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...
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.
The solemnity (more and/or less) of the past three days — All Saints Day and All Souls Day — dissolves today into the genuine solemnity of the annual commemoration of the end of World War I. November 4 (1918) is the date on which war against the Austro-Hungarian empire and its allies ceased.
It sounds so tidy: Victory. Peace. Ninety years have gone by. Let’s move on.
But every year the moving-on stops, to observe what is now called the Festa of the Armed Forces. Many civic monuments, and not a few of the parish memorials listing the fallen sheep of the local flock, are decorated with shiny fresh laurel wreaths given by the City of Venice. And a ceremony performed by veterans’ groups and other military elements is held every year on this day in the Piazza San Marco.
In Rome, the President of the Republic made the traditional visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which soldiers guard night and day.
France had established the first tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1920, and the Italians wanted to do likewise. They had lost some 1,240,000 men, almost entirely on the northern front which had stretched some 400 miles, almost one-third of the entire Alpine arc. In what some have called history’s greatest mountain battlefield, the gathering and burial of unidentified soldiers had been going on for two years.
A commission was formed to choose one soldier from each of the eleven sectors of the front (Rovereto, Dolomiti, Altipiani, Grappa, Montello, Basso Piave, Cadore, Gorizia, Basso Isonzo, San Michele, and Castagnevizza). No identifying marks of any kind were to be permitted — no name, or rank, or serial number.
The eleven caskets were taken to the basilica of Aquileia, not far from Trieste. Here they were arranged in a line, and on October 26, 1921, a woman named Maria Bergamas from Gradisca d’Isonzo stepped forward to choose one.
Her son, Antonio, had been killed but his body had never been found. No one imagined, I’m sure, that one of the eleven victims could have been her son. She was there to represent all of the mothers, wives and women of Italy.
One eyewitness reported that she walked toward the row of eleven coffins, “with her eyes staring, fixed on the caskets, trembling…in front of the next to last one, she let out a sharp cry, calling her son by name, and fell on the casket, clasping it.” Strangely, there are less fervid accounts, also by eyewitnesses: “In front of the first coffin she seemed to become faint, and was supported by her escort of four veterans, all decorated with the Gold Medal for Valor. In front of the second, she stopped, held out her arms and placed her mourning veil upon it.”
As a journalist, I can’t grasp how there could be more than one version of the event, but I assume everyone was extremely keyed up.
Here is the scene as depicted by “La Domenica del Corriere.” Meaning no disrespect, it clearly would have made an excellent third act to a tragic opera.
In any case, one was chosen, placed on a gun carriage, lashed onto an open-sided train carriage,and covered with the Italian battle flag. Four other open carriages were attached, to contain the flowers which undoubtedly were going to be offered by the people along the way.
The train stopped at Udine, Treviso, Venice, Padova, Rovigo, Ferrara, Bologna, Pistoia, Prato, Firenze, Arezzo, Chiusi, Orvieto, and finally Rome. But in fact it stopped — was stopped, actually, by the throngs which had waited for hours to see it — at all the stations, even the tiniest. Some threw flowers, others clasped their hands and knelt.
The train arrived in Rome on the evening of November 3, and the casket was taken to the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri near the station. Mourners passed all night to pay their respects.
The next day, November 4, 1921, the war would formally end at 3:00 PM. The cortege proceeded slowly down the Via Nazionale toward Piazza Venezia and the massive monument known as the Vittoriano, where the body would be entombed.
The monument known as Il Vittoriano, in Rome. The “Altar of the Fatherland,” where the casket was placed is in the center, beneath the statue of the goddess Roma in the golden niche. (Photo: Alessio Nastro Siniscalchi)
Total silence reigned. King Vittorio Emmanuele III walked behind the gun carriage bearing the casket. At the monument, the casket was lifted and carried by six veterans, all of whom had been decorated with the Gold Medal for Valor. Finally, it was placed in the space beneath the statue of the ancient goddess Roma. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOMk91vCfo
You might be surprised, as I have been, to discover how many poems (at least in Italian) have been written about the Unknown Soldier. Some are even composed as accusations, reflections, admonitions, rebukes, spoken directly to the reader by the Soldier. There is also a number of songs about him and/or war, in the mold of the protest songs of the Sixties and early Seventies. They seem dated and futile.
Well, of course they’re futile. Just look around. Still, some respect for the fallen is the least we can do. Or apparently the most we can do.
She wasn’t weeping, she was eating something. Life insists on going on.
A view of the riva dei Sette Martiri. You must imagine a floating platform where the innocent little sailboat is tied up, and hordes of people ashore. The storm was last year -- so far the sun is still shining.
One of the things I love most about Venice is its voluptuous, velvety silence. Many writers over the past few centuries have commented on this, though they have also commented (as do I) on the noise that is generated during the day by working people, their vehicles, and their voices. But hey, it’s daytime; people are supposed to be working, or at least doing things. “Get out of the house” is always good advice for physical and mental health, except where the mental health of your neighbors might be concerned.
