I’m guessing you haven’t been giving much thought to ship caulking lately. Probably about as much thought as you haven’t given to San Foca — a point you share with most Earth-dwellers. I can help you with this.
San Foca is the patron saint of caulkers, hence he is also the patron of The Societa’ di Mutuo Soccorso fra Carpentieri e Calafati: The Society of Mutual Aid between Carpenters and Caulkers.
I can’t say there’s much work for either of these categories here anymore — certainly not as much as there was when the Venetian Republic was in full cry. But these craftsmen were always near the top of the food chain, considering that Venetian power was essentially naval. A statement to this effect was recorded in the Venetian Senate, for what reason I know not, on July 13, 1487 (translated by me): “… carpenters and caulkers, have been at all times the most appreciated and accepted on the galleys and other of our ships because in every need of any sort these men are the most adapted and necessary of any other kind of man.” Considering the wear and tear a Venetian ship was likely to undergo in its life, especially after cannon began to be used, your caulker would have been up there with the navigator and the cook as far as the well-being and probable safe return of the crew were concerned.
Glimpse of a battle under the ramparts of Zara (now Zadar) Croatia, from the facade of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio. Just to give an idea of how useful it was to have a carpenter and/or caulker aboard.The Society's standard, brought out for the occasion.
If you’re still not convinced that caulking is such a big deal, consider how much, as the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. An example: On the night before a certain battle, which I’m not going to pause to look up just now, the Venetian admiral was pondering the odds for winning the imminent battle with the unpleasantly superior Turkish fleet. Hope for the best? Or just send a batch of men at night to swim under the Turkish ships and rip out the caulking sealing the planks of their hulls? Dawn broke to what must have been a quiet but busy sound from the Turkish bilges, something like blub-blub-blub….
Back to the mutual aid society. March 5 is San Foca’s feast day, so he was celebrated at a special mass in honor of him as well as the departed members of the sodality. And then, naturally, there was a party. You’ve heard it before: “All the psalms end with the ‘Gloria.'”
The church was full, something you don't see every day.
Seeing that I am a newly fledged (or whatever the ship-caulking counterpart might be) member of the SMSCC, Lino and I went to join in.
The ceremony was in the church of San Martino, which is right under the haunch of the Arsenal, and which is full of assorted tokens of carpentering and caulking. There was nothing especially noteworthy about the mass, except for the unusually large number of people attending. And the party followed tradition in its simplest and clearest outlines: People! Noise! A small, hot room crammed with loud, hungry humans and vats of Venetian food!
I don’t know if San Foca had a favorite dish, but I’m always going to associate him with tripe soup. An ancient and honorable comestible which deserves a wider audience and which I’d bet money you would like as long as you didn’t know what it was.
And I think next year we should all plan to hold the party in Calafat, Romania. It was founded by caulkers from Genoa, but I suppose we could overlook that for the sake of harmony. I’m going to get to work on the convoy’s banners: “Calafat or Bust.”
The priest blesses the gift packets containing a candle, an image of San Foca, and a small bread roll. The painting over the altar depicts the Holy Family with San Marco and San Foca.
My gift packet. The image of San Foca is from the basilica of San Marco. I suppose he is depicted hefting a rudder rather than a bag of dumb irons and a couple of mallets because, as patron saint of seafarers in general, it was thought best not to show favoritism to any particular craft.Symbols of caulkers' tools in the main aisle of the church of San Martino.
We eat! Of COURSE we can all fit into the tiny room of the parish hall. Where's the food?Keep that tripe soup coming.
Just the thing on a cold winter night. Be lavish with the grated parmesan, even if it isn't pasta.
The soup keeps you going till they bring out the bigoli in salsa. Or you can just keep snacking on peanuts, pickles, beans, salame sandwiches...
