The title says “ahead” but in fact I’m going to take you back a few years, well within living memory, to the epoch when you traveled by train and the train traveled by coal. I mean steam.
Venice’s fascinating past isn’t limited to Carnival and Casanova; there are plenty of people (Lino, for example) who still vividly remember when the mighty steam locomotives ruled the rails, and the Santa Lucia terminal was at work, day and night, with the coming and going of these behemoths. (Spoiler alert: Lino’s father was a macchinista, or train driver, so I am relying on Lino for some information.)
My curiosity awoke some time ago, when we were passing through Castelfranco Veneto on the train and Lino casually pointed out this rusty derelict beside the station tracks.
“See that?” he asked. “That was what they used to fill the steam trains’ tanks with water.” A monster faucet, in other words.Compared to Castelfranco, the city of Feltre has a much keener appreciation of its old train relics.Like animals, the locomotives needed food (coal) and water. These were often, though not always, carried in a tender, the vehicle attached to the engine. “Acqua” is water and “carbone” is coal. Excuse me if you figured that out. The water was topped up at important stops along the way by means of the trackside apparatus shown above. One source states that a roundtrip (distance not specified!) locomotive in the Thirties consumed 771 pounds/350 kilos of coal and 528 gallons/2000 liters of water, transporting a maximum of 80 passengers.
Let’s say trains don’t interest you much. But you might be surprised to see how many traces remain around the area of the station, if you know what you’re looking at.
First, a bit of background.
This is the church of Santa Lucia; it stood for centuries on the Grand Canal until it was inconveniently in the way of the structure that was needed by the trains. It was demolished between 1861-1863. The church of the Scalzi is still in place, a few steps further on. (Francesco Guardi, c. 1780).Perhaps not the most memorable facade of the many Venetian churches, but it was fine until it wasn’t. But at least the name “Santa Lucia” was preserved in the name of the station.The train station looked like this from the 1860s to the 1940’s. After the Second World War the project was to build today’s station. When he was a boy Lino knew the area as one big construction site as this station came down and the new one emerged.Now we have this. Although today’s station was designed in the Thirties (this is evident), it was built in 1952.
So much for setting the scene. Back to the trains themselves.
Let’s imagine we’re in the Venice station on any ordinary day back in the first half of the 20th century. It was full of colossi like these. In fact, for several generations there wasn’t anything else.
I am not a train connoisseur, but I know massive when I see it. This locomotive steamed into the Santa Lucia station the night of October 29, 2021, as the “Train of Memory,” retracing the route of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier to Rome a century earlier.This wouldn’t have impressed anybody back in the day. It was normal. And really noisy, too, between blasts of steam and assorted screeching whistles. And let’s not forget the mayhem of the crowds when the families were leaving for their summer holiday in the mountains. The trains were so full that sometimes people were passing their kids into the carriages by the windows. Not made up. My source was one of those kids.Steam trains were still normal in Venice in 1973, here arriving at Santa Lucia (Wikipedia, not credited). The last steam locomotive in Italy was decommissioned in 1976. It operated a daily passenger service and some freight services on the Udine-Cervignano route (in Friuli). Since 2008 some steam locomotives are back in service, but only for historical trains on special occasions.This was the engine that Lino’s father drove (that is him in the photo.) His usual route was up the Valsugana, from Venice to Trento and, obviously, back again. But he could also work the shifts required to reposition the locomotives and/or carriages into the configurations needed for the next day’s trains. That went on all night; his shift went from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Note that this train didn’t use a tender for the water and coal, which went into the black box just in front of him. (Do not ask for details; I don’t have them.) The first passenger carriage is clearly right behind him.
So where did all this maneuvering of the rolling stock take place? As close to the station as the water allowed.
