Venetian Events

How to blight a festa

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The procession of the feast of the Redentore, depicted by Canaletto. Let us not forget, in all the turmoil about the party, that this is essentially a religious occasion. Or at least it was supposed to be.

As I’ve related probably all too well, summer is loaded with more festas than the average barge with paying festa-goers.  I have a reason for making that comparison, because once again we are now on the verge of the festa del Redentore, the “Notte Famossissima,” inspiration of song and story, one of the great parties of the world (though  in terms of sheer tonnage I wouldn’t compare it to, say, the Kumbh Mela, which technically isn’t a party.  But still).  In a word, it’s tonight.

What is inspiring lively conversation this year, however, is the drastic decision announced a mere two days ago by the Capitaneria di Porto, the branch of the navy which is responsible for certain tracts of the lagoon. The commanders have made it clear that this year they’re throwing the book at the festivizers, and are ready to fine and possibly confiscate the large barges known as “topomotori” which usually show up carrying ten times as many people as they’re allowed. Without any safety equipment of any kind.

The classic Venetian topomotore, in the rio di San Trovaso. If it can carry refrigerators or bricks, why not beer and sarde in saor? And, of course, the hordes to consume them?

Yes, illegally overloaded barges have become part of the tradition, because they are a wonderful size for carrying large tables groaning with food and drink surrounded by the aforementioned people, a few of them also groaning.  These working boats are typically certified to carry “cose” (things) but not “persone” (people).  I suppose a clever lawyer could try to make a case for the people qualifying as things, but I’ll stop here.

Technical note: Of course you’ve seen these barges plying the Venetian waters every day loaded with merchandise with people aboard to heft the cargo, but the legal limit is six.

These restrictions also apply to the big fishing boats that trundle up from Chioggia and Pellestrina — they hold more people (good!) but they are impossible to present as anything other than what they are.  (“Certainly, sir, all these women and children are professional fishermen too…..”).

What is really upsetting people isn’t primarily that that oppressed minority known as Venetian families is going to be prevented from enjoying a Venetian (debatable, by now) event.  The truly distressed people are the barge owners who are now accustomed to making money by renting their vessels for the evening.  The intake (in small, unmarked bills) to the party’s organizer could be 100 euros per person, with a payload of up to 40 people.  The barge owner could expect 300-400 euros just for letting his boat leave the dock.

A typical fishing boat from the area of Pellestrina and Chioggia, proudly vaunting its illegal clam-sifting attachment. These boats can hold astonishing numbers of people.

Some nervous organizers have already canceled their parties. Others are saying, “We’re going to chance it.  Out of thousands of boats, why should they pick me?” I like the way estimating odds works: Your chance of winning the lottery (in your own eyes) is from reasonable to even very high; your chance of being fined for carrying a clan, a tribe, an entire linguistic group, is almost nil. Such is the power of human desire.

What’s modestly upsetting me is that this drama was avoidable because, as the Capitaneria has pointed out,  the owners of these barges could have avoided all this unpleasantness by coming to the office in time to apply for official permission to “occasionally” carry more people than usual.  I didn’t know such an option existed because it doesn’t affect me, but it would seem that a person with a barge, especially one who was looking forward to a couple of hundred free euros, might have exerted himself to acquire a more extensive knowledge of the rules of the road.  And that forestalling this awkwardness in a timely manner could have been done without even breaking a sweat. But I forgot. Drama is so much more entertaining than just doing things the easy way.

As an interesting additional factor in the evening’s excitement (and in this case, totally unavoidable by anybody) is the weather.  They’re predicting wind, and also rain.  Perhaps even thunder and lightning.  Looking at the forecast, maybe people would have canceled anyway.  Or maybe the organizers and owners would have calculated the odds in their favor, as per usual.

I can hear it now: “With all these thousands of boats, why should it rain on me?”

We weren’t planning on being in a boat anyway, but on watching from the shoreline, like two years ago.  The only thing that could spoil my evening would be for the gelateria to run out of ice cream.

 

 

 

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Boatworld, Nature

Disaster strikes

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A tornado crossed part of the lagoon yesterday morning, and part of Sant’ Elena was in its way,  And all of our boat club.

The office is gone, the two buildings and sheds where our boats were kept are gone.  And the boats are pretty much gone, too.  I don’t mean “gone” as in lifted to heaven in the rapture, I mean it in the sense of smashed to various bits.  Because we were in a phase of demolishing the old clubhouse in anticipation of a new facility and all our 34 boats were outside.

