Adrift in Venice

I think this is the smallest boat in Venice: less than 6 feet or 2 meters from stern to prow

If you're thinking of buying a boat in Venice and want to save a good deal of money on the cost of a mooring place, buy a wood boat. The comune is trying to stem the continuing decline of wooden boats in Venice by offering steep discounts for ormeggi to those who own such boats. Of course, what you save on mooring fees you may spend on the extra work and upkeep one must put into a wood boat to keep it sound. And, more immediately, there simply are no mooring places available.

None.

How bad is it? The other day I was talking to a native Venetian friend when he suddenly leaned in close and said quietly, sheepishly, "I'm embarrassed to be asking you this, as I've lived here all my life, but if you hear of an ormeggio, please let me know. I'd like to get a boat, just a little one, but I can't find a place to put it."

As real estate is a constant topic of concern in New York City, so ormeggi are here. Especially as I'm discovering that even the least likely of Venetians--folks who rarely venture outside, for instance, or people who had boats for decades and sold them off after reaching a certain age--all get the itch to buy one.

You'd think that with so many fewer people in Venice than there were 40 years ago there would be more ormeggi available than ever before. But it seems that perhaps the percentage of boat owners among city residents has greatly increased over the years: a friend complains that even teenagers now have their own. And according to another friend, the size of people's boats has greatly increased. He claims that one large boat now takes up the space in which two or three could formerly have been moored.

All of this is very bad news indeed for boat owners but, even as I sympathize, I have to admit what a relief it is to me. You see, among those who would love to have a boat are my son and wife, and I've found it infinitely more effective and pleasant to remind them that there simply is not a single place to put the boat they so ardently desire than to remind them, once again, that there's no way we could really afford it.


PS: A couple of days ago, after I'd started a draft of this post, I happened upon a beautiful photo of the same little boat pictured above on the 16 February post of the Venetia Micio blog. It's taken from a different angle and shows more of the surroundings:

http://venetiamicio.blogspot.com/#

Venetian Beach Rule # 1,359

                                                                                          photo credit: Jen

Is it proper to walk upon this pier in Cavallino Treporti on February 26? Probably not. 

For a country that is infamously factious and difficult to rule, it's amazing to observe the number of inherited rules and proscriptions from which individual Italians would never dream of straying--nor even question. For instance, tax laws exist solely to be flouted, but letting some grated parmigiano fall upon a piece of fish merits the sternest rebuke. Or while even Venetian firemen believe that smoke alarms are absurdly unnecessary in family dwellings, for a child to go swimming any sooner than three hours after eating lunch is to invite certain death.

This last example is one of the first (of countless) beach rules one learns when one starts to go to the Lido during the summer with Venetians. But yesterday Jen learned another.

It was a mild sunny day and Jen and Sandro spent much of it on Lido. Sandro met a girl of his own age there and they played together for quite a while. She was there with her grandfather, a friendly man, and good with kids, as many older Italian men seem to be. But he looked a little less conventional than the average Italian grandfather, Jen said. His gray hair was long, he wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, he smoked cigarettes. He looked a bit like a very tidy biker, a bit like a sculptor. He pointed out sea gulls to his grand-daughter and Sandro. He looked on pleasantly as they ran around and played in the sand with sticks, but when his grand-daughter began to dig in the sand with the plastic beach shovel Sandro had brought he gently took it away from her, telling her in Italian that it was not the right season for sand shovels and buckets.

Inevitably, in the course of their play she succumbed a few more times to the temptation to use the shovel and each time he took it away from her again and calmly explained once more that it was not yet time to use such things. It's only February, after all. He held up a hand to her and counted off on his fingers the number of months until the proper time will arrive: one, two, three. Late May or the beginning of June, depending on how you want to calculate it. Then, and only then, will it be time to use sand shovels at the beach. At least according to Venetian rules.

Carnevale Comes to a Fiery End, This Morning

The ancient rite of Dionysus clamorously concluded with the murder of a live bull. The female followers of Dionysus, inflamed by music and dance and (depending on whom you believe) certain intoxicants and/or the presence of the god himself, would reach such a state of ecstasy that they would, with their bare hands, tear a bull to pieces. That famous resident of San Michele here in Venice, Stravinsky, had something like this in mind when he composed his Rite of Spring. A version of the rite also appears at the end of Apocalypse Now.

The destruction of a bull in the wee hours of this morning to mark the end of Carnevale was not quite so dramatic as this, but it was certainly a great spectacle.

Well endowed at all points with everything that makes a bull a bull, the sacrificial victim had been moored beside La Punta della Dogana since the beginning of Carnevale--except during a period of repair after some extraordinarily high winds got the better of him.

You can find close-up photos of the bull and a description of what he was made of at the excellent Venetian blog Hello World:

http://ytaba36.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/more-bull-and-other-stuff/

As the gondolieri began to reach the basin of San Marco at the end of their annual Vogata del Silenzio down the Grand Canal, the bull, floating on a raft in the basin, was put to the torch. It was about 12:30 am. The large crowd on the molo had begun forming just after 11 pm. I'd arrived at 11:15. It was worth the wait. There's something peculiarly satisfying about concluding a festival with fire; last year they simply set loose a raft-load of helium balloons as the gondolas arrived at San Marco. Here's hoping that, as the old gospel song puts it, it's the fire next time--or next year--as well.