This splendid relief carving surmounts the main entrance to the church of San Giuseppe (Saint Joseph) in Castello. There are two especially good things here: First, Saint Joseph is, as always, in the background -- even on a church dedicated to him. He must have been a remarkable person. Second, the three shepherds are as accurate as artist Giulio dal Moro (early 1500's) could make them. The first one, kneeling, not only has a small barrel attached to his belt (brandy?), but his upraised right hand is holding sheep-shears.
Venice at Christmas — it sounds as if the entire city ought to be refulgent with gleaming and sparkling, as if every fragment of its shattered splendor should come together and shine in an unearthly and glorious way.
Yes, it does seem that it ought to be that way.
Instead, scattered efforts at decoration all around the city make bright flickers, some bigger, some smaller, that don’t come together in any coherent way. Venice is littered with Nativity scenes, in paintings, in sculpture, not to mention other aspects of the Christmas story — the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, and even the Massacre of the Innocents –yet the general attitude toward Christmas is not excessively devout. It remains essentially a domestic holiday and I suppose that ought to translate, if depicted accurately today, into scenes of Mary in the kitchen wrestling with something heavy in the oven while Baby Jesus is busy trying to teach the cat how to swim, or of them looking desperately, not for a room at the inn, but for a place to park at the mall. Meaning no disrespect.
Punctually on December 1, the Christmas mailbox gets installed outside the tobacco/lottery/toy shop.
Little old people, as everywhere, are being wrangled into some extended-family configuration; and the children are, I think, essentially like children everywhere — eyes and spirits fixed, not on the Star, but on the imminent deluge of presents. And not brought by kings or wise men, but laid on by squadrons of adoring relatives, even in times like these.
Perhaps there are gala balls being held in palaces, but my sense is that anybody with a palace is probably already at Cortina.
Still, the framework remains the same, at least in our little hovel: Christmas Eve means risotto of go’ and roasted eel, the ripping open of the presents, midnight mass, the singing of “You Descend from Heaven,” and slicing the panettone at midnight and popping the prosecco.
Christmas Day means the big mass at San Marco, some fabulous meaty lunch, then either sleeping on the sofa or visiting relatives, then more eating, and more sleeping.
The day after Christmas — the feast of Santo Stefano — is another holiday. More gorging on food, this time with all of Lino’s family.
One quaint aspect of this holiday is that there are no newspapers for two days because the journalists and editors and printers don’t work on Christmas Eve and Christmas. This is an antiquated practice that is even more exotic than bearing in the boar’s-head and drinking wassail. Newspapers in the rest of the world come out as usual, but here, for some reason (and I do not believe it’s because the entire category wants to spend two whole days in church) the newspaper-producers just don’t work on Christmas.
To which I say: Who notices or cares? The broadcast journalists are working as usual, and the news continues to flow to us in an unbroken stream via the television and the Internet. But somehow print journalists feel themselves to be special, which, I presume, is fostered and sustained by the unions. And then they complain that readership is falling.
But this is normal.
This homemade Nativity scene was created by the family on Sant' Erasmo where we go to buy our vegetables. Who says there were no apples and squash in the stable?
What is going to be abnormal this year for the holidays is: Minimal garbage collection. Of any sort, whether recyclable (there’s a weekly schedule for the different types of material) or otherwise (clam shells, coffee grounds, orange peels, fishbones, half-eaten cupcakes, wine bottles, etc.). And this will last for two days: Christmas Day, and Santo Stefano.
Two days with no garbage collection — this is a startling innovation in the festal folkways, especially in a city which purports to be world-class, or somewhere near it, and during a period which could be described as garbage-intensive.
The Gazzettino conveys the explanation given by the garbage company, which is nothing more than an arm of the city government with a different name: The garbage collectors are all going to be too busy keeping the streets clean to have time also to collect the bags which are daily left outside the doors of houses and shops.
The very best part is that, given this fact, the garbage company respectfully requests the good citizens to refrain from putting their bags of refuse outside for two days. So the streets can be neat and tidy. And the interiors of the houses and stores can become kitchen middens.
