Impressions of Venice
Jan 8th, 2009, 05:35 AM
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Impressions of Venice
We're in Venice for a while - eight weeks in fact. I'm not attempting a travelogue, just scribbling. Some impressions:
The silence here is palpable, broken mainly by the bells of our local church, which strike the hours, and also play a tune somewhere between “I like Aeroplane Jelly” and “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”. It was once said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”, so assuming that the sunbeam scenario tolled for me, I found myself at Mass last Sunday in the Basillica of San Marco.
San Marco is Relic Central, Jim's Relics, Relics-r-Us, Relic Warehouse and Mr Relics rolled into one. It is claimed that relics include a knife used at the Last Supper, the stone on which John the baptist was beheaded, the skull of the said Baptist, an arm of St George, a picture painted by St Luke, a rib of St Stephen, a finger of Mary Magdalene, the sword with which St Peter cut off Malchus's ear, a splinter from the Cross, fish bones from the loaves-and-fishes miracle, chopsticks used by Buddha, a lace from the One True Blue Suede Shoe, the femur of St Dhakota and Pauline Hansen's wisdom teeth.
The above ensured a reasonable flow of pilgrims to Venice up to the ninth century, and when the pilgrim trade went quiet – Venice has always relied on a stream of tourists – a new attraction was needed, a patron Saint to replace St Theodore, who was not looking like being Venice's answer to Italian Idol. Enter, stage left, St Mark, or at least his remains, stolen from Alexandria by a pair of Venetian adventurers, smuggled out in a barrel of salt pork, in the knowledge that Muslim customs clerks would not open and check the barrel. St Mark, a Saint on the A-list, a first magnitude star in the panoply of Saints, was duly buried in a new Basilica, and the pilgrims flowed. Sadly, his remains were lost in the fire of 976, but were recovered in a well documented and brilliantly stage managed miracle when the bones burst forth from a marble column. Or bones very like St Mark's, as one skull looks much like another, dental records not being extant.
So, I had a few things to ponder when I attended Mass on Sunday – like, how did they apply all that gold leaf to the ceilng – reputed to be eight kilos of leaf, and would Pauline Hansen been any the wiser if she'd had wisdom teeth. And there was a choir from a girls school in Sydney singing parts of the Mass – quite special and ethereal.
Venice is big on campaniles, there are scads of them, and they occasionally collapse. The campanile in San Marco fell in 1902, the only casualty being the caretakers cat, and was rebuilt, dov'era e com'era, or “where it was, and as it was”. This possibly extended to the foundations, which are wooden soldier piles, and are now being restrained with titanium rods to stop the piles spreading. Sometimes repeating the designs of the past can be a problem, and they found a few years ago that the outer piles were starting to lean, the whole stone pile cap was growing. The titanium rods – which will see a lot of sea water – are being strain gauged so that growth can be monitored. The engineering here is amazing, especially when you consider that most of Venice is a only foot or so above the water table.
The clock tower in San Marco, built in 1490-odd survives. It has a 24 hour clock, digital date function (today being XI-XII, the year being not given), phase of the moon, and sign of the zodiac. The sign of the zodiac is a waste of time – all Venetians are fated to be Aquarians, water carriers, over the next few days – as the tide for Friday XII-XII is forecast to be 110 cm, which will flood most of Venice. Sump pumps are high on everyone's Christmas wish list, featuring prominantly in window displays, and carpenters all over town are hammering lee boards across doorways. Rubber boots are much in fashion, as are fishing waders. We bought carrots this morning from a guy standing in six inches of water, and the tide was ebbing at the time. It all seemed pretty normal to him. The Venetians don't talk about floods. For them, it's just acqua alta, high water, and an excuse for women to procure the most fashionable of rubber boots. Rubber boots with high heels. And gentlemen look pretty sharp in their Armani suits and waders.
There are sirens to warn of exceptionally high acqua alta – they go off about two hours before high water, and are the air raid sirens from WWII. They went off at 6:00 this morning, sounding like those Ealing Broadway 1950's movies. One expects to hear a clipped English accent saying “Right-ho lads, man the ack-ack guns, and well give Jerry a bloody nose”. Anyway, the Venetian sirens are being put to use – and I'd recommend Grundfoss shares as being a sound investment – Grundfoss pumps are walking out of the shops here. Selleys No-more-gaps seems popular also.
It is rumoured that the builders of the clock, an horogolical masterpiece of its time, were judicially blinded so that they could not create another. That seems a most robust way of securing intellectual property. One can visualise the dialogue at the the Risk Management Committee.
“How can we secure our IP?”
“Easy peasy, we'll just blind the engineers and drafters”.
“OK, sounds like a plan.”
Piaget of Geneva, Switzerland, have just completed an overhaul of the clock that has taken some six years. It's pretty complex, massive, and their craftsmen are sighted. There are a pair of life sized bronze statues armed with hammers which strike the bell – they inadvertently hit a workman, precipitating him into the square and breaking his neck about three hundred years ago. I believe that Piaget's artisans were better looked after – most likely with better permitting procedures in place.
There is every sort of craft here – rubbish boats with on-board compactor and jib crane, police boats – very snappy, ambulance boats with sirens and strobe lights, fire boats, boats delivering scaffold pipes and planks, boats with high reach cranes (you want your Steinway piano delivered to the top floor? No problem, we'll drop it in through that window”). Gondolas, of course, with the patrons being treated to endless “O solo mio's”, while drifting around at about two metres per minute, with the temperature hovering around 2 degrees. It's pretty cold here – the gondola patrons don't look all that happy with their 60 Euro per hour experience.
Mapping here is interesting. There are no street numbers, but every door has a number. Each sestier, or suburb, of which there are six, has had the doors numbered. Our address is simply 2xxxA Dorsoduro – the place over the road – the road being just two metres wide – being 2xxx Dorsorduro. Even doors that have been bricked up two hundred years ago have numbers. Simple, really. Unless you are the postman.
There's an amazing feling of antiquity here – you could walk into Venice after a 200 year absence and have no problem finding your way about. There is a ferry to cross the Grand Canal at the end of our street – a gondola with two at the oars – and the ferry or traghetto is shown on maps from the 14th century. You expect to run into Marco Polo, just back from the Orient with the latest in silks and spices, offering goods for sale on the street. Instead, it's dudes from Africa selling fake Gucci hand bags. Maps created 100 years ago still work well enough, - I bought a Baedeker printed in 1905 and it is accurate enough, and it reports the cafe at the railway station, the Ferrovia, as “cafe – poor”. The two main cafes in the Piazza, Florians and Quadri's, have both been in business for over 150 years. Both cafes can provide a cappucino at prices that are ruinous to the average tourist
Base price – 3 Euro, to drink it standing at the bar.
Extra to have it outside on the terrace – another 6 Euro.
Extra because the cafe orchestra is belting out selections from Phantom of the Opera – 5 Euro.
Service – 12 ½ %.
Total – about 17 Euro. But at least, you are taking coffee in what Napoleon was pleased to call “The drawing room of Europe”.
The two cafe orchestras are something of a bizarre institution, a Venetian Battle of the Sounds. Quadri will blast off with “Colonel Bogey”, Florians see them and raise them one with “I'm getting married in the morning”. Quadri tops out, though, the full musical royal flush, with “If I was a rich man” from Fiddler on the Roof. And if I was a rich man, we'd take coffee at Quadri's on the terrace.
But I'm not rich – and Quadri's going to flood tomorrow anyway.
The silence here is palpable, broken mainly by the bells of our local church, which strike the hours, and also play a tune somewhere between “I like Aeroplane Jelly” and “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”. It was once said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”, so assuming that the sunbeam scenario tolled for me, I found myself at Mass last Sunday in the Basillica of San Marco.
San Marco is Relic Central, Jim's Relics, Relics-r-Us, Relic Warehouse and Mr Relics rolled into one. It is claimed that relics include a knife used at the Last Supper, the stone on which John the baptist was beheaded, the skull of the said Baptist, an arm of St George, a picture painted by St Luke, a rib of St Stephen, a finger of Mary Magdalene, the sword with which St Peter cut off Malchus's ear, a splinter from the Cross, fish bones from the loaves-and-fishes miracle, chopsticks used by Buddha, a lace from the One True Blue Suede Shoe, the femur of St Dhakota and Pauline Hansen's wisdom teeth.
The above ensured a reasonable flow of pilgrims to Venice up to the ninth century, and when the pilgrim trade went quiet – Venice has always relied on a stream of tourists – a new attraction was needed, a patron Saint to replace St Theodore, who was not looking like being Venice's answer to Italian Idol. Enter, stage left, St Mark, or at least his remains, stolen from Alexandria by a pair of Venetian adventurers, smuggled out in a barrel of salt pork, in the knowledge that Muslim customs clerks would not open and check the barrel. St Mark, a Saint on the A-list, a first magnitude star in the panoply of Saints, was duly buried in a new Basilica, and the pilgrims flowed. Sadly, his remains were lost in the fire of 976, but were recovered in a well documented and brilliantly stage managed miracle when the bones burst forth from a marble column. Or bones very like St Mark's, as one skull looks much like another, dental records not being extant.
So, I had a few things to ponder when I attended Mass on Sunday – like, how did they apply all that gold leaf to the ceilng – reputed to be eight kilos of leaf, and would Pauline Hansen been any the wiser if she'd had wisdom teeth. And there was a choir from a girls school in Sydney singing parts of the Mass – quite special and ethereal.
Venice is big on campaniles, there are scads of them, and they occasionally collapse. The campanile in San Marco fell in 1902, the only casualty being the caretakers cat, and was rebuilt, dov'era e com'era, or “where it was, and as it was”. This possibly extended to the foundations, which are wooden soldier piles, and are now being restrained with titanium rods to stop the piles spreading. Sometimes repeating the designs of the past can be a problem, and they found a few years ago that the outer piles were starting to lean, the whole stone pile cap was growing. The titanium rods – which will see a lot of sea water – are being strain gauged so that growth can be monitored. The engineering here is amazing, especially when you consider that most of Venice is a only foot or so above the water table.
The clock tower in San Marco, built in 1490-odd survives. It has a 24 hour clock, digital date function (today being XI-XII, the year being not given), phase of the moon, and sign of the zodiac. The sign of the zodiac is a waste of time – all Venetians are fated to be Aquarians, water carriers, over the next few days – as the tide for Friday XII-XII is forecast to be 110 cm, which will flood most of Venice. Sump pumps are high on everyone's Christmas wish list, featuring prominantly in window displays, and carpenters all over town are hammering lee boards across doorways. Rubber boots are much in fashion, as are fishing waders. We bought carrots this morning from a guy standing in six inches of water, and the tide was ebbing at the time. It all seemed pretty normal to him. The Venetians don't talk about floods. For them, it's just acqua alta, high water, and an excuse for women to procure the most fashionable of rubber boots. Rubber boots with high heels. And gentlemen look pretty sharp in their Armani suits and waders.
