As I’ve often remarked, one of the things I love about being here is the faithful return of certain events — moments — throughout the year. Of course there are events everywhere upon which one may confidently depend — tax deadline day comes to mind — but I’m talking about here.
One occurrence which is so predictable that I don’t even have read the paper, much less even wake up, to recognize it is the double-edged event known as THE EXODUS.
Trieste is only 7 km/4 miles from the Croatian border. From then on, time and distance take on new meanings.
No, it has no Biblical overtones, unless one is thinking of the famous Plagues. In fact, now that I think about it, this could possibly be a worthy candidate to join the frogs and the flies that afflicted Pharaoh. But since we’re living in a democracy, this little plague afflicts everybody going on vacation. And everybody goes in August.
So the first weekend of August inevitably sees an outbound migration of massive proportions clogging the highways — The Exodus. On the last weekend of August, there is the equally appalling Return Exodus.
This is what Croatia looks like from the Italian side of the border. You can be sitting and looking at this for quite a while. But of course, you're not seeing this, you're seeing what it represents: Fabulous beaches, great food, maybe even no people.
We could call it the Plague of Traffic. Or, if you’re sitting on the highway in a monster backup, the Plague of Everybody Else on Earth. And the only thing that changes from one year to the next is the length — from unbearable to inconceivable — of the backups at the Italian borders and Alpine tunnels. Last Saturday the backup at the border dividing Slovenia from Croatia reached about 40 km/25 miles. Ah yes, Croatia: Gorgeous! Near! Irresistible! Cheap! Also: Small! Mountainous! Not Many Roads!
This Exodus traffic is funny to people who aren’t there, like me, and to people who are funny wherever they are, like Lino Toffolo.
Lino Toffolo is an actor/standup comic from Murano who writes a column every Sunday in the Gazzettino. He’s usually right on top of the main subject of the day, which last Sunday was The Exodus.
Here is what he wrote (translated by me):
Instead of facing the usual five kilometers of tailback [in Italian, merely “tail”] to go to Jesolo, why don’t we go to Croatia or Dalmatia or along down there, where there are bound to be fewer people?
Perfect idea! Let’s go! 40 kilometers of continuous tailback! Basically, when the last person gets there he just turns around because his vacation is over.
Every year, right on schedule, other than the drama of the “checking the stomach on the beach I swear I’m never eating again” is the one — unsolvable — of “where to go” and above all, “when to leave.”
The imagination is unchained! At night, at dawn, at mealtimes like telephone calls [local people scribbling ads often say “call at mealtimes”]. Every so often somebody has the idea of the “intelligent departure,” which they reveal only to their friends who — as with all true secrets — they pass along to one friend at a time, even on Facebook.
The result: Everybody is stuck in the backup, everybody is complaining.
Grandpa Tony thinks that the laborers working on the highway are tourists who just got bored sitting still and figure this way they can at least be doing something…. Sometimes you can watch plants growing.
“But — it is obligatory for us to do this?” “No! That’s exactly why we’re doing it! If it were obligatory, we’d all stay home!”
And the Croatians? Where do they go? Italy? Gorgeous! Near! Irresistible! Expensive!
This is a glimpse of the Croatian coast. Worth the voyage, as the Michelin Guide might put it.
This is the Italian coast in Puglia.
Croatia.
Italy. The only difference I can see that might make it worthwhile to sit in a car for hours to get to one instead of the other would be that Croatia is currently a hot destination, while Puglia has always just been there.
It wasn’t the newspaper, it was the “I see you but I do not respond” glance that cried “New York” to me. Then he asked/told me not to take any more pictures, which is pure Venice. Not because people are rude, but because in a small town which millions of people visit every year primarily — it seems — to take pictures, sometimes a line has to be drawn.
Whenever I find myself with some Venetian for the first time, and for whatever reason I mention that I used to live in New York, the person almost always seems slightly startled, then makes some remark along the lines of “Boy, Venice must seem really small/different/strange/minuscule/quarklike” to you.
At first glance, it might in fact seem that the fabled Large Malus domestica (pop. 8,175,133 and growing) would have nothing at all in common with the equally fabled Most Serene Republic (at the moment down to 60,052 and shrinking).
On the other hand, this glance, from the doorkeeper at the Porta della Carta of the Doge’s Palace, says “I see you, but you look just like everybody else until you say or do something that requires me to react.” This would be Venetian, where one of the major energy-saving tactics is not merely turning off the lights in empty rooms, but not responding until you actually have to. Otherwise you’ll never make it to closing time.
