Yesterday was the second day of Carnival 2018 (Jan. 27-Feb. 13), and the festivities started, as they have for a number of years now, with a monster boat procession in the Grand Canal. The boats and rowers were decorated and trimmed and upholstered and whatever else seemed good across the gamut from minimal (a hat) to the glamorous (let’s all be Mozart for a day!) to the fabulously imaginative, funny, and irreverent. They say that during “Carnevale, ogni scherzo vale” (during Carnival every joke works) and the boat people showed they’ve got plenty of high jinks still in them.
Note: For an overview of Carnival garb, behavior and general atmosphere back in the glory days, I recommend my very own piece on masks for Craftsmanship magazine.
Further note: I promised Lino that I would convey his belief that this festival, amusing and picturesque as it may be, is NOT the real Venetian Carnival. He is extremely firm on that point. Other cities, most particularly Viareggio, are famous for celebrating Carnival with highly elaborate floats (“carri allegorici“). The floats of Viareggio are titanic constructions that can hold their own against any other carnival in the galaxy. But Lino contends that this sort of parade is not the Venetian Carnival and he strongly objects to the introduction of this foreign body into the Venetian culture. I am not going to adjudicate the matter in any way, I have only fulfilled my promise to add his voice into the festive confusion. Confusion there has always been during Carnival, even here, and history attests this. But no carri allegorici.
That said, I’d like to return to the floating (sorry) festivities. I’m a stout defender of Venetian traditions, but I have to admit that I found the whole thing hugely entertaining. That’s all I’m going to say.
The gathering of the boats at the entrance to the Grand Canal. We arrived around 10:45, and we began processing at 11:15. The weather didn’t get the message that it would be hilarious to rain or snow, so we made do with ordinary old sunshine. A good thing, too, because the day after was solid fog.The boat in the foreground bears proudly on its bow the typical sign listing the stops that is displayed on the #1 vaporetto. Cute, but why?Here’s why: The sign says “For today only, the ACTV will provide service by oar.” The crew is wearing the regulation necktie that is part of the ACTV uniform.The battling Casanovas, comparing gondolas and, probably frills. Remember the gondola on the left, it will reappear further on.I’m sure I’m missing something (I’m never wrong if I think that), but here we have a whaling longboat helpfully named “La Baleniere” (“the whale boat,” though the term usually means the entire ship). Instead of being rowed backwards, it’s been fitted out to be rowed the Venetian way, standing up, facing forward. Hazmat suits are always appropriate, so I won’t inquire about those, but the headgear looks like jellyfish brains or something else from the abyss. I’m not even sure what they were made of. Men wearing pink, though, is always entertaining.The boats lined up to check in at the control station at the Customs House Point. The organizers threw bottles of water (never drunk) and packs of sandwiches (never eaten, at least not by me) into the boat. They took no chances that somebody might suddenly feel faint.The star of everything was this enormous plastic mode of a rat, here being carried on a yellow boat to the end of the line where, at the crucial festive moment, he will be broken upon to release a mass of colored balloons. To get the joke you need to know that in the Piazza San Marco, one of the peak moments of Carnival, then and now, is the “flight of the Colombina.” In the very olden days a high-wire artistwould descend a wire stretching from the top of the campanile to the Doge’s Palace (no net. Fun!!). Or sometimes he or she was replaced by a huge model dove (“colomba”) which would burst open and shower the under-standers with clouds of confetti. Seeing that our procession will conclude in the Cannaregio Canal, far, far from the piazza and its glamor and history, the ubiquitous rodent was chosen as the mascot, symbol, patron saint, whatever we want to call him or her, of our lower-brow festa. I wish I could have gotten closer, this is the only picture I managed to make. The backward-looking eyes make me laugh. I wouldn’t have thought a creature this big would bother checking who was behind him.Maybe he was watching for this, a dragon boat from the Canottieri Mestre. The American flag is flying…a yellow-haired effigy is standing…a model of a rocket is pointing…and all the rowers are wearing archery targets on their backs. Um….And astern the flag of some unidentified nation (it is not the official flag of North Korea, I checked). But whatever that bit of fabric may be, I think we can surmise what it symbolizes. And a rocket pointing that way. Hilarious.Wait: THIS is hilarious. The sign the central rowers are holding up translates as: “Mine is longer.” Badaboom.The Addams Family, Uncle Fester rowing astern. The other family members were very white-faced, which was worth a photo but for some reason they kept looking the other way. Are they under witness protection?She spent quite some time adjusting the black crape. We even have Cousin Itt in the form of the long blond wig on a