little glimpses

I am working on a longer post — several, in fact — but meanwhile nibble these few morsels.

This is the apotheosis of Easter eggs in Venice, everything displayed in the glorious window of Drogheria Mascari at the Rialto Market.  Most smaller pastry and chocolate shops offer some variety of eggs, as do all the supermarkets.  Size, variety, glamor (cost, too, of course) all come into play when you’re deciding on the essence of Easter delectation.  The price also reflects, to a certain extent, the value of the little doodad hidden inside.  Did I mention they’re hollow?  They are.  Busting them open, shards of chocolate flying across the table, livens up the post-lunch torpor.
This year our intrepid neighborhood pastry wizard underwent some important experience.  A challenge?  A request from somebody’s grandchild?  A way of telling the public he just isn’t going to be forced to spend his remaining years turning out mere eggs or bells or any other chocolate cliche’? Behold the chocolate rat!  I suppose he could have done an ascending dove, or a gamboling lamb, or a hundred little marzipan chicks, if he’d wanted to stretch his skills.  But I clearly have underestimated this man, whom I have seen smile exactly once over the past 20 years.  Stand by for news from the Melita pastry shop, where something epochal is underway.  (Notice the horizontal line dividing the egg into equal halves.  That’s the seam by which the egg is closed around the “surprises,” or tiny gifts, inside the oval.)
The sheet of chocolate supporting the creature deserves admiration, though I can’t conjure a reason for the little silver nubbins. I honestly thought it was a beaver, at first glance. The Easter Beaver would be an animal that deserves more consideration, in my view. But a rat is also good. For Venice, maybe even better.
This is the menu outside the Ristorante Giorgione on via Garibaldi.  The prices are toward the high end — not excessive, but not bargains, either.  It would appear, though, that no money was allocated in the budget for the display menu.  I have never seen a menu in this condition.  Unless it was created for the Biennale, thereby qualifying itself as a work of art, I have no idea how something like this could ever have been (A) made and (B) displayed and (C) displayed every single day.  If there were any way one could bring to the owner’s attention how exceptionally bizarre this creation is, I might try it.  But the owner obviously thinks this is fine.

Nothing to do with food, but this glimpse touches the same nerve as the Giorgione menu, along with everything else that just somehow doesn’t work for me.  My brain says, “They needed a window, they made a window, everybody’s happy.”  My eye says “Noooooo…”.  The new resident above the former Negozio di Legnami (lumber store) didn’t bother removing its lovely frescoed sign.  That would have cost money.  Just slice out what you don’t need and on we go.  Sharp-eyed readers will realize that this isn’t in Venice; we came upon it in Bassano del Grappa, a lovely town a mere hour away that I highly recommend.

Oh look — it’s peaceful coexistence.  So it’s not a myth?
Me here, you there — sure, we can do this.
I like some fashion with my flounder. The passera di mare (Platichthys flesus), or European flounder, used to throng the lagoon.  At some point the gilthead bream got the upper hand, and you hardly see this fish anymore.  I’m glad the survivors still have style.
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Happy Easter

Easter chocolate eggs germinating sugar flowers.

Or to my non-Christian friends, happy whatever spring-time commemoration you observe.
The operative word is “spring.” As in “budding flowers and fruits.” We have them all over Venice and environs. So please accept these images in the spirit of reawakening, and let us continue to hope for the best.
Peach blossoms from Sicily. I watch for them every year.

Lemon-buds waiting to blossom, seen on a lemon tree in a big pot at the Rialto Market.

The lemon blossom a week later.

You don’t only see spring here, you eat it. Some of the earliest delicacies are (clockwise from upper left): Bruscandoli, or wild hops; carletti, the leaves of the unhappily named bladder campion; asparagus; and the slim strands of “barba di frate” (friar’s beard). Get them when you see them, because they’re not staying long.

A small fig tree getting to work on Sant’ Erasmo.

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How we are (part 3)

Feel free to look at this star magnolia as long as you need to.
At least the flowers are doing well.

The earliest spring rays have begun to warm our little world  (after the fog, that is), and I detect the tiniest sensation of the world opening up somehow, a barely perceptible air of relaxation.  It’s a lovely feeling, long awaited, and I would say almost entirely illusory.  Because while the temperature may be ever-so-gently rising, and the minuscule blossoms just beginning to emerge from their twigs, pandemic Venice, Veneto, and Italy are still struggling.

Every day over the past few weeks has brought ominous new bulletins, decrees, adjustments in prohibitions and permissions, all expressed in a revolving series of colors applied to Zones.  We’ve already gone through being a Red, then Orange, then Yellow, then Orange again.  At one point scattered places were Dark Red, and even Dark Orange.  At this rate, keeping up with these variations in contagion will probably drive us to color the map with splotches of wenge, celadon, amaranth, sarcoline, burnt sienna, Paynes grey, Prussian blue, and any of the other 1,114 spot colors from the Pantone system.  Amazingly, there is one “White” zone (Sardinia).  Not sure how they’ve managed it, or if it’s even true today.  It was true yesterday.