This is only moderately annoying to us, but for families with children, it’s inconceivable. I can tell you right now, sitting here with my eyes closed, that the streets are going to be FULL of bags of garbage. Or maybe there will be a mass reversion to the Old Way, which involves a big splash.
To review: We are requested to not clutter the streets because the trash-teams are going to be busy keeping the streets clean. But if we’re not putting out trash, why do the streets need to be cleaned? It’s like the definition of chutzpah: First you kill your parents, then you plead for clemency from the court because you’re an orphan.
I tell you, sometimes life in the most beautiful in the world makes my head hurt.
But let us return to the reason for the season, as they say. Here is a small assortment of glimpses of Venice preparing for Christmas. But of course, the most beautiful scenes of all are arranged and decorated and illuminated where you’ll never see them: In each person’s heart. Compared to which glass angels and marzipan cake and all the strings of lights ever plugged in are as nothing.
Out on the eastern edge of Venice, the furthest bit of inhabited land, someone has chosen to put up a lighted little sleigh with one reindeer.
I'm still mystified by whatever is hanging on the fence below the sleigh, but it does seem merry and bright. Could it be an illuminated poinsettia?
The boathouse of the Generali insurance company's rowing club always has a Nativity scene of some sort. This year they made it float on the canal -- beautiful and evocative, though the waves from the endlessly passing motorboats during the day make it toss like a ship in a storm.An enterprising bakery and pastry shop hollowed out a chocolate panettone and put in little figurines of Mary, Joseph and Jesus made of marzipan.They also added a small light to represent the star. But if marzipan can be made to resemble real fruit and fish and so on, why did they make the Holy Family look as if it were carved out of soap? Lino says they already did plenty to make it look like this, and I should just zip it.
One of the innumerable variations on the Christmas cake. However they decorate it, the sentiment is always happily the same.The Nativity scene in a hut in via Garibaldi has all the necessary components, down to the empty manger. In a startling flash of logic, the Baby Jesus isn't installed until Christmas Day.
The glow of Christmas on via Garibaldi, silently and majestically and completely upstaged by the moon. And to all a good night.
Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up above via Garibaldi.
Today, as every year, I indulge in a little orgy of nostalgia for the Thanksgiving traditions, customs, and eccentricities of my native heath. I miss all of it, even the tyranny of the turkey — I know they say we can eat anything we want, probably even tofu or tilapia, but rejecting turkey seems to me to be asking for trouble.
We usually saute a turkey breast and get on with the day. I long ago learned that you cannot duplicate foreign customs with any degree of satisfaction — in fact, trying only makes it worse — so I don’t try. But turkey breast is my propitiatory offering to whatever needs to be propitiated. It’s better than decapitating a live rooster buried in the wheatfield. I’ll get to that in a minute.
The town of Gemona del Friuli decorated City Hall with local products, including eggplant.
Just because Italy doesn’t have Pilgrim Fathers and Ben Franklin and the Gettysburg Address and so on doesn’t mean that the countryfolk here have no harvest traditions. Au contraire — the country is suffocating with them, as a brief little research has revealed. Venice doesn’t share any of these practices, having devoted all of its forces of gratitude to the Madonna della Salute. But I’m in the harvest mood, so I decided to range afield.
The primary divergence from American customs seem to be that grain, not the bird, has traditionally been the hero of the end-of-cultivation-season celebration, and the majority of these festivals take place toward the end of the summer. Schedule your harvest festival to coincide with the harvest itself? What an idea.
The symbolism, as explained by the author of the website “Luce di strega,” works this way:
The Spirit of the grain is rooted in the pagan traditions of the cycle of fertility, birth and rebirth; the myths of Demetra and Persephone, Ceres and Proserpina, vividly illustrate this reality. Vegetation dies at the end of the summer, returning to the earth from which it will be reborn the next spring. That is, if you perform the correct actions pleasing to the Spirit of the grain.
The dried corn is classic, but in Gemona they added a bunch of wild persimmons.
