Up from the Shallows, Momentarily

A curious (or recklessly hungry) crab holds onto a stick for a few seconds before coming to his senses and dropping back into the water of the Arsenale (27 April 2014)

Calcio, Campo Santa Margherita: 8 April 2012

These kids are now adults--I wonder how many of them still live in Venice. And I wonder if kids today can still play like this in the campo, as a few years ago non-resident/Mr-conflict-of-interest Mayor Brugnaro began to crack down on play in the public spaces, since so much of the space had been given over to restaurants for seating. In other words, in order to allow tourists the "authentic experience" of dining in a Venetian campo, what little remained of spontaneous, authentic Venetian life had to be eradicated. This is the perverse and destructive logic of mass tourism. 

 

 

 

 

Towed Homeward Toward a New Life

Our friend's larger heavier sanpierota tows our new boat homeward yesterday evening, with our six-year-old son (barely visible behind the 9.9 hp engine) driving. (11 July 2014)

NOTE: I came upon the above image today and didn't remember if I'd ever posted it before. It turns out that I had, almost exactly a decade ago, and I re-post below the original text I put up with it back then.

Our neighbor, a native Venetian, saw me on the street last week and greeted me with a smile and a handshake and congratulations, saying "It will change your life." From his manner he could have been responding to the news that we were expecting a second child but, in fact, he'd heard that we'd agreed to buy a boat.

Jen and I had been thinking about it for at least two years, as I've written about here before, and almost exclusively in terms of what we'd been told was the most practical and inexpensive of boats to buy: a cofano. A cofano is usually about 5 meters long, usually made of fiberglass (which requires much less maintenance than wood), and there's no shortage of used ones around for sale at reasonable prices.

And yet after all those months of envisioning our practical fiberglass cofano, it is a wood sanpierota that we ended up buying yesterday and towing from a sailing club in Mestre, where its very kind owner had used it, to Venice proper. A sanpierota is also a traditional Venetian craft, but unlike the typical contemporary fiberglass cofano, it can be rowed or used with a sail--rather than just an outboard motor. Ours measures 5.8 meters in length, and is made of compensato marino (or plywood), which means it's very light. It came with a pair of forcole (oarlocks) and remi (oars), which we do know how to use, and a sail, which we do not (yet). A 6 horsepower engine will be arriving for it next week, which is plenty large for such a light boat.

Of course there is nothing very practical in general about living in Venice--not in the opinion of many visitors, at least a couple of whom have told me outright that it strikes them as simply the most impossible inconvenient place they've ever seen. Perhaps this was an argument in favor the more practical choice of a cofano, and yet it was the possibility of rowing and sailing the boat that made it impossible for Jen and I to resist, regardless of any other considerations. For the way we hope to use the boat, only a sanpierota would do.

But I'm afraid I don't even have the time to shape this post into any final form, there's still much to do with the boat--tonight--the details of which I'll spare you. Instead I'll close with something I jotted down in a notebook in April as I watched, as I like to do, boats returning from a day out on the lagoon, something I'm sure contributed largely to my sense that the sanpierota is what we wanted:

"... a group of no fewer than ten people, of all different ages, in a beautifully-painted (red and white) large old underpowered wooden sanpierota. Looks to be about a 6 horsepower engine on it, an ancient one that sounds like a mosquito, and the boat plows slowly, uncertainly among the waves--wavers its way through the waves, you might say, so unsteady and tentative and almost plaintive its lack of power renders it, as it leaves the calm of the Canale di San Pietro and turns into the deep busy waterway of vaporetti and car carriers and big ships leading toward Piazza San Marco.

A woman onboard looks a little sheepish at the quality of their progress and waves vaguely in my direction where I sit on the bench quayside watching, a gesture motivated it seems more by embarrassment than friendliness or recognition, as it's no one I know. As if the gesture will distract my attention from how the boat lopes and loops and sidles and almost waddles its way along. But she has nothing to be embarrassed about. I stare enviously at the beautiful boat, full of family and/or friends, with its four kids sprawled across its foredeck, blissfully at home in the late warm sun, the soft breeze, the amniotic movement."

