Saturday, November 23, 2013

Festa della Madonna della Salute--and Castradina


Glancing at the Città di Venezia website just before the Festa della Madonna della Salute last Thursday I'm pretty sure my eyes swept across a phrase describing it as the least turistico of the city's holidays. This is the kind of thing I should have double-checked, but if it were there it was the last thing I wanted to know: as the most alluring marketing line one can use about anything here is that it is "the least touristic." Few phrases draw a crowd of tourists more quickly, so I'll restrain myself from mentioning any such thing about the festa and settle instead for saying that it is the only large holiday event in the city where one can conceivably hear only Italian being spoken--and that alone is worth celebrating. While it lasts.


By the time we arrived at 4 pm the church and the calle of balloons and sweets (known on every other day of the year as the Calle dei Cathecumeni) were packed. Judging by all the pushing inside the church, the Festa della Salute is not one of those holidays that puts believers into a retiring, contemplative, tread-softly-on-Mother-Earth-and-one's-neighbor's-toes kind of mood. But then again, I've been shoved much more forcefully by elderly ladies anxious to board a vaporetto so, relatively speaking, the crowd of people surging forward to have their candle(s) lit as a sign of gratitude to the Virgin for delivering the city from the plague of 1630-31, and as a little nudge for Her to keep them well for the upcoming year, wasn't so bad.

In fact, the one spot in the church where some people did turn their thoughts to Mother Earth (or at least their eyes to the ground), around a small metal disc set into the marble floor, was a small aperture of calm amid the kaleidoscopic shifting all around. There I did as Tiziano Scarpa suggests in a passage of his book Venice Is a Fish (which I've only just gotten, not yet read, and only fortuitously happened upon the morning of the feast):
On the feast of the Madonna della Salute place yourself at the exact center of the octagonal church, beneath the lead chandelier that plunges tens of meters from the dome; drag the sole of your foot across the bronze disc set into the floor, as tradition decrees, touch with the tip of your shoe the words unde origo inde salus cast into the metal: from the origin comes salvation, the origin is the earth, walking on it brings you luck, does you good; salvation rises up from the feet. 
This may be a tradition, but not one that is widely followed. There were only two or three people at a time politely awaiting their turn to stand directly upon the metal disc, upon the belly button of the church, the sacred omphalos. Everyone else had their minds on candles.

By the time I took my turn on the bronze disc, Sandro had forced Jen to take him outside to the calle of balloons and sweets--he'd had his mind on nothing else since I picked him up from school.

As 6 pm approached the wind became biting and rain began to fall, as it seems it must on this day--at least each of the three times we've celebrated it. It wasn't a bad thing, as waiting at home to warm us up this year was the castradina whose preparation I wrote about in my last post.

Some people, our neighborhood butcher revealed to Jen only yesterday, don't like the traditional dish of smoked seasoned sun-dried leg of mutton called castradina upon first bite; others come to dislike it after 2 or 3 days of its taste revisiting them due to gastric upset. According to our butcher, the shorter the preparation time, the longer (or more likely) the unpleasant after-experience. The two batches of carrots, onion and celery that one boils the meat with two different times (according to the recipe in my previous post) are present not to flavor the broth but to absorb some of the fat from the very fatty meat. That's why they're thrown out after being cooked--and why the first pot of boiled water is also thrown out--rather than kept as part of the final soup. Even if all goes well, our butcher admitted yesterday, castradina is not something you should eat more than once a year (troppo pesante, she said, too heavy). She asked Jen if she'd recommended the right amount of meat for us to buy and looked, first, happy, when Jen said it was just right, then slightly disgusted upon hearing that there was just enough of it for me to have it for lunch the day after the Festa.

Of course our butchers didn't dwell upon the digestive dangers of castradina as they told me how to prepare it, only advised me to follow the recipe carefully. And having done so, it was not at all pesante. Sandro didn't like it as soup--I think the verza (savoy cabbage) put him off--but he loved the meat once it had been removed from the broth. Jen liked the soup a lot, as did I. I'm no "foodie", nor a food writer, so I can only say I was surprised by the sweetness of the verza, like faint glimmers of Tiepolo's pale pinkish yellow in the dark smoky atmosphere of the mutton. You see, even in the finished soup I still tasted somehow the spiced smokiness of church incense I'd smelled in the castradina before cooking--something which sounds entirely unappetizing to anyone else (such as Jen), but which seems appropriately sacramental to me in a dish eaten only once a year and three days in the making.

