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.
I hadn’t thought of writing about the Vogalonga (my 20th, undertaken on Sunday, May 15); after all, the pictures tell the story just as well, or even better — what? — than I could.
For the record, there were almost 2,000 boats registered and something around 8,000 rowers. What was unusual this year was the acute increase in single (or double, but mainly single) kayaks. Not judging, just saying. If this continues, before long we will be the eccentric guests at the Kayaklonga.
Our trusty crew awaits the 9:00 AM start aboard our equally trusty six-oar caorlina. Except that there are nine of us, which means the rowers were transporting an extra 400 pounds or so around the lagoon. They’re smiling here because they don’t realize that yet. From the front, our little floating United Nations is composed of Marianna Ciarlante (from Abruzzo), Axel and Sandra (Braunschweig), Pietro and Chiara (Rome), Camilla De Maulo and Marta Compagnini (Milan). Invisible me from the USA on the bow, and seated astern, the ineffable Lino (good grief! a genuine Venetian!!)Looking at the boats assembling is always entertaining, and the “disdotona,” or 18-oar gondola, of the Querini rowing club is always spectacular.There is the most wonderful energy and enthusiasm to the start. The cannon fires, all the bells start to ring, all the boats get going, and there is the amazing sound of water rushing past a world of boats.So we were carrying our extra people, but this Sicilian tartana carried a piano and player. Reports were that he played during the whole event, but even though we were pretty close, I never heard a note. Was he playing “As Time Goes By”? “Nearer, My God, to Thee”?
Not long after the endless serpent of boats began to coast along the island of Sant’ Erasmo, there seems to have been a mass decision — lemmings with oars? — to strike out in a straight line across the shallows instead of staying in the channel that curves its way along the edge of the island. Perhaps you can make them out, on the line separating water from sky. We stayed in the channel, all by our peaceful, unhassled little selves. First of all, our boat would have probably been too heavy to make it across the shallows without ridiculous effort. Second of all, at the farthest point of Sant’Erasmo. the boats came back into the channel almost exactly in the position they held when they broke free. We certainly welcomed back a number of boats which had been beside us 35 minutes earlier.The few pilings marking the channel at the northeast end of Sant’Erasmo are crowned by duck decoys. Evidently they mark a rest stop.Still rowing, still happy, almost at Burano, the halfway point.Friends of ours from Pavia.A crew of hardy Dutch ladies who I thought, ignorantly, had escaped from the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. But closer study makes it obvious that they have ingeniously modified their traditional headgear to be boatworthy.
“Burano” is Vogalongaspeak for “bananas and bottles of water or tea or other rehydrating agents thrown deftly from a barge into your boat.” I think slightly more than a ton of bananas sacrifice themselves to keep us rowing. Not all in our boat, of course. I’ll try to take a picture of the Great Banana Throw next year — I was too busy catching them to photograph them.At Burano we finally got a glimpse of the amazing Mike O’Toole (astern) and Gary Serbeniuk of “Gondola Getaway” in Long Beach, California. Not that they rowed from California, though I have no doubt that they could have.Down the Grand Canal., and the end is in sight. After five hours of rowing, that’s a phrase you could sing to “Take me hooooooome, country rooooooad…”.We made it through the usually-clogjammed Canale di Cannaregio with no problem and now it’s on to the finish line.The two best moments of the Vogalonga — if one had to choose — are the beginning and the end. Mike and Gary, conquering heroes, have made it back to the club, and they look like everybody feels when they’ve finally done it. If that sounds like an exaggeration, you may notice that the blue skies of the morning have turned grey and (you can’t see it) very windy and cold. They’re smiling also because they know that pasta with mussels awaits them. Well, maybe they didn’t actually KNOW that, but they knew there was wine somewhere very nearby. Because, you know, Italy.
“The Vianellos beat everybody,” the headline states. “The foreigners increase.” According to the article, there are 4339 people in the Comune of Venice with the last name Vianello. I’m sorry to see that the Barbarigos and Mocenigos have gone the way of the great auk, though some once-noble families (Moro, Dona’) are on the list.
Not a game at all, but shards of information I consider interesting, in an ephemeral sort of way. My favorite kind.
Meeting people here, or even just reading about them in the paper, will fairly quickly give you the sensation that there is only a handful of last names in Venice. Reading Venetian history has the same effect. There were 120 doges, and every five minutes it’s a Mocenigo or a Morosini or a Barbarigo or a Contarini (I feel a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song coming on).
