in the sunlight.) They say that her relics are kept here. You might think that there would be ceremonies on her feast day (December 4), but no. Until either plague or gunpowder strikes, it appears they want to leave her in peace.
“The sacred remains of Santa Barbara virgin and martyr of Nicomedia donated by the devotion/reverence of Giovanni son of Doge Pietro Orseolo II and for about a millennium in temples of the lagoon of Rialto of Torcello and of Burano. Conserved and venerated in this chapel restored by the Comune perpetuate the light of heroic faith.” The discharged Venetian sappers remembering the work of their member Vittorio Maraffi in the redemption of this building. These stones positioned by their hands are devotedly consecrated to the Patron of the corps. The kalends of October 1957 Reconstructed by the Section of Veteran Combatants of Venice 1998. The “kalends” was the first day of each month of the Roman calendar and is a very elegant/archaic way of citing a date. However, there is a common expression here when you want to predict that something will never happen — you say it will occur on the calende greche, or Greek calends, which on the Greek calendar don’t exist.