In any case, people used to go home at night and things eventually got quiet.
The novelty in the past few decades is the noise by night. Summer, and now early autumn, is especially prone to nocturnal racket, what with kids zooming around the lagoon, and the city’s canals, in boats with motors of 40, 90, and even more horsepower.
Lino can’t figure it out: “It used to be that the only people who were out at night were fishermen,” he said this morning. “Now it’s everybody.”
Last night the situation took a turn for the worse.
We had already endured the usual nightly yelling and running (and yelling and standing still) of families going up and down the street outside our bedroom window. I’m not saying they ought to be home at 9:00 with the shutters bolted (though it would be nice if they’d do it by midnight). I’m merely saying that stopping to talk with loud voices about things ranging from what they’re going to do tomorrow up to and including their upcoming operation to remove their ovaries (not made up) is tiring and obnoxious. To say nothing of the man somewhere upstairs who, when the lights go off around the neighborhood, takes a handkerchief that must be the size of a tablecloth and begins giving two long honking blows of his nose, separated by a silence of about 18 seconds, followed by two long blows, etc., for way too long. It’s like the foghorn code, except he’s not warning anybody away. We’re stuck here.
I’m not saying he should be forbidden to blow his nose. I’m saying he might consider closing the window. Of course, we could close our window, but that would mean suffocating to death. So maybe closing his window means he would suffocate? Let’s just stop right here. I’m saying he could get some treatment for whatever this condition is, because it can’t be all that enjoyable for him in any case, after the first forty minutes or so.
So what does a certain Umberto Bossi have to do with all this cacophony?
He is the leader of a political party known as the Northern League, whose mission in life is to slag anything and anybody south of the Po River, and to promote the secession of said northern area (the regions of Veneto, Lombardy, and environs) from the rest of Italy. He and his cohorts want to establish a new entity known as Padania, an independent, financially and politically self-sufficient entity, in order to be rid of all of the injustices which a national government inflicts on the productive, honest, disciplined, hard-working, right-thinking northerners.
Unable, so far, to accomplish this goal, he and his cohorts spend most of their time in parliament blocking other parties’ initiatives.
So what do he and his followers have to do with the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world, and Erla’s nightly efforts to slumber?
Because every September he stages a huge rally here. Why here? Because the Po River, the aforementioned geographical and emotional frontier between Us and Them, flows into the sea not far away, and because Venice is the greatest stage set imaginable, perfect for publicity. You can’t imagine a serious rally being put on in, say, Rovigo, though they do have a very nice stadium.
This rally draws the faithful from all over, who come to hear his incendiary speechifying, and to witness his emptying of a flask of Po River water into the Lagoon. Great theatre, though I still don’t quite grasp its meaning. From 1600 to 1604, the Venetians cut the Po in half to send it southward; if it had continued to debouch into the Lagoon, by now Venice would be sitting in the middle of cornfields. But this is a detail. The Po belongs to Bossi and he wants to bring it to Venice.
So yesterday, in the build-up to today’s Big Event, there were clashes between groups demonstrating against Mr. Bossi and his League and the police who were trying to contain their destructive enthusiasm.
And last night, at about 3:30 (when silence was, in fact, reigning over our streets and canals), we were all blasted awake by a new and appalling noise.
A motorboat was going down the canal with an amplifying system brought from some exploded star. And it was playing music: “Faccetta Nera,” a marching song adopted by the Fascists (though it predates them), full of racist and colonialist overtones. Everybody over the age of two — even I, by now — know that it is hugely incorrect politically to play “Faccetta Nera” or any of its companions such as “Giovinezza” (Youth).
But there it was, ripping the night asunder a mere five steps from our front door. It faded away as the boat proceeded, presumably in a tour around most, if not all, of the city. But I wasn’t sure. I lay there awake for a while expecting it — them — to come back, thinking about how glad I am that whoever these people might be have the right to make so many people miserable. Democracy is indeed a great thing.
This morning, a sunny Sunday, the streets around here are full of police and carabinieri in riot gear, waiting to form up and get to work. Lino begged me not to make photographs, so I didn’t.
The enormous floating platform with its banners and podium, is tied up, as usual, at the riva dei Sette Martiri, between Arsenal and the Giardini. Police helicopters are rumbling around overhead. But I know at least some people are happy. Two bakeries are open — something unheard-of on a normal Sunday — because they also sell snacks and cold drinks, and the faithful are going to really need these items, especially if they do a lot of shouting.
“Non tutti i mali vengono per nuocere,” as the saying goes: It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
Perhaps the promised thunderstorms will indeed strike this afternoon. They would ruin the regata at Burano, true, but it could be worth it, to wash away all this detritus.
