Not with a Bang but a Twitter

Five boys, three hand-held electronic diversions; with two other boys (not pictured) across the aisle, each texting

I see them all crowding around a small common point of interest, like the wise men and shepherds in countless paintings of the adoration in the manger, or the apostles transfixed by the sight of Thomas touching the wound of the risen Christ, and find myself thinking of a slightly altered version of T.S. Eliot's famous last four lines in "The Hollow Men": 

This is the way a culture ends

This is the way a culture ends

This is the way a culture ends

Not with a bang but a twitter.

A detail of Veronese's "Adoration" in SS Giovanni e Paolo

For they, the Venetian boys I'm talking about, are huddled around nothing miraculous--at least not compared to the city all around them, the fantastical product of long centuries of hard improbable labor, which they as young natives are entitled to ignore--but hand-held electronic devices. Video games, usually: and the exact same games that other boys are playing everywhere else in the world, their rapt faces softly illuminated by the glowing device like those of those painted visitors in the manger, beholding their small Savior.

I remember Tiziano Scarpa's description in Venice Is a Fish of the Venetian childhood games he played growing up in the city: massa e pìndolo, tacco, s'cioco e spana, and scainèa, to name just a few (the last of them played on pissote, the humped masses of bricks and plaster filling the obscure angles of the city's architecture, intended to prevent urination). Scarpa was born in 1963, and admits that he was of the last generation to play such games. By the time his book was published in 2000 he could describe such diversions as "ghosts," dead and gone and unknown by the young.   

(The whole idea of games specific to a region or locale is so quaint now as to seem almost far-fetched, though the 12-year-old son of my cousin in Piemonte was, until recently, playing in a  youth pallapugno league, a traditional sport played only around the provinces of Asti, Cuneo, and Savona: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallapugno).   

A detail of Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of St Thomas"

Such Venetian games, in other words, had disappeared well before smart phones and tablets and all the rest became ubiquitous, even in Italy, and even in the hands of children. But I find myself less preoccupied with any kind of mourning for the disappearance of such traditional games as I watch Venetian kids in vaporetti and fermatte and sometimes even playgrounds(!) huddled around electronic devices, than with wondering about the future. What other cultural traditions, more essential even than childhood games, might disappear in a population raised with such devices? 

I watch a group of Venetian kids or adolescents or young adults all together but worlds apart, each lost in his or her own tiny screen, and I wonder can la passeggiata continue to exist with such technology, such habits, maybe even such addictions?

Maybe the passeggiate, those nightly strolls, those daily does of what Beppe Severgnini calls "social therapy," matter more to me as an American coming from a country of extraordinary isolation beneath a smiley-face mask of anxious, almost coercive friendliness and institutionalized get-togethers, than to Italians themselves. Maybe the loss of such an old-fashioned manner of being together is a small price to pay to be technologically of the moment and in the know.

   

And maybe in Venice, where, according to a recent local newspaper headline, senior citizens outnumber children by a 6 to 1 ratio, the city's living culture is sadly reaching its end in any case, with or without the enthralling distractions of smart phones and the like.