Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Venetian Faces 3, or, Etruscans


25% of Venice's population is over the age of 65 years of age, making it, in terms of percentage of population, the oldest city in Italy (which, as a whole, has one of the oldest populations in Europe). Only since moving to Venice have I realized how restricted was the age-range of people I saw on a regular basis while living in Brooklyn, NY, or Asheville, NC, or while visiting anywhere else in America. In contrast, the older population of Venice is, if you'll pardon the expression, "free range." That is, not confined, either by their own or someone else's choice, to particular buildings or neighborhoods (which can sometimes give the impression that Western society has come to believe that aging is a disease against which quarantining might be required). Of course, in my experience in America it's economic necessity that dictates who lives where, and it's not much different in Venice. Except that in Venice it's the older residents, who have owned their homes for years, who have been able to afford to stay in the city, while younger residents, looking to buy, have been driven out by real estate prices inflated by absentee second home owners and the economics of tourism.

On vaporetti it's often the older residents of Venice who will make their trip without the usual form of distraction: a newspaper, a book or, often, one (or more) of the electronic gadgets to which so many of us have wedded (and practically welded) ourselves, cyborg-like. Though iPhones and other such things aren't quite as common among young Venetians and Venetian children as they are in the States (where, according to a school teacher friend who lives in Missouri, a school bus of second graders is a busload of streaming videos and video games on hand-held devices), I still marvel at those who spend their time on the vaporetto with their heads down and eyes locked on digital simulcra while one of the truly legendary cities of the world and all of history slides past unseen just outside the window.

Perhaps it's becoming rather rare to see a person who can do the most elemental of things: simply sit with themselves, as many of the older Venetians do on the vaporetto. Which far from being boring, or monotonous--as we are told it must be by all those with something to sell--may very well be to sit with a vast multitude of things: memories and plans and the bits of present experience that can squeeze their way in between them.

It's particularly the memories of these older Venetians on the vaporetti that I find myself wondering about, as they are, it seems to me, the last generation of residents who lived as adults in this city when it was truly a city: 150,000 strong. When tourism was actually seasonal, so that gondolieri, as Jan Morris wrote in 1960, actually held second jobs for much of the year. When cattle trains made regular runs into town, their doomed freight driven to the slaughterhouse nearby in the northwestern corner of Cannaregio (now, aptly enough from what I've heard about Italian education, part of the university of Ca' Foscari). When there was a cotton factory whirring away beside the church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli (now part of the IUAV campus), and clothing manufacturing and shipyards on Giudecca.

Hard to imagine.

Etruscans, I sometimes find myself thinking when I look at these older Venetians, wondering about all the things they remember, and don't remember: the last living witnesses to have fully lived in a vanishing culture.  

6 comments:

  1. I think there are 2 categories of passengers who don't read and don't distract themselves in any other way: the really self-sufficient people - or someone who needs a moment or two to think, to meditate, to contemplate - and some who don't need distraction of any kind, even provided by gadgets, simply because their inner world is so dull they can not be bored.

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    1. Well, It would be hard for an outsider to differentiate between the two categories, though the second category of person might, in some contexts and cultures, also be considered a saint.

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  2. Hi

    This a very interesting and thoughtful post. It is always interesting and possibly a bit sad to reflect on all these changes since in so many places these changes seem to lead to a certain homogenizing of popular cultures. Hard to imagine anything on an IPOD could be more interesting than the view out the window in Venice but people can get jaded by anything over time I suppose.

    all the best.
    Guy

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    1. It occurred to me after posting this piece, though, that I sometimes read while I'm on the vaporetto. Is this somehow "better" than playing a video game, for example? To me personally it is, as I enjoy reading, but I'm not willing to say that in any absolute sense it is: either way you're missing the city passing by. And, yes, homogenization seems to be going on almost everywhere, and oddly enough perhaps it brings with it some advantages--and I mean advantages besides the highly over-rated ones of "convenience" and "cheapness": a bit less insularity, perhaps? As well as the obvious crushing and deadening drawbacks. Thanks for your comment!

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  3. When I lived in Venice, I barely noticed things, I was used to the views, the details at every corner, the breathtaking beauty. After I moved to the US I remember the first time I was taking some friends around to show them MY city, I was blown away wondering how I possibly did that, I can you get anything done in such a magical place. Two summers ago I went inside the Chiesa Dei Carmini, the church where I was baptized, had my first communion and confirmation, a church I entered hundreds of times. I was blown away again, how did I not notice or remember the incredible interiors, the wood work, the paintings. I think people should learn the power of now, learn to stop and smell the roses, be in the moment, whether they are in Venice or in any other spot on Earth.

    You don't have to ask just people over 80 about the old Venice. Venice was still a nice place to live in the 80's, so anyone over 40 will be able to tell you great stories.

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    1. It's amazing, Laura, the way habit and familiarity makes us blind to even the most remarkable things. I don't even have the good excuse of having been born and raised here, and yet I'm always noticing things I passed right over 100 times before. And Dei Carmini was one of them (for a while). How nice to have a personal history with it, though!

      When I first visited Venice very briefly as a teenager in 1982 one of the few things I clearly remember is being told (already) how young people could not find jobs in the city and how many people were living on the mainland and commuting into work. So I guess that's why I think of the Venice of even longer ago as being the "unspoiled" (though unsustainable) Venice. But I'm sure it was a very different world in the '80s--as it still was even in '91 when I was here for a few weeks.

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