Foggy Morning in Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo, Today

Condottiere in a blanket

Early morning appointment at Ospedale Civile and too much fog for the vaporetti to run, even with their radars. But it wasn't so bad, as Venezia in the fog is a lovely place.

Evening Market on Via Garibaldi, Tonight

A new green grocer recently opened on Via Garibaldi in a spot that had been vacant for a little less than a year and it's quickly become a favorite of ours and many other folks. I've found myself referring to it as "The Five Guys," as that is about the number of men who seem to run the place, but there may actually be one or two more.

I had started to believe (sadly) that soft persimmons (or cachi) were done for the year, as even the grocers at the Rialto had only mushy blotchy ones on offer today, but somehow the Five Guys still had a good stock of them tonight. (I have resisted the urge to devote an entire post to that most sensual of fruit, the persimmon, as I feared I might inadvertently veer into R-rated territory and I'm trying to keep this blog decent.) In any case, this fruit and vegetable market is a great addition to Via Garibaldi, worth checking out if you're in the neighborhood, and, as you can see above, has a pretty good view of Santa Maria della Salute as well.

Boy Wonder on the Grand Canal

Sandro's skills with a 35 mm camera are rapidly improving. Today he managed to take a picture of Jen and me that was well-framed and pretty much in focus--at least as well as I usually manage. But just as we were congratulating him on this--the three of us enjoying the perfect quiet beside the Palazzo Loredan dell'Ambasciatore--along comes the young marvel in the photos above and below (taken by me, not Sandro). And suddenly, much as I appreciated Sandro's developing ability with the camera, I found myself fantasizing about one day just a few years off when he'd be able to row his lucky parents (and no more than a few friends--we wouldn't want to overburden him) around in a gondola!

But it turned out that even gondoliere prodigies have their limitations. When it was time to turn off the Grand Canal into one of the side canals an adult took over. Gondolas really are quite huge--a gondola's oar is really quite huge in itself--and I was impressed the kid could maneuver one down Venice's own Broadway. But narrow side canals are even more of a challenge.

So much for my vision of Sandro rowing us around at the age of nine or ten... I'll have to keep working on my own rowing skills.

What a Racket!: Festa di San Martino, Today

Hello, Good-bye: Palazzo Ducale, Bridge of Sighs

Here's something that hasn't been seen for nearly 3 years: the southeast corner of the Palazzo Ducale. Finally, the famous early 15th-century sculpture of the drunkenness of Noah above the corner capital beside the Ponte della Paglia is once again visible to us all as a warning of the kind of embarrassment too much celebration can lead to. (Not that it's ever been heeded.) Also thankfully visible again: the second of the two older gothic windows with tracery that predate the 1574 fire--like an eye finally uncovered after a three-year-long eye-chart exam.

Gone, finally, are all those awful clouds--and all those even more awful ads, paid for by those awful advertisers who deserve only scorn and a lasting boycott for their participation in the defacement of what Ruskin called "the central building of the world."

Why can't more advertisers do this?

In fact, though the Venetian civic group 40xVenezia approached numerous advertisers about designing billboards more respectful of the buildings on which they are placed, only one company has responded to date: the kitchen design firm Scavolini.

You can see Scavolini's sensible effort to the left. It manages to suggest that the advertiser is a partner in the renovation of a valuable piece of history, instead of a vile cold-hearted opportunist preying upon La Serenissima's poverty to thrust himself upon her. If only more advertisers would follow the example of Scavolini...

In any case, that's the good news. The bad news, as you can see above, is that scaffolding has now gone up in front of the Bridge of Sighs. The fabric covering the scaffolding is transparent, instead of the usual opaque--and without ads! (at present)--but I imagine some visitors may be disappointed with this compromised view for the next, oh, 2 or 3 years. Though I'm not. I'd trade an obscured Bridge of Sighs for the departure of that gargantuan storm of ads any day.

Alas, when it comes to the Libreria Sansoviniana--praised by Palladio as the finest building since antiquity--there appears to be no similar trade-off in the works. The south face of that marvelous facade, the narrow side that so beautifully frames the Piazzetta as you cross the basin of San Marco in a vaporetto, is being covered with scaffolding. Okay, I thought, that must mean the billboard abomination right around the corner, on the library's long side, will be coming down.

Nope.

It appears that the south-eastern corner of the library will likely be subjected to the kind of wrap-around advertising that polluted the southeast corner of the Palazzo Ducale for so long. It's a shame, as it means that even from the Punta della Dogana the view of the Piazzetta is likely to be splatted with ads. 

And people used to think those filthy mobs of pigeons were bad! When it comes to defacement, man (especially in pursuit of profit) always and easily trumps beast.