There are sirens to warn of exceptionally high acqua alta – they go off about two hours before high water, and are the air raid sirens from WWII. They went off at 6:00 this morning, sounding like those Ealing Broadway 1950's movies. One expects to hear a clipped English accent saying “Right-ho lads, man the ack-ack guns, and well give Jerry a bloody nose”. Anyway, the Venetian sirens are being put to use – and I'd recommend Grundfoss shares as being a sound investment – Grundfoss pumps are walking out of the shops here. Selleys No-more-gaps seems popular also.
It is rumoured that the builders of the clock, an horogolical masterpiece of its time, were judicially blinded so that they could not create another. That seems a most robust way of securing intellectual property. One can visualise the dialogue at the the Risk Management Committee.
“How can we secure our IP?”
“Easy peasy, we'll just blind the engineers and drafters”.
“OK, sounds like a plan.”
Piaget of Geneva, Switzerland, have just completed an overhaul of the clock that has taken some six years. It's pretty complex, massive, and their craftsmen are sighted. There are a pair of life sized bronze statues armed with hammers which strike the bell – they inadvertently hit a workman, precipitating him into the square and breaking his neck about three hundred years ago. I believe that Piaget's artisans were better looked after – most likely with better permitting procedures in place.
There is every sort of craft here – rubbish boats with on-board compactor and jib crane, police boats – very snappy, ambulance boats with sirens and strobe lights, fire boats, boats delivering scaffold pipes and planks, boats with high reach cranes (you want your Steinway piano delivered to the top floor? No problem, we'll drop it in through that window”). Gondolas, of course, with the patrons being treated to endless “O solo mio's”, while drifting around at about two metres per minute, with the temperature hovering around 2 degrees. It's pretty cold here – the gondola patrons don't look all that happy with their 60 Euro per hour experience.
Mapping here is interesting. There are no street numbers, but every door has a number. Each sestier, or suburb, of which there are six, has had the doors numbered. Our address is simply 2xxxA Dorsoduro – the place over the road – the road being just two metres wide – being 2xxx Dorsorduro. Even doors that have been bricked up two hundred years ago have numbers. Simple, really. Unless you are the postman.
There's an amazing feling of antiquity here – you could walk into Venice after a 200 year absence and have no problem finding your way about. There is a ferry to cross the Grand Canal at the end of our street – a gondola with two at the oars – and the ferry or traghetto is shown on maps from the 14th century. You expect to run into Marco Polo, just back from the Orient with the latest in silks and spices, offering goods for sale on the street. Instead, it's dudes from Africa selling fake Gucci hand bags. Maps created 100 years ago still work well enough, - I bought a Baedeker printed in 1905 and it is accurate enough, and it reports the cafe at the railway station, the Ferrovia, as “cafe – poor”. The two main cafes in the Piazza, Florians and Quadri's, have both been in business for over 150 years. Both cafes can provide a cappucino at prices that are ruinous to the average tourist
Base price – 3 Euro, to drink it standing at the bar.
Extra to have it outside on the terrace – another 6 Euro.
Extra because the cafe orchestra is belting out selections from Phantom of the Opera – 5 Euro.
Service – 12 ½ %.
Total – about 17 Euro. But at least, you are taking coffee in what Napoleon was pleased to call “The drawing room of Europe”.
The two cafe orchestras are something of a bizarre institution, a Venetian Battle of the Sounds. Quadri will blast off with “Colonel Bogey”, Florians see them and raise them one with “I'm getting married in the morning”. Quadri tops out, though, the full musical royal flush, with “If I was a rich man” from Fiddler on the Roof. And if I was a rich man, we'd take coffee at Quadri's on the terrace.
But I'm not rich – and Quadri's going to flood tomorrow anyway.
Jan 8th, 2009, 06:14 AM
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OMG...Don't you love Venice! I can't wait to get back. I know exactly what you mean by the silence--and not just noise. No cars, no (well maybe one or two in all of Venice) neon lights, a peace and comfort that radiates from the buildings. It's absolutely amazing.
When a girl friend and I went this past year, it took me well in to the second day before I purposefully reached out a hand and touched a building and realized that I was actually there, I was actually in Venice seeing it with my own eyes and experiencing it with my own person and taste buds! I don't think-or remember- I touched anything before that point just to the mere fact that it felt like I was in a museum, in a painting.
Have fun and keep us posted!
When a girl friend and I went this past year, it took me well in to the second day before I purposefully reached out a hand and touched a building and realized that I was actually there, I was actually in Venice seeing it with my own eyes and experiencing it with my own person and taste buds! I don't think-or remember- I touched anything before that point just to the mere fact that it felt like I was in a museum, in a painting.
Have fun and keep us posted!
Jan 9th, 2009, 05:07 AM
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We took a trip to Rome for a several days.
As per below.
Rome.
I'm no big fan of motor racing, but I think I've discovered something. There's been no great Italian driver since Fangio, and the reason is now clear to me. All the Italians who might be gracing the Formula 1 Circuit are racing on a daily basis on the streets of Rome. And what a circuit it is. Round the Circus Maximus, down the via Di San Gregorio straight, hard right at Constantine's arch, sweeping left hander at the Colloseo, dodge the guys dressed as centurions who are waiting for (paid) photo ops. Full noise up the via de Fori Imperiali (mind that Korean guy taking snaps). Rocket through the Piazza Venezia past the Victor Emmanuel monument, minding the tight chicane by the barriers aroung the current archeological excavations, and off up the streets of the Capotoline Hill. Throw a left at St Peters, and blast down the bank of the Tiber. It's absoultely free for spectators, and the whole thing is raced in micro cars – or diesel buses.
If you are outrageously brave, you can stop the whole show by stepping onto a pedestrian crossing. This takes considerable nerve, I'm here to tell you. It is a test of will, pedestrian vs driver in Fiat 500, and leaves the running of the bulls in Pamplona for dead as a spectacle and adrenaline rush. There is an insane moment, when both pedestrian and driver do a quick “will he / won't he” calculation, eye contact is made, and one either crosses, or hops back to the safety of the pavement. It has one in mind of Octavius (later to become Ceasar Augustus) staring down Mark Antony in Egypt, except that in Rome, Cleopatra will likely be wearing ostrich leather boots (Prada), a silk scarf (Hermes), crocodile handbag (Gucci), a well cut little number (Yves st Laurent) and coat (Dolce & Gabana), bling by Cartier. As you do.
My Italian is not perfect, but I do have a grasp of basic sign language. I rather think that the two fngered salute that one receives from motorists on occasion is not meant in homage to Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” salute. Particularly when it comes with a blast from an air horn. Allora!
Motorcycling, or rather scootering, is a different contest to automobiles. Scooters are immune from road laws, pedestrian crossings and red lights. Lights and laws are clearly intended as advisory only, a sort of ”You might consider stopping here, provided it doesn't interfere too much with the chat you are having on the mobile phone, or maybe you need to pause to light a smoke”. The combination of cobbled streets and souped up scooters rattling themselves to pieces makes for some interesting spectacles. The double lines in the centre of the road seem intended as a two way dedicated scooter lane 40 cm wide. I can see now how Valentino Rossi has become a champion bike rider – he is Roman, and it's in the blood.
Combine all the above ingredients with some horse drawn carriages – Rome's answer to the gondola - Vespa 3 wheel delivery vans with two stroke engines blowing much smoke and some suicidal cyclists and the resulting pandemonium is a great performance.
Tourists are fair game for scams in Rome. We are tourists, so naturally fair game. We were stung in the most memorable fashion a couple of years ago, when we managed to purchase a pair of leather jackets (“I'm on my way home from the Milan fashion shows, where are you from?, my sister lives in Adelaide, I've lost half my map of Rome (shows half map), can you direct me to the bank, my Visa card is broken (shows Visa card with broken corner), here take these two leather jackets – they are just samples, I don't need them, could you spot me 50 Euro, I'm about out of petrol (points to petrol gauge)”. 50 Euro for two leather jackets – unbelievable, and they had an Italian label – pasted over the other label that said “Made in Beijing”. A few polyvinylchlorides were killed and their skins tanned to make those jackets. And he was right when he thanked us for our help – “you'll never forget me”, he said. We haven't.
So we were chuffed this time when a guy pulled up, asking to be directed to the Tiber – all of 50 metres away, bridge in full view, jackets in plastic bags on the back seat. Anticipation of sweet revenge. Same dialogue, up to the point when we were advised that his sister lived in Perth. And then he drove off – he must have spotted Lou's grin as she poked me in the ribs. Damn. Hate that.
The centre of Rome is ruined, totally. While the shortage of tradesmen is acknowledged, I find it hard to believe that after two thousand years, they could not have fixed it up a little. If I can paint a room in a mere six months, then surely the Colloseum could have been repaired in two thousand years. It looks for all the world like the MCG without the northern stand. And the Forum – it's just a total mess. Bits of marble everywhere.
The foundations to the temple of the Vestal Virgins still exist, but they've let the flame go out long ago. I thought they were instructed to keep the thing alight, on pain of excommunication or marriage or something, but obviously the message got lost. Or maybe the virgins just got de-flowered, and replacements were hard to come by - it's hard to tell.
The Palatine hill is slowly being dug over, revealing the most intricate brickwork, arches and vaults built on vaults, which in turn are built on vaults. The private residence of Augustus is open, and the frescoes on the walls that remain are in good condition. I find that remarkable – they are just water colour on plaster. And I can't see how they could ever have had enough firewood to fire the millions of bricks that create the Paletine. There are remains of sewers (draining to the Tiber, of course), wash troughs, chimneys, courtyards, all the requirements of a comfortable life in 50 B.C.
Back in Venice
We're back in Venice, and it's cold.
So IT'S FUR TIME! Venetian women of a certain age – the age being about 60 – take fur. I think it's a coming of age ritual, or maybe a status thing, in the way that top barristers take silk There are totally no PVC's being slaughtered to create the furs – but a lot of foxes, sables, arctic seals, minks and the like have met their end to dress these women. Their silouette resembles your average house brick, with colour and facial expression to match. Only the truly foolhardy would mess with these women.
They complain. “There's no cabbage to be bought in all of Venice”, which means that the green grocer that her family has been dealing with for the last 300 years has just sold his last cabbage. Tradition dies hard in this town.
Tradition is alive and well, and part of the tradition is keeping dogs. The average Venetian residence does not extend to a back yard, so Fido, a Great Dane, gets walked in the streets – which are alleys at best. And dogs being dogs, and Italians being Italians, having contempt for the sign that says “Clean up after your dog”, dog droppings are not unknown. The streets are swept every morning by folk using traditional brooms – twigs bound with wire onto a handle – and garbage is collected daily. There's no such thing as a mechanical street sweeper here.