The red lines are bridges, yellow are where tracks were or bits still are; green is where the trains were reshuffled. Ignore Tronchetto, for the purposes of this discussion; it wasn’t built until the 1960’s.A military photograph c. 1915 shows the area marked in green above when it was full of trains. The station is on the right side of the frame, and the bridge to the mainland is in the upper right. Those long lines that look like perforations are trains-in-waiting. The central area was used for the locomotives. (Available from Il Cantuccio del Collezionista https://ilcantucciodelcollezionista.it/index.html)A detail of the photograph, just to make those little dots clearer. I repeat: Each of those is a train carriage. Perhaps not as impressive as Milan or Rome, but frankly they made better use of their limited space here in Venice than I’ve ever been able to do at home.This is the deposito, or train-sorting area, today. We discovered this morning that the tracks strewn around for years, if not ages, are being removed. I imagine it will create more parking space.A better view of the tracks on the left (drawn in yellow on the map) leading toward the Marittima.Leftover tracks that were easier to just pave over than remove.This bridge connected the station area to the right with the train yard. Fun fact: Decades ago the rectangular space just to the right of the bridge was used as a pool by the Rari Nantes swimming club. There was a similar setup along the Zattere for swimming in the Giudecca Canal. Not made up.The same bridge seen in real life. The Santa Lucia station (with red train) is just on the other side of the Grand Canal.One of the perks of working for the railway was the allotment of coal you were given for your own use, and it was distributed in the area on the right side of the bridge. The railway workers would come in their (or someone’s) boat — rowed, no motors — and tie up five or six deep parallel to the embankment when they went to collect it. One reason for doing it there may have been because the station where the freight trains were handled was on that side.This was the building where the organizing of the freight train maneuvering was done.Freight trains carrying fruit and vegetables would slide onto the special tracks along the waterfront facing Piazzale Roma.The trains stopped along the edge of the embankment and off-loaded the fruit/veg onto boats (again, not motorboats, but big boats such as caorlinas or battellos that were rowed) that took the produce to the neighborhood vendors. The building served as a warehouse for whatever had not been taken away that day.The railway bridge connecting the station to the deposito seen from the water.That’s a serious underbelly. It would have to look like this if it was going to support countless tons of iron machinery 24 hours a day.
Let’s shift our attention to the tracks that carried the freight trains to and from the waterfront at the Marittima area (Santa Marta and San Basilio).
This bridge enabled the freight trains to cross from the yard down to the Marittima.Here is a look at the bridge indicated on the map just above. We’re heading toward Santa Marta. The top bridge carries the little “People Mover” train that connects Piazzale Roma on the left to the parking area at Tronchetto (and until just a few years ago, to the cruise-ship Venice Passenger Terminal, now empty and useless). The middle bridge is a simple footbridge for the people going from their parked cars to the city. And the third bridge carried the freight trains to San Basilio.A closer look at the ex-railway bridge, as we proceed toward Santa Marta. The flat roofs are part of the Venice Passenger Terminal complex at Tronchetto.The same bridge as seen when going toward Piazzale Roma.A general view of the Santa Marta waterfront, where the tracks used to be. A group of the houses to the left of the University IUAV were built expressly for the families of the train workers. The only catch was that when the worker died, the family had to move out. Logical! And awful!Flanking the Scomenzera canal, the tracks are just behind that transparent wall.That zone behind the wall is something of a railway graveyard.But when the trains were working, the tracks just snaked their way around the church of Santa Marta.This was Santa Marta when the trains and the port were working at full capacity (c. 1930).
The warehouses and offices at San Basilio are now almost entirely dedicated to non-maritime pursuits.Lino’s father’s official train-driver’s watch is still running. The plastic case was crucial protection from the coal dust blowing everywhere.This is the watch in its natural state.The caption says this scene was at the station, but Lino says it was in the deposito area where the trains were assembled. The process of electrification has begun, as the cables show. I’m not romanticizing anything. Just saying that the trains were a huge part of Venetian life.
“La Vigilia di Santa Marta” (The Eve of Santa Marta) by Canaletto. c. 1760. (Wikigallery.org). This view shows the Zattere, with the church of Santa Marta the last building in the distance. I realize that they did not have stadium lighting back then, but I’d have hoped to see more of the famous illuminated boats. I think he was paying too much attention to the geometry of the painting and not enough attention to what was really going on. Or maybe that’s just my way of saying “I wish I’d been there.”
July 29, as all the world knows, is the feast day of Santa Marta. Or in any case, now the world knows.
She is essentially forgotten here; her church has been deconsecrated, swallowed and partially digested by the Maritime Zone, and her celebration — once one of the greatest of the many great festivals here — is gone forever. Only a painting by Canaletto brings us the tiniest (and darkest) glimpse of what was once a very big night in Venice. Her name today is used mainly to refer to the adjacent neighborhood.