For more on castradina and how one goes about preparing it, see: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/11/a-ritual-dish-for-la-festa-della.html



 


12 comments:

  1. I think the castradina looks and sound delicious, the perfect thing for a cold and wet November evening.

    Beautiful photos, I especially love the one of the man with wax drips on his arms, it looks slightly hazardous! I shall be checking out that disc on my next visit, I love looking down in churches.

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    1. Thanks so much, Susie. All that wax on his arms caught my attention, too; perhaps it's a kind of mortification of the flesh ritual for the people dealing with the candles? They seem to be the same young men and women each year--sometimes I imagine they are people in the early stages of taking holy orders, but I don't actually know.

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  2. I think I can feel some notes of disappointment in this text. I was also there. and the event that was supposed as the climax of my this year's visit felt exactly opposite. Of course it's only an outsider's view but I saw the whole happening as purely routine, I saw no faces in the crowd that were lighted by anything (even by the candles - it was a surprise that only one in seven or eight visitors buys a candle) , most of these present were obviously much more concerned with the difficulties of getting there and out of there than with anything else, most of people just stayed in the church for 3-5 minutes.

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    1. I was disappointed that we couldn't get there sooner, Sasha, because of Sandro's school (last year he had the day off), and that we didn't have daylight time to simply wander or mill around the fringes of the sweets and balloons areas where it's most pleasant to run into people one knows. Also that I got there too late to taste the castradina that had been available on the old ship (Il Nuovo Trionfo) moored beside the Punta della Dogana.

      I don't know where you got your figures for the percentage of people who buy candles, but they seem way off to me. While every Venetian feels compelled to go there, and many may simply go and leave, as you say, I'm not aware of nor have I observed people who would go to the trouble of showing up and then not buy a candle. The mere logic of superstition--regardless of any religious feeling--dictates that one doesn't make a pilgrimage and then not complete the ritual.

      Any show of light in people's faces appears, I think for the most part, when they encounter someone that they know there. Perhaps, as you suggest, one reason that it (hopefully) won't take off as a tourist event is because there is very little in it for the outsider to grab hold of, besides the way it looks. There's not even a procession.

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  3. And, I wondered how that young man (and the others who manage the candle-lighting, removal, etc.) managed to get that wax off his arms! Ouch.

    I'm relieved to hear that your hard work with the castradina paid off. It looks surprisingly good! Bravo.

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    1. I hope after all these centuries the church has perfected some painless way of dealing with wax removal, Yvonne. Or maybe appropriately edifyingly painful, as the case may be, if they are seminarians.

      The castradina was, and is worth trying! It's now become one of my favorite rituals of the holiday.

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  4. Going to the Chiesa della Salute and lighting a candle is a tradition for Venetians, for many it has nothing to do with being a good catholic. We all did it since we were little kids, fascinated by the balloons and spun sugar like your son, and going in such a beautiful church is magical. If had been visiting Venice I would have gone despite my non existing religion, just to remember the times of a Venetian past and the magic of when I was a child. I think it is one of last things that Venitians know is just theirs, not shared with the millions tourists, so they flock to the Salute to feel united.

    Thanks for sharing your experience.

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    1. Thank you for your perspective on it, Laura, it makes sense to me from what I've observed. I can understand why an outside observer might expect that there'd be "more," but the "more" is to be found in the feelings and associations you write about, which can only be within one (and perhaps for some people for whom it is only an "obligation", not even there).

      It succeeds as a Venetian event exactly in the way it fails as a tourist event, and how wonderful that at least one thing can remain Venetian, as you say.

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  5. There is a small procession, Sig. The Patriarch processes from the building to the left of the church together with clergy from all over the city. They sing prayers of intercession to Our Lady and then enter the main doors which, as you know, are rarely open. Scola used to smile and bless the crowd on his way round but the current Patriarch always looks sternly straight ahead.

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    1. Thank you for the correction, Andrew, as having never actually seen the procession you describe it entirely slipped my mind. But short though it may be, your description makes me think it's worth checking out next year.

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  6. While I know this was posted a year ago, I wanted to thank you! As luck would have it I will be arriving in Venice on the day of this year's festival and am looking forward to participating! Yes, I will be a tourist, but I am also living with breast cancer, so it feels serendipitous that I can go - although I am not religious. I'll try not to speak much English ;-)

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    1. That sounds like perfect timing to me, regrounding.me, and I hope you enjoy the festa, regardless of what language you speak and how much of it! Regardless of one's level of belief or faith it's somehow pleasant to buy a candle and be part of the throng waiting to have it lit: communal, I suppose. And don't forget that little bronze disk in the very center of the church pavement!

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