Under the Distant Eyes of Angels: Rio della Sensa

Venice at the Crossroads

Caryl Phillips reads from his work in the Santa Margherita Auditorium of Ca' Foscari

In the three and half years I've lived here I've somehow managed to miss each year's edition of Incroci di Civilità (Crossroads of Civilization), the International Festival of Literature in Venice, prior to this latest one, which concluded yesterday evening. Since its inception in 2009 the series has featured major writers from around the world, including Michael Ondaatje, Roberto Calasso, Kiran Desai, Yves Bonnefoy, Adonis, Jeannette Winterson, and Nobel Prize Winners Orhan Pamuk and VS Naipaul.

The events are free to the public, though one must make an online reservation in advance to be assured of a ticket. And in almost every case it's a very good idea to make your reservation--which is quite easy to do online--as soon the festival website begins taking them. Each of the three events I attended this past weekend--the American writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn on Friday night; the American poet, playwright and novelist Rita Dove, and the English novelist, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips on Saturday-- consisted primarily of substantial and lengthy discussions with the authors. Each of the authors I saw were excellent, their interviewers all did a good job, and each program lasted for at least 90 minutes (much longer than most of the American literary events I'm used to).

You can see a complete program for this year's festival, and a full archive of programs from each previous year, at: http://www.incrocidicivilta.org/

If you plan on being in Venice in early spring of next year, it's a site worth bookmarking and keeping in mind. And perhaps for some people it may be even worth a trip in itself.

Rita Dove in conversation with Sally Michael and Duccio Basosi

Daniel Mendelsohn in conversation with Pietro del Soldà in the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi

Caryl Phillips in conversation with Maureen Freely and Annalisa Oboe

Tourist Trap: Una Fantasia (Posted 2 days Late)

A bench on Sant' Elena is a marvelous place from which to watch the sun set--but is it worth the risk?

Some locals find the number of tourists already wandering out to Sant' Elena and planting themselves on its benches along the lagoon dismaying. Only two bridges connect this island located at the easternmost edge of Venice to the rest of city and I've heard people suggest that each should have a guard house on it, with another located at the vaporetto stop. Unless you're a resident, or a guest of the hotel or B&B on the island, or a customer of one of its two restaurants or bar or pizzeria, you'd be forbidden entrance.

Many people say that such an idea, among its other faults, would turn Sant' Elena into little more than a zoo: at best, a wild life preserve for the last remaining Venetians. At worst, a prison.

But proponents of the plan ask: Do the bars of a zoo serve to keep the animals in, or the teeming masses of much more dangerous and destructive animals out?

People on all sides of the issue however marvel at the fact that the visitors keep coming, in spite of the alarming frequency of tourist disappearances that occur here.

Some locals, claiming to have inside knowledge of the disappearances, claim they are evidence that the CIA has extended its program of "extraordinary rendition" into Venice. But I have it on good authority that nothing in the background of most of the disappeared would even vaguely validate such claims.

Others suggest that the disappearances are actually kidnappings: money-making schemes carried out by the many gangs of criminals jockeying for power on Sant' Elena. However, another highly-placed source assures me that no ransom notes have ever been received.

A few of the more eccentric neighborhood characters even claim that Sant' Elena is the center of alien abductions in Italy--perhaps in all of Europe. According to these folks the island is a sacred vortex of some kind, and the mass of trees that were uprooted a couple of years ago in its park were torn out not by a cyclone, as reported in the local papers, but by the extraordinary force of a low-hovering alien spacecraft.

Whatever the source of the disapperances, city officials have managed, remarkably enough, to keep all news of them out of the papers. So the tourists, all unsuspecting, keep coming, lured by the promise of the city's only sizable park, and perhaps the opportunity to glimpse "authentic Venetian life."

Ah, that ultimate commercial pitch of every tourist trap, capable of penetrating the defenses of even the most jaded of travelers: in this pre-packaged world of mass tourism of ours a forbidden taste of "authenticity."

And so they come and--I shudder as I type this--meet their mysterious end.

Ruskin's Irregularities

One of the defining features and great virtues of Gothic architecture, according to John Ruskin, that champion of Venetian Gothic, was its irregularity. I find myself thinking of this when I see the work being done in the lagoon to the west and a bit north of Venice, pictured above. They are creating a vast new barena, one of those islands submerged during the highest tides, exposed during low ones, that were once a common feature throughout the lagoon.

In their succinct and immensely informative book The Science of Saving Venice, Caroline Fletcher and Jane Da Mosto talk more precisely about mud flats and salt marshes (rather than my more general term barena) and note that they "are down to a third of their extent since the end of the 19th century," while approximately "20 percent of the lagoon's plant and 50 percent of its bird species have disappeared since 1930."

"So what?" I can imagine some people responding, "we've lost a few plants and birds...."

But more than being just a vital part of the lagoon ecosystem, the "irregular forms" of mudflats and saltmarshes--with their shallow textured depths, their underwater grasses, their "intricate sub-structure of winding creeks and meandering canals"--served to "moderate wave energy" coming in from the Adriatic Sea, according to Fletcher and Da Mosto, and "used to help to dampen the intensity of acqua alta."

Man-made changes in the 20th century to the dimensions of the lagoon (land reclamation projects for the airport, for example), to the shape of the lagoon's inlets from the Adriatic, and to the number and (much greater) depth of canals, have transformed this once shallow marshy mucky mixed ecosystem of salt and fresh water into an ever deeper and ever-more-scoured salt water bay. The lagoon now holds twice the volume of water it once contained within its formerly larger dimensions and salt marshes and mud flats have disappeared from the central lagoon around the city, leaving the tide and wind-pushed waves to enter the city with unprecedented force.