The reason I didn’t get this post finished by July 29 is because I got lost reading assorted accounts, some of them first-hand, about this uber-fest. It didn’t take me long to conclude that the fabled feast of the Redentore, which has remained a very big deal, was really nothing so remarkable compared to Santa Marta’s. The Redentore had fireworks, it’s true, but Marta had fresh sole.
Fish was an excuse for a colossal boating party? Why not? The Venetian civil and religious calendar was bursting with events of every type and voltage. A very short list would note the festivals of Santa Maria della Carita’, Palm Sunday, S. Stefano, “Fat Thursday,” May 1, or the Doge’s Visit to the Monastery of the Virgins, S. Isidoro, the taking of Constantinople (1204), the regaining of Candia (1204), S. John the Baptist “Beheaded,” Sunday after Ascension Day, the victory over Padua (1214), the defense of Scutari (1479), the victory of Lepanto (1571), S. Rocco, Corpus Domini, the victory of the Dardanelles (1656), and the conquest of the Morea (1687). These are just a few of the major events; the Venetians also commemorated defeats. There was something going on almost every day.
But there was always room for more, and although Santa Marta couldn’t claim to have sponsored any particular victory, discovery, or other noteworthy occurrence, her feast day conveniently fell in the period when the weather was suffocatingly hot, and the sole were in season. Plus, her church was located on a little lobe of land facing lots of water, and there was a beach. All this says “Put on your red dress, baby, ’cause we goin’ out tonight” to me.
Joan Blaue’s map of the late 1600’s shows the peninsula crowned by the church of Santa Marta, but I don’t see a beach. On the other hand, I do see rows of rafts formed of logs — “zattere” — in front of their eponymous stretch of waterfront. Nice.On Ludovico Ughi’s 1729 map, “Pictorial Representation of the Illustrious City of Venice Dedicated to the Reign of the Most Serene Dominion of Venice,” we see something like beach surrounding Santa Marta’s headland. To each cartographer his own.And this is how how that little lobe of land looks today. The big docks at Tronchetto were built in two stages in the 20th century, and Santa Marta (lower right corner of land) has become an afterthought. (www.panoramio.com)
The basic components were: Everybody in Venice, either on land or on the water, regardless of social station or disposable income; every boat in Venice — so many boats you could hardly see the water, festooned with illuminated balloons and carrying improvised little arbors formed by frondy branches; music, song and dance, and lots and lots of fresh sole.
A “genteel” sole, who was more the star of the evening than Santa Marta herself.
July is the season for sfogi zentili, or Solea vulgaris, and while the Venetians could bring their own vittles, plenty of them also bought the fish which had just been saute’d, either on the beach or on the street by enterprising entrepreneurs. If you were really in luck, there would be moonlight, too.
The best and most famous chronicler of this party was Giustina Renier Michiel, who was born in 1755 and belonged to several patrician Venetian families. She spent 20 years researching her six-volume work, Origine delle Feste Veneziane (1830), but the fact that she had personal memories of many of these events makes her books exceptional.
I started to translate what she wrote about the feast of Santa Marta, but she went on so long, and her style sounded so curious in English, that I became tired and discontented. So I’m going to give some bits and summarize the rest. Anyway, it’s clear that the event was so phenomenal that even people who saw it finally gave up trying to describe it adequately or coherently.
Here is her version of how the festa was born:
“In the old days many groups went out in certain boats to fish for sole, the best fish that one eats in July. (Lino concurs with date and description.)
“And in the evening they would go back to the beach by the church of Santa Marta and feast on the fish, enjoying the cool air that restored their depleted strength after the labor of fishing, as well as the heat of the season.
“Later on, as the population became richer, and softness set in, the work of fishing was left to the poor people, who had to do it in order to live, and what used to be a fatiguing labor changed into a singular entertainment.”
My version: It didn’t take long for everybody else in Venice to say “A cookout on the beach? We’re on our way.” Everybody started making Santa Marta’s Eve a great reason to head for her neighborhood and eat fish, garnished and enlivened by the classic saor sauce of sweet-sour onions. It was like a gigantic clambake, a barbecue, a luau, for thousands and thousands of people.
Obviously the beach was too small for everybody, so the boats made themselves at home on the Giudecca Canal, “whose waters could only be seen in flashes, and almost seemed to be strips of fire, agitated by the oars of so many boats that covered the water and which doubled the effect of the lights which were on the boats.”