An effigy of a cruise ship might be rather fun to see go up in flames...

 

The Venice FD gets in a little practice

Time to pack up the wine fountain: after the immolation, peace returns to the Piazzetta.

Martedì Grasso on Via Garibaldi, This Afternoon

Fat Tuesday has a lot different feel on Via Garibaldi than it does in Piazza San Marco. Not nearly as many people in costume--and not nearly as many people, period--but a lot more actual socializing and catching up between old friends. It's a local crowd, which gathers to enjoy the food and drinks table set up in front of La Società di Mutuo Soccorso fra Carpentieri e Calafati--or the Mutual Aid Society of Carpenters and Ship Caulkers, whose membership, sadly, is surely dwindling, and whose headquarters is probably my favorite storefront on Via Garibaldi.

Like Piazza San Marco, Via Garibaldi (as you can see to left) offers live entertainment of its own. After watching this singer for a while I think he has some right to lay claim to the late great James Brown's title of "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." It can't be easy to give your all when your performance, amply amplified though it is, rarely draws a single person away from the food and wine some 20 yards to your right. But give it his all he did, nonetheless.

Night & Day, Front & Back: 2 Views of San Pietro di Castello

 

A Venetian Education

This is not the exact mototopo our son took to school, but one like it

The other morning our son Sandro went to school in a mototopo--that is, in one of the long motorized workboats you see plying the waters of Venice carrying merchandise, food, or (as above) construction materials and workers. Of course it seems odd to me that my son should go to school in any kind of boat, but the vaporetto doesn't seem quite as exotic to me as it once did. He also gets a ride to school pretty regularly in our neighbors' little outboard motorboat. He was, and is, extremely excited about this and it used to seem quite exotic to me also--but not quite so much now. But a mototopo...!

A small yellow school bus was the most exotic form of transportation I ever took to school, and it wouldn't have been exotic at all if I'd been any older than five years of age. At that age just traveling anywhere, in anything, without my mother along was thrillingly novel.

But Sandro is becoming something like a real Venetian. This is one of the reasons he is now taking a boat to a school about as far from our apartment as one can go in Venice instead of attending the preschool just a few hundred meters away from us. At a certain point this year we began to ask ourselves about what kind of "real Venetian" we wanted him to be. This is actually a longer subject than I want to go into in this post, but when a child speaks one language at school and another at home it can sometimes seem that he is becoming rather a different person in each language. That is, what I'll call his repertoire of expression can vary greatly from one language to the other. It's not just that the vocabulary differs, but the parameters or breadth of each vocabulary differs and with them his range or mode of expression as well.

Put simply, in the absence of the good teachers he had last year (both of whom left), his Italian self was becoming much more aggressive, much more foul-mouthed than his English-speaking self. The models for his Italian self were not his teachers, who showed little interest in their students except when it came to yelling at them, but some particularly energetic classmates. Energetic in the sense of selvaggio, or wild.

But with his change of schools his Italian self is changing. He now has two teachers who actually model a much broader and calmer range of behavior and communication. He likes school again. Actually, he loves going to school again.

But he hasn't forgotten what he learned at his previous school--or what, I'm sure, he's still learning from older boys at his new one--and that in some contexts some people seem to even consider appropriate. As, for example, when traveling to school in a mototopo.

The other morning the mototopo piloted by the Venetian grandfather of one of Sandro's classmates got held up for 15 minutes in a small canal in Cannareggio behind a garbage mototopo and a construction mototopo. Sandro and his classmate and her grandfather could do nothing but wait, floating in place, while the workers on the two other workboats did whatever it was they had to do. Or at least it seemed there was nothing for the two kids and the grandfather, Nonno Pietro, to do but wait, until Sandro started to yell in Italian at the workers in the other boats to "get out of the way" or he would "punch them in the stomach."

I think I blushed in embarrassment when this was first recounted to me and I blush even now in the typing of it, but Nonno Pietro told it not only with amusement but a certain approval. Perhaps more evidence that my son may yet become the Venetian I know I will never be.

Carnevale Internazionale dei Ragazzi Opens Today

The black-light arts & crafts workshop room

I thought the most fun and spontaneity of all of last year's carnevale was to be found not in Piazza San Marco but in the middle of the Giardini Pubblici, within the central exposition space of the Biennale, at the Carnevale Internazionale dei Ragazzi.

Today the third annual edition of this kids carnival opened, with a greater number of participating countries (up to 7, from 4), more workshops in various forms of creativity, live performances, free hot chocolate for the kids, free pasticcio for everyone, and free (and quite tasty) vin brule for very grateful adults. This year's theme is Favole e pensieri (Tales and Thoughts) and features free workshops in making toys from everyday and recycled materials, carnival masks and costumes, art with painted lightbulbs, puppet theatres, and music--among other things. 

And did I happen to mention that today there was free vin brule for parents?

The Carnevale Internazionale dei Ragazzi runs from today until 21 February. Admission is free, as are all workshop materials, and the hours are typically 10:00-18:00.

Much more information about it can be found at http://labiennale.org/it/Home.html

Clouds are a visual motif of this year's edition, but these inflated ones out front were redundant today