But I have always felt right at home here, because — as I tell the person, startling her or him even more — there is an amazing number of ways in which Venice and New York appear to be like those twins that get separated five minutes after birth and years later turn up to have both married women named Clotilde on the same day and have vacation cabins on Lake Muskoka.
Speaking of twins, I’ve never quite understood that whole business of twinning cities. Not because I don’t grasp that both partners desire thereby to undertake commercial adventures together, but because the partnerships often seem so odd.
The other places are frequently the same grade of innocuous as the one you’re entering, which makes sense, I suppose. I mean, you’d never see “Toad Suck/Beijing.” Naturally there are exceptions to what seems like an obvious rule; Rome/Paris makes sense, but Rome/Multan, Pakistan is a bit more obscure. Or there are less glamorous but equally curious combinations (Seattle/Tashkent), on down to the level of Torviscosa/Champ-sur-Drac. Well, as long as they’re happy.
Venice has formally twinned itself with 15 cities; the link is fairly clear with St. Petersburg (seaport cities with canals), though the link with Islamabad is a bit harder to discern. It might have been clever (only to me, of course) to have twinned Venice with every town named Venice, or which bills itself as “the Venice of” wherever it is.
There are 19 “Venice of the North”s, and a remarkable amount of so-called “Venice of the such-and-such” strewn around the world at other compass points: South (Johannesburg; Tawi-Tawi island), East (Alappuzha, India; Bangkok; Melaka River, Malaysia), China (Wuzhen), and so on. There are four American towns named Venice, one each in Florida, California, Illinois, Utah. (Venetia, Pennsylvania, doesn’t count, though I give it special points for historical interest.) Surprisingly, there are many more towns in the US named Verona.
These are not the Sharks or the Jets, though there may well be a girl named Maria in the group. They’re just teenagers on their way to school and as such could basically fit in anywhere.
Back to the Ur-Venice and its resemblance to New York. I’ve made a little hobby of collecting points of similarity, as I come across them, and in no particular order, here are some of the most obvious examples:
* They are both seaport cities.
* They are (or have been) economic colossi. The wealth of Venice was something inconceivable today, unless we’re thinking of that tiny top percentage of people who own everything. Not long ago an Indian tycoon staged his daughter’s wedding here; it went on for three days and cost, it was reported, something like 10 million euros ($14 million). He would have fit right in with the Pisanis and Corners (and Rockefellers and Carnegies.)
* They both have a long history of many coexisting (more or less happily) ethnic communities.
* Housing/real estate is a major issue, both regarding cost (exorbitant) and space (cramped). In either city you can as safely launch a conversation with a stranger on the problems of housing as you can on the weather.
* They are both populated by complainers; not the ordinary type, but those special inhabitants who belong to the category in which, according to the famous quip about New Yorkers, “Everybody mutinies but nobody deserts.”
“Dez (heart) Ruez I love you for all of my life.” The sentiment is universal and, regrettably, so is the urge to express it in a form that’s really, really hard to remove. I have no doubt that they have long since broken up, married other people, and gotten divorced by now. But it is a sign of normal life in cities large and small, watery or not.
* Everybody notices each other and plenty of things about each other, though it may not seem so. The minute you step into the subway train, everybody will have evaluated you in a hundred instant ways, starting with your potential for being dangerous and ending (perhaps) with your choice of shoes. I thought I was invisible here in the early days, which Lino thought was hilarious. I’d only been here a week when he said, “Everybody already knows everything about you.” I let that slide, till one day I ran into one of the few people I knew, who lived far away on the Giudecca. “I saw you rowing in the caorlina last Saturday afternoon,” he told me. It seemed like a friendly remark, except that having been seen by somebody I hadn’t seen at all gave me a tiny shudder. And made me realize that nobody is invisible here, and never has been.
* Pride: New Yorkers refer to themselves as living in “The City”; no need for further identification. With many more centuries of experience at this, Venetians by now don’t even do that. It’s so obvious that being Venetian is the best that there is no need to mention it.
I realized this the day I struck up a conversation in Rimini with a couple who said they were from Venice. I asked the normal follow-up question: “Oh? Where do you live?” (As in: Cannaregio, Campo Ruga, near the Accademia, etc.) A split second of hesitation, and the wife answered, “We live in Castelfranco Veneto.” Castelfranco Veneto is a small town (pop. 33,707) 40 miles/64 km from Venice.
