…is a good offense. As we know. Not social offensiveness, but what is also called by the disphoneous term “pro-active.”
I just made up that word, because the inventors of language have overlooked creating an opposite to “euphoneous.” They offer “cacophony,” which is completely wrong here.
Why am I even talking about offense/defense?
Because of a little event in Lino’s life which is an excellent illustration of how this works. He’s very good at these gambits.
I don’t remember what we were talking about, but it brought back to his mind a small but perfectly formed encounter years and years ago.
It was a Friday, and on Sunday the annual corteo on the Brenta known as the Riveria Fiorita was coming up. The club’s gondolone, or 8-oar gondola, was on the list to participate and the rowers were all signed up.
But the boat had to be at Tronchetto at 8:00 the next (Saturday) morning, which — considering that the club was on the Lido — would have meant going to the Lido in the middle of the night to have enough time to put the boat in the water and traverse the lagoon. This didn’t seem like the most entertaining thing to do.
So he and his son went to the club on Friday and rowed the gondolone to Venice, to the canal that went by their home. Then they looked for a place to tie up.
They found a spot on an empty stretch of his canal, just under the fence marking off a bit of garden. The space was ample, and it was available to the public. He wasn’t encroaching on any boat-owner’s parking place. He wasn’t encroaching on anything.
But a man came out of a domicile facing the garden, and it was clear that he felt extremely encroached upon.
“You can’t tie the boat there,” he stated.
“Why is that?” Lino asked.
“Because”(some vague reason here — maybe narrowing the space for other boats, or something. Anyway, he didn’t want the boat there.)
“If you leave this boat here,” he finished in high dudgeon, “I’m going to come and sink it.”
“Be my guest,” was Lino’s immediate reply. “Because if anything happens to this boat between now and tomorrow morning, I’ll know exactly who did it, and then we can go to the Carabinieri together.”
Silence. Not the silence of a quibble that was squashed, but the profound silence of deep space. The man went back inside and was never seen or heard from again.
But Lino was now more than tranquil. Because, as he explained it, “He probably came out to check on the boat every 30 minutes all night long.
I suddenly realized that when I was proposing the going-away party for the boy — clothes, but possibly also food, because he must be really hungry by now — I didn’t mention the frog.
That was an oversight. So here’s the plan.
First, the frog would be freed.
Second, he would be given a large pile of small- and medium-sized rocks to throw at the boy.
Third, he would be given a hundred things his heart might desire, from the unlisted phone numbers of Charles Ray (sculptor) and Francois Pinault (collector), to his own private estate with tennis court and helipad in the Great Moss Swamp, to a date with every winner of the Miss Humanity of the Netherlands pageant. And a huge party at the Waldorf-Astoria for freed dolphins, liberated dancing bears, wounded hedgehogs, rehabilitated slow lorises, and birds whose owners accidentally left their cages open. He’ll also have his own smorgasbord with all the beetles, grasshoppers, spiders, and Purina Frog Chow he’ll ever want. And a trampoline. And a pony.
Lino spotted this gull because of his little identification anklet. Maybe he’s in the bird atlas by now, with a number if not a name.
While we’re on the subject of animals, here’s something you might find interesting. More than 240 species of birds spend at least some, if not all, of their time in the Venetian lagoon and immediate vicinity.
An article in the Gazzettino announced this fact along with the notice of the publication of a new atlas of birds, the result of five years of data-gathering. For the record, the title is “Uccelli di laguna e di citta’ – L’atlante ornitologico del comune di Venezia 2006-2011,” written by Mauro Bon and Emanuele Stival, ornithologists of the Museum of Natural History, published by Marsilio.
Of these birds, 142 species come only for the winter, 115 come to nest, and about 60 are migrating. If you stop and read that over again, I think you’ll be respectfully amazed. In fact, the lagoon is at a crucial point on a major north-south flyway, and is one of the largest lagoons left in Europe. It’s far from being just scenery.
Even though I’ve never seen them, I now have learned that there is a Hungarian royal seagull which arrives in the fall, and spends the winter in the Giardini Reali between the Piazza San Marco and the lagoon. And there is an extremely rare black-legged kittiwake that comes from England.
The Little Egret, which is abundant in the lagoon, doesn’t mind looking for a bite wherever the chances seem good, though they seem to be happier pecking through the shallows when the tide is low. There is a tree near the Vignole which at twilight in the summer is almost completely white with the egrets who’ve come to perch there for the night.
I was already interested in birds because rowing around the lagoon at all hours and in all seasons means that you see plenty of them. For one thing, they’re everywhere. For another, they’re generally easier to see than fish.
Some of the birds I’ve come to recognize are as much as part of Venice as canals and tourists. The svasso (grebe) and tuffetto (little grebe), only appear in the winter. The cormorants, mallards, seagulls, egrets and herons are here all year. I’ve already gone on too long about my passion for blackbirds (a few months per year), and I’ve never bothered to mention pigeons because there’s nothing worth saying about them. They are the roaches of the avian world; they’ll be here pecking around and crooning after the last nuclear device explodes. I am prepared for hostile letters from pigeon-feeders.
There is one kingfisher who I watch for as we row behind the Vignole; all you can see is a flash of iridescent blue-green flitting through the trees and over the water. I wish he’d hold still somewhere just for a minute, but he’s not interested in being admired.