For the record, Venice — or rather, the Veneto — was in the Yellow zone till last Monday, when it was demoted to Orange.  Those days were brief; tomorrow, Monday, March 15 (hello, Ides) it will be Red again, and will persist through Easter.  So there goes that holiday.  There has been a disturbing increase in hospitalizations, and most of these patients have gone straight into the Intensive Care Unit.  In fact, all of Italy is now Red, except Sardinia.

Everything is starting to seem symbolic in some way. I need to find a hobby.

Red Zone basically means lockdown.  Stay home.  The only stores that can be open are supermarkets, newsstands, tobacco shops, pharmacies, eyeglasses, hardware, fuel.  Also bookstores, plants and flower shops/nurseries, cosmetic/perfume shops (who on God’s earth is wearing makeup?) and shops selling sporting goods, even though it’s forbidden to gather to play a sport.  A run to buy new equipment for your home gym is okay, seeing that you’re not going anywhere anymore.

If you must go out, your needs had better fit into one of these three categories: Work (justified; if the police stop you, they will call your purported boss to confirm that you have to be out); health (doctor’s appointment, hospital, etc. Manicures do not count as health, though I think a visit to your therapist probably does); serious necessity (visiting your housebound mother to feed her lunch, etc.). Beyond these three categories, a big fine is coming your way.

Yep — just like a year ago.  I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those people who haven’t been wearing masks.  Looking at you, bright spark at the newsstand who only puts on his mask when his friends tip him off to the approach of a police officer, thereby cleverly avoiding a fine.  Then he takes it off again.  “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry famously stated several centuries ago.  Try it today and the response would be “Hey, you can have both.”

The hammer has dropped and we’re back into the Red Zone — near total quarantine — until April 6. Or whenever the numbers improve, or everybody has been vaccinated, or I learn to speak Armenian and how to play the harmonica.  At the same time.  From left to right: “Infections sky high,” Hotspot in volleyball team,” “Red Zone, ACTV cuts bus, tram and vaporetto runs,” “Children at home from school, controversy on distance teaching.”
The world as it was yesterday, toward noon.  A year has gone by and here we are again.  I mean “still.”

Two weekends ago, when the city was still Yellow, so many people tried to come to Venice that the traffic was being counted, and at a certain point cars were made to turn around and depart.  The same with some streets.  But don’t get excited, because that was only during the two weekend days (note: sunny and warm), and considering how many hotels are still closed, these visitors were only intermittently profitable.

In any case, all those people were often always too close together, and masks were not always used.  The headline two days ago: “The Veneto is back in full epidemic, hospitalizations are 50 more each day.”

The economic effects of all this?  Here’s one of myriad indicators: In the past 12 months, passenger traffic at Marco Polo airport has dropped 89 per cent.  Pick a business or attraction at random and be appalled by similar statistics.

Some gondoliers had tentatively begun to work, primarily on weekends; it was lovely to see them out again.  Yet this was but a flicker on the grainy film, metaphorically speaking, of the city’s economy.  Last Saturday, a friend who works at one of the gondola stations at the Piazza San Marco had a few clients, as did some of his colleagues.  At the end of the day, they all put their money in a hat (or something) and divided it equally.  My friend went home with 35 euros.

As of tomorrow, he won’t be out at all, so they can put the hat away.  Easter used to be an epic interlude for tourists.  Now we’ll be eating lamb and chocolate eggs at home alone, like last year.  For Easter weekend (April 3-5) one visit to family or friends per day is allowed within the Region, “Maximum two adults with children under 14 years old or persons who are disabled or not self-sufficient who live with them.”

A sunny Saturday morning (March 13), a great time to take a gondola ride except there are no people and almost no gondolas ready to go.
All tucked up till further notice.
The fondamenta della Canonica behind the basilica ought to be swarming. But you know that.
Anybody up for a gondola ride? Anybody at all?  On Monday, these gondolas and their gondoliers will be back under wraps.

The city is gaunt.  Life is gaunt. All the flesh of ordinary life — parties, festivals, big events, family gatherings, making plans, going places, and above all, working — has been starved away, and only the bones seem to be left.

Speaking of bones, every business is in crisis.  Here’s an idea somebody came up with: Stop paying taxes.  “Fiscal disobedience” is what Paolo Bianchini calls it.  He is president of MIO (Movement of Hospitality Businesses), and told Il Giornale that the group has launched legal action against paying the taxes from last March till now.

“This is because our industry has had an average national collapse of 57 per cent, with peaks of 70/80 even 100 per cent.  It’s enough to remember that there are businesses that since last March have never reopened.  Our legal system foresees ‘the impossibility of paying,’ so just imagine that it wouldn’t be recognized in a period of world pandemic such as this one.”

The protest is being made by restaurants, hotels, bars. pizzerias, pubs, shops, wholesalers, distributors, and freelancers with a financial registration code.  “All workers,” he says, “that can’t manage to pay the myriad fair and unfair taxes, when the fiscal pressure has reached 70 per cent of the gross income. ”  Please pause and read that last part again.

