Ponte dei Ferai | Venice: I am not making this up

Generations have made their fortunes, to one degree or another, promoting Venice as a city of mystery, secrets, enigmas. What amazes me, though, is how many discoveries one can make by just looking around. It’s not as if you have to go looking for secrets — there are plenty of extraordinary things sitting right out there in the open, in front of everybody, but that go unnoticed for ages.

I have walked with Venetians, on our way to do something, who have suddenly stopped, looked up at/around/behind/next to some normal thing (a bridge, a window, a door) at something strange or beautiful and said, “I never saw that before.”

So here is something I saw because I looked up. Was it a secret? Only from me until that afternoon.

And the date is the same when read upside down or downside up. A new sort of palindrome? A mystic code opening to another dimension? Somebody’s PIN number?

This fresco isn’t far from San Marco at the intersection of the Rio Tera’ de le Colone and Calle dei Fabbri. Here is a map to clarify.

The garish aqua-tinted circle marks the position of this now-no-longer surprise.

Looking up as I walked west along the columned walkway …

This is the view along the Rio Tera’ de le Colone, for anyone in charge of navigating.

I came upon this, as previously noted:

The passageway was temporarily blocked, as you see, but that’s not important. Just look up.

The edited street sign is a relic of a brief but intense period when the populace revolted against the “Italianizing” of the local street names; they had always been in the Venetian language, but an official urban improver in the city administration thought Italian would be better. For a while nocturnal vigilantes took a hand in correcting this cultural vandalism, but don’t let this deviation from the name printed on your map disturb you.

Back to the fresco at hand. My first theory was wrong, of course, but I wasn’t alone in supposing the dice in this design to be a mystic reminder of what may have been a gambling establishment back in 1691. There were plenty of them, but people probably didn’t need signs to show them where to go, mainly because gambling was mostly illegal.

Rummaging through the internet I found that several people had also found it reasonable to suppose that gambling inspired this curious fresco. But then I was even more surprised to discover a much simpler explanation. No need to go any further back than the 1980s and a particularly whimsical artist named Dorino Cioffi (born 1932 in Este, Veneto region), now living and working in Venice.

I could go find him and ask him about all this, and I’m not saying I won’t, but I wanted to get this little tale out into the ether. Whatever his motivations might have been, and however he may have managed to get permission to paint on a public space (“No worries, it’ll be down by Wednesday”), he created this diverting little image. Fooling people is so much fun. Carnival comes to mind.

Starting at the top is a streetlight (*feral*, in Venetian, pronounced fehr-AHL), sitting atop a cooking pot (*pignata*, in Venetian), behind three dice (*dai*, in Venetian). This is important to the story, so read on.

For reasons as yet, if ever, to be discovered, the artist devised this image to refer to the three bridges nearest to the location of the fresco. I don’t know why that spot was chosen, though if you’ve decided you want to paint on an outdoor ceiling, your options are already limited.

The aqua circle is the fresco; the yellow circle to the right is the Ponte dei Ferali, and the red on the upper left is the Ponte de le Pignate.

The Ponte dei Dai connects to the Piazza San Marco, as you see.

The Ponte de le Pignate, walking toward the Rialto bridge.

The Sotoportego dei Dai, with the bridge just coming up.

Having just crossed the bridge, I look toward the Piazza San Marco. This bridge, like so much of Venice, has been patched and repaired to a Frankensteinian degree. The long strip of lighter-colored material stretching along the right side is undoubtedly the scar left when it was necessary to open that part of the bridge to get at whatever pipe is installed beneath it. Water pipes, cables, or any other tubes that may need repairing and replacing are reached by incisions made in the bridge as needed and then closed up with varying degrees of finesse. I have seen bridges that are held together after numerous dissections by various materials from asphalt patches to leftover concrete. In some cases the only things they haven’t used to put a bridge back together are safety pins, duct tape, chewing gum, and a few staples.

This is what bridges look like under the paving stones. Stripping this bridge to its very innards was a drastic move indeed — usually they just remove the bare minimum to resolve whatever little problem may have been bubbling under the surface. I’m guessing it wasn’t the innards that were the problem, but the bridge itself.

The names of the bridges, like the streets, referred to something that was made, or sold, or both, on or near that bridge. As far back as the 1200’s the feraleri, or makers of streetlights (ferali), had set up their shops on nearby streets, as well as on the bridge itself (do not ask me how that worked). The same explanation applies to the pignate (cooking pots).

As for the dai (the original name was dadi, or dice), they were not so much produced as simply sold near their eponymous bridge. This is amusing, considering that gambling with dice was forbidden. You and your friends might call a place the “bridge of crack cocaine” if that’s what makes sense to you, but painting the name on an official street sign would be strange. I think we can agree on that?

You may be awaiting more information on the pots and the dice, which I suppose there is, but the streetlights turn out to be far more interesting than the other two items put together. (Do not recommend.) As I leave the eccentric fresco behind, though, I can say that without it I almost certainly wouldn’t have given a thought to the lamps.

My next post will be shedding plenty of light on the subject.

decoding the fresco