In daily life nowadays, it’s Vianello or Zennaro or Busetto or Scarpa, all at some point from Pellestrina, where so many with these surnames dwell — and have dwelled — that the town is divided into four sections, each named for one of those specific tribes. This situation was created by doge Andrea Contarini, who in 1380 sent the four eponymous families from Chioggia to Pellestrina to reconstruct and inhabit the former town which had been destroyed by the Genoese in the “War of Chioggia” (1378-1381).
The density of these four names in Pellestrina is such that the post office finally gave permission to put nicknames on addresses, to give some hope of distinguishing between the scores of individuals with the same first and last name, some of them even living at the same location.
In the Comune at large, Costantinis and Penzos abound, and every year there is a bumper crop of D’Estes and Dei Rossis. Each name has its own provenance; some of them are obvious (“Sartori” means “tailors,” “Tagliapietra” means “stonecutter,” with which Venice had to have been infested) and some are more obscure (“Ballarin” meant “sawyer,” and “Bastasi” were the porters, specifically for the Customs or the quarantine islands).
As we see, there are more Hossains now than Senos or even than Chens. But after 500 years they might well be on the list of Venetians, if there’s still a Venice.
I’ve been here long enough — and it doesn’t mean you need to have spent a LONG time — to recognize the provenance of many of these names. If you hear one of these, you have a good chance of knowing where the person comes (or came) from:
A few tidbits from the article, which are not evident in the table of numbers but are obvious to anyone living here:
First is that during the past ten years, the number of individuals bearing each surname has diminished. That’s just part of the well-known shrinkage of Venetians.
Second — also fairly obvious to locals — is the addition of foreign surnames. Of course, my surname is foreign too (German-Swiss), but I’ve been happy to disappear among many Venetians whose last names also begin with “Z,” and they aren’t German, either: Zane and Zanella and Zuin and Zuliani. It’s great down here at the end of the alphabet, I’ve finally got company.
As you easily notice, Muslim and Asian names are becoming more numerous. (I realize that “Muslim” is not a nationality, nor a geographical area, but while the bearers of these names are most likely from Bangladesh, I decided not to guess).
So where would the “Vianello” clan come from? According to my dictionary of Italian surnames, it springs from Viani, which isn’t a place, as far as I can determine, but a basic root-name. Lino hypothesizes that it could derive from “villani” (pronounced vee-AH-nee in Venetian), which means farmers, tillers of the soil — “villein,” in the feudal terminology, a partially-free serf. You can still hear someone around here vilify another person by calling him a “villano,” and they don’t mean “villain” — they mean clod, churl, oaf.
“Rossi” means “reds.” It’s the most common surname in Italy, though in the Southern half it is often rendered “Russo” (the second-most common surname in Italy). It most likely came from a personage with some strikingly red attribute, such as hair, beard, or skin. Or all three.
“Scarpa” — It means “shoe,” so I’m guessing their forebears were shoe-makers, though then again, it’s possible that it was once somebody’s nickname (in Venice, at least, nicknames are fairly common and the person bears it for life and even sometimes leaves it to his children.) However, another hypothesis holds that it could be a variation of Karpathos, the Greek island known as “Scarpanto” in Venetian, and which formed part of the Venetian “Sea State” from 1306 to 1538, plenty long to germinate names. Thousands of Greeks lived in Venice, so the place name may have shifted to a personal name.
There are lots of names that come from places, sometimes Venetianized, such as:
Visentin (vee-zen-TEEN): Vicentino, or from Vicenza
Piasentini (pya-zen-TEE-nee): Piacentino, or from Piacenza
Veronese: from Verona
Trevisan (treh-vee-ZAHN): from Treviso
Furlan (foor-LAHN): from Friuli
Schiavon (skyah-VOHN): from Schiavonia, later Slavonia, which is now the easternmost part of Croatia. The Venetians were known to trade, among other valuable merchandise, in slaves, which often came from Central Asia or the Balkan hinterland. “Schiavo” (SKYA-voh), conveniently shortened, means “slave.” Slav – Slave. Not made up.
The names may change, but the activity described on a plaque inside the Arsenal remains the same regardless of time, nation, or blood type (translated by me): “5 June 1743 Gabriel di Ferdinando was the Adjutant of the Admiral of the Arsenal He was banished under threat of hanging for being an unfaithful administrator guilty of enormous extremely grave detriments inflicted in the management of the public capital.”
Sun that’s strong enough to make shadows this black is sun that is drying your clothes like a blowtorch.
As everyone knows by now, laundry, over time, has become a minor obsession with me.
I’m not alone; to judge by the number of tourists who stop daily to snap photos of lines of drying clothes, hanging out your garments has become as quaint as hand-grinding your cornmeal.