Here’s the thing: I knew they didn’t live in Venice by the faintly self-satisfied way in which they had said it. People in Venice don’t say it that way, just as New Yorkers don’t brag about living in New York. If you live there, you already know you’re in the best place in the world; there’s no need to rivet exclamation points all around it.
* They’re not for everybody. This is the strongest link of all between the two cities. Living in either city is a vocation, a calling, a challenge, a Zen conundrum. Living here, as in New York, requires a complex combination of skills (physical, emotional, intellectual) and predilections (history, humor, remembering the names of people’s children) that frankly don’t suit everybody.
Guys like Queequeg here are one of the main forces that keep Venice going. I’m sure he has a brother or a cousin in New York, with or without tattoos and tank top. Attitude is the tie that binds.
“It’s great to visit, but I could never live here,” almost everybody says about New York. I’ve almost never heard it said of Venice, though it’s not unusual to hear someone say “It must be so wonderful to live here.” Tourists have been so brainwashed by publicity and postcards that they don’t believe it’s real and don’t even want it to be. And they’re here for so short a time, they don’t usually have the chance to be disillusioned, unless something bad happens.
That, probably, is one of the main mileposts at which Venice and New York diverge. Things go wrong in New York (barring homicide, etc.) and visitors regard it as either inevitable or picturesque, the stuff of stories forever. If something goes wrong here, people get mad, as if they’d been baited-and-switched.
No bait here.
These friends could easily be standing on a corner in New York, except that here they’re probably not talking about the point spread, but what to have for lunch.
I hope nobody has told him people are expecting to spend an intimate evening with him. He'd be in for a shock.
There’s not much I can say about the poster on the trash can near the “Giardini” vaporetto stop.
Of course that’s not true. I could say all sorts of things, but there are two main observations that it inspires, which is why I’m mentioning it.
First: Once again, as at the festa the other night, it’s written in English. I guess they don’t believe any non-English-speaking Italians/Venetians/miscellaneous foreigners are going to be interested. Or they don’t want non-English-speaking I/V/mfs coming to this event, even if they did happen to be interested.
Or maybe it’s in English because there’s not enough space on the poster for “nan yon aswe entim ak ekselans nan” or “ng isang kilalang-kilala na gabi na may ang quintessential” or even “একটি বিশুদ্ধ সঙ্গে অন্তরঙ্গ সন্ধ্যায়.”
Second: It’s not that it promotes a mere concert.
It’s going to be “an intimate evening” with James Taylor in the Piazza San Marco, a event which, on the intimacy scale, certainly beats the stuffing out of Bobby Short at the Carlyle, Sally Bowles at the Kit Kat Klub, or Noel Coward anywhere.
The Piazza San Marco cannot in any way be made to look, sound, or feel intimate, any more than can Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania, which it resembles more than you might think. Go Nittany Lions.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the next time you want to savor an intimate evening with your personal heartthrob, you should plan a candlelight dinner in the Piazza San Marco. If the racetrack at Belmont isn’t available, I mean.
Sweet Baby James is going to have to work some kind of magic to keep this intimate. Or even quintessential.
Everybody creates their own ranking of what’s important to them, or to their friends, or to the world supply of gum arabic, or to the Ethiopian wolf, and so forth.
Naturally many people would have considered yesterday, the last Sunday of Carnival, to have been a day of supreme importance to Venice. And considering what beautiful, warm, sunny weather was bestowed on the revelers (and, by extension, to the phalanxes of people making money from them), it was indeed a day worth noting.
The poster for the tournament. Too bad you never saw it around town.
Lino and I, being somewhat naturally contrary to many kinds of commonly accepted tendencies, did not go to the Piazza San Marco to look at people in costumes. One reason was because we knew we wouldn’t have been able even to get close to the Piazza, and the idea of spending hours standing wedged into a wall of humanity attempting to get there didn’t sound like fun at all. You know the amazing ashlar masonry at Machu Picchu? San Marco would have been like that, with people instead of stones.
So we went to the Palasport, an all-purpose sports facility just around the corner, safely out of the way behind the Naval Museum, to watch a fencing championship.
But this was not just any championship. Our little Venice, which seems to exist only to be looked at, was hosting what happens to be a honking important international sporting event, the 34th Coppa Citta’ di Venezia (City of Venice Cup).
Moments like this were frequent even during the quarter finals. Unlike Aspromonte, though, these men didn't yell.