stick.Unlikely as it may seem, everybody manages fine with all those oars.it does get squeezy under the Accademia Bridge, but we are not actually rowing the boat next to us. It only looks like that.And speaking of squeezy, the overloaded vaporettos had to stay where they were, tied up to their boat-stop dock, until the procession had finished. That’s for everybody’s safety, obviously. And to allow all the passengers to crowd to the outboard side to make photographs of the spectacle, which judging by the inclination of the boat wouldn’t meet anybody’s safety standards. Fun!Splashing along toward San Toma’, the boats seem to be organizing themselves by color somehow. Suddenly we’re in the blue section.One caorlina’s crew maintained the roditory (made up — we need this word) theme by dressing as mice and loading the boat with cheese. Another hefty form of parmigiano adorned the stern as well.Now we’re getting closer to the old satirical bone. Here the rowers are each carrying a cardboard rendition of a MOSE floodgate, complete with streamers of algae and the occasional barnacle. Algae also trailling from the boat, as you see. Check my last few posts about the condition of the gates to appreciate the satire here.A quick refresher on what the real gates look like. They do not inspire mirth.And while we’re on the subject of current events, this boat has remnants of jewelry strewn across its bow and the sign says: “Doge’s Palace, here’s what’s left of the Maharaja’s treasure.” Maharaja helpfully rowing nearby. For reference see my post “Lugash on the lagoon.”Every square or triangular or rhomboidal inch was occupied by people, even up onto the roof of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.Behind us, yet more miles of the flotilla. In the center, the “peata” of the rowing club G.S. Voga Riviera del Brenta, bearing the soundtrack: music, singers, people yelling reckless happy phrases that added to the general atmosphere of revelry.This little group demonstrated yet again that you don’t need an elaborate or expensive costume for carnivaling, but just a little imagination. Everybody in bathrobes and with towels wrapped around their heads; the two seated people are armed with the moveable showerhead and back-scrubbing brush. I think there’s a shower curtain there too. So: Bathrobes. How can you say you don’t have a costume?And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the alligator will lie down with the young penguin ..This caorlina was draped with wafty white fabric and clumps of big cotton balls to create a wintry Alpine scene, complete with rowers in down jackets and somebody on the bow wearing red reindeer antlers. Pay no attention to the blue and white bits in the background — that’s a white caorlina whose bow has been surmounted by a very large seagull head trailing sky-blue fabric. If they had wanted to create a real Venetian scene, they’d have added a few bags of garbage pecked and ripped open with the contents strewn wildly around.A charming couple in fairly authentic mountain-dwellers’ (as opposed to mountaineers’) garb.The gloriously bedecked man astern is Angelo Boscolo, who recently launched his gondola made of 350 fruit crates. However amusing this may be, he spent a year and a half at it, and scrupulously adds that it is 30 cm (11 inches) shorter than the traditional gondola, and that the crates are made from 11 different types of wood (classic gondola uses 8 types, possibly not those used for kiwi containers). On the thwart behind the seats has been carved a very Venetian saying: “Chi sa tace, chi non sa chiede. El mona sa già tutto” (Who knows, remains silent; who doesn’t know, asks. The asshole already knows everything).First prize and a blue ribbon in the “Actually, why the heck not?” category.The Rari Nantes Patavium boat club (in Padua) has an elegant 12-oar gondola, here made even more elegant without six of its rowers but with the addition of two tangoing couples.Of course it’s possible to tango in a space the size of a bathmat. I admire them even more for doing it on a boat, where even the smallest rogue wave could add a few steps they never studied in school.They made it to the end, this extravagantly dressed pair of rowers. It’s true that everyone was rowing against the tide, but somehow seeing them at it made it appear even harder and more thankless. In any case, this is the once- typical boat of Lake Como, and bears the banner of the lakeside town of Bellano. Five centuries ago the craft was simply called “batel,” used for fishing and also passengers; since 1827 it has been called a “Lucia” in honor of the heroine of the novel “I Promessi Sposi” who makes her escape across the lake in such a boat.Our four boats of the Remiera Francescana moored near the top of the Cannaregio Canal, in what appears to have suddenly become the Red Zone (the facing boats belong to the G.S. Voga Riviera del Brenta club).The crowds along the fondamentas were in full cry. Here, a very cool family.Cool, as in wearing your sunglasses over your mask.The view of people ashore was almost as good as the one they got of us. Fun!
In my last post on the Vogalonga (though I suppose it would be more accurate to say that this is my last) I acknowledged the lack of any photographic evidence of our excellent — and rapid — circuit of the northern lagoon.