Anything In There? (On Sant'Elena)

18 May 2014

The Walk Home

30 April 2014

 

Under The Bridge (Ponte della Libertà)

Though countless people travel over this bridge every day on wheels or rails, few of them suspect how many people travel beneath it in boats: among them, in this image, my son, piloting with an oar a racing row boat being towed back from a regatta on the north side of the city to its cantiere on Giudecca. (15 June 2019)

 

Leapfrog, Campo San Stin

16 April 2015

A Mototopo in the Bedroom

29 March 2014

 Some children want to fight fires or go to outerspace or become a teacher or doctor or professional athlete; from an early age our son was determined to become a delivery person on one of Venice's many work boats or mototopi. Actually, in his earliest years he wanted to drive a vaporetto, and would practice tossing ropes onto door handles, or around the back of a wooden chair, and then tying the door handle or chair to some other object in the room, as if tying a vaporetto up to its dock. On some days he would string so many ropes across our living room--tying a variety of objects to other objects that weren't necessarily in close proximity to one another--that it became nearly imposible to walk across it.

So it was something of a relief when he switched his career plans to mototopi. Ropes were no longer an issue, boxes were. He collected every empty box he could get his hands on, the bigger the better, as these served as the packages he had to deliver in the course of his play, while either his bed (as above) or the living room couch (unfolded into a double bed), served as a mototopo. In the image above our son stands in the steering position of his imaginary mototopo loaded with boxes, and with a real hand truck to one side. (The folded out double bed in the living room was large enough to accomodate the hand truck onboard, and was therefore more realistic, and was his delivery boat of choice.)

This was play that would keep him busy for extended periods of time, and the real hand truck he got for his 6th birthday actually came in handy in the real world. But his collection of boxes eventually got so large as to take up about half the space of his small bedroom and had to be thinned. 

I suspect that growing up in Venice is like growing up in no other place in the world. I wish more children had the chance to do so. 

Racing Alongside Rio San Barnaba

5  March 2021

Winter Lights, Riva dei Sette Martiri

28 January 2014

Winter Colors

12 February 2013

New Year's Bubbles (on Lido)

1 January 2014

 

A Sparkl(er)ing New Year's Eve (Grand Canal)

31 December 2018

A Marzipan-Colored World

My son's favorite thing about the Christmas stalls set up in Campo San Bartolomio around the Goldoni statue was marzipan--an item which never appealed to me, and a taste I could only attribute to the fact he grew up in Venice. (23 December 2013)

The Lost Princess (Near the Top of the Dome of Santa Maria della Salute)

The Festa della Santa Maria della Salute is all about two things for Venetian kids: helium balloons and sweets, both of which are available in abundance just outside the church. The image above thus contains an implicit (and perhaps predictable) narrative, and is a reminder of why it's best, if at all possible, to delay the purchase of a helium balloon until after the child's visit inside the church, lest the child too literally follow the theme song of this particular princess from the film Frozen and "Let It Go". (21 November 2016)

Trick Or Treat

31 October 2011

Bug! (Campo Sant'Alvise)

25 March 2014

Harvest Time in the Vineyard of the Cemetery Island of San Michele

A sure sign that the book or video you are watching is written by or presented by someone who has no actual experience of living in Venice as any thing other than, at best, a long-term tourist, is when they refer to the city and lagoon as mournful and "redolent of death" and with similar other tired old Romantic cliches that have been lazily repeated for the last two centuries by people more interested in posturing than perceiving (eg, Peter Ackroyd, who, not content with disgorging--I wouldn't call it writing--one of the worst books on the city I've ever read, followed it up with an equally ridiculous BBC series). They have no idea of the local life that's carried on behind the walls of even the cemetery island, as seen above. (22 September 2023)

Rowing Lesson

20 August 2017

My son wasn't interested in my first offers to teach him how to row, when he was 7 and 8 years old,  though he loved to be out in boats and drive them. So I imagined that it was something in which he had little interest, and in which he might not ever have any interest. So I was surprised when he finally said he wanted to learn at the age of 9 by how very quickly he picked it up. By the end of the first lesson I was able to let him row in the rear of the boat (la poppa), the place from which one steers the boat by altering the angle of the oar in the water as one draws the oar back towards one's chest. He picked it up so quickly in fact, that I soon realized I didn't need to row at all and could lounge in the front of the boat and leave everything entirely to him. By the end of that first lesson he'd even taken to rowing with just one hand, as he'd seen gondoliers do, with that showy nonchalance that characterizes them--and I realized I'd been wrong about him having no interest in rowing those previous years: rather, he'd been watching people do it closely enough to mimic them convincingly when he chose to learn himself.

By the second lesson he was so adept that I decided we could venture onto the Grand Canal, with all its traffic, which is what is shown in the image above (though I am rowing in the poppa on the Grand Canal).

In spite of the tourist crush and its many problems, Venice is a marvelous place for a young child to grow up, and it pains me to see how few children there are in the city, and how that number, like the population in general, continues to decrease. 

Beach Day's End, Sant'Erasmo

26 July 2013