The man who operates the winch to put the boats in and out of the water was in the metal container that served as his temporary shelter at the water’s edge.  The tornado rolled it over a couple of times with him in it, and two men managed to get him out.  He was rushed to the emergency room with a gash in his head and two broken ribs, but at least the container wasn’t tornado’d into the water with him in it.

Trees snapped and uprooted, but no further victims, as far as I know, unlike the previous tornado in 1970.

When the tornado struck, we were at the Rialto market where our attention was mostly dedicated to the price of cherries.  It rained, but we had not even the slightest hint that devastation was being wrought just over the way. We had a blast of rain, but there wasn’t anything about it that made you think of anything worse than your wet feet.

We got the news from a friend who was at San Marco, and who had seen it.  Then the phone calls began to spread the word.  At that point I was on Murano  with a friend, so I wasn’t able to go help with the first load of work, But Lino was there all afternoon, along with almost every club member who was available.

I’m still trying to get a grip on all this.  Because this morning has dawned cool, clear, and dazzling with cloudless sunshine.  Translation: The perfect day to go out in a boat.

The website of the Remiera Casteo has photographs and film of what the tornado left behind.

YouTube has a number of clips of this event but here is one of the best. If the video isn’t shown, here is the link: http://youtu.be/KFCaI_L_K4s

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Venetian History

Stendhal syndrome in San Marco

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The Pala d'Oro started out as a relatively modest silver panel commissioned by doge Pietro Orseolo in 976-978 A.D. It was expanded by doge Ordelafo Falier (1104), and over the centuries it grew into this ponderous rectangle 11.4 feet (3.5 meters) long and 6.8 feet (2.1 meters) high.

I can tell you precisely when was the last time I sat and looked at art. It was Easter morning, and I wasn’t in a museum.

We were sitting in the front row of the basilica of San Marco and the occasion was the elaborate festal mass.  The sermon was well underway.  I had had every intention of listening carefully, because it was the new patriarch’s maiden voyage and I had been curious to check his rigging and navigation skills on one of the biggest days of the year.

If you’d like to know more, you’ll need to ask someone else.  Because while he didn’t drift into uncharted political or theological waters (I’m finished with this metaphor now), as his predecessor used to do, he wanted to convey a message I couldn’t follow, and he was in no hurry to finish it.  It was the religious equivalent of the stationary bicycle.

To be fair, he could just as well have been reading the Government Printing Office Style Manual, because the basilica of San Marco is an Olympics-level competitor if you’re trying to get somebody’s attention.  So I made the most of being installed in my seat for a while, and let my eyes wander around the opulence of the basilica itself.  And where my eyes wander, my brain tends to follow.

The story of Christ's temptations is presented in its barest essentials, but nothing has been left out, up to and including Satan giving up and flying back down to Hell.
I love this lion. He's just one small part of the gleaming mosaics on the ceiling and walls, which cover about 86,000 square feet (8,000 sq/m). I'm convinced that Venetian mothers for centuries implored their daughters to marry a mosaicist. They'd have been fixed for life.

After scanning my usual favorites (the mosaic depicting the Temptation in the Wilderness, the bug-eyed lion of San Marco in the Prophets Cupola, the relief on the small marble altar outlining Saint Paul’s crisis on the road to Damascus), I let my eyes settle on the Pala d’Oro.

One usually has to pay a small fee to go behind the high altar to see this prodigy, but on major feast days it is rotated to face the nave.  Of course, when you’re seated out there you can’t discern much detail, but even from a distance you can tell it’s something phenomenal.

As I gazed at it, I let my eyes slide beyond the extravagant assortment of enamel medallions, and the myriad (1,927, actually) precious and semi-precious stones, and its gleaming golden surface, dazzling though it all may be.

What I saw were the hundreds of people involved in making it, and how hard the work was, and how much it cost.  I don’t mean the bills that were presented to various doges, or what its total price would be today in round dollars, if such a thing could be calculated, which it probably can’t.

I mean the money every single person earned who was involved in this project, bearing in mind that what we see is the result of additions, substitutions, and renovations over centuries.  If thinking of Accounts Payable seems crass, it probably wasn’t so crass to the artists who made it.  Art is many things, but toward the top of the list is the word “business.”  I doubt that any more than .0035 percent of all the art in the world was made for free.

The number of individuals who contributed to this prodigious creation is similarly difficult to calculate, along with their vast amount of skill, effort, and imagination. So let’s take just one person.

I’m thinking about a master enamelist. First, there are the years he spends as an apprentice, doing the scut work, making mistakes, throwing things out, learning little tricks, getting yelled at.  He learns how to work with wire, with glass, with color, with fire. After I don’t know how long, he ‘s good enough to get the commission to do five saints (let’s say).