In the plush summer nights we almost always hear a solitary owl called a soleta (civetta in Italian), somewhere high in the trees in the Public Gardens. He or she makes a soft one-tone hoot, repeated pensively at perfectly regular intervals. It’s like a metronome, far away. It goes on for hours. It’s very comforting.
A young Little Gull, photographed in Northumberland. Maybe he’s thinking about his Venetian vacation.
For two days not long ago we were startled to see a fluffy young gull we’d never seen before, standing on the fondamenta gazing out at the lagoon. Determined research revealed that it is a Little Gull. We haven’t seen it since.
And one magical winter day a trio of swans flew over us. You hardly ever see the wild swans, but here were three, flying so low that I could see their long necks undulating slightly and hear a curious murmur from their throats.
Many of these birds depend on organisms and elements in the lagoon wetlands which exist because of, or are replenished by, acqua alta. If so many people who never leave the city didn’t get so worked up about having to put on boots, the water could continue to provide for lots of creatures who like being here too. Maybe your tourist or trinket-seller doesn’t care about the birds, but the birds probably don’t care about the Doge’s Palace and Harry’s Bar. Just saying.
A luscious look at acqua alta in the lagoon. A soaking marshy islet looks even better to a bird than it does to me.This is the single grey heron I’ve seen here, always fishing between Sant’ Andrea and Sant’ Erasmo.And of course the indefatigable seagulls. They look more attractive out here than plodding along the fondamentas ripping open plastic bags and strewing the garbage all around. Lino says nobody ever saw gulls in the canals, much less on the streets, when he was a boy. The same with cormorants, who we sometimes see fishing in our canal.
Update from the innards of the hapless marine creatures who keep us alive.
You may recall my heartfelt ode to the fish inside the fish which will never see daylight again (either one of them). Evidently this ode is going to have to be put on a continuous loop.
Lino was cleaning some hyper-fresh seppie not long ago, and I heard the clarion call from the kitchen: “Hey, look at this.”
One seppia’s last hors d’oeuvre was a minuscule sole.
This tiny sole made a seppia happy at least for a little while.
Then there was the day we bought a batch of moli, as they’re called here, otherwise known as blue whiting, or Melu’ or Micromesistius poutassou.
They’d been having a real feed, wherever they’d just been.
One of the moli had really hit the buffet — an anguela on the left, and a shrimp, too. Ignore the pink thing. It was never a fish.
I suppose I’ll have to stop this now. It’s no news that smaller fish are eaten by bigger fish. It’s just that… I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they’re swallowed whole. But then again, would I expect them to be ground to paste and spread on crackers?
This is canottaggio, a sport which motondoso has doomed to imminent extinction in Venice. A few clubs still have some rowers, but training is feasible almost exclusively in the winter. This image, taken in January last year, shows some rowers from the Querini rowing club making the most of the broad stretch of water by Sant’ Erasmo (here looking toward San Nicolo’ on the Lido), an area which in a few months will be a boiling maelstrom of waves. Between May and October, training will have to be done at dawn, if at all.
What I love are the glimpses of life I get when I’m walking around the city with Lino. Lino’s life, mostly, which by this point extends and entwines itself with what seems like virtually everyone and -thing we encounter. I’m convinced that I could point at anybody (or thing) at random, anywhere in the city, and it would bring some reminiscence to the fore.
Sometimes the reminiscences arrive under their own steam.
The other morning we were walking from San Giovanni e Paolo (please note: No matter what the guidebooks insist on claiming, primarily because most of them repeat what they’ve read in other guidebooks — fancy way of saying “copy” — NOBODY says “Zanipolo.” I have seen it written as the name of a transport company, but as for saying it? Never. They might have done so 50 or 100 years ago, but even if the Venetian language is still thriving, it too is metamorphosing, and certain words and phrases are as remote as “Forsooth.” People here go to the Maldives and Thailand on vacation and have all the satellite TV in the world. And it’s hard to maintain quaint old-fashioned modes of speech, no matter how much certain foreigners wish you would, when your kids watch “The Simpsons” and MTV). Anybody who wants Venetians to be saying “Zanipolo” almost certainly wants Americans to say “Goldarn it” and Mexicans to say “Caramba.” Except that specimens of the latter two might possibly still be found in a grotto somewhere. If you find a Venetian who has just said “Zanipolo,” I want you to bring him or her to our house and I’ll fix him or her dinner and take pictures of him or her and send them to the Gazzettino.
So as I say, we were walking from there toward the Strada Nova, wending through the mid-morning traffic. A man overtook us.
“Ciao Lino,” he said as he passed, without stopping.
“Oh, ciao!”
And he was gone.
“That man used to be a national rowing champion,” Lino said. By “rowing” he was referring to canottaggio, or what is also called here “English-style rowing.” This is a sport with a glorious history of Venetian athletes but which now barely survives, due to the inexorable increase of motondoso, by eating tree bark and licking dew-dripping leaves. So to speak. So a national champion from Venice is not to be taken lightly.
“His son also rowed,” Lino continued.
“One day they (the Italian Olympic committee) contacted his son and invited him to join the national Olympic team. No tests, no trials, no eliminations. Just like that. He was that good.
“And his son said, ‘Nah. Not interested.’ Nobody could make him care. So he didn’t go.”