We know nothing about fencing, except that it’s very cool and extremely different from our usual activities. (Years ago I spent a few months at it, trying to get the hang of the basics, but eventually gave up.) So instead of wandering around outside in the sun and fresh air like everybody else, we sat inside for four hours breathing indoor-fluorescent-lights air and watching what amounts to a dramatically physical version of chess.
The City of Venice Cup is one of the most important elements in the Venetian events calendar. Even if you don’t care about sabers, en garde, touche’ or parry and riposte, you might be surprised to learn that this contest is a major component of the World Cup of fencing, Men’s Foil division. Which, I assume, leads eventually to the Olympics.
The international aspect was emphasized by the array of flags, most important of which is clearly that of the international fencing ("escrime") federation.
Venice is not merely one of only three cities holding meets composing the world Grand Prix of fencing, the other cities being Tokyo and St. Petersburg. This was the only Men’s Foil competition for the World Cup to be held in Italy. Yes, right here in can-you-bargain-for-a-gondola-ride Venice.
Therefore intense international attention was focused Saturday and Sunday on the athletes, which were among the best in the world. I noticed only a few of the country names on assorted teams: Japan, France, Ukraine, Germany, Korea, Russia, and the increasingly redoubtable China. It was impressive.
We got in (for free, like everybody else) to watch the end of the eliminations, the semi-final, and the final, which was broadcast live on national sports television. From about 3:00 to 7:00 PM, we sat on concrete risers surrounded by families, girlfriends, aficionados, assorted kids, and momentarily unoccupied athletes, most of whom urgently needed to go somewhere and then return by way of the tiny space in front of us. More was going on in the stands than there was on the floor. (I exaggerate, somewhat.) There may not have been thousands of spectators, but we still felt as if we’d parked ourselves on the shoulder of I-95.
There were a number of families who brought their kids. Some were enthusiasts and some, like this little princess, weren't. I could read her body language from across the arena. It says, "I'm doomed. They dressed me up and brought me here to die."This fan, however, didn't let a little fencing tournament interfere with his Carnival trajectory. He showed up rocking the classic tricorn hat and a mask typical of the Commedia dell'Arte character, Capitan Zerbino. He never took either of them off.
It was gripping to watch. You don’t need to be an expert in the sport, nor to be a fan of any particular competitor, to find yourself involved in what was obviously serious battle at an extremely high level. There were many exotic details — the judges’ gestures were as gnomic as those of a baseball catcher signaling the pitcher, or bidders at an auction — but even in complete ignorance you could appreciate the differing styles of the players and feel the intensity of their confrontation.
The winner by one point was Valerio Aspromonte (for the record), bringing joy to the old Bel Paese. It’s always great to win before a home crowd. Second, by one point, was a certain J.E. Ma, a tall, serene, spectacularly ferocious fencer from China. Third was a tie between Simoncelli and Cheremisinov (Russia). The trophies were large beautiful objects of blown Murano glass.
I was rooting for Ma, but didn’t dare clap or call out his name for fear of being lynched. I loved his concentration, his reflexes, his skill not only in scoring points but avoiding the attacks of his adversary.
Aspromonte’s arsenal of tactics involved a series of highly annoying antics. For example, his primal scream whenever he scored, or whenever his opponent scored. This must be a custom borrowed from soccer, but struck me as ridiculously out of place in a sport (like dressage) which was born of elegance and noblesse.
This excellent character behaved perfectly. Not only did he watch without protesting, he would break the monotony by getting up and practicing his fencing footwork, lunging forward and back again.
He also frequently stopped, however briefly, to attend to an endless series of temporary, perhaps genuine, injuries (rubbing his ankle — sprained? no, it’s okay — massaging his calf — torn muscle? no, it’s okay — manipulating his shoulder — inflamed rotator cuff? no, it’s okay), and so on. He changed foils three times. He even pulled off his mask after Ma’s foil touched it, rubbing his left temple as if having nearly missed being blinded. I still can’t understand what could have happened behind the wire wall that protects the face, but it was all part of the show. He reminded me of James Brown at the culminating moment of a concert, simulating near-collapse and being helped off the stage, only to suddenly spring to life again.
Outside, there were plenty of kids dressed up as Zorro, or Prince Charming, or a medieval knight, or any other character required to carry some sort of spadroon.
Inside a very ugly cement building there was brilliance and beauty flashing among men who had the real thing, and knew exactly how to use it.
I want to come back next year, but I may bring a big wool sock for Aspromonte. Bless his heart.
Ma attacks, during one of the many moments when he was ahead on points. I really thought he was going to win, he was built like an American staghound compared to his opponent. But not this time.
