2 Views of Sunset Over (and Behind) Santa Maria della Salute, This Evening

Venice's "Baby Berlusconi" Puts His Foot Down in Defense of Cruise Ships & the Local Partito Democratico Comes to Heel

In protest of Mayor Brugnaro's de facto cancellation of Gianni Berengo Gardin's photos of cruise ships at Palazzo Ducale, a group of residents displays their own images of them in front of the same location, Saturday morning, September 5. (Though the above image appeared without photo credit on various websites last week--RAI, ANSA, Nuova Venezia, etc--I did actually take it.)

For a candidate who ran against the benighted "Party of Those Who Say NO", Venice's new mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, has been nixing a lot of things in his first month of office. Not only the contracts of 18 city library employees and the presence of books on tolerance in city preschools (as recounted in a recent post), but an exhibition of photos of cruise ships scheduled to open on September 18 in the Palazzo Ducale by one of Italy's most venerated photographers, Gianni Berengo Gardin.

Contrary to some reports, Brugnaro did not cancel the exhibition outright. No, he demanded that the group of city museums (Musei Civici) that organized it postpone it until the photos could be displayed in tandem with his and Paolo Costa's (the Head of the Port Authority) cherished plans to "resolve" the cruise ship problem once and for all by dredging the old polluted Vittorio Emanuele canal that runs from the industrial wastes of Marghera to Venice's cruise ship terminal (http://nuovavenezia.gelocal.it//2015/08/09/grandi-navi-brugnaro-blocca-la-mostra).

Indeed, big-hearted and community-minded as he is, Brugnaro simply proposed to Berengo Gardin that if he wanted to display his photos he do so in the broader context of a "series of meetings and seminars" in which the photographs of cruise ships dwarfing Venice's famous architecture would serve to document the issue whose only solution was--ta-daa!--that proposed by Brugnaro and Costa themselves!

In other words, the images could be displayed here in Venice only as advertising for Brugnaro's own plans.

But, of course, the choice was entirely up to Berengo Gardin. He could choose to allow his images to be exploited in this way, or he could choose not to have them shown at all.

In these first months of Brugnaro's rule it's hard not to get the impression that the blustery new mayor believes himself to be re-enacting, again and again, the heroic old story of David and Goliath. Unfortunately, Brugnaro seems to believe the hero of that tale is Goliath.

And perhaps this should come as no surprise from a man who made his fortune from a temporary employment agency: that is, by catering to the demands of entrenched business interests. Indeed, it struck me as some kind of perverse joke that at this troubled time in its history a city which exists today only because of the most ambitious long-range, civic-minded planning (eg, rerouting mainland rivers over 500 years ago) should elect an impresario of the impermanent, a doge of the disposable, a priest of the provisional, a flunky of the fleeting, a slave of the status quo.   

That at a time when any slim hope of Venice's survival as a city (or small town) rather than a mere theme park depends upon innovative and sustainable approaches to job creation, Venetians elected a man whose self-trumpeted business acumen seems distinctly more parasitical in nature than creative. After all, his great fortune comes not from creating jobs, but from just the opposite: from saving businesses from the need to actually add employees.

A rich industrialist, whatever his sins, might point to his wealth as evidence that he knows how to put people to work. Brugnaro's wealth, on the other hand, simply suggests a man who knows how to exploit Italy's troubled labor market by providing cheap, disposable, short-term functionaries to business--at the expense of the country's legions of workers seeking regular employment, as well as of any broader social good. 

And, thus, if Brugnaro is himself in the pocket of the cruise ship industry--and he's made no secret of this--then why shouldn't the photographer Berengo Gardin be happy to join him? Sure, one's vision is severely limited inside there, but it's quite cozy, and oh-so-profitable.

Berengo Gardin has refused to this point to do so but, surprisingly enough, both the regional and local leaders of the Partito Democratico, the center-left party, have recently jumped right in. Local papers announced a couple of days ago that, in spite of concerns about the serious environmental effects of Brugnaro's and Costa's plan, Alessandro Moretti (regional head) and Andrea Ferrazzi (city head) are now in favor of the dredging (http://www.veneziatoday/cronaca/moretti-si-canale-vittorio-emauele). Even though Fabio Casson, who ran on the Partito Democratico ticket against Brugnaro in June (and is now in the Italian senate), remains firmly opposed to it.