“All of this in front of a collapse of earnings of -57 per cent, an extremely high number that in some sectors reaches as far as -95 per cent.”

Which taxes are these?  “Trash collection,” he begins; “the tax on shop signs…and the contributions to Inps (Social Security) except for contributions for employees.  And they still have to explain why we, mostly little entrepreneurs, have to pay the tax on shop signs if we’ve been obliged for six months to keep them turned off.”

Businesses notorious for evading taxes?  Fun fact: Italian companies are the second-most heavily taxed businesses in the EU (14.1 per cent, just after The Netherlands’ 14.2 per cent).  They pay 101.1 billion euros a year to the government via taxes, levies, tributes, imposts, and contributions.

“The cruel reality is that, even before Covid, we struggled to finish each month with a profit,” Bianchini continued.  “So just imagine now, with a fall in business of 50/60/70 percent.” So MIO will be fighting the law by using it against itself.

“Five to seven years could pass with appeals, and various grade of judicial procedure, before receiving a final judgment.  Of course we’ll reach an agreement before that, but meanwhile we won’t pay anything for two or three years and we don’t risk any type of foreclosure.  And in any case, it’s a battle that we have to win.  The hospitality industry accounts for 30 per cent of the gross domestic product; without it, the Italian economy will never be able to recover.”

He’s not going down quietly: Starting at the top left, by vertical columns: “Forced closure government dictatorship,” Closed for abuse of power,” “Closed for the lack of influential acquaintances and application of the table of ‘First Numbers,'” Closed for violation of first 4 articles of the Constitution,” “Closed for violation of human rights,” “Closed after 33 years of sacrifices (Me and you Jesus Christ maybe I was your heir,” “Closed for the lack of admission of political guilt,” “Closed because of psychological and mediatic terrorism,” “Closed for governmental incapacity.”  I took this picture a year ago, and the shop hasn’t changed at all except that at some point the furious signs were removed.
Calle de le Rasse, near San Marco. A main thoroughfare of shops, hotels, bars, usually clogged with people.  Hey — I saw somebody with a suitcase yesterday.  That was weird.
A couple looking at a guidebook? Why? Everything is closed.

The sign says they’re open. Not very, by the look of it.

The storied shop of Venini glass from Murano, in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini near the basilica, is permanently closed.

The Mercerie.  Believe it.
Go ahead and try to figure out where these blighted scenes of desolation are located.  Maybe it will take the edge off the horror.
In the Mercerie, a reflection in the glass of a former shop says “Gucci.” They were open this morning. Whenever you get tired of wondering about larger philosophical issues, please wonder about why a Gucci store could possibly be open right now. Do you detect any potential customers?
This place used to sell some of the best gelato around San Marco.
“For sale.”
“50 per cent off everything, business is closing.”
“Giving up the business.”
Was a first-rate shoe store.  “Total liquidation business closing.”
“Giving up commercial activity.  No time-wasters, only if really interested and with “portfolio” (wallet)…Thank you.  (Not like certain ministers).  Leave name and telephone number under the door I’ll call you.”

Here ends the glimpse of the San Marco area these days.  I have about a thousand more photos, but these seemed enough to give an idea of the state we’re in.

To be fair, there was plenty of bustle at the Rialto market Saturday morning. I wonder who will be there next Saturday, if anybody. Pretty sure the fish vendors are wondering the same thing.

Next time, images of life as she has been lived in via Garibaldi lately.

The most work being done these days appears to be renovation and reconstruction of buildings and fondamentas. Street and pipes repairers are underfoot everywhere.  At least they have plenty of space to work in.
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Best of holidays to all

I’m down to the holiday wire, sending this out on Christmas Eve, but as I race to finish the dusting (which I had about five months to accomplish) and Lino is wrangling the canoce (Squilla mantis) into pasta sauce and antipasto nibbles, I thought I would send a few Christmasy images from here.

Heartfelt best wishes to everyone for the end of 2020 and all of 2021.

Christmas fish-traps at the Rialto market. A festive sight for everybody, except the fish.
There are so few gondolas to be seen in the canals — phalanxes of them have remained at their moorings for weeks on end — that this brave little red bow stood out like the brightest beacon of the holiday spirit.
The good news was that it was probably the last day of school before the Christmas vacation. The bad news, obviously, was that it was so much earlier in the morning than he would have liked. Having his father nearby to haul his backpack clearly wasn’t enough.
This was edgy — the bright sparks at Nevodi Pizzalab decided to create gifts-of-the-Magi pizza. They sound pretty good, but I’m uneasy that there may be something in the fine print of the catechism that would label this blasphemy. I just don’t know….. (Peperoni here are not spicy sausages, but bell peppers.)
And speaking of the fish market, on Saturday there are also flowers there.  It’s a little uncanny how she designed her shopping to complement her cart.  Or vice versa.
Sunrise always lifts my spirits, and I hope it does the same for yours.  I have not done anything to the color here — this is how it was.

 

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