Some Greetings in Italian & Venetian Best Avoided

A view from more linguistically innocent times: Sandro swinging off jet lag after our arrival last November

As was the case almost a year ago, when one of the first posts I wrote was about parolaccie, our son Sandro still seems to learn most of his Italian "bad words" from a certain classmate, the son of a gondoliere. This boy has something of a school-wide reputation--one mother we know has referred to him as maleducato (rude, ill-mannered), which I think is a little severe, as he only just turned 4. I tend to think of him as a little like Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio: that is, the original rambunctious head-strong wooden scamp, not the watered-down blandly-innocent Disney version.

Not all of this kid's words are actually bad, though, some of what Sandro picks up is just a bad idea, socially-speaking. For example, before the weather here turned cold we were eating on the upper deck of a double-decker restaurant/bus parked near the beach on Lido when a pair of young brothers familiar from the playground came up and greeted Sandro.

Sandro replied glibly with: "Ciao, puzzolenti!"

The boys, so sweet to begin with, turned away, looking troubled, and walked off. My wife and I, not recognizing the word Sandro used, had no idea what happened. Sandro, quite pleased with the exchange, offered no explanation.

When we got home and looked in the dictionary, we discovered the two brothers hadn't appreciated being addressed as "stinkies" or "smellies."

Nor, as Sandro would soon realize (after ignoring our warnings), do new acquaintances take warmly to being called "brutto" (ugly) or "cattivo" (bad). Though, as I noticed the other day, Sandro's friend still addresses other kids as all of the above and--for all his boisterous charm--only really manages to pull it off with his close friends, such as Sandro, who understand him.

But by far the worst form of address Sandro has employed was entirely of his own devising. One day as we walked into the city center Sandro was in a particularly gregarious mood. We'd pass this or that woman, or pair or trio of women, and he'd happily address some greeting to her or them that we didn't catch at first. We noticed it was only women he was addressing for some reason, but didn't know why until we finally understood what he was saying:

"Ciao, cocona!" Or "Ciao, cocone!"

This was actually rather shocking.

It's a Venetian word he learned during an August of swimming and bathing and running around naked with a female Venetian friend and classmate. It's the term Venetians use with children to refer to the vagina.

It, along with its male complement, pipoto, were, along with their referents, sources of great interest and amusement to a pair of skinny-dipping three-year-olds. No surprise in that. But that Sandro should, by a curious and cunning process of induction, decide to apply (and address!) the term to women he passed on the street...!

And thus began a new discussion whose underlying theme was that as great and exciting as it is to learn and use new words, it's also important to learn the proper context in which they might be employed--productively and without offense. 

It's such an interesting phase of language acquisition, contextual ramifications such as these, for anyone--not just kids--learning a new language. Such subtleties--each word's place within a social-cultural-historical web--are reminders of why the most truly poetic works of poetry can't really be translated.  

That's one way of looking at it. Another is simply that Sandro has, in just a year, become more crudely Venetian than we ever could have expected. After all, these are the extremely blunt people who still call the little area beside one end of the Rialto Bridge where prostitutes used to congregate "Fondamenta Traghetto del Buso"--or "of the hole".

Postcard from Piemonte: Autumn

photo credit: Dario Cavallotto

For today only we will stray from Venice across Italy to the beautiful region of Piemonte, famous for its wine, truffles and hazelnuts. My cousin sent me this photo that he took yesterday morning and though autumn appears in Venice in its own distinct way--with some of the most beautiful sunsets of the year, for example--I couldn't resist posting it.

The photo was taken in the Quartino di Loazzolo, between the small villages of Cessole and Bubbio, not too far from the hometown of the great writer Cesare Pavese. We made our first extended stay in Italy, from March through May 2010, in Cessole, working for our room and board on an organic vineyard/farm/agriturismo B&B, while our son spent part of the day at a pre-school (which he loved) in the neighboring village of Monastero Bormida.

The slender trees with the white trunks in the background are young pioppi (poplars) that are planted around the Bormida River and harvested (I believe after about 10 years) to make paper. Another horizon line of mature pioppi with their green-yellow leaves are arrayed a little further back, before the view hazes off into the distant trees on the justifiably famous colline (hills).

The field in the foreground, plowed so clean, I'd find austerely beautiful in itself if it didn't remind me of a few particularly arduous days of labor: one interminable day we spent planting 200 young hazelnut trees, and two others on which we, blinded by sweat, buried legions of ocular potato bits beneath earth’s heavy lid in record April heat.

Yet even such trying days as those, as the poet Leopardi pointed out, ultimately become achingly sweet in retrospect, the vista soft and appealing as the photo above.