The amount of pure physical work that goes to keep Venice operatiing is massive. Everything is ultimately carried by hand or barrow, and there are steps over every bridge. It's hard yacka. Barrels of beer, sheets of plaster board, structural steel, fish, fabrics, food, furniture, books, bricks, bread, boots, the lot. About the only place that has direct street, or rather canal, access, is our local Billa supermaret. They load the delivery truck onto a barge, and transport the whole contrivance to the front of the supermarket and unload it by fork truck. The fork was working in nine inches of water last week, acqua alta being acqua alta. It seemed part of the routine.
In spite of the work that goes to keep Venice afloat and proceeding under it's own steam, prices are not as savage as we would have expected. Wine is pleasingly cheap, with drinkable wine costing about 3 or 4 Euro a bottle, which does offset quite nicely the high cost of red meat. Fresh produce is cheap, even after allowing for the AUD/Euro exchange rate - cherries at 20 Euro or AUD 40 per kilo being a notable exception. Our apartment is well equipped, and we're working through the Venetian cook book we brought with us. The chicken stock is cooking now, ready for this evening's risotto.
Crime in Venice is not common, but we were in the right place at the right time to witness a police chase, Venice style, straight out of the Keystone Cops. Alt! Ladro! ( Stop! Thief!), blowing of whistles. African hand bag seller (specialising in fake Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton bags) runs through the campo at high speed, hurling bags behind him as a diversion, closely followed by policeman with whistle. That endurance training on the Veldt paid off for the chased, and he got away. Closing scene – cop returns, spends time kicking and stamping on the bags.
Priceless.
It's the Christmas holiday period, and so Venice is seeing an influx of visitors. American accents are heard on the streets, along with comments like “But they said it was just beside the canal, and can you tell me, Shirlene, which canal they meant. And how come that bar that Hemingway made famous, it's called Harry's rather than Ernest's”. That's the mid-West for you, I suppose.
Getting lost in Venice is part of life here. With the narrowest street being a bare two feet wide, finding one's way presents intersting challenges, and a GPS would suffer a total melt down. I anticipated this, and came armed with a compass, a fine Silva model. It has a slight problem, though, which has contributed to me seeing some most unexpected sights both in Rome and Venice – I've observed that the north end of the needle, painted red and clearly marked “N”, actually points south. I've checked this - the sun rises in the south east and sets in a westerly direction, right? - and I do lay claim to some basic navigational skills. Making a compass that is completely WRONG takes some doing. I could tolerate minor errors, magnetic deviation being not unknown, but 180 degrees wrong? I could be sailing the South Seas, and find myself heading towards Alaska when my destination is Terra del Fuego.
There will be words in Melbourne with the Silva retailers, and that will be quite fun. I'm not going to accept a replacement or refund – that compass has shown me way too many new vistas.
A greater hazard to navigation is tourists reading maps and taking photos. Hansel and Gretel laid a trail of bread crumbs to find a way back out of the forest (the trail eaten by sparrows, as I'm told, which rather prejudiced their return), but some tourists seem compelled to photograph every step of the way in Venice. Maybe they can just press re-wind, and find themselves back at Marco Polo Airport. I'm being cynical here. But Lou earned the ultimate accolade yesterday – an ITALIAN asked her for directions! Sadly, she had to reply, in her best Italian, “Mi scusui, non capisco, sono Australiana, ciao, ciao”, to which he replied “Allora”, and threw up his hands in his best Italian.
Cameras are big here – really big. Digital SLR cameras seem the weapon of choice, resembling a shoulder launched anti tank missile in both size and sophistication of electronics. Lock on and fire! I'm a bit of a Luddite here – I think I'm the last man standing in Venezia that is still using film and a hand held light meter. The people at the photo shop treat me as if I am from the past, a visitor from the nineteenth century – they speak slowly and gently to me when I buy film. Lou is doing water colour paintings, so not worrying in the slightest about apertures, shutter speeds or film ASA ratings.
I'm shooting black and white.
The sophistication of the digital cameras, however, is far exceeded by the sophistication of our washing machine. It has all the dials that one would expect in a Soviet era nuclear power station, Chernoble on the Adriatic. One can select temperature, time, spin speed, water quantity, day of the week and biorythm – and that's just the basic set of controls for the casual user. Power users can opt for water hardness, background radiation level, tide level, ambient temperature and barometric pressure. Lou's mastered it.
Have you ever seen that Alfred Hitchcock film “Rear Widow”? Venice is like that. Life is very internal – but the windows give a glimpse of life inside these houses. Sure, there's a problem with rising damp, Istrian stone not making the best of damp courses, and red brick working like a suction pump to pull water from the canals. But on the second floor, behind the peeling facade, people are living in rooms that were decorated 300 years ago. We've just watched through the window the woman of the house at No 2688B Calle Lunga St Barnaba setting the table for Christmas Eve, and the children unwrapping their Chrsimas presents, in a room with a chandelier that must weigh half a tonne. The presents look like a lava lamp and a Superman suit (Warning – wearing suit does not enable occupant to fly) and we will probably see the Superman suit at midnight Mass later tonight.
I am not often accused of being religious, but we did attend Mass at mid-night, in our local church, a church with the odd Tiepolo painting, a Veronese or two, plus minor works. Statues of various Saints and notables chisseled out in 1500 A.D. Incense, chanting, singing, the whole Ecclestical show. One can't help but be swept up in it, the knowledge that, for a brief time, one is part of an ancient tradition, part of a very old community of faith, and part of a continuing community too. The Christmas story resonates universally.
Houses, even the grand palazzios, are compact, with furniture and appliances to match. A wide screen television in Venice has a 17” screen, and I can't help but think that people live better when they have less stuff in their lives, and the life is simultaneously rich and simple. One factor that inhibits the acquisition of stuff is that it is just so hard to transport. Sure, there's an Ikea on the mainland, but to get that Billy bookcase home will mean a drive, and then walking it over about 40 bridges, and then up three floors. Alternatively, engage a transport company to deliver it by boat. The community is close, because people go about on foot all the time, and continually rub up against their neighbours. Shopping is a daily occurence, because it is impossible to cart a weekly shop home in your average troley. There are voices in the streets. And the garden next door is planted out with winter vegies. We've bought seeds from Venice for our garden in Melbourne.
This is a town with 60,000 permanent residents – the population of Wagga – with about 20 million visitors a year. That's a lot of visitors, making for pedestrian traffic jams in the streets. The protocol is that you walk on the right, and dawdling two abreast is seen as being anti-social, three abreast is the equivalent of a B-double smash on the Westgate bridge. Bearing in mind that the main drag from the Rialto to the railway station is frequently less than a couple of metres wide, traffic jams can be significant. Don't stop in mid step to consult that map. Pull over into a slip lane – the slip lane most likely to be selling horrible glass from Murano – Homer Simpson paddling a gondola. But maybe some of the Murano glasswere has just been unpacked out of a container from the Peoples Republic of China at Murano – it's hard to tell. Lou and I promised ourselves that we would buy some fine wine glasses here, and we've done it. They cost a bomb, and will be treasures to come. The contents come cheaply, so we see it as a kind of economy.
It's Boxing day, with the wind sweeping down from the Italian alps, blowing hard enough to have the shutters rattling and the seagulls working to windward with difficulty. A gondola ride today would be like a surf boat at Coogee or Bell's Beach, with no lifesavers standing by with the line and reel. It is freezing cold, one or two degrees, I think, with a perfectly clear sky that would have had Canaletto reaching for his paint box, or JMW Turner stretching a canvas. The wind carries the sound of the bells from the campaniles probably north of us (the compass being a dud), and so we are hearing a whole lot of new bells. I'm not totally anal, but I did count one bell ringing seventy three times. Venice is full of bells – it is just delightful.
The wind has also shredded the “No Mose” protest banner on the apartment railing a block away. One sees a lot of “No Mose” graffiti, Mose being the set of barriers presently being built at the entrance to the lagoon in an attempt to stem the flow of water when exceptionally high tides are anticipated. When a big acqua alta is expected, then the barriers will be raised to stem the flow of water from the Adriatic into the lagoon. Many Venetians think Mose is a waste of money – it's costing multi-billion Euro – and might not work anyway. I suspect the protests are about “We've been doing water here for 1500 years plus, so go buy some waders and get over it”. The floor of the lagoon has dropped about 20 cm over the last 50 years through extraction of ground water to supply the chemical industry at Mestre, on the land side of the lagoon. Add to this the dredging to allow tankers and corpulent cruise liners to enter the lagoon, and you've got the perfect environmental problem – tidal flows have increased hugely. The perfect environmental solution is something else again.
Maybe the locals just dont like the concept of Mose, or Moses, handing down a fresh set of commandments which will take the fun out of life. I can sympathise – the commandments will probably be driven by a bunch of EU officials from Brussels, and Brussels is not the most exciting of towns – even the citizens of Brussels agree on that. Or maybe the Venetians think that Mose will be about as effective as the tidal warning sirens, a system that sees much derision and humour.
We don't watch television much. Venetian TV seems to comprise movies dubbed into Italian by interpreters whose first language is Arabic. The alternative is soap operas that make “The Bold and the Beautiful” appear quite Shakesperean, or game shows that make “The Price is Right” look philosophically sophisticated. One particular game show seems designed to provide a venue for a woman with exceptional legs and miniskirt with a length measured in microns to prance across the stage, shaking her Watusi. Shot, as one would expect, from low camera angles.
The Christmas / New Year influx of visitors over the last few days has seen an equivalent influx of street vendors, handbag floggers and rose sellers. The rose vendors have a cool style – shove two roses into the woman's hand, demand money from her male companion. They won't take no for an answer, but we've now got a routine to foil them. Lou smiles, takes roses. Hands them to me. I hand back to vendor, who snatches them. He says something un-printable, expletives not deleted, in a language that I don't understand, but it's not Italian. Easy peasy. The handbag vendors (genuine Gucci, guaranteed) have a different system. Pick tourist, thrust handbag into woman's hand. Ask “what do you think this is worth”. Negotiate price with woman. Then say to male companion, as cash is handed over, “Is that all you are going to pay?” We've got no strategy for these gentlemen, we just click on mute, and pretend to be Venetian.
Priceless – or price negotiable.
As per below.
Rome.
I'm no big fan of motor racing, but I think I've discovered something. There's been no great Italian driver since Fangio, and the reason is now clear to me. All the Italians who might be gracing the Formula 1 Circuit are racing on a daily basis on the streets of Rome. And what a circuit it is. Round the Circus Maximus, down the via Di San Gregorio straight, hard right at Constantine's arch, sweeping left hander at the Colloseo, dodge the guys dressed as centurions who are waiting for (paid) photo ops. Full noise up the via de Fori Imperiali (mind that Korean guy taking snaps). Rocket through the Piazza Venezia past the Victor Emmanuel monument, minding the tight chicane by the barriers aroung the current archeological excavations, and off up the streets of the Capotoline Hill. Throw a left at St Peters, and blast down the bank of the Tiber. It's absoultely free for spectators, and the whole thing is raced in micro cars – or diesel buses.