This Spirit was transposed to a sacrificial animal, to improve the chances of pleasing it; this animal was traditionally a bird (rooster, turkey, quail) which lives and hides in the fields, especially in the shocks of harvested grain. The last phase of the harvest would become a sort of race among the farmers to be the first to finish, nabbing a luckless bird, thereby obtaining an appropriate creature to kill as an offering to the Spirit of the grain. Note: The sacrifice has to be an animal because it contains blood, the crucial element in the magic of fertility rituals.
“In some parts of Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Picardy,” writes James George Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” “the harvesters put a live rooster in the grain which is to be harvested last, and they hunt and catch him and bury him up to his neck and decapitate him with the scythe or sickle.”
If this practice should seem extreme, consider that killing a fowl was seen to be better than killing the person who had scythed the last stalks of wheat, which was the original idea.
Have I just completely ruined your enjoyment of your turkey? Perhaps you could regard its position on your table as something a little less drastic — maybe as a sort of propitiation of the Spirit of Black Friday. In any case, there is a definite link, in mythological terms, between the annual ingathering and a cooked (anyway, killed) bird.
Our favorite farmers on Sant' Erasmo put this together before Halloween. The pomegranate is a nice touch, though eggplant seems to be non-negotiable.
Wandering around the web and YouTube reveals an impressive number of harvest festivals in the countryside and mountains of Italy, out where some connection with agriculture can still be found, though the festivals by now, however deeply felt they may be, seem to have shifted their focus to propitiating the Spirit of Tourism. Which, by the way, never dies, so it never has to be reborn. No blood, just offer money.
Here is a snippet of the famous harvest festival in Foglianise, a small town in the region of Campania about 50 km (30 miles) northeast of Naples. It is held on August 16, which not only coincides with the end of the harvest (at least in the olden days), but is the feast day of San Rocco, patron saint of plague victims. Seeing that he responded to the villagers’ pleas for deliverance from a disastrous pestilence in the 1600’s — yes, it was everywhere — the people of Foglianise have made a special point of honoring him on his day.
The traditional procession involves the predictable dancing, costumes, and music, but the most fantastic element is the series of all sorts of buildings and monuments made of twisted straw, drawn along on carts. The Corn Palace is essentially the same thing, except that it was built to attract settlers, not to invoke fertility. I think. And, of course, it doesn’t move. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1203SadCYs
I’m not going to go into the symbolism of the cornucopia, but it’s pretty complicated too. It doesn’t involve death, however.
Happy Thanksgiving, whatever you decide to do. Or eat.
The church at Gemona was decorated for their Day of Thanksgiving on November 13. Cornstalks are always an excellent touch.An arrangement set before the high altar involves not only the usual squashy vegetables but flowers made from fresh wood shavings.City Hall was festooned within an inch of its life. There are some cabbages up there, too -- along with the eggplant.
A satisfyingly dim view of the panorama as we headed to church. This is the very least the weather should be doing for this holiday.
Yesterday one of the most important days in the Venetian (hence in my) calendar came around again: the annual feast of La Madonna della Salute, Our Lady of Health.
Health is one of those things, like air or the ability to speak your mother tongue, that you don’t give much thought to till it’s been impaired. Or removed.
In a city that has the highest median age of any city in Italy, health is a subject that’s right up there on the short list of things to really worry about, several places ahead of acqua alta and even a close second to tourism. Considering that the city government is currently debating (or not — I can’t keep track) whether to close the hospital here and send everybody who needs help to the big hospital on the mainland (pause for screams of rage and disbelief), health is clearly a big issue.
The sign is put up every year: "It is dangerous to lean out when passing under the votive bridge." Those who don't speak Italian probably discover this fact on their own.
But let us return to the health at hand. This feast was established in 1630 in thanksgiving for the Madonna’s response to the desperate plea of the city of Venice for deliverance from arguably the worst plague in its history, though the pestilence of 1574 was also noticeably catastrophic.