As reported in last Friday's Il Gazzattino, Casson reminded Moretti and Ferrazzi that the leader of the the party in the senate (Luigi Zanda) had recently sent a letter to three parliamentary ministers (of Culture, Environment, and Public Works) laying out the party's strong opposition to the dredging of the Vittorio Emanuele. Then, incapable of coming up with any other explanation of Moretti's and Ferrazzi's defection from the party line, Casson wondered if they'd "smoked something strong" ("hanno fumato qualcosa di forte") before declaring themselves in favor of Brugnaro's and Costa's pet project.

And so the circus rolls on, while the clown at the wheel of Venice tweets triumphantly "that good sense has finally started to prevail" ("Finalmente il buon senso comincia a prevalere"). Meaning, of course, that he feels confident that the wishes of big business will prevail. And what could possibly be wrong with that? He's made a personal fortune serving its interests.

For more information about this group and to find out how you can also participate in its program, no matter where you live, please visit its Facebook page: Vogliamo Venezia (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1488759288100937/)

Looking at Bill Viola's Artwork, Thinking of Giovanni Bellini

An image of Bill Viola's plasma screen video Water Martyr

This is the last weekend to catch an exhibition of 15 contemporary artworks on the riva of the Giudecca beside the church of the Zitelle called, Heartbreak Hotel. Among the artists represented by a single work are Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, and Joana Vasconcelos, whom visitors to the 2013 Venice Biennale will no doubt remember as the creator of Portugal's "floating pavilion" (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/portugal-pavilion.html).

It's an interesting show that allows each work enough space to be pondered on its own terms; it's admirably restrained, you might say. Well, except for the show's handout on the works which has the unfortunate tendency to collapse each work into a tidily packaged message we can easily deposit in our shopping cart of experiences. A tendency perhaps in keeping with what the show's brochure describes as the "entrepreneurial spirit" of the artworks' collector and curator: one definition of entrepreneur being, I suppose, one inclined to impose a definite value on everything. 

In any case, one of the most captivating of the pieces on display is video artist Bill Viola's Earth Martyr, Air Martyr, Fire Martyr, Water Martyr (2104), which consists of four tall narrow high-definition plasma screens: one on each of the four walls surrounding a central seating area in its own darkened room, and each one showing a different solitary figure undergoing an ordeal with one of the four elements (though it might be argued that the "air" is actually more "high wind").

Each figure begins (simultaneously) in a subdued state, then is subjected to an encounter with his or her designated element that gradually builds to a peak of intensity. The water martryr, for example, lies curled up sleeping in the bottom of the small screen, before being hauled up by his feet in a deluge. The fire martyr dozes in his chair before the first flames drop quite beautifully from above like burning wax and little by little start to accumulate around his chair. The air martyr, a woman in white, is suspended with thick rope by her wrists mid-screen, her ankles bound by the same kind of rope and tethered to the floor. The earth martyr is huddled at the bottom of the screen among a mound of dirt.

The action in each case is tumultuous, dramatic, yet unfolds in complete silence and somehow, paradoxically, maintains a persistent sense of precisely-rendered tranquility. It was the persistent tranquility rendered with a preternatural clarity that, in spite, of all the movement probably made me think of two of Giovanni Bellini's altarpieces here in Venice: the large one in the church of San Zaccaria and smaller one in the side chapel of I Frari.

Though working in a radically different medium and 500 years later, Viola manages, like Bellini, to create a work that is both beautiful, "a feast for the eyes" as they say, and yet otherworldly, transcendent. Viola may, at least in the fire video, be using a "palette" more evocative of Caravaggio than Bellini, but he manages to distance his figures from the physical, bodily world in a way in which Caravaggio had no interest.

In his great San Zaccaria altarpiece, Bellini is careful to situate his "sacred conversation" between the enthroned Mary and the saints in what appears to be an extension of the church itself: the columns and their gilded capitals in the painting famously reproduce the columns that frame the painting in the church itself. The picture space, in other words, pretends to be an actual side chapel of San Zaccaria.

Yet this illusion of immediacy is broken by how Bellini portrays the figures themselves, whose arrangement, expressions, postures, all serve to remove them from any human world we know. For all the beauty of their brocade and silks, their sphere of existence--unlike that of, say, Veronese's religious figures--is not one we dare think of sullying with our human touch. The richness of Veronese's colors and surfaces is alluring: even his religious paintings are filled with objects of desire.