If you are outrageously brave, you can stop the whole show by stepping onto a pedestrian crossing. This takes considerable nerve, I'm here to tell you. It is a test of will, pedestrian vs driver in Fiat 500, and leaves the running of the bulls in Pamplona for dead as a spectacle and adrenaline rush. There is an insane moment, when both pedestrian and driver do a quick “will he / won't he” calculation, eye contact is made, and one either crosses, or hops back to the safety of the pavement. It has one in mind of Octavius (later to become Ceasar Augustus) staring down Mark Antony in Egypt, except that in Rome, Cleopatra will likely be wearing ostrich leather boots (Prada), a silk scarf (Hermes), crocodile handbag (Gucci), a well cut little number (Yves st Laurent) and coat (Dolce & Gabana), bling by Cartier. As you do.
My Italian is not perfect, but I do have a grasp of basic sign language. I rather think that the two fngered salute that one receives from motorists on occasion is not meant in homage to Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” salute. Particularly when it comes with a blast from an air horn. Allora!
Motorcycling, or rather scootering, is a different contest to automobiles. Scooters are immune from road laws, pedestrian crossings and red lights. Lights and laws are clearly intended as advisory only, a sort of ”You might consider stopping here, provided it doesn't interfere too much with the chat you are having on the mobile phone, or maybe you need to pause to light a smoke”. The combination of cobbled streets and souped up scooters rattling themselves to pieces makes for some interesting spectacles. The double lines in the centre of the road seem intended as a two way dedicated scooter lane 40 cm wide. I can see now how Valentino Rossi has become a champion bike rider – he is Roman, and it's in the blood.
Combine all the above ingredients with some horse drawn carriages – Rome's answer to the gondola - Vespa 3 wheel delivery vans with two stroke engines blowing much smoke and some suicidal cyclists and the resulting pandemonium is a great performance.
Tourists are fair game for scams in Rome. We are tourists, so naturally fair game. We were stung in the most memorable fashion a couple of years ago, when we managed to purchase a pair of leather jackets (“I'm on my way home from the Milan fashion shows, where are you from?, my sister lives in Adelaide, I've lost half my map of Rome (shows half map), can you direct me to the bank, my Visa card is broken (shows Visa card with broken corner), here take these two leather jackets – they are just samples, I don't need them, could you spot me 50 Euro, I'm about out of petrol (points to petrol gauge)”. 50 Euro for two leather jackets – unbelievable, and they had an Italian label – pasted over the other label that said “Made in Beijing”. A few polyvinylchlorides were killed and their skins tanned to make those jackets. And he was right when he thanked us for our help – “you'll never forget me”, he said. We haven't.
So we were chuffed this time when a guy pulled up, asking to be directed to the Tiber – all of 50 metres away, bridge in full view, jackets in plastic bags on the back seat. Anticipation of sweet revenge. Same dialogue, up to the point when we were advised that his sister lived in Perth. And then he drove off – he must have spotted Lou's grin as she poked me in the ribs. Damn. Hate that.
The centre of Rome is ruined, totally. While the shortage of tradesmen is acknowledged, I find it hard to believe that after two thousand years, they could not have fixed it up a little. If I can paint a room in a mere six months, then surely the Colloseum could have been repaired in two thousand years. It looks for all the world like the MCG without the northern stand. And the Forum – it's just a total mess. Bits of marble everywhere.
The foundations to the temple of the Vestal Virgins still exist, but they've let the flame go out long ago. I thought they were instructed to keep the thing alight, on pain of excommunication or marriage or something, but obviously the message got lost. Or maybe the virgins just got de-flowered, and replacements were hard to come by - it's hard to tell.
The Palatine hill is slowly being dug over, revealing the most intricate brickwork, arches and vaults built on vaults, which in turn are built on vaults. The private residence of Augustus is open, and the frescoes on the walls that remain are in good condition. I find that remarkable – they are just water colour on plaster. And I can't see how they could ever have had enough firewood to fire the millions of bricks that create the Paletine. There are remains of sewers (draining to the Tiber, of course), wash troughs, chimneys, courtyards, all the requirements of a comfortable life in 50 B.C.
Back in Venice
We're back in Venice, and it's cold.
So IT'S FUR TIME! Venetian women of a certain age – the age being about 60 – take fur. I think it's a coming of age ritual, or maybe a status thing, in the way that top barristers take silk There are totally no PVC's being slaughtered to create the furs – but a lot of foxes, sables, arctic seals, minks and the like have met their end to dress these women. Their silouette resembles your average house brick, with colour and facial expression to match. Only the truly foolhardy would mess with these women.
They complain. “There's no cabbage to be bought in all of Venice”, which means that the green grocer that her family has been dealing with for the last 300 years has just sold his last cabbage. Tradition dies hard in this town.
Tradition is alive and well, and part of the tradition is keeping dogs. The average Venetian residence does not extend to a back yard, so Fido, a Great Dane, gets walked in the streets – which are alleys at best. And dogs being dogs, and Italians being Italians, having contempt for the sign that says “Clean up after your dog”, dog droppings are not unknown. The streets are swept every morning by folk using traditional brooms – twigs bound with wire onto a handle – and garbage is collected daily. There's no such thing as a mechanical street sweeper here.
The amount of pure physical work that goes to keep Venice operatiing is massive. Everything is ultimately carried by hand or barrow, and there are steps over every bridge. It's hard yacka. Barrels of beer, sheets of plaster board, structural steel, fish, fabrics, food, furniture, books, bricks, bread, boots, the lot. About the only place that has direct street, or rather canal, access, is our local Billa supermaret. They load the delivery truck onto a barge, and transport the whole contrivance to the front of the supermarket and unload it by fork truck. The fork was working in nine inches of water last week, acqua alta being acqua alta. It seemed part of the routine.
In spite of the work that goes to keep Venice afloat and proceeding under it's own steam, prices are not as savage as we would have expected. Wine is pleasingly cheap, with drinkable wine costing about 3 or 4 Euro a bottle, which does offset quite nicely the high cost of red meat. Fresh produce is cheap, even after allowing for the AUD/Euro exchange rate - cherries at 20 Euro or AUD 40 per kilo being a notable exception. Our apartment is well equipped, and we're working through the Venetian cook book we brought with us. The chicken stock is cooking now, ready for this evening's risotto.
Crime in Venice is not common, but we were in the right place at the right time to witness a police chase, Venice style, straight out of the Keystone Cops. Alt! Ladro! ( Stop! Thief!), blowing of whistles. African hand bag seller (specialising in fake Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton bags) runs through the campo at high speed, hurling bags behind him as a diversion, closely followed by policeman with whistle. That endurance training on the Veldt paid off for the chased, and he got away. Closing scene – cop returns, spends time kicking and stamping on the bags.
Priceless.
It's the Christmas holiday period, and so Venice is seeing an influx of visitors. American accents are heard on the streets, along with comments like “But they said it was just beside the canal, and can you tell me, Shirlene, which canal they meant. And how come that bar that Hemingway made famous, it's called Harry's rather than Ernest's”. That's the mid-West for you, I suppose.
Getting lost in Venice is part of life here. With the narrowest street being a bare two feet wide, finding one's way presents intersting challenges, and a GPS would suffer a total melt down. I anticipated this, and came armed with a compass, a fine Silva model. It has a slight problem, though, which has contributed to me seeing some most unexpected sights both in Rome and Venice – I've observed that the north end of the needle, painted red and clearly marked “N”, actually points south. I've checked this - the sun rises in the south east and sets in a westerly direction, right? - and I do lay claim to some basic navigational skills. Making a compass that is completely WRONG takes some doing. I could tolerate minor errors, magnetic deviation being not unknown, but 180 degrees wrong? I could be sailing the South Seas, and find myself heading towards Alaska when my destination is Terra del Fuego.
There will be words in Melbourne with the Silva retailers, and that will be quite fun. I'm not going to accept a replacement or refund – that compass has shown me way too many new vistas.
A greater hazard to navigation is tourists reading maps and taking photos. Hansel and Gretel laid a trail of bread crumbs to find a way back out of the forest (the trail eaten by sparrows, as I'm told, which rather prejudiced their return), but some tourists seem compelled to photograph every step of the way in Venice. Maybe they can just press re-wind, and find themselves back at Marco Polo Airport. I'm being cynical here. But Lou earned the ultimate accolade yesterday – an ITALIAN asked her for directions! Sadly, she had to reply, in her best Italian, “Mi scusui, non capisco, sono Australiana, ciao, ciao”, to which he replied “Allora”, and threw up his hands in his best Italian.
Cameras are big here – really big. Digital SLR cameras seem the weapon of choice, resembling a shoulder launched anti tank missile in both size and sophistication of electronics. Lock on and fire! I'm a bit of a Luddite here – I think I'm the last man standing in Venezia that is still using film and a hand held light meter. The people at the photo shop treat me as if I am from the past, a visitor from the nineteenth century – they speak slowly and gently to me when I buy film. Lou is doing water colour paintings, so not worrying in the slightest about apertures, shutter speeds or film ASA ratings.
I'm shooting black and white.
The sophistication of the digital cameras, however, is far exceeded by the sophistication of our washing machine. It has all the dials that one would expect in a Soviet era nuclear power station, Chernoble on the Adriatic. One can select temperature, time, spin speed, water quantity, day of the week and biorythm – and that's just the basic set of controls for the casual user. Power users can opt for water hardness, background radiation level, tide level, ambient temperature and barometric pressure. Lou's mastered it.
Have you ever seen that Alfred Hitchcock film “Rear Widow”? Venice is like that. Life is very internal – but the windows give a glimpse of life inside these houses. Sure, there's a problem with rising damp, Istrian stone not making the best of damp courses, and red brick working like a suction pump to pull water from the canals. But on the second floor, behind the peeling facade, people are living in rooms that were decorated 300 years ago. We've just watched through the window the woman of the house at No 2688B Calle Lunga St Barnaba setting the table for Christmas Eve, and the children unwrapping their Chrsimas presents, in a room with a chandelier that must weigh half a tonne. The presents look like a lava lamp and a Superman suit (Warning – wearing suit does not enable occupant to fly) and we will probably see the Superman suit at midnight Mass later tonight.
I am not often accused of being religious, but we did attend Mass at mid-night, in our local church, a church with the odd Tiepolo painting, a Veronese or two, plus minor works. Statues of various Saints and notables chisseled out in 1500 A.D. Incense, chanting, singing, the whole Ecclestical show. One can't help but be swept up in it, the knowledge that, for a brief time, one is part of an ancient tradition, part of a very old community of faith, and part of a continuing community too. The Christmas story resonates universally.