If anyone (such as me) has ever tried to imagine what an epidemic of plague might entail, a few passages from “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni might help. They certainly provide a way to grasp the magnitude of this festa (not to mention the votive church, which took 50 years to build).
The votive bridge, made of a few bits of the big bridge that's installed for the feast of the Redentore (another plague situation). Highly useful for pedestrians but a large pain for transport, which is one of many reasons why it isn't permanent.
The plague of 1630 exterminated much of northern Italy, and drawing on contemporary documents, Manzoni describes the plague in Milan. I presume that it was much the same in Venice, where 80,000 Venetians died, including the doge, though here the carts obviously were replaced by boats.
…sickness and deaths began rapidly to multiply…with the unusual accompaniments of spasms, palpitation, lethargy, delirium, and those fatal symptoms, livid spots and sores; and these deaths were, for the most part, rapid, violent, and not unfrequently sudden, without any previous tokens of illness….
All the doorways into the streets were kept shut from either suspicion or alarm, except those which were left open because deserted or invaded; others nailed up and sealed outside, on account of the sick or dead who lay within; others marked with a cross drawn with coal, as an intimation to the monatti [men who removed the bodies] that there were dead to be carried away….
Everywhere were rags and corrupted bandages, infected straw, or clothes, or sheets, thrown from the windows; sometimes bodies, which had suddenly fallen dead in the streets, and were left there till a cart happened to pass by and pick them up, or shaken from off the carts themselves, or even thrown from the windows….
And while corpses, scattered here and there, or lying in heaps…made the city like one immense sepulchre, a still more appalling symptom, a more intense deformity, was their mutual animosity, their licentiousness, and their extravagant suspicion…not only did they mistrust a friend, a guest; but those names which are the bonds of human affection, husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother, were words of terror, and dreadful and infamous to tell! the domestic board, the nuptial bed, were dreaded as lurking-places, as receptacles of poison…
Men of the highest rank might be seen without cape or cloak, at that time a most essential part of any gentleman’s dress; priests without cassocks, friars without cowls; in short, all kinds of dress were dispensed with which could contract anything by fluttering about…And besides this carefulness to go about as trussed up and confined as possible, their persons were neglected and disorderly; the beards of such as were accustomed to wear them grown much longer, and suffered to grow by those who had formerly kept them shaven; their hair, too, long and undressed, not only from the neglect which usually attends long depression but because suspicion had been attached to barbers…
The greater number carried in one hand a stick, some even a pistol, as a threatening warning to anyone who should attempt to approach them stealthily; and in the other, perfumed pastils, or little balls of metal or wood, perforated and filled with sponges steeped in aromatic vinegar, which they applied from time to time, as they went along, to their noses, or held there continually.
Some carried a small vial hung around their neck, containing a little quick-silver, persuaded that this possessed the virtue of absorbing and arresting every pestilential effluvia; this they were very careful to renew from time to time…
Even friends, when they met in the streets alive, saluted each other at a distance, with silent and hasty signs. Every one, as he walked along, had enough to do to avoid the filthy and deadly stumbling-blocks with which the ground was strewn, and in some places even encumbered. Every one tried to keep the middle of the road, for fear of some other obstacle, some other more fatal weight, which might fall from the windows…
…the sick… were wandering about as if stupefied; and not a few were absolutely beside themselves: one would eagerly be relating his fancies to a miserable creature laboring under the malady; another would be actually raving; while a third appeared with a smiling countenance, as if assisting at some gay spectacle.