Drying clothes, though, requires only a cord, a handful of clothespins, and sun and breeze. Or sun or breeze. Or lots of time and hope. One memorable day I hung out an excellent collection of raiment, and we went for a long walk. It rained. (Bad.) It stopped. (Good.) This happened three times before we got home. This sort of day will make you appreciate the sun more than eight days on the beach in Curacao.
The washing of said garb, however, is an entirely different matter. Since I’ve been on Earth, there have always been washing machines of some sort. But Lino, and anybody else born before, say, 1950, recalls otherwise. If you’re a woman, you recall it vividly.
How do I know this? Thank you for asking.
And if you can add wind to the sun, you’ve got the perfect menu for clothes which may or may not be totally clean, but they WILL be dry. Only in a place that is humid much of the year can you come to appreciate the glorious sensation of truly dry clothes.
One morning, my phone rang. It was one of my dearest elderly friends, and she was asking for help. Not for herself, but for her equally elderly cousin, L.G, 84 years old, who, in the middle of their morning walk to the supermarket, began to feel seriously faint.
My friend called the ambulance, and waited with L.G., of course. But she couldn’t manage also to accompany her cousin to the hospital, because she herself didn’t have any strength to spare. When you’re over 85 and have constant pain in most of your joints, especially your right knee, you have to ration your energy, and she had already used up her allotment for the day. Would I be willing to run to the hospital, intercept L.G. when she was delivered to the Emergency Room, and see her through whatever had to be seen through? There is only one answer to that question, and that’s the answer I gave.
We were at the hospital seven hours, which isn’t important to this story; most Emergency Rooms take a leisurely approach to people whose life is not in imminent danger (perhaps not recognizing that the accumulated tedium can be deleterious to your health). So I spent the day on my feet, standing next to her in her wheelchair and strolling along with her to whatever X-rays or other tests had to be made. No food for either one of us all day, because I knew if I were to wander away even for 20 seconds, the doctor who hadn’t been born yet when we signed in would suddenly appear and take her someplace I would never find her again.
All of this is preamble.
We were chatting away (she had begun to feel less faint rather quickly). She was telling me about her other assorted physical problems.
“And my wrist really hurts,” she told me, holding up her right arm. “It hurts so much I can hardly move it.”
“What happened?” I asked, imagining a fall, or her running into the furniture in the middle of the night.
“It happened when I was wringing out the sheets.”
Excuse me?
“I had washed the sheets and I was wringing them out.” Obvious? Not in the third millennium.
I stared at her. I once mopped up all the water in the bottom of Lino’s boat using a terrycloth hand-towel from my hotel, and I can tell you that after about an hour, wringing out sodden cotton begins to hurt. It has never been my fate to have to hand-wash a sheet, but I can imagine it.
What I couldn’t imagine was an 84-year-old woman doing it. But she does.
She grew up washing sheets by hand; it’s not as if she had been forced to start doing it when she turned 70. This has always been normal, and while she’s perfectly aware that the washing machine has been invented, she doesn’t see any need for it.
If I had to wash this sheet by hand, I swear I’d never use it. I’d leave it in its coruscating splendor and go sleep on newspapers and sawdust.
When she was discharged, I accompanied her back to her apartment, where I got a look at how this particular lady lives. I don’t say that her situation is typical, but I wouldn’t say it’s unique, either.
First, the climb to her apartment is up two flights of stairs which are as steep as the ratlines on a square-rigger. She does this every day, though when she goes to the mountains she has to ask her neighbor to help her horse her suitcase down (and up) the stairs.
On the other hand, she has lived in this apartment her entire life; she was born here. So she’s had time to get used to the degree of ascent involved. I can tell you that if it were a mountain trail, plenty of people would just turn around and go back to the lodge.
The apartment itself reminded me of my grandfather’s house, primarily because the furniture was old, and although in reasonable condition, it showed every sign of having been left to fend for itself. If something wasn’t broken — I mean totally broken and useless — it would be there forever. A little break, or nick, or crack, doesn’t count as damage. Everything was old, and seemed to be tinted with the same general, faded-all-over earth-tone from the distant days when the concept of color scheme was simpler, or perhaps hadn’t been invented yet. The whole apartment smelled kind of tired.
Among the many things that hadn’t been changed since she was a girl was the kitchen sink. It is a rectangular slab of granite, with a shallow rectangular hollow in the center, and I’ve been told that a sink like this could be sold for its weight in almost any currency you choose. I’ve seen another like this — even bigger — in the kitchen of a palace, installed next to another amazing artifact: A fireplace remaining from the days when you cooked in cauldrons over the flames. (More about that in a moment.) But the palace residents were not aged widows living on a pension. Au extremely contraire.