There's a hieratic quality to Bellini's altarpiece. It may possess a softly glowing precision, like an eerily-clear early morning in Venice after a night of gale-force storminess--but it has little to do with any world we can experience. Its tranquility is transcendent, otherworldly, airless--or at least filled with an atmosphere too refined for human survival.

And that is what I was reminded of while looking at Viola's videos. His four martyrs' apotheoses are highly aestheticized and occur, I'm almost tempted to say, at that contemporary point (common in marketing today) at which the aesthetic becomes conflated with the ascetic.

Viola may have been looking to allude to the religious iconography of Old Masters such as Bellini, but the look of the piece also evokes, at least for me, our own age's high-end commercial class-porn cult of transcendence and spirituality.

It's shiny, to use the title of a piece by Douglas Coupland published this summer as part of e-flux journal's Venice Biennale "Super Community" project (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/douglas-coupland/), very shiny. Coupland writes (channeling Andy Warhol via David Lynch): "I love shiny, because the moment you see something shiny, you know there's going to be something rotten or scary nearby..."

But if this has any general validity--and I kind of doubt that it does--it has little to do with Viola's piece in which the "scary" part of martyrdom, the human part, is mostly left out. Just as it is entirely left out of any high-end advertisements for, say, organic cotton yoga clothing or exclusive spiritual retreat travel packages.

Of course martyrdom by fire was certainly not unknown in Venice. Indeed, during Giovanni Bellini's own lifetime he would have possibly seen or certainly heard of those "sodomites" burned alive between the twin columns of the Piazzetta "so that if the body is burned up by fire the flight of their souls is not damned" (from the Archivio Stato di Venezia, quoted in Guido Ruggiero's excellent book, The Boundaries of Eros). And the American Viola himself would probably have had a hard time not hearing of the CIA's extensive program of waterboarding--a kind of water martyrdom, in which death is approached but never achieved, over and over again--during George W. Bush's presidency.

These thoughts, too, occurred to me while watching Viola's piece--though I suspect they aren't "supposed to." They aren't Viola's intention (not that an artist's intention should matter to a viewer), nor are they--I've just found out by doing a web search on the work--the response of most reviewers to the piece. Indeed, thanks to the web search, I've just learned that this particular piece was created specifically for St Paul's Cathedral in London, where it was permanently installed last year. And in at least one other case, I've just discovered, a critic also found himself thinking of torture and advertising (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art//Bill-Viola-St-Pauls-Cathedral.html)--then feeling bad for doing so.

It is not Viola's fault. We are all of us drowning under a deluge of images more overwhelming than the torrent that batters his water martyr.

Bellini depicted the Virgin Mary and saints; Viola is depicting human beings. I guess part of me wonders if the tranquil air that was appropriate in 1500 for the former may, by 2014, be ill-suited and ineluctably corrupted.

In any case, if you are in Venice this weekend--or London at any time--it's worth a look, to see how it strikes you. 

An image of Bill Viola's plasma-screen video Fire Martyr

Diane by Joana Vasconcelos, foreground, with Katharina Frisch's Händler (Dealer) in background

Nick van Woert's Damnatio memoriae

Detail of Damnatio memoriae

Street Serenade, This Evening

The owner of Trattoria Giorgione sings to his outdoor diners, and any number of passersby, on Via Garibaldi.

Venice's Own "Baby Berlusconi" Takes His First Steps--and They're Backwards

Always dignified, never "kitschy", Venice's new mayor does the city proud by tweeting an image of himself with Michelle Obama (photo credit: http://www.blitzquotidiano.it/foto-notizie/michelle-obama-brugnaro/)

The owner of a prominent professional sports team, this politician asserts that his vast personal wealth elevates him far above the petty and venal political bog in which all hope of progress in Italy has been mired for decades, to a lordly height of clear vision. His status as a "self-made" entrepreneur, he tells us, is proof that he knows how to get things done. He is a vital man of action, a force of nature, a knight, taking up arms against the benighted legions of the "Party of No", that is, against those whose only goal is to impede progress and growth. And yet for all of his great wealth and success--you haven't forgotten his enviable wealth and success, have you?--he is also a man of the people. Not some dry-as-dust technocrat, some impotent intellectual, some mealy-mouthed wind-sniffer, strait-jacketed by politically-correctness... No, he's the embodiment of the assertive Italian spirit, forging ever forward, glad-handing, backslapping, grandstanding.  