So he goes home to give his wife the good news, and tells her how much he’s  going to be paid (and when!).  And they stay up late feeling happy and trying to decide how they’ll spend the money — finally buy that horse? Pay the butcher? Order their daughter’s wedding dress?

Then I thought the same things about the artist who applied the baroque pearls (years, labor, etc.). Then I stepped back one step to the merchants who sold and bought the pearls (years, labor).  And the person who brought the pearls from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople.  And the person who dived for the pearls.  (I stopped short of imagining the oyster making the pearls, but you’re free to go ahead.)

Then I thought about the gold-leaf beaters and appliers. (This is no small thought, considering that the Pala d’Oro consists of gold in  many forms: repousse’, cast, applique’, chased, stamped, matted, and filigrees, not to mention granulation and beading.)  The gold merchant.  His wife and kids.  The camel-driver and ship’s captain who carried the gold.  Their wives and kids. The gold miner.  His wife and kids.

The central medallion depicts "Christ Pantocrator," a classic Orthodox/Byzantine depiction of Christ as the Almighty, or Ruler of All. This piece alone would have kept a number of people busy.

So I probably missed an excellent sermon while I was imagining spouses and offspring and extra food and new shoes and sick grandfathers and quack doctors and on and on, through the whole infinitely expanding intricacy of the connections between just about everything.

So whenever I see a few square inches of art (frescoes, mosaics, marble statues, kilim carpets, whatever), I sometimes unleash my mind and let it roll around like a Weazel Ball among centuries and countries and people.

I came back to my immediate surroundings when they passed to take up the collection.  Speaking of money.

So the goldsmith comes home and his wife asks how his day went, and he says "Excellent -- I finished the wings. Tomorrow, the seraphim." I deduce that this is an image of Ariel, one of 12 archangels represented in the throng. The garment is reminiscent of the Byzantine emperor's robes.

 

 

 

 

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Venetian Events

Patriarchal postscript

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Zwingle’s Eighth Law states “The bigger your memorial, the less people remember who you were.”  A wander around Westminster Abbey shines a blinding light on that truth.  A black marble slab for Charles Dickens, a white marble meringue for James Cornewall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case anyone was wondering if there might be any memorials to the three patriarchs of Venice who became pope, the answer is yes.  But you might not notice them, and if you did, you might not quite grasp who they were. Especially if the inscription is in Latin (grrr).

Trivia alert: Venetians refer to popes, especially the three that touched Venice, by their civilian last names, not their formal papal names.  Also, the word for “pope” in Italian is papa (PAH-pah.) The nickname for your daddy is the same word, pronounced pah-PAH. If you mix them up, people will think the pope is your father.

Pope Pius X, “Papa Sarto,” was deeply moved on leaving Venice to go to Rome for the conclave of cardinals meeting to elect the successor to Pope Leo XIII. The throng which came to see him off at the station was exhibiting what we’d call intense separation anxiety.  He reassured them by promising that he would return, whether alive or dead. Yes, he said those words. He was elected pope, and though he lived another 11 years, he never made it back. He died in 1914.

In 1959, Pope John XXIII (just coming up in our chronicle) — who knew of this unfulfilled promise — arranged for Sarto’s casket to be disinterred, organized a special train which left, in those days, from a station within the Vatican, and sent him back to Venice.  The body lay in state in the basilica of San Marco for a month, then was returned by special train to the Vatican. Promise kept.

Footnote: Lino remembers the day the train arrived, not because he was present, but because all the employees of the Aeronavali, which maintained and repaired airplanes at Nicelli airport on the Lido, were taken in a bus to see where the new Marco Polo airport was going to be built on the mainland. The sacred and the profane just keep on running into each other.

Of the three papal memorials here, that of Saint Pius X is the most impressive by weight, but the least impressive by location: at the head of the Ponte della Liberta’ by Piazzale Roma, next to the Agip gas station.  Lino says it’s because he’s there to guard the gate to the city.  There may well be more to it than that, but I haven’t taken the time to root it out.  That could be a project for my old age.

This is a crucial node in your arrival by car. If you want to park, you're now looking for the garage. If you're taking a ship, or the ferry to the Lido, you'll be taking the off-ramp at the bottom of the picture. If you're at the gas station, you'll be staring at the price on the pump with something like terror. If it's night, the light over the monument will never stand out in the intermittent illumination from the street lamps. Speaking of illumination, sorry I took this in the morning -- I didn't realize I'd be facing due east.