As I had hoped, a kind soul did in fact take some pictures of us, and that kind soul knew some friends of ours, who sent them along. Perhaps there are more such souls out there, but I don’t know them or their friends. So here’s a big shout-out to the club Voga Fortuna Berlin, and Sandra, who chose to work the camera rather than the oar.
Here we are returning to the club to get our numbered bib. If you ask where are all the hordes of rowers waiting for the starting cannon to fire, I can tell you they're behind us. Where most of them stayed all morning. The crew this year was a sort of mixed fishfry. (L to r): Sandro Graffi, his 12-year-old son Davide, 14-year-old Filippo Novello, Antonio Borgo, me, and Mike O'Toole, a/k/a/ "Otolini," master and commander of Gondola Getaway in Long Beach, California. Lino is sitting on his starboard side, as navigator and co-pilot, though he rarely intervened.And our return, down the incredibly spacious Cannaregio Canal. Somewhere around Murano we reshuffled the squad: Antonio is now in the bow and Sandro is at #4. Lino has moved from the stern to sit in the bow, which was undoubtedly more comfortable but which reversed his view of the proceedings. What you can't hear, unfortunately, is all of us saying some variation on "Holy Sacrament, I can't believe how few people are here. I'm never going back to the old way."
Considering how well my personal Vogalonga went this year (along with my six boatmates), it’s taken me this much time to find anything to say about it other than that.
Also, I have no photographs whatsoever of us, for one reason which explains both these little paragraphs. We didn’t start in the Bacino of San Marco.
A glimpse of the Bacino of San Marco on or about the start this year, which we didn't see. This image is even more beautiful for that very reason. (Thanks to the unnamed photographer who took this picture, which I found on the web.)
The tradition in any boat I’ve been in that includes Lino (all but one — the first year — of the 16 editions I’ve joined) is that we start in the Bacino of San Marco when the cannon fires and all the bells ring. It’s thrilling and I love this moment, which is all too brief because we then commence rowing, along with a mass of boats surrounding us like migrating krill.
This means that while we have the chance to savor the richness of the moment — boats, cannon, bells — the krill create many well-known problems along the way. Such as at what I think of as the “death corner,” the first turn at the point of Sant’ Elena, where any number of non-Venetian rowers suddenly discover some problem which they hadn’t planned on facing — such as a tricky current, or some boats around them also having problems, or, I don’t know, existential lack of nerve, like cragfast climbers. You can expect to see at least one capsized vessel here, and a batch of confusion from the mass of boats trying to avoid it.
Then there are the snaky curves along the flank of Sant’ Erasmo, also excellent territory for making miscalculations of available space, relative speeds, and wind direction and force.
Then, of course, there is the every-year-more-difficult (I meant to say “ghastly” but changed my mind) passage into and through the Cannaregio Canal, where inexperience, fatigue, and lack of common sense create packs of boats like Arctic ice.
This year we didn’t have any of that — I mean, ANY of that — for one surprising reason. We forgot our boat’s number, without which the boat can’t be checked at various points along the way and hence acknowledged as officially doing the course.
So when the cannon/bells/confusion began at 9:00 AM, we were back at the boat club behind Sant’ Elena digging the numbered bib out of Lino’s locker.
Which meant that we joined the scrum after the “death corner,” and — this was unexpected — in some way near the head of the herd. Please note that this does not mean we started early, as some unsporting people tend to do. We slipped into the traffic stream at 9:10, roughly the same time it would have been for us at that point even if we’d started in the usual place.
The result of all this being that not only did we cover the entire course in record time without even breaking a sweat (three hours — unheard of), we were able to do it in unearthly tranquillity. Yes, there were other boats, but noticeably fewer at that stage. We slithered along Sant’ Erasmo as if there wasn’t anybody else around, and we entered the Cannaregio Canal (over which I always see an invisible sign saying “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) as if it were a normal day, only better: The reasonable number of boats ahead of us were proceeding in a reasonable way at a reasonable speed and behaving, well, reasonably. I had never imagined I could see such a thing.
The only flaw in the ointment, as a friend of mine used to say, was that we were also ahead of the photographers. We missed the departure, which is always good for spectacular pictures, and we missed the mass return, ditto.
So unless some unknown photographer makes him- or herself known, I’m just going to have to keep my memories dusted and polished, because there isn’t anything else I have to show for this event.
It was so wonderful that I’m already trying to think of ways to convince the crew to leave before 9:00 next year. If all goes well, I’ll be able soon to report that we finished the course before the others had even started it.
Crazy? Unsporting? Simply wrong? Yes indeed. But now the rot has set in.