The “Bucintoro dei Savoia,”also called the “Bucintoro del Po,” is the only surviving example of a Venetian peota of the 18th century. It was built in 1730 by a squero on Burano for Carlo Emmanuele III di Savoia and is now the property of the Civic Museums of Torino. Most noble families had one, and they were just the thing for big events such as the Regata Storica, processions honoring doges and kings, and alfresco picnics featuring a big fish fry.
The patricians came out on their fabulously ornate peote, and often carrying musicians who sang and played wind instruments. There were scores of the classic fishing boat called a tartana, draped with variously-colored balloons and loaded with laughing families and friends. There were artisans in their battellos, and hundreds of light little gondolas, and plenty of gondolas da fresco, and there were even the burchielle, the heavy cargo boats that carried sand and lumber. If it could float, it joined the vast confusion of boats being rowed languidly in every direction, or tied up along the Zattere where there was just as much happy turmoil ashore.
Or, if you were a fisherman, you might come out in an equally impressive (in its way) boat — a caorlina da seragia. Only a few still exist, and this very old craft has retained its original pitch waterproofing. You could fit several families, aristocratic or otherwise, into this monster.Or if all you had was a little s’ciopon, you’d have bedecked it too, and come out with the food and family.
The Gazzetta Urbana of 1787: “Along this riva, called the Zattere, the cafe’s and bars are crammed to overflowing with people. There are tables set up outside their doors, and everything is so lit up that it seems to be daytime.
“The passage (of people) in all the streets leading to Santa Marta was dense and continuous, and the splendid gathering at the Caffe of San Basegio, at the head of the Zattere, formed a separate spectacle, in which our Adriatic beauties, wearing modern shimmering caps in the Greek style, ornamented with plumes, inflamed with their glances the hearts of the young men who, like butterflies, always flutter around the flare of a woman’s beauty.”
Also amid the throng were little ambulatory kitchens — a man with a basket of sole would put two stones on the ground, then lay two bunches of sticks crosswise on them, light a little charcoal under them, pour some oil in a pan, and stand there bawling for business. He kept a container of saor ready to put on the fish.
Renier Michiel: “The entire length of this district was full of a grand concourse of people, moving toward the piazza of Santa Marta which was the best vantage point to enjoy the spectacle. On the piazza there were more food vendors, some of them selling roast chicken. There is a racket of cups, plates, the yells of the vendors, the music from the boats on the water. Every house is transformed into a sort of tavern where people eat and drink, and there was perfect joy and harmony.”
“Perfect joy and harmony”? How can this be (apart from the fact that she was looking back on it, years later, when the festival was gone forever)?
I think it’s because Santa Marta was secretly taking care of people. She is the patroness of cooks, butlers, laundry-workers, servants, housewives, and waiters. Though I suppose you could just say “housewives” and leave it at that.
Because as Santa Marta, and 99 percent of women on earth, can attest, while some people at a party are laughing and scarfing the canapes and playing with the dog and singing comic songs and reveling in industrial-size helpings of joy and harmony, there’s at least one person somewhere in the background doing everything to make it seem as if there is absolutely nothing that needs to be done.
And I have no doubt that when the boats went home at dawn on July 29, there was somebody who had to put the boat away and swab the bilge and pick up every single fishbone, as well as deal with the dishes and the wine- and saor-stained clothes. Behind every great saint is somebody with a bucket and mop, I say.
You can barely make out the “Punta di Santa Marta” from the roof of the Molino Stucky Hilton.The church of Santa Marta in 1934 was only slightly in the way of progress. Trains came down onto the waterfront to deliver or collect cargo to the ships in the maritime zone. No more beach.There’s still a church in there somewhere behind the parking lot. Ex-church, that is, restored and now used as an exhibition space. Nice that it’s not falling to ruin, but any possible trace of character or history has been thoroughly expunged.I realize that it wasn’t ever the most heavily decorated building in Venice, but they seem to have gone to the opposite extreme here. Seen from this angle, it could be a Potemkin church.To review in closing: This entire area of water was completely covered with illuminated boats full of people singing and eating and laughing and being happy. And I think it’s safe to say that most of them were not tourists. That’s something else to recall occasionally — that Venice had an amazing life that had nothing to do with tourism. Seem strange? They’d think we’re even stranger.