And so the barges and heavy machinery and laborers head out with their gabions (wire cages containing rock or other material), sacks of organic matter and other supplies to try to reintroduce into the Venetian lagoon the "Savageness" the "Changefulness", the "Naturalism," and the "Redundance" that Ruskin celebrated as the essential qualities of the Gothic, and by which he meant variety, spontaneity, roughness of surface, imperfection, accumulation of diverse forms--as opposed to the smooth scrubbed abstracted symmetry and simplicity and uniformity for which he condemned Classicism and the Renaissance, and which now might be used to describe the state of the lagoon bed.

Indeed, Ruskin argued that the moral health of the Venetian Republic was directly embodied in the noble vivacious irregularity and spontaneity of its Gothic constructions; in their rough imperfect surfaces bearing the imprint of un-oppressed laborers, of their detailed abundance of leaves and vines and natural forms untamed by tyrannical ideals of form. It's actually quite a dubious reading of Venetian history: part myth-making, part fond fantasy, and largely (like much of history) having more to do with the challenges and context of his own time, and his didactic response to them, than with any doge or council or citizenry of Venice.

Yet if his principles of gothic had little to do with the actual moral state of the lagoon society in which they were employed, they seem now, over 150 years from when he first put them forth, to have a good deal to do with present attempts to try to restore the ecological health of the lagoon. And so you (or at least I) can still find Ruskin all around Venice, even in the lagoon itself amid heavy machinery, even when you (or I) aren't looking for him.

Miles to Go Before I Sleep

There used to be at least one company in the area of New York City from which you could order a mattress by telephone and have it delivered to your residence in two hours.

Sleep doesn't come so easily, or so cheaply, in Venice. Or at least mattresses don't, as I was reminded this morning by the sight of the man above using his own boat to avoid the substantial delivery fees charged by commercial services.

Assuming he picked up his mattress from a truck at Tronchetto, at the westernmost edge of the city, he had quite a way to go down the Grand Canal with his rather precariously-attached load to what seemed to be some destination in Castello in the vicinity of the Arsenale. (Hence the title of this post borrowed from Robert Frost, who was not thinking of Venice or boats when he wrote it.)

No doubt he saved a good deal of money doing it himself, but I like to imagine there might be an additional benefit. Having transported his bed himself, it will be forever associated in his mind with the movement of a boat upon the water: the rocking, the surges, the rolling that I've noticed hardly ever fails to put children to sleep in the course of an evening boat ride, and that, recollected while lying upon the very bed he thus transported, might do wonders for even an adult insomniac. 

Festa di Primavera in Campo Bragora, Last Night

The multi-talented Gigi Miracol lights up in a big way

The regular quarterly events in Campo Bragora have become great ways to mark the changing seasons, with music, dance, activities for kids, food, wine, ritual--and, inevitably, fire. The next one, marking the summer solstice, will be in June, amid the other activities of the roughly week-long Festa di San Giovanni in Bragora. 

Agnese Ferro and Enrico Bertolotti in the midst of their Omaggio a Vivaldi, performed in the church of S. Giovanni in which the composer was baptized (and featuring his small image in background at right)

The Cannaregio-situated restaurant, Orient Experience, provided a middle eastern buffet (above), while La Laguna nel Bicchiere (featured just a couple of posts ago) provided the wines

The various pyrotechnics were popular with even the smallest of children

Gigi Miracol, poet, musician, juggler, winemaker, bon vivant, and a recurrent subject of this blog, plays with fire

Drinking In Good Literature and Fine Wine at the Mercato di Rialto

A good crowd turns out for the opening night of the RialtoLibri reading series at the Rialto fish market, hosted by Libreria Marco Polo owner Claudio Moretti (right) and featuring Nicola Manuppelli (left)

Last Sunday night marked the opening of the RialtoLibri reading series, the brainchild of Claudio Moretti of Libreria Marco Polo and Marco Montaldo and Giovanni Mattana of Bar Pescaria, which brings authors and fans of both books and fine wines together in the Pescheria (or fish market) of the Rialto market.

It kicked off with Nicola Manuppelli reading from and talking about his imminently-forthcoming book Bowling (due for release at the end of this month by Barney Edizioni, https://www.facebook.com/TheOutlawsifuorilegge) while a large crowd enjoyed Rosso Veronese Corvina and Bianco Veronese Garganega: two organic wines produced by Fasoli Gino (http://www.fasoligino.com/it/).  

A complete list of the remaining five events of the reading series--with both the books and the wines to be featured--appears below. Any one of the evenings, or all of them, would be well worth checking out.

Sunday, 23 March

Guida all città ribelli: Parigi, Roma, Barcelona. E Venezia? (Voland)

Extremo Merlot del Monferrato--Torelli

 Sunday, 30 March

Almanacco del giorno prima, by Chiara Valerio (Einaudi)

Franciacorta Brut e Saten--Clarabella

Sunday, 6 April

Piccola osteria senza nome, by Massimo Cuomo (e/o)

Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso e Tocai Friulano--Castello di Arcano

Sunday, 13 April

Gli eroi imperfetti, by Stefano Sgambati (minimum fax)

Lambrusco Nero Maestri--Quarticello

Sunday, 20 April

Si fa presto a dire Adriatico, by Fulvio Ervas (marcos y marcos)

Prosecco col fondo Era e Brut DOCG Nature--Renzo Rebuli

For more information on the series, its hosts, the books, the readers, and the wines, please visit:  

http://www.rialtolibri.it/

Bookseller and writer

Writer and his text