…two horses, which, stretching their necks and pawing with their hooves, could with difficulty make their way; and drawn by these a cart full of dead bodies, and after that another, and another, and another; and on each hand monatti walking by the side of the horses hastening them on with whips, blows, and curses. These corpses were for the most part naked, while some were miserably enveloped in tattered sheets, and were heaped up and twined together, almost like a nest of snakes unfolding themselves….at every trifling obstacle, at every jolt, these fatal groups were seen quivering and falling into horrible confusion, heads dangling down, women’s long tresses disheveled…
The entire story contained in one extravagant altarpiece by Giusto Le Court: On the left, the city of Venice (as usual, represented as a beautiful and wealthy woman) kneels to implore mercy and deliverance from the plague. In the center, the Virgin Mary, holding Jesus, makes a gracious gesture of assent. On the right, a cherub uses a torch to drive away the Plague, shown as a hideous hag, fleeing. Below is an icon of the Mesopanditissa, or Madonna of Health, brought from Crete by Francesco Morosini in 1670.
A few stalls are set up for selling candles; it's inconceivable to me that someone could come and not offer a candle, though I suppose there's no rule against it. The cheapest candle costs 2 euros (($2.69). The ones with the red base are often taken home, to be lighted in times of peril (usually storms). Burning a few leaves of the olive branch you brought home from Palm Sunday was (is still?) believed to ward off the danger.
Not wishing to spoil the party, I think it’s not a bad idea to acknowledge at least briefly that the day was fixed to express gratitude (or desire) for heavenly intervention in matters of life and death, and not primarily so we could buy balloons of Nemo and Spiderman and eat cotton candy and slabs of deep-fried dough slathered with chocolate.
The weather was perfect, by which I mean cold, raw, damp, foggy, and breezy. I’ve been to the basilica of the Salute to offer my candle on days when it was sunny and the temperature in the sixties, and I can tell you that it just feels wrong. This isn’t a happy holiday, it’s a solemn, penitential, I-really-mean-this kind of day, even though there are plenty of balloons and highly sugared and fat-laden treats being sold from stalls behind the church. It’s probably years before Venetian kids grasp the fact that the day isn’t dedicated to Our Lady of Fat and Sugar. Amazing, now that I think of it, that she should be honored as the guardian of health with this payload of calories. They ought to depict her — no disrespect intended — holding an insulin syringe.
Back to the weather: The worse it is, the happier are the Ladies who Mink. I’ve remarked before that this city is an unrepentant recidivist on the animal-skin subject. (I don’t count shearling in this category.) One winter evening I counted 11 mink coats on the vaporetto going home. Someone I know told me about a little old lady on the Lido who was packing her steamer trunks for a holiday in the Dolomites with four peltish coats. This was the minimum a woman could rationally consider bringing; no telling what your friends would think if they should see you in the same old fur, day after day.
Therefore Lino refers to this legendary day as the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coat. And laughs on the rare days when it turns out to be, as I mentioned, sunny and warm, because wearing their fur coat to the basilica is more important to these ladies than offering a candle for their husband, or maybe even for themselves. We enjoy imagining them hanging tough in the heat, wrapped in mink, wearing terrycloth headbands, like sweating tennis players.
Yesterday, though, I only saw one fur-like garment, and I am dead certain it was fake. This does not bode well, but I’m not sure for what.
You bring your candle into the basilica and eventually decide to join the crowd that clusters near the few points where volunteers are feverishly lighting and installing them in the racks.
It's rare to see someone with this many candles, this big. I can only hope she was offering them in thanksgiving, and not with pleas for intervention.Sometimes the children get to hold the candles.
It's hard work to take people's candles, light them and install them. Because you also have to remove somebody else's flaming candle first. These young men spend the day covered with wax drippings.
A few of the classic thank-offerings for answered prayers are displayed on the wall near the high altar. When I came to Venice, the walls were covered with these tokens of gratitude, representing true healings, something much bigger than even a very big candle. I wonder where they went, and why.
The street behind the church is just as crowded, but a lot more cheerful. Finally the kids get to gorge.
This is just one small part of the panoply. Lino remembers when only Venetian frittelle were sold, at stalls in front of the church. Now, with a minor exception, it's all sweets from Sicily.
The balloons have all gone Hollywood and evidently Geppetto is moonlighting.
Kids with candles, grown-ups with cotton candy. It's great.