Houses, even the grand palazzios, are compact, with furniture and appliances to match. A wide screen television in Venice has a 17” screen, and I can't help but think that people live better when they have less stuff in their lives, and the life is simultaneously rich and simple. One factor that inhibits the acquisition of stuff is that it is just so hard to transport. Sure, there's an Ikea on the mainland, but to get that Billy bookcase home will mean a drive, and then walking it over about 40 bridges, and then up three floors. Alternatively, engage a transport company to deliver it by boat. The community is close, because people go about on foot all the time, and continually rub up against their neighbours. Shopping is a daily occurence, because it is impossible to cart a weekly shop home in your average troley. There are voices in the streets. And the garden next door is planted out with winter vegies. We've bought seeds from Venice for our garden in Melbourne.
This is a town with 60,000 permanent residents – the population of Wagga – with about 20 million visitors a year. That's a lot of visitors, making for pedestrian traffic jams in the streets. The protocol is that you walk on the right, and dawdling two abreast is seen as being anti-social, three abreast is the equivalent of a B-double smash on the Westgate bridge. Bearing in mind that the main drag from the Rialto to the railway station is frequently less than a couple of metres wide, traffic jams can be significant. Don't stop in mid step to consult that map. Pull over into a slip lane – the slip lane most likely to be selling horrible glass from Murano – Homer Simpson paddling a gondola. But maybe some of the Murano glasswere has just been unpacked out of a container from the Peoples Republic of China at Murano – it's hard to tell. Lou and I promised ourselves that we would buy some fine wine glasses here, and we've done it. They cost a bomb, and will be treasures to come. The contents come cheaply, so we see it as a kind of economy.
It's Boxing day, with the wind sweeping down from the Italian alps, blowing hard enough to have the shutters rattling and the seagulls working to windward with difficulty. A gondola ride today would be like a surf boat at Coogee or Bell's Beach, with no lifesavers standing by with the line and reel. It is freezing cold, one or two degrees, I think, with a perfectly clear sky that would have had Canaletto reaching for his paint box, or JMW Turner stretching a canvas. The wind carries the sound of the bells from the campaniles probably north of us (the compass being a dud), and so we are hearing a whole lot of new bells. I'm not totally anal, but I did count one bell ringing seventy three times. Venice is full of bells – it is just delightful.
The wind has also shredded the “No Mose” protest banner on the apartment railing a block away. One sees a lot of “No Mose” graffiti, Mose being the set of barriers presently being built at the entrance to the lagoon in an attempt to stem the flow of water when exceptionally high tides are anticipated. When a big acqua alta is expected, then the barriers will be raised to stem the flow of water from the Adriatic into the lagoon. Many Venetians think Mose is a waste of money – it's costing multi-billion Euro – and might not work anyway. I suspect the protests are about “We've been doing water here for 1500 years plus, so go buy some waders and get over it”. The floor of the lagoon has dropped about 20 cm over the last 50 years through extraction of ground water to supply the chemical industry at Mestre, on the land side of the lagoon. Add to this the dredging to allow tankers and corpulent cruise liners to enter the lagoon, and you've got the perfect environmental problem – tidal flows have increased hugely. The perfect environmental solution is something else again.
Maybe the locals just dont like the concept of Mose, or Moses, handing down a fresh set of commandments which will take the fun out of life. I can sympathise – the commandments will probably be driven by a bunch of EU officials from Brussels, and Brussels is not the most exciting of towns – even the citizens of Brussels agree on that. Or maybe the Venetians think that Mose will be about as effective as the tidal warning sirens, a system that sees much derision and humour.
We don't watch television much. Venetian TV seems to comprise movies dubbed into Italian by interpreters whose first language is Arabic. The alternative is soap operas that make “The Bold and the Beautiful” appear quite Shakesperean, or game shows that make “The Price is Right” look philosophically sophisticated. One particular game show seems designed to provide a venue for a woman with exceptional legs and miniskirt with a length measured in microns to prance across the stage, shaking her Watusi. Shot, as one would expect, from low camera angles.
The Christmas / New Year influx of visitors over the last few days has seen an equivalent influx of street vendors, handbag floggers and rose sellers. The rose vendors have a cool style – shove two roses into the woman's hand, demand money from her male companion. They won't take no for an answer, but we've now got a routine to foil them. Lou smiles, takes roses. Hands them to me. I hand back to vendor, who snatches them. He says something un-printable, expletives not deleted, in a language that I don't understand, but it's not Italian. Easy peasy. The handbag vendors (genuine Gucci, guaranteed) have a different system. Pick tourist, thrust handbag into woman's hand. Ask “what do you think this is worth”. Negotiate price with woman. Then say to male companion, as cash is handed over, “Is that all you are going to pay?” We've got no strategy for these gentlemen, we just click on mute, and pretend to be Venetian.
Priceless – or price negotiable.
Jan 9th, 2009, 01:48 PM
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Please keep posting your "impressions". I am re-living my last visit to Venice by reading your posts. I love your style!
Your comment about the television shows made me laugh out loud.
"One particular game show seems designed to provide a venue for a woman with exceptional legs and miniskirt with a length measured in microns to prance across the stage, shaking her Watusi. Shot, as one would expect, from low camera angles."
That would be the Italian version of Wheel of Fortune. My husband couldn't belive it! We watched almost every night - laughing hysterically the whole time. Our B&B "neighbors" must have thought we were crazy!
Anyway, I hope we keep hearing from you! And I wish I was in Venice right now. Thanks for bringing that wonderful city to me.
Your comment about the television shows made me laugh out loud.
"One particular game show seems designed to provide a venue for a woman with exceptional legs and miniskirt with a length measured in microns to prance across the stage, shaking her Watusi. Shot, as one would expect, from low camera angles."
That would be the Italian version of Wheel of Fortune. My husband couldn't belive it! We watched almost every night - laughing hysterically the whole time. Our B&B "neighbors" must have thought we were crazy!
Anyway, I hope we keep hearing from you! And I wish I was in Venice right now. Thanks for bringing that wonderful city to me.
Jan 9th, 2009, 02:19 PM
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Pete
Great writing!
I doubt your Murrican readers understand the significance of the wisdom, or lack thereof, of Pauline Hanson.
I liked the description of the Coliseum as like the MCG without the northern stand. Caused me to LOL. Not 10 minutes earlier, in the Oz forum, I described one of the worst days of my life, (so far) - at the AFL Grand Final, in the northern stand of the MCG.
Keep on with the reporting - we were there in 2007 for a week, and were planning to spend a couple of weeks this year, but events have overtaken us - so I'm living vicariously!
Great writing!
I doubt your Murrican readers understand the significance of the wisdom, or lack thereof, of Pauline Hanson.
I liked the description of the Coliseum as like the MCG without the northern stand. Caused me to LOL. Not 10 minutes earlier, in the Oz forum, I described one of the worst days of my life, (so far) - at the AFL Grand Final, in the northern stand of the MCG.
Keep on with the reporting - we were there in 2007 for a week, and were planning to spend a couple of weeks this year, but events have overtaken us - so I'm living vicariously!
Jan 9th, 2009, 06:19 PM
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Scribbling? I should scribble so well!! Love your style.Reminds me of Dame Edna's comments "Aren't those journalists clever ? They ought to be writers!" Your report is bringing back lovely memories of my time in Venice last September.
Jan 9th, 2009, 10:40 PM
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"The frescoes on the walls that remain are in good condition. I find that remarkable – they are just water colour on plaster"
Technically not true.
A <b> fresco </b> is a painting applied to plaster while it's wet. This creates a chemical bond between the plaster and the colouring, so the resultant screed is actually coloured plaster. It's an astonishingly fiddly and demanding job - but it produces paintings that last for thousands of years.
The alternative - a wallpainting produced by just putting paint onto dry plaster - is technically known as a <b> secco </b>, though most people just call it a wall painting. It's a lot quicker and cheaper to do, was widely used in the Third World (above all, England) during mediaeval times and just a few hundred years later usually looks like a blob of mould.
I'm not sure how many Roman and Etruscan wallpaintings are actually frescoes (even seccoes can last in the right environment) - but in this, as in so many things, imperial Rome used more advanced technology than the backward parts of the world 1500 years later. Think concrete, central heating and lavatories.
Technically not true.
A <b> fresco </b> is a painting applied to plaster while it's wet. This creates a chemical bond between the plaster and the colouring, so the resultant screed is actually coloured plaster. It's an astonishingly fiddly and demanding job - but it produces paintings that last for thousands of years.
The alternative - a wallpainting produced by just putting paint onto dry plaster - is technically known as a <b> secco </b>, though most people just call it a wall painting. It's a lot quicker and cheaper to do, was widely used in the Third World (above all, England) during mediaeval times and just a few hundred years later usually looks like a blob of mould.
I'm not sure how many Roman and Etruscan wallpaintings are actually frescoes (even seccoes can last in the right environment) - but in this, as in so many things, imperial Rome used more advanced technology than the backward parts of the world 1500 years later. Think concrete, central heating and lavatories.
Jan 9th, 2009, 11:09 PM
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annw
Yes, Pauline Hanson is sort of similar to Sarah Palin, but with red hair and an especially strident voice. I haven't heard SP speak; she may also have a grating voice. Failed politician and Aussie nightmare.
Yes, Pauline Hanson is sort of similar to Sarah Palin, but with red hair and an especially strident voice. I haven't heard SP speak; she may also have a grating voice. Failed politician and Aussie nightmare.
Jan 10th, 2009, 01:20 AM
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Pauline Hanson doesn't have Sara Palin's wardrobe!! Hey Peter, I hope Pauline Hansen does have wisdom teeth just think how much more embarrassing she would be without them!! Love your report. I was a bit stunned to read that you have 8 weeks in Venice - what luxury!
Please keep your reports coming - it's a lovely read.
Please keep your reports coming - it's a lovely read.
Jan 10th, 2009, 01:59 PM
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Oh pleeese keep writing! I am pretending I am back in Italy looking in amazement at the Italian women who go to the market dressed as I would dress when I am going to work, and laughing about your comments regarding the Italian tv. We were always amazed at the programs, but after spending a large part of the last year in Mexico, I have to say that American tv is rather tame compared to other countries' programs, and the acting in both Italy and Mexico is somewhat comparable to watching old Ponderosa reruns. You can't stop watching because it is so hysterical. Keep up the great comments.
Jan 11th, 2009, 04:41 PM
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If you have time you should do the "Secret Itineraries Tour of Doges Palace". They take you behind the doors look at Casanova's prison cell and high up into the palace. It was an awesome tour.
Jan 12th, 2009, 07:07 AM
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Big Post - a couple of thousand words.