I could be recounting the self-presentation of Silvio Berlusconi above. But, actually, it's Venice's new mayor I have in mind: 53-year-old Luigi Brugnaro, born and raised on the mainland (in Spinea); son of an elementary school teacher and a union leader in Marghera; founder of Umana Holding, a temporary employment agency which, after just a decade of operations, was doing about 300 million euros' worth of business; and owner of Reyer Venezia Mestre, which fields both a mens and womens team in Italy's top professional basketball league.

He took office in June and if--based upon his bold promises that he was "neither Left nor Right" and would tolerate neither the waste nor corruption that was killing Venice--you thought he might first turn his keen, fearless, all-seeing businessman's eyes upon MOSE, the forever-inoperable mobile flood gates project which has sucked up 5 billion euros over the years (a full 1 billion of which it's estimated has been siphoned off by corruption), you'd be wrong.

It turned out, instead, that the first great battle against budgetary waste that Venice's righteous defender chose to wage--the one with which, it's assumed, he intended to set the tenor of his mayoral term--was against 18 of the city's librarians.  (http://mestre.veneziatoday.it/proteste-licenziamenti-cooperative-biblioteche.html)

In ringing tones (Agamemnon at the gates of Troy), he announced their contracts would not be renewed. For he was outraged to discover that each of them was making 7.50 euro per hour. This, he declared, is exactly the kind of absurd expenditure that is draining the city coffers dry. (His actual metaphor involved "eating the soup of the city", but I can't locate the exact quotation at the moment.)

Having thus with one heroic stroke set the city's account books in order, Mayor Brugnaro then turned his attention to school books and, fulfilling a campaign promise, ordered 49 titles removed from the shelves of preschools. The books had been purchased by the previous administration to expose young children to simple tales designed to counteract discrimination against people based on race, culture, disability, sexual orientation, family configuration (eg, a single mother or same-sex parenting), or gender identification.

It was not, Brugnaro explained, that he personally had anything against tolerance, but that he feared that children might be confused by a depiction of, say, a family with two parents of the same sex.

Or, in other words, as much as the city's 28 preschools may be actively engaged in transmitting cultural norms (and I speak here from personal experience, as the father of a child who attended one), they should do absolutely nothing that could in any way interfere with parents' inalienable right to raise little bigots.

Besides, Brugnaro noted--clad, I like to imagine, in gleaming Crusader's armor, with the beaver of his helmet up and accountant's half-spectacles perched on the end of his nose--10,000 euro were spent on those books! (http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2015/06/24/brugnaro-ordina-di-ritirare-libri-gender-da-scuole_n_7653794.html)

(Or .00001 of a percent of that money lost to MOSE corruption alone. But who's counting?)

Well, at this point the new mayor would have liked to focus all his attention on arming the city's vigili urbani (the metropolitan police force) and creating the occupying-army-style police force now in vogue in cities around the world (http://nuovavenezia.gelocal.it/venezia/cronaca/2015/07/22/news/gia-armati-i-primi-quaranta-vigili-urbani-1.11817063).

Or in inviting the Mayor of Barcelona to Venice to show her how extremely well-founded--oops--foolishly ill-founded were her fears that residential life in her city might become "like Venice" and be utterly destroyed by mass tourism (http://www.travelnostop.com/veneto/cronaca/venezia-e-viva-brugnaro-invita-il-sindaco-di-barcellona_125889).

Or simply in taking and posting "selfies" of himself with Michelle Obama on his Twitter account. (http://www.blitzquotidiano.it/foto-notizie/michelle-obama-a-venezia-selfie-con-il-neo-sindaco-brugnaro-foto-2214861/).

But his removal of those books from preschools angered a lot of people. And the next step he took of returning all but two of the titles to the schools did not mollify them, as the two titles he continued to deem inappropriate for young children were both devoted to showing that a same sex couple could, in fact, make very good parents.

Amnesty International protested this decision; as did PEN Italia, Venice residents, people around the world, and Elton John (who has a house in Venice) (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/world/europe/venice-childrens-books-ban.html?_r=1: this NY Times piece does the best job of discussing this conflict within the larger context of contemporary Italian politics). And the Pope even sent a supportive letter to the writer of one of the two books (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/28/pope-francis-sends-letter-praising-gay-childrens-book).