 

The inscription reads: "He returned (reference to his vow) with the halo of the saints. Alleluia!" And beneath the bust, "O holy father, bless Venice." I'd like to know if anyone ever puts money in the slot. It may be the most challenging place for a hundred miles to make a contribution. More people stop at memorials on mountaintops than stop at this one. The dates flanking his head (April 2, 1959 - May 10, 1959) refer to the period of his return visit. He was canonized in 1954, so his sainthood was official.

Pope John XXIII, Papa Roncalli, or “The Good Pope,” was known as a saint by anyone who ever met him, at least here in Venice.  The beatification details that made it official were just extra.

Lino had two encounters with him.  One was by surprise, crossing the patriarch’s path as he left the basilica of the Salute.  Lino was strolling with his girlfriend, and Roncalli stopped to say hello.  “Are you two engaged?” he asked in a friendly, if generic, way.  “Yes, Your Eminence” — Lino repeats this in a tiny abashed voice.  “Love each other,” he said, patting each of them on the cheek. Evidently his charisma marked this little event in a powerful way, because on paper it looks like nothing.

The second encounter was at the airport, where Lino worked as an airplane mechanic.  Patriarch Roncalli came to celebrate mass there for the workers, and he was lacking an altarboy to assist him.  Lino volunteered.

My favorite bit of Roncalli lore is the nickname the gondoliers gave him: “Nane Schedina,”  or Jack the Lottery Ticket.  When he chose the name John XXIII, to the wags at the Molo stazio the Roman numerals looked like the pattern of the numbers on a lottery ticket.

If you needed any further evidence of his qualities as a patriarch/pope/human being, the nickname says it all.  Gondoliers bestow them spontaneously, and only when they really want to.  In fact, if there is any category which comes equipped with a built-in automatic crap detector, as Hemingway put it, it would be the gondoliers. The fact that Roncalli would sometimes walk over to the Molo to say hello, and even sometimes take them up on their offer of going to get a glass of wine at the nearby bar, obviously had something to do with their feeling for him.  He’d play cards with the staff in the evening, too.  Not with the majordomo, with the cook and the cleaning ladies.

He’s the only patriarch of the three that has two memorials.  That doesn’t earn him any bonus points, I merely mention it.

This bust of Pope John XXIII faces the side entrance to the basilica of San Marco. It looks well-lit from this angle, but if you see it straight on it's always in a sort of muddy little area of wall that makes it hard to distinguish. Not to mention makes it almost impossible to read the fulsome Latin inscription over it. I think that's pretty funny, considering how he moved the liturgy from Latin to the vernacular so it could be understood by everybody. I'd be willing to bet that this inscription really annoys him. If saints can get annoyed.

 

I was thinking of getting a translation of the encomium above him, but I resisted, on principle. Anyway, the inscription doesn't add anything you can't get just by looking at his face.

Pope John Paul I, “Papa Luciani,” was smaller and, it turns out, more frail than his two patriarchal predecessors.  But Venetians loved him, and not just because he came from the mountains just up the road.  In his mere 33 days on the throne of St. Peter he earned the sobriquet “The Smiling Pope.” Venetians already knew that.

So far, no bust of him has been made, or if so, placed anywhere a human can see it.  But he is remains an extremely tough act to follow, as his successors have amply demonstrated.

The patriarch's palace faces the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, joined to the basilica of San Marco. The two memorial plaques are between the two windows on the right and left of the entrance.

 

"In this patriarchal seat Cardinal Albino Luciani lived at the head of his flock in goodness and hard-working humility from 1970 to 1978 when elected Pope John Paul I for thirty-three days as father and universal master opened the way to a new hope."

 

"In this patriarchal seat in the spirit of the mission of Venice illustrated by Saints Lorenzo Giustiniani and Pius X Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli shepherd and beloved father from 1953 to 1958 in fruitful thoughtfulness prepared the ecumenical vastness and innovatory ferment of his glorious pontificate."

 

Mons. Francesco Moraglia's coat of arms, now in place over the entrance to the patriarch's palace. Its symbolism, from top to bottom, is: The patriarchal hat, the lion of San Marco, a star representing the Virgin Mary, its eight points denoting the eight Beatitudes, a battlement (a pun on his name -- "muraglia" means wall), and the sea with an anchor, freely borrowed/interpreted from the crest of Pius X. The motto reads "With Mary mother of Jesus," a phrase which among other things, was used by Pope John XXIII on presenting to the Curia the Apostolic Constitution. Tempting fate?

 

To descend, as I enjoy doing, from the sublime to the quotidian, on Tuesday morning a barge was called to the service entrance of the basilica to take away a rack of vestments. I don't know if they were used at the big investiture ceremony two days earlier, or are being sent to the drycleaner to be ready for Palm Sunday and/or Easter. But off they go.
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