Food is good here, both what we buy and cook, and also eating out. Venice is known for sea food and fish, and so one particularly good place close to us advises “No fish” on its menu. Very Venetian, given Venetian perversity. You've got to be perverse to build a city on a mud flat, and turn it into a major maritime power. However, the restaurant does do smoked leg of goose and hare pie.
Supermarkets are different, too. Note the number of your produce (carrots are number 47), place produce on scales and enter the number. Put the resulting bar coded ticket on produce, and it will be scanned at the checkout. Easy – once you know the system – we got into trouble the first time around. Allora! Stupido! Bread is sold by weight too, and sliced bread is unknown – as are toasters, it would seem. They charge for plastic bags, and shopping jeeps are all the go. I've yet to see it, but I bet Louis Vuitton are making shopping jeeps for the Venetian market.
There are four classes of produce available. The imported (not desirable or in the least patriotic), the Italian (acceptable), produce from our region, the Veneto (OK, if you MUST!), and produce from the lagoon – which is the real thing, likely to be just off the boat. Artichokes are most popular here, and a source of local pride. Our favourite green grocer is friendly, and we stumble through in a combination of sign language, pointing, and “Si, si”. There's a boat load of produce just in front of his shop.
We're cooking in a kitchen about the size of the galley of your average racing yacht, but doing pretty well. The galley does not move with the swells – unless it's swells caused by the fact that wine is about 3 Euro a bottle. The fridge is microscopic – but as the outside temperature hovers around zero, food keeps well on our terrace.
Breakfast is now Italian-style, a cappucino and marmalade croissant, eaten at the bar. Many people take a glass of something stronger with their morning caffeine hit, a slug of grappa or a brandy. We have not taken to that practice – yet. This morning I saw a bottle of absinthe, guaranteed alcohol content 72%. It comes with a free spoon for some reason – maybe to scrape the consumer up off the pavement. I'd have thought that with that alcohol content, a fire extinguisher and Material Safety Data sheet would be more appropriate. I was tempted, though – it's so cold that maybe the alcohol would function like anti-freeze.
I think I mentioned the concept of getting lost in Venice. We were here with my five year old some years ago (about 33, in fact), and she got lost! Pip went in search of a toyshop she had seen. Twenty minutes while one's heart stops, and then we spotted her, or she spotted us. 'Where were you!!” she demanded, somewhat angrily. At times like that, you don't know whether to hug your child or beat them. I recollect we did both.
I also remember Pip dancing in St Marco's to “Tiptoe through the tulips”, belted out by Quadri's cafe orchestra, and breaking off in mid bar to harass pidgeons, of which there were multitudes, avain rats. Pidgeons have been a curse in Venice for centuries, and Venice has been trying to eliminate them. The main problem, I believe, were the licensed vendors of corn to feed them in St Marco's, with licenses probably issued by Benito Mussolini, so not easy to cancel. Somehow, the licences have been withdrawn, and the pidgeon population is now much reduced. Perhaps the corn vendors have been re-trained as street beggars, with turf allocated by ballot or public tender. They abound.
There's two contour maps here. The first is pretty simple – it just maps the areas that are likely to flood with acqua alta. The second is cost based, and we've noted that if one shops along the Statione / Rialto Bridge / St Marco ridge, the main visitor route, then prices will be higher. We're keeping to the lower ground. Slugging tourists has an ancient tradition here, ever since the knights of the Fourth Crusade were kept holed up on the Lido in 1202, while shipping rates to the Holy Land were negotiated and a fleet, fodder and victuals assembled. In the meantime, Venetian armourers were able to sell materiel to both sides of the conflict, making them, I suppose, the first war profiteers. The sting in the tail of the deal was, when the Crusaders were unable to pay, Doge Dandolo, near blind and aged 88, had a little side venture written into the charter agreement, “Yep, we'll ship you there, but as a little contract sweetener, we want you to subdue some recalcitrant Dalmatian colonies, and invade Constantinople en route”, thereby hijacking the Crusade. The Crusaders delivered on the deal, and history records that Dandolo was the first man ashore at Constantinople – history mostly being written by the victors. The crusade never reached the Holy Land, but from a minor breach of contract, the Venetians were able dominate the eastern Med. I believe they call it negotiating from a position of strength, and the tradition continues.
The population of Venice is in decline, and the permanent population is now about 60,000 – it was three times that number 30 years ago, and Venice has the oldest population of any European city. They also have the longest life expectancy of any European city, probably to do with all that walking, or 72% absinthe – or maybe, as cigarette smoking is de rigeur, they've preseved themselves like fine smoked proscuitto. Many people have moved to the mainland, to Mestre, an industrial city that looks as though it was designed by architects who worked with the radio on, listening to Easy Network, and whose last commission was East Berlin in 1947. There are many buildings in Venice with doors that look as though they have not been opened in years. Locks that appear to have been hand forged.
The upper floors of the house over the road at No 2691 Dorsoduro seem quite uninhabited, and the window shutters look as though they have not been opened in decades – possibly not since the Fourth crusade. This is common in Venice – commercial activity on the ground, and vacant rooms, whole vacant floors, above. I'd give my eye teeth to have a look in there. Furniture left over from Napoleon's time in Venice, wine from the vintage of 1930, and newspapers with headlines saying “Assassinato” “JFK morte”, “Jacki lamentare”.
We're studying hard at “Looking Venetian 101”, with mixed success. Decent marks are awarded if one can walk past a gondolier without him saying “Gondole, gondole”. A Credit is obtained when the handbag sellers don't bother to accost one, and a High Distinction is awarded when the rose sellers leave you alone. Dragging a shopping trolley helps, and leading a dog seems most Venetian. I could, of course, solve the problem with a stroke of a pen. Cash in my super, mortgage the house, and buy Lou a fur, preferably made of skin from an endangered species.
Molto Venetian, but I'm afraid not priceless.
5.
We find the greengrocer beside the Ponte de Pugni – the Bridge of Fists – not to be the friendliest of people. It's the signs in both Italian and English saying “Don't touch”, and he's a bit grumpy. Maybe he's just suspicious of anyone who walks over the bridge from the Parish of Santa Maria del Carmine into his Parish of San Barnaba. Parochialism raised to a high order – the Rialto Bridge had, in 1494, a drawbridge section in it, to keep the pesky tradesmen from San Polo away from the money changers, bankers, insurers and stock exchange traders in San Marco. In its day, the Rialto was Wall Street.
But the Ponte de Pugni has an interesting history. The bridge was the venue for organised fist fights between the Santa Maria lads vs the San Barnaba boys, and when fists proved insufficient to carry the day, resort was had to cudgels, iron bars, and the occasional dagger, Cronulla on the Veneto. There was no parapet on the bridge, so plunging into the Rio San Barnaba canal was common (and this at a time when the canals served as sewers and waste disposal systems). The history of the bridge is immortalised in footprints let into the paving in white stone, which deliniate the starting line for the fights. I've seen an engraving of an event, and it was certainly full on - maybe we cross on a daily basis the birthplace of football hooliganism. The fights were outlawed in 1705, and possibly peace broke out, or a fresh venue was found.
There's a parapet to the bridge now.
New Year.
There is a smell to New Years Eve in Venice, compounded of pizza, cooked fish, and freshly baked bread. There is another vital ingredient in the mix – the smell of black powder. Fireworks are available at our local mini mart, and the explosions started around dusk, about 5:00 PM this time of year, and continued until the small hours. Fireworks is really a misnomer – there were crackers being let off in San Marco about the size of a milk carton, which qualifies them as ordinance. I might mention that the entire population of Venice was in San Marco at the time, and so a little circle was cleared in the middle for the fireworks, displacing children, cops, prams and dogs – cleared by letting off fireworks.
There was a New Years Eve concert in San Marco, themed on “Love”, or “Lerve”, take your pick. Lots of encouragement to love, kiss somebody, anybody.
“Love to everyone, love to the world, we love you all”.
Followed by crash of exploding ordinance, loud enough to make the air pulsate and the window shutters dance.
The whole charade was sposored by the bottlers of Bellini, a pleasant concoction of peach juice and prosecco, a light sparkling white. We watched the Bellinii boys set out a couple of thousand plastic glasses for the crowd and fill them. Australia has the big banana, the big pineapple and the big Merino at Goulburn, and San Marco had the big inflated Bellini bottle. Bellini cocktails were invented by Cipriani, operator of Harry's bar, Hemingway's favourite drinking haunt, but not Hemingway's favourite drink, and I've always thought of him as a bourbon or rough rye man myself. But Ernest did try a Bellini once,, labelling it a drink for sissies, and suggesting that it was more appropriate for his drinking buddy, Scott Fitzgerald. One wonders what Hemingway would have thought of a thousand sneaker shod tourists consuming his not favourite cocktail.
A little dialogue, quoted from a not-remembered source,
Fitzgerald - “The rich, they're different to you and me”.
Hemmingway - “Yeah, they've got more money”.
It started to snow just before the stroke of midnight, which was quite magical, and one could imagine that the snow was the result of excellent stage management. This did not dampen the fireworks in the least. The snow lasted in places for a whole week – it's been exceptionally cold, daytime max of about one degree, if that.
There's a tradition of Americans in Venice, Henry James, Ernest H, Scott Fitzgerald, and Peggy Guggenheim who became Venice's favourite American daughter and an Honourary Venetian, which is no small accolade. She certainly did it in style, buying in 1951 the incomplete Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (started construction 1749, contractor claiming Extension of Time, negotiations still continuing), maintaing a private gondola and gondoliers, and a fleet of small dogs, which are buried in the garden of said Palazzo (the dogs, that is). She also maintained a salon of the brightest artists of her day, Paul Klee, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky, and was, by contemporary reports, as free with her favours as she was with her money, the USD / lire exchange rate being pretty hot in the fifties and sixties. As was Peggy. Kick Jackson out of bed, dust down the Picasso, send the gondolier out for some decent fresh food for the dogs, lunch with Mondrian. Take tea with Klee, dinner with Kandinsky, sup with the gondolier(s). Her legacy is a fine museum of modern art, including a large equestrian statue which many find a tad confronting, facing the Canal Grande.
This might, of course, be all untrue, facts being difficult to establish in Venice. Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian philosopher, once remarked, “I never, never tell a lie, but the truth not to everyone”. However, Peggy's gondola is in the Museum Maritime.
Or a gondola very like hers.
True.
6.
The Arsenale.
I visited the Museum Maritime yesterday, and yes, there's a gondola said to have been Peggy's. Venice has a proud naval history, having thumped just about every marine power over a period of one thousand years. Pick any country in the Levant, or all the eastern Med for that matter, and Venice has defeated them – along with some non-Levant nations like Libya. They had naval warfare developed to an art form, and one wonders what the outcome might have been if the Spanish at Trafalgar had the Venetian navy on its side. The sad thing, of course, is that by the time of Trafalgar, the Venetian navy was a shadow of its former self, Venice having turned into a sort of pleasure dome, repeating the excesses of Rome, and anticipating the speculative excesses of today's USA.