Brugnaro had nothing to say to the Pope on the matter. But the possibility of making headlines by mixing it up with a world-famous celebrity seemed too much for him to resist and--as has become his wont--the new mayor took to his Twitter account to respond to John.

There, Brugnaro dismissed John's criticism as "represent[ing] the arrogance of someone who is rich and can do whatever they want" (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33978500, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/18/elton-john-protests-venice-ban-on-gay-childrens-books).

For a politician who flaunted his own personal wealth during his campaign (which included a firework display), this was an odd strategy of attack. Indeed, Brugnaro's own campaign slogan of  being "Neither Left nor Right" rested upon the notion that his own personal wealth freed him from all obligations and debts to parties or interests. Like Berlusconi, Brugnaro presents himself as one of those towering figures whose success has liberated him "to do whatever they want." But, like Berlusconi, Brugnaro assures us, of course, that his decisions (issued from on high) would be for our own good. Even if we don't realize it--or aren't included in the decision-making process.

After all, though Brugnaro criticized the previous city administration for being so arrogant as to place such titles in schools without first consulting the parents of students, his removal of them was also done with even less consultation (as not even the city council was involved in it). But (again like Berlusconi) as rich as he may be--you do remember his wealth, yes?--he has an intimate connection with the will of the people and voices their unspoken desires, even as he seems only to be doing whatever he wants. Or, as the case may be, catering to the wants of one extreme of the Italian political spectrum.

In any case, to show that he was unbowed by the book battle, he more recently announced that, though he "has friends who are homosexual", he will never allow Venice to be the site of a Gay Pride Parade. They are, he declared, "a buffoonery, as kitschy as it gets" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/27/the-mayor-of-venice-wants-to-ban-gay-pride-maybe-he-needs-to-get-to-know-his-city-better/).

A comment which has made more than a few people wonder if the new mayor of Venice, the boy from the mainland, has actually spent much time in the city during Carnevale or, really, at any other time.

But this is just the beginning of Brugnaro's term (or is it, "rule"?) and this post touches upon only a few of his many questionable steps so far. Other ones, like his canceling of an exhibition of photos of big ships by the famed photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin (http://www.theguardian.com/2014/apr/03/gianni-berengo-gardin-best-shot-venice) scheduled for the Palazzo Ducale, will no doubt feature in future posts. Though you can read one account of that particular controversy here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/j-michael-welton/in-venice-politics-vs-photos.
   

A Tall--Rather Than a Big--Ship, This Evening

If all big ships passing through Venice were limited to this size and this style perhaps there would be less complaints about them.

The Mountains of Venice

Moon-rise over the Dolomites, taken last week near the village of Unterinn (aka, Auna di Sotto) above Bolzano

Venice is, as everyone has long known, such a distinctive place that I have sometimes had a hard time imagining that real Venetians can thrive outside it. They are creatures of the lagoon, and in the lagoon--or at least in the wider aquatic environment of the Adriatic and Mediterranean--they must stay. After all, they are infamously--and admittedly--awful drivers of anything other than boats.

And yet a native Venetian friend, an agonista (competitive rower) who will compete once again in next week's Regata Storica, and who's rowed since the age of five, is also an avid and excellent skier.

For as much as this surprised me, for as much as I'd assumed a Venetian with generations of saltwater coursing through his bloodlines would be as ill at ease on a ski slope as a lion in the arctic, the Dolomites and South Tyrol actually play an integral part in many if not most Venetians' lives. They ski them in the winter, they flee to them in the summer from the hot heavy air of their native city. Indeed, one of the things that stamped us most indelibly as non-Venetians is the infrequency with which we took to the hills.

Last week we tried to rectify that. The area around Cortina--just 2 hours by car from Venice or over 3 hours by a combination of train and bus--is the obvious destination. And for any visitor to Venice intent on getting a sense of what it might actually be like to live here as a Venetian I'd suggest that a short jaunt in that direction is almost as important as getting out into the lagoon in some kind of boat. 

But we went slightly further afield, taking a train one hour to Verona, then transferring there to another one for the 90 minute ride to Bolzano. From Bolzano's city center, where the station is, it's just a 10 minute ride in a cable car, or a 25 minute car or bus ride--all hairpin turns and terraced vineyards--into the mountains.