Back to L.G. This granite receptacle is where she washes everything — dishes, sheets, herself. She doesn’t have a shower or a bathtub. She doesn’t have a hot-water heater, either. If you want water, it’s cold. She does have heat, though, and she has a toilet, in a tiny cubicle about two inches larger than the appliance itself.
Someone actually made this sign. That person never had to do the laundry, he was so busy being funny.
I wondered silently whether this arrangement was the result of habit, or parsimony, or sloth. You can make a case for all of these factors. But the truth is otherwise.
The reason, I was informed by a reliable source, is that she isn’t sharp enough to understand how to operate it.
Faced with the challenge of attempting to operate a washing machine, and almost certainly failing, a wet sheet is just simpler, even if it does have to be washed and wrung out using nothing but her own ten little toothpick-sized fingers. Just like she has always done.
The history of washing machines (by which I mean the mechanical invention, not the woman herself), begins in 1851. Many improvements in the design rapidly followed. I realize that not everyone could afford one, but buying a washing machine wasn’t as unusual as, say, buying a flying saucer. Anyone in Venice who had the means to get one did not hesitate.
This alacrity was inspired by the fact that virtually everyone washed everything by hand until the end of World War II, and often beyond. Lino and his older sister (born in 1929) have educated me on how Wash Day proceeded at their house.
They had running water in their second-floor apartment, and a sink. But their mother, like many Venetians, was still cooking over a wood fire in a fireplace, just like Little House on the Canal. “There was a chain that hung down,” Lino said; “the cooking pot was attached to it, and that’s how my mother cooked.”
Wood fires make ashes. Ashes plus boiling water make lye, or in Venetian, “lissia” (YEE-see-ah). Lye makes soap.
Lino’s father made their soap from the aforementioned lye and the fat and bones that had been saved from whatever meat they had eaten. He boiled it all, as Lino remembers, in a big pot in the kitchen and then poured it into a wooden container, where it dried and could be cut into pieces.
The advertisers tried to make doing the laundry look like more fun than dancing the maypole, but I don’t believe any woman was taken in.
When it was wash-day, your clothes or other fabric items such as tablecloths went into a big wooden tub, and you got to work with a washboard. The washboard in a Venetian family had two uses.
First, to scrub clothes (over time, the scrubbing could begin to wear out the fabric, to the point of producing holes. Hence “bucato” as the general word for “laundry” — it means “holed.”)
The second use was a kickboard to help children learn to swim. Generations of Venetian babies, up to and including Lino, clung to mom’s washboard as they thrashed their way around the water — usually out in the lagoon, but a nearby canal was just as good, and more convenient, too. That which does not kill me makes me stronger.
But lissia also makes bleach. As Lino’s sister explained it, they would carefully layer the items to be bleached into the wooden washtub, and cover them with a cloth. Then they would pour the lissia into the tub and leave it all to soak for a while. “Your clothes came out perfectly white,” she said, and smiled, remembering how her mother would look at the result with a sort of bedrock satisfaction.
You can understand her smile if you know that Lino’s father drove a steam train, fueled by coal, of course, on the Venice-Trento line. He came home in the evening black all over. That’s not the inspiration of the phrase “ashes to ashes,” but wood-ash seems to have been the perfect weapon against coal dust.
Now this would truly be a white to be proud of. Maybe you have to sell your soul to the devil to get your clothes this white.I don’t know who she is, but I’d bet anything she made lissia at home when she was a girl.
Lissia was such a common element of life that, like so many common elements, it became a very useful term to express all kinds of situations, and some of these expressions are still used.
“Far lissia” (to make lissia), to really clean right down to the ground. You could also say this if you’ve eaten up everything in the house (as we would say “really cleaned out”).
“Perder el lissia e ‘l saon” (pehr-dehr el EE-see-ha ehl sah-OHN — to lose the lye and the soap). It means you’ve totally wasted effort and money and have nothing to show for it all.
“Mi sugaro’ sta lissia” (Mee soo-gah-ROH sta EE-see-ah — I’ll dry out this lye). You’d say this when you mean to really settle an issue or deal with a problem once and for all.
“Co e done fa pan e lissia, i omeni scampa via” (coe eh doe-neh fa pahn eh EE-see-ah, ee OH-men-ee scampa vee-ah –When the women make bread or lye, the men get the heck out of there). Centuries of domestic conflict-resolution are contained in this phrase, which I think must have been coined by a man. Making really good bread, and making lye, were two strenuous tasks that would inevitably exhaust the wife. And an exhausted wife, as all husbands discover, is a dangerous person to be around. Flee!
On the island of Burano, housewives can still rig up their temporary clotheslines the way women did in Venice a century ago. I like this method. It’s simple, cheap, and efficient.