The Venetians built ships at the Arsenale for any one who would pay, and they pumped them out. It's recorded that, as a demonstration for a visiting big-wig, the Venetians laid the keel for a galley at breakfast, and rowed the completed vesssel past the visitor as he completed his dinner. Complete with a cannon or mortar, cast that morning, that weighed 2,000 pounds. (The engineer in me questions the cannon – it takes longer than a day to cool a casting of that mass. But it was a standard piece of ordinance, so a switch was possible.)
The galley that rowed past the dinner party was very much like the one whose keel was laid in the morning – that's Venetian marketing for you, and galleys were a standard product. Contemporary records recount the “galley in a day” story, while word of the substitution was likely suppressed. “The truth not to everyone”, as they say.
It's undeniable, though, that the Arsenale was the biggest industrial facility of its time, the progenitor of the military-industrial complex, and the time lasted about 800 years. At its peak, it employed 17,000 tradesmen, who were skilled and, once employed at the Arsenale, were guaranteed a job for life, still paid if they were sick or after they finished work. The Job for Life tradition still seems to continue – many of the trades at the Williamstown Dockyard in Melbourne (“Warship Builders to the Nation” was their proud bumper sticker) seemed to think the same way, even if they did little work. But the Arsenale was “Warship Builders to Anyone Who Could Pay”, and the Arsenale was able to launch a ship a day, and did. It has me in mind of the present day Korean ship yards, with ten vessels on the stocks, extruding tankers by the metre.
The Arsenale facility was self contained, producing rope and cordage, cannon balls, cloth for sails, gold leaf for decoration, gunpowder, oars for galleys (which weigh 60 kilos each, so a decent sized vessel sailed with six tonnes of oars), salted meat in barrels and even baked ships biscuit, which was highly regarded. One biscuit oven survives at the Arsenale, but the recipe has sadly been lost with the death of the last baker. A store of ships biscuit was found walled up in a store in a Venetian fortress in Crete and was still edible and free of mould and weevils after 150 years when the fortress had been abandoned. Good news for the citizens of Crete who were suffering a famine, and redefining the concept of “Use by”, or “Best before”, I suppose.
In a way, there were two power bases in Venice, the Doge's Palace and the Arsenale. Napoleon laid waste and looted both when the Austrians invaded, and I'm inclined to think that a visitor who nominates a Viennese address in the hotel register may still not receive the best of service. Memories are long here. There are “before and after” engravings of the Arsenale, showing in great detail the broken ships, torched sheds and ruined slips, missing piles of lead ingots, spars and masting, stolen cannonballs, and mentioning the 6000 cannons looted and melted down. The Sestier of Castello, where most of the trades lived, still retains something of a gritty working class feeling, like suburbs on Tyne-side or around the Belfast yards, where the Titanic was built.
The Venetians were particulary grumpy when Napoleon looted the four gilded bronze horses from the portico of St Marks – they represented the soul of Venice. The Venetians were devastated, the portico looked naked without them. In some ways, their complaints seem a bit rich – the Venetians had looted the horses in turn from the Hippodrome, the racecourse in Constantinople in 1204, payola from assisting the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Easy come, easy go, but for Venice easy come has always been preferable, and the easy go side is not so happy for them. I notice this at the supermarket - if the tab comes to 10.97 Euro, dont expect change from eleven. If the tab comes to 11.03 Euro, the full amount is expected. Small change is always in scant supply – when we bought mussels yesterday, the fishmonger threw in a few extras to bring the cost up to a rounded Euro.
Plunder can be unlucky for some, too. It's unlucky to walk between the pair of columns by the Basin of St Marks. One column has the winged lion of St Mark atop, and St Theodore, with his foot resting on a crrocodile, is on the other. The origin of the crocodile is uncertain, but many theories abound. The columns were looted, also from Constantinople courtesy of said Crusade, and took some removal and erecting, being about 20 metres tall and monolithic. Legend has it that there were three columns, but one was dropped into the Basin of St Marks, where it rests to this day, but maybe that's a “Truth not to everyone” sort of thing. The Incident Report would make fine reading, and the remaining columns were erected in 1172, as it took 150 years to figure out how to raise them.
The erection was overseen by Nicolo Barattieri, also engineer for the first Rialto bridge. He sweated them into place by rigging them with wet rope, and as the rope dried, it tightened and lifted the columns a couple of millimetres. Pack columns with dunnage, re-rig ropes and repeat the process – many times. I've seen the detailed engravings for the process, probably part of his tender submission. For his efforts, Nicolo was awarded a licence to operate gaming tables between the columns. There are spoil sports in every society, and to curb the gaming the authorities used the air space above the tables for public executions, which were not infrequent. This rather cruelled the place as a gaming venue, and it's still unlucky to walk between the columns. I don't walk between them, and I'm not even a gambler.
Got an issue with problem gambling?
Public hangings on Southbank should do the trick.
Food is good here, both what we buy and cook, and also eating out. Venice is known for sea food and fish, and so one particularly good place close to us advises “No fish” on its menu. Very Venetian, given Venetian perversity. You've got to be perverse to build a city on a mud flat, and turn it into a major maritime power. However, the restaurant does do smoked leg of goose and hare pie.
Supermarkets are different, too. Note the number of your produce (carrots are number 47), place produce on scales and enter the number. Put the resulting bar coded ticket on produce, and it will be scanned at the checkout. Easy – once you know the system – we got into trouble the first time around. Allora! Stupido! Bread is sold by weight too, and sliced bread is unknown – as are toasters, it would seem. They charge for plastic bags, and shopping jeeps are all the go. I've yet to see it, but I bet Louis Vuitton are making shopping jeeps for the Venetian market.
There are four classes of produce available. The imported (not desirable or in the least patriotic), the Italian (acceptable), produce from our region, the Veneto (OK, if you MUST!), and produce from the lagoon – which is the real thing, likely to be just off the boat. Artichokes are most popular here, and a source of local pride. Our favourite green grocer is friendly, and we stumble through in a combination of sign language, pointing, and “Si, si”. There's a boat load of produce just in front of his shop.
We're cooking in a kitchen about the size of the galley of your average racing yacht, but doing pretty well. The galley does not move with the swells – unless it's swells caused by the fact that wine is about 3 Euro a bottle. The fridge is microscopic – but as the outside temperature hovers around zero, food keeps well on our terrace.
Breakfast is now Italian-style, a cappucino and marmalade croissant, eaten at the bar. Many people take a glass of something stronger with their morning caffeine hit, a slug of grappa or a brandy. We have not taken to that practice – yet. This morning I saw a bottle of absinthe, guaranteed alcohol content 72%. It comes with a free spoon for some reason – maybe to scrape the consumer up off the pavement. I'd have thought that with that alcohol content, a fire extinguisher and Material Safety Data sheet would be more appropriate. I was tempted, though – it's so cold that maybe the alcohol would function like anti-freeze.
I think I mentioned the concept of getting lost in Venice. We were here with my five year old some years ago (about 33, in fact), and she got lost! Pip went in search of a toyshop she had seen. Twenty minutes while one's heart stops, and then we spotted her, or she spotted us. 'Where were you!!” she demanded, somewhat angrily. At times like that, you don't know whether to hug your child or beat them. I recollect we did both.
I also remember Pip dancing in St Marco's to “Tiptoe through the tulips”, belted out by Quadri's cafe orchestra, and breaking off in mid bar to harass pidgeons, of which there were multitudes, avain rats. Pidgeons have been a curse in Venice for centuries, and Venice has been trying to eliminate them. The main problem, I believe, were the licensed vendors of corn to feed them in St Marco's, with licenses probably issued by Benito Mussolini, so not easy to cancel. Somehow, the licences have been withdrawn, and the pidgeon population is now much reduced. Perhaps the corn vendors have been re-trained as street beggars, with turf allocated by ballot or public tender. They abound.
There's two contour maps here. The first is pretty simple – it just maps the areas that are likely to flood with acqua alta. The second is cost based, and we've noted that if one shops along the Statione / Rialto Bridge / St Marco ridge, the main visitor route, then prices will be higher. We're keeping to the lower ground. Slugging tourists has an ancient tradition here, ever since the knights of the Fourth Crusade were kept holed up on the Lido in 1202, while shipping rates to the Holy Land were negotiated and a fleet, fodder and victuals assembled. In the meantime, Venetian armourers were able to sell materiel to both sides of the conflict, making them, I suppose, the first war profiteers. The sting in the tail of the deal was, when the Crusaders were unable to pay, Doge Dandolo, near blind and aged 88, had a little side venture written into the charter agreement, “Yep, we'll ship you there, but as a little contract sweetener, we want you to subdue some recalcitrant Dalmatian colonies, and invade Constantinople en route”, thereby hijacking the Crusade. The Crusaders delivered on the deal, and history records that Dandolo was the first man ashore at Constantinople – history mostly being written by the victors. The crusade never reached the Holy Land, but from a minor breach of contract, the Venetians were able dominate the eastern Med. I believe they call it negotiating from a position of strength, and the tradition continues.
The population of Venice is in decline, and the permanent population is now about 60,000 – it was three times that number 30 years ago, and Venice has the oldest population of any European city. They also have the longest life expectancy of any European city, probably to do with all that walking, or 72% absinthe – or maybe, as cigarette smoking is de rigeur, they've preseved themselves like fine smoked proscuitto. Many people have moved to the mainland, to Mestre, an industrial city that looks as though it was designed by architects who worked with the radio on, listening to Easy Network, and whose last commission was East Berlin in 1947. There are many buildings in Venice with doors that look as though they have not been opened in years. Locks that appear to have been hand forged.
The upper floors of the house over the road at No 2691 Dorsoduro seem quite uninhabited, and the window shutters look as though they have not been opened in decades – possibly not since the Fourth crusade. This is common in Venice – commercial activity on the ground, and vacant rooms, whole vacant floors, above. I'd give my eye teeth to have a look in there. Furniture left over from Napoleon's time in Venice, wine from the vintage of 1930, and newspapers with headlines saying “Assassinato” “JFK morte”, “Jacki lamentare”.
We're studying hard at “Looking Venetian 101”, with mixed success. Decent marks are awarded if one can walk past a gondolier without him saying “Gondole, gondole”. A Credit is obtained when the handbag sellers don't bother to accost one, and a High Distinction is awarded when the rose sellers leave you alone. Dragging a shopping trolley helps, and leading a dog seems most Venetian. I could, of course, solve the problem with a stroke of a pen. Cash in my super, mortgage the house, and buy Lou a fur, preferably made of skin from an endangered species.
