Friday, February 20, 2015

Late Afternoon in Natural Sepia


I added a vignette to the above image taken this afternoon, but the combination of a haze over the lagoon and the sun created the sepia tint.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Carnevale and the Cult of Confetti

A criminal leaves his pursuing police officer in a wake of coriandoli
Childhood is in the details.

Perhaps this is obvious, I don't know. But it occurred to me recently that as much as we adults might, in depicting childhood, get caught up in the sweep and swoon and sentiment and swim of it all, in lighting effects and filters and all the rest, the thrills of childhood for the child himself or herself often reside in the most concrete things--whose appeal often eludes full adult comprehension.

The thing that occasioned these thoughts is coriandoli, or confetti.

I don't think I'm the only adult--or at least not the only American adult--who might be surprised by how important a role this stuff plays in Venetian kids' sense of Carnevale. Based upon my own seven-year-old son, I've been tempted to think at times this year that confetti ranks almost as high as costumes in the festivities for kids.

An adult visiting Venice during Carnevale could easily miss confetti's centrality completely. Though once your attention is called to it you'll notice bags of coriandoli displayed for sale in every window of every tabaccheria selling the variety of cheap plastic disguises--fake eyeglasses with bulging eyeballs or a huge nose, over-sized plastic ears--aimed at local kids, not tourists in search of stereotypically "Venetian" masks (even if made in China).

In the weeks leading up to Carnevale Sandro talked much more excitedly about the coriandoli and the neon-colored goopy string-stuff sprayed out of a can than costumes. Of course this is one of the great benefits of living in a place where certain things are rigorously, and by common agreement, limited to certain constricted periods of the year: scarcity and narrow associations greatly enhance their appeal. I suppose a child could toss handfuls of confetti on Via Garibaldi in December, but he'd generally be considered to be littering by most passing adults, who'd direct a suitably damning look at his parents. (Just as in non-tourist areas of Italy, such as the small Piemonte village we lived outside of for three months, the prohibition against a gelateria/pasticceria beginning to make gelato too early in April--when the weather is "troppo freddo"--has the weight of a moral absolute.)

Perhaps it's only because confetti played no role at all in my own childhood that I've been so surprised by its importance here. (Would it have been just too hard to clean up in a place with lawns rather than paving stones?) But it seems to have been a central element of Italian Carnevale for a long time. Indeed, the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne explicitly equates the one with the other when he writes about his 1858 experience of Carnevale in Rome (in Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks):
Soon I had my first experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my face...
In fact it really does seem in Hawthorne's account that the throwing of confetti and other supposedly harmless materials really is the main point of the Carnevale festivities in Rome. So much so that costumes are valued only so far as they provide protection from assault, like armor at a medieval jousting tournament. Hawthorne writes:
Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the face were a protection for both sexes,—not a needless one, for I received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears. It seems to be a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English) not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies. We had one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T——— was there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a handful of lime. Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums. Possibly we may not have received our fair share of these last salutes, for J——- had on a black mask, which made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti that we might otherwise have escaped. A good many bouquets were flung at our little R——-, and at us generally.... This was what is called masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the great majority of people appeared without them....
So, in Rome at that time they threw not only confetti, but flowers, sugar-plums, "winged seeds" (blown from a straw), "something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower" (which hits Hawthorne on another day) and lime. This last is interesting for a few reasons:

1. It is traditionally thrown upon the corpses in mass graves, which makes it an appropriately morbid harbinger of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season that Carnevale precedes and prepares for.

2. Hawthorne recounts a few pages later that it was almost exclusively English and Americans who threw lime--and whom received police summons for doing so, as it was not considered an acceptable material to launch at one's fellows (despite, or perhaps because of, #1 above).

3. It reminds me of the baking flour that a native Venetian friend told me was a problem during the first couple years after Carnevale's official re-introduction here in 1980. It seems in those rowdier first years roving gangs of youths would pelt costumed revelers with flour and rotten eggs. While certainly in keeping with the anarchic origins of carnival, this wasn't at all appreciated, and by the third year local authorities had cracked down on such aggression.

But aggression, I've learned firsthand, remains an elemental part of carnival. Not that you'd know it, fortunately, on any given afternoon these days in Piazza San Marco, when perhaps as many as two dozen elaborately costumed folks (or more) are posing for hoards of happy shutterbugs.

No, you need to happen upon a kids' celebration of Carnevale in one of the lesser campi, or within the confines of a patronato (parish hall), or on Via Garibaldi, where the coriandoli still flies, and is flung fiercely--as often as merrily--as part of helter-skelter games of chase.

Note how thrilled the kids are to launch volleys of coriandoli at adults--either their own or the parents of others. As masks traditionally subverted the established social hierarchy by concealing identity and one's "proper" or usual place, so coriandoli still gives kids the chance to upend their usual power relationship with adults, becoming physically aggressive toward them with impunity (for the most part). 

And as Carnevale was traditionally a period of excess immediately preceding the sober privations of Lent, so a chief pleasure of coriandoli seems to be the extravagant squandering of it. For any parent in the habit of forecasting how long a given toy is likely to engage a child it comes as quite a shock to find that the large bag of coriandoli you've bought for a party--as directed by the invitation--is basically emptied as soon as you've opened it.

The cookies or beverages one might usually bring to a kids' party would have lasted longer!

For before I'd even finished greeting the host of a party last weekend in Campo San Giacomo dall'Orio Sandro was returning the large empty bag to me. "I didn't even get to see you throw it!" I said to him, imagining, in my naivete, that the whole point of coriandoli was the spectacle of its bright abundant colorful drift through the air, the children capering quaintly beneath it.  

But I soon learned two things. First, that a chief pleasure of coriandoli seems to be in the recycling of it. Of gathering up handfuls of it from the paving stones and setting off in pursuit of your target

And, second, that coriandoli, really, is the Carnevale version of those old cream pies in silent films. Each finding its proper comical end in its delivery to some victim's face or head. Even--or especially!--my own.

In any case, what I've come to like about coriandoli is the fact that these days a few stray colored dots of paper turn up absolutely everywhere. I don't mean the dusting of them in calli or campi--though I like seeing them there, too--but in the more intimate places of one's life. On the floor of our apartment, or clinging to our furniture. Two or three of them under the covers of our bed. A good dozen of them in one pocket of my coat, a couple more in the other. One in the chest pocket of my shirt, a few more in my bag.

I like how they turn up unexpectedly even after you think you've made a good thorough cleaning of your place or person. Dots of pleasant recent memories, bits of experiences. Reminders of small things which, if I'm lucky, I'll never forget.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Some Views of Carnevale, Piazza San Marco, Yesterday Afternoon


I walked around Piazza San Marco yesterday to have a look at the people in costumes and the many more people with cameras who photograph them. It was a beautiful afternoon and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, the people with cameras perhaps even more than those in costumes, as far I could tell. For the enjoyment of the unmasked folks with cameras was evident, while those completely concealed behind masks and other elaborate ornamentation, well, who knows how they were feeling? I assume they were also having fun.

Some of the people in costume know other people in costume, and it added to the sense of festiveness to see groups of