Even before we'd reached Bolzano, though, a glimpse of a young man getting into the next train car wearing mustard-colored pants and a deep cranberry shirt signaled to me we were leaving the Italian peninsula behind. German colors, I thought--which is a bit hard to explain, and probably not worth the effort, aside from noting, in general, that one of the things by which you can identify the origin of a visitor to Venice is the color palette of their clothing. In every other feature (including the cut and style of their clothing) they may look as if they could be the resident of any Western country, but the colors they're wearing can sometimes place them as clearly as their passport.

A friend recently explained why this might be the case by telling me about a designer friend of hers who says the quality of light is so different between, say, Venice and Amsterdam, that each requires a whole different range of colors. The colors she uses in designs destined for northern Europe are entirely different from those she designs for sale in the south, and to mix up the palettes and their destinations would be, for the designer (and her clients), a disaster. For the very same azure and pale rose and saffron cloths, for example, that glow beneath the Mediterranean sun with all the subtlety of Giovanni Bellini's San Zaccaria altar piece supposedly take on a garish Barnum and Bailey circus look in the light of Amsterdam or London.

(Which, parenthetically, makes me wonder if some of those foreign pilgrims traveling to, say, India or Rome or Assisi might not confuse the particular quality of light in these places with enlightenment, muddling the spiritual with the aesthetic and sensual, mistaking as otherworldly a roseate glow having more to do with physics and optics and meteorology than any sacred text.)

Another difference between the South Tyrol and Venice is that food in the former region is much better than that in the latter--though no less expensive. Sandro, who after spending the last 5 of his 7 1/2 years of life in Venice is easily the most Venetian of us--with a Venetian's appetite for Venetian dishes that I find barely edible (for example, the briny, fishy pasta dish bigoli in salsa)--loved canerdli, the speck(ham)-flecked dumplings typical of the mountains.

And then, of course, there are the mountains themselves, which in their solid imposing immanence provide, perhaps, something of an existential respite for Venetians from the flat fluid glitter of their lagoon. For as much as the water of the lagoon protected Venetians for centuries from foreign invaders, the very flatness of their surroundings left them entirely exposed, with no forests or groves or hillocks or gullies for cover, beneath the vast dome of the sky, the unblinking eye of the heavens. Their response, ultimately was to brazen it up: if they had no choice but to be seen, they would create in their exposed position one of civilization's great spectacles--determined to dazzle and overwhelm the eye that they could, in any case, not avoid. Their architectural gestures tended to the grand and defiant, the theatrical, the haughty--even as, on the simplest level, they gave them something to hide within.

What a relief, then, must the mountains be to people with such a history! A region where questions of ascendancy and dominance are, quite literally, ones of elevation and topography. Situate your castle--or, as the case may be, your vacation home--atop just this particular strategic rise, well above the marauding hordes (of barbarians or tourists), open to the southern sun, sheltered from the north wind, and, most of all, with a lordly vantage point on all that lies open before and below you.

At least this is one way of looking at the relation between Venetians and the mountains that mean so much to them. I'll spare you any others for the time being. 

In any case, Sandro was impressed. So much so that he's begun a new campaign with unsettling similarities to one he waged (successfully) a few years back. As he once bemoaned our lack of a boat, he has now, since our return to Venice, taken up the following refrain: "We really need a house in the mountains. A lot of my friends have houses in the mountains..."

To him, a house in the mountains--like the boat before it--has now become an essential requirement of Venezianità, or Venetian-ness. He can't believe we don't have one: how can we bear with the deprivation? How can we show our faces in public here?

I try to explain to him a few things about the cost of houses as compared to that of small boats, as well as about the great rise in property value since the time most of his friends' forebears bought their mountain homes. I tell him he can buy a mountain home himself after he gets old enough to earn the money he plans on making with his mototopo trasporti business (a fleet of delivery boats for which he's already decided upon a name).

He half-listens, then returns to his campaign. 

And so it goes. Foreign parents sometimes like to imagine that a child brought up amid all the celebrated art and architectural splendors of Venice is bound to be a refined creature, full of the loftiest cultural aspirations, native to rarefied air. The realities of Venetian life, however, tend to be--as they have always been--much more earth-bound and material.