Molto Venetian, but I'm afraid not priceless.
5.
We find the greengrocer beside the Ponte de Pugni – the Bridge of Fists – not to be the friendliest of people. It's the signs in both Italian and English saying “Don't touch”, and he's a bit grumpy. Maybe he's just suspicious of anyone who walks over the bridge from the Parish of Santa Maria del Carmine into his Parish of San Barnaba. Parochialism raised to a high order – the Rialto Bridge had, in 1494, a drawbridge section in it, to keep the pesky tradesmen from San Polo away from the money changers, bankers, insurers and stock exchange traders in San Marco. In its day, the Rialto was Wall Street.
But the Ponte de Pugni has an interesting history. The bridge was the venue for organised fist fights between the Santa Maria lads vs the San Barnaba boys, and when fists proved insufficient to carry the day, resort was had to cudgels, iron bars, and the occasional dagger, Cronulla on the Veneto. There was no parapet on the bridge, so plunging into the Rio San Barnaba canal was common (and this at a time when the canals served as sewers and waste disposal systems). The history of the bridge is immortalised in footprints let into the paving in white stone, which deliniate the starting line for the fights. I've seen an engraving of an event, and it was certainly full on - maybe we cross on a daily basis the birthplace of football hooliganism. The fights were outlawed in 1705, and possibly peace broke out, or a fresh venue was found.
There's a parapet to the bridge now.
New Year.
There is a smell to New Years Eve in Venice, compounded of pizza, cooked fish, and freshly baked bread. There is another vital ingredient in the mix – the smell of black powder. Fireworks are available at our local mini mart, and the explosions started around dusk, about 5:00 PM this time of year, and continued until the small hours. Fireworks is really a misnomer – there were crackers being let off in San Marco about the size of a milk carton, which qualifies them as ordinance. I might mention that the entire population of Venice was in San Marco at the time, and so a little circle was cleared in the middle for the fireworks, displacing children, cops, prams and dogs – cleared by letting off fireworks.
There was a New Years Eve concert in San Marco, themed on “Love”, or “Lerve”, take your pick. Lots of encouragement to love, kiss somebody, anybody.
“Love to everyone, love to the world, we love you all”.
Followed by crash of exploding ordinance, loud enough to make the air pulsate and the window shutters dance.
The whole charade was sposored by the bottlers of Bellini, a pleasant concoction of peach juice and prosecco, a light sparkling white. We watched the Bellinii boys set out a couple of thousand plastic glasses for the crowd and fill them. Australia has the big banana, the big pineapple and the big Merino at Goulburn, and San Marco had the big inflated Bellini bottle. Bellini cocktails were invented by Cipriani, operator of Harry's bar, Hemingway's favourite drinking haunt, but not Hemingway's favourite drink, and I've always thought of him as a bourbon or rough rye man myself. But Ernest did try a Bellini once,, labelling it a drink for sissies, and suggesting that it was more appropriate for his drinking buddy, Scott Fitzgerald. One wonders what Hemingway would have thought of a thousand sneaker shod tourists consuming his not favourite cocktail.
A little dialogue, quoted from a not-remembered source,
Fitzgerald - “The rich, they're different to you and me”.
Hemmingway - “Yeah, they've got more money”.
It started to snow just before the stroke of midnight, which was quite magical, and one could imagine that the snow was the result of excellent stage management. This did not dampen the fireworks in the least. The snow lasted in places for a whole week – it's been exceptionally cold, daytime max of about one degree, if that.
There's a tradition of Americans in Venice, Henry James, Ernest H, Scott Fitzgerald, and Peggy Guggenheim who became Venice's favourite American daughter and an Honourary Venetian, which is no small accolade. She certainly did it in style, buying in 1951 the incomplete Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (started construction 1749, contractor claiming Extension of Time, negotiations still continuing), maintaing a private gondola and gondoliers, and a fleet of small dogs, which are buried in the garden of said Palazzo (the dogs, that is). She also maintained a salon of the brightest artists of her day, Paul Klee, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky, and was, by contemporary reports, as free with her favours as she was with her money, the USD / lire exchange rate being pretty hot in the fifties and sixties. As was Peggy. Kick Jackson out of bed, dust down the Picasso, send the gondolier out for some decent fresh food for the dogs, lunch with Mondrian. Take tea with Klee, dinner with Kandinsky, sup with the gondolier(s). Her legacy is a fine museum of modern art, including a large equestrian statue which many find a tad confronting, facing the Canal Grande.
This might, of course, be all untrue, facts being difficult to establish in Venice. Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian philosopher, once remarked, “I never, never tell a lie, but the truth not to everyone”. However, Peggy's gondola is in the Museum Maritime.
Or a gondola very like hers.
True.
6.
The Arsenale.
I visited the Museum Maritime yesterday, and yes, there's a gondola said to have been Peggy's. Venice has a proud naval history, having thumped just about every marine power over a period of one thousand years. Pick any country in the Levant, or all the eastern Med for that matter, and Venice has defeated them – along with some non-Levant nations like Libya. They had naval warfare developed to an art form, and one wonders what the outcome might have been if the Spanish at Trafalgar had the Venetian navy on its side. The sad thing, of course, is that by the time of Trafalgar, the Venetian navy was a shadow of its former self, Venice having turned into a sort of pleasure dome, repeating the excesses of Rome, and anticipating the speculative excesses of today's USA.
The Venetians built ships at the Arsenale for any one who would pay, and they pumped them out. It's recorded that, as a demonstration for a visiting big-wig, the Venetians laid the keel for a galley at breakfast, and rowed the completed vesssel past the visitor as he completed his dinner. Complete with a cannon or mortar, cast that morning, that weighed 2,000 pounds. (The engineer in me questions the cannon – it takes longer than a day to cool a casting of that mass. But it was a standard piece of ordinance, so a switch was possible.)
The galley that rowed past the dinner party was very much like the one whose keel was laid in the morning – that's Venetian marketing for you, and galleys were a standard product. Contemporary records recount the “galley in a day” story, while word of the substitution was likely suppressed. “The truth not to everyone”, as they say.
It's undeniable, though, that the Arsenale was the biggest industrial facility of its time, the progenitor of the military-industrial complex, and the time lasted about 800 years. At its peak, it employed 17,000 tradesmen, who were skilled and, once employed at the Arsenale, were guaranteed a job for life, still paid if they were sick or after they finished work. The Job for Life tradition still seems to continue – many of the trades at the Williamstown Dockyard in Melbourne (“Warship Builders to the Nation” was their proud bumper sticker) seemed to think the same way, even if they did little work. But the Arsenale was “Warship Builders to Anyone Who Could Pay”, and the Arsenale was able to launch a ship a day, and did. It has me in mind of the present day Korean ship yards, with ten vessels on the stocks, extruding tankers by the metre.
The Arsenale facility was self contained, producing rope and cordage, cannon balls, cloth for sails, gold leaf for decoration, gunpowder, oars for galleys (which weigh 60 kilos each, so a decent sized vessel sailed with six tonnes of oars), salted meat in barrels and even baked ships biscuit, which was highly regarded. One biscuit oven survives at the Arsenale, but the recipe has sadly been lost with the death of the last baker. A store of ships biscuit was found walled up in a store in a Venetian fortress in Crete and was still edible and free of mould and weevils after 150 years when the fortress had been abandoned. Good news for the citizens of Crete who were suffering a famine, and redefining the concept of “Use by”, or “Best before”, I suppose.
In a way, there were two power bases in Venice, the Doge's Palace and the Arsenale. Napoleon laid waste and looted both when the Austrians invaded, and I'm inclined to think that a visitor who nominates a Viennese address in the hotel register may still not receive the best of service. Memories are long here. There are “before and after” engravings of the Arsenale, showing in great detail the broken ships, torched sheds and ruined slips, missing piles of lead ingots, spars and masting, stolen cannonballs, and mentioning the 6000 cannons looted and melted down. The Sestier of Castello, where most of the trades lived, still retains something of a gritty working class feeling, like suburbs on Tyne-side or around the Belfast yards, where the Titanic was built.
The Venetians were particulary grumpy when Napoleon looted the four gilded bronze horses from the portico of St Marks – they represented the soul of Venice. The Venetians were devastated, the portico looked naked without them. In some ways, their complaints seem a bit rich – the Venetians had looted the horses in turn from the Hippodrome, the racecourse in Constantinople in 1204, payola from assisting the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Easy come, easy go, but for Venice easy come has always been preferable, and the easy go side is not so happy for them. I notice this at the supermarket - if the tab comes to 10.97 Euro, dont expect change from eleven. If the tab comes to 11.03 Euro, the full amount is expected. Small change is always in scant supply – when we bought mussels yesterday, the fishmonger threw in a few extras to bring the cost up to a rounded Euro.
Plunder can be unlucky for some, too. It's unlucky to walk between the pair of columns by the Basin of St Marks. One column has the winged lion of St Mark atop, and St Theodore, with his foot resting on a crrocodile, is on the other. The origin of the crocodile is uncertain, but many theories abound. The columns were looted, also from Constantinople courtesy of said Crusade, and took some removal and erecting, being about 20 metres tall and monolithic. Legend has it that there were three columns, but one was dropped into the Basin of St Marks, where it rests to this day, but maybe that's a “Truth not to everyone” sort of thing. The Incident Report would make fine reading, and the remaining columns were erected in 1172, as it took 150 years to figure out how to raise them.
The erection was overseen by Nicolo Barattieri, also engineer for the first Rialto bridge. He sweated them into place by rigging them with wet rope, and as the rope dried, it tightened and lifted the columns a couple of millimetres. Pack columns with dunnage, re-rig ropes and repeat the process – many times. I've seen the detailed engravings for the process, probably part of his tender submission. For his efforts, Nicolo was awarded a licence to operate gaming tables between the columns. There are spoil sports in every society, and to curb the gaming the authorities used the air space above the tables for public executions, which were not infrequent. This rather cruelled the place as a gaming venue, and it's still unlucky to walk between the columns. I don't walk between them, and I'm not even a gambler.
Got an issue with problem gambling?
Public hangings on Southbank should do the trick.
Jan 12th, 2009, 07:59 AM
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Peter, thank you so much for your delightful musings! I am enjoying them so much I intend to print them out to re-read each time the Venice-hunger strikes, as it often does on these dark and dreary January days here in Oregon. I envy you spending eight weeks in one of my favorite places, envy in the nicest possible way. I hope you will share some of your photos with us - I know you would have to scan the slides/negatives and that is a lot of work, but you're sure to have some moody treasures and I'd love to see them. Here's a link to some of my Venice images, for others like me who need a Venice-fix: http://my.fotopic.net/collection/01636029/
Jan 12th, 2009, 10:04 AM
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I'm sorry - I posted an incorrect link. Here's another: http://jmstudio.fotopic.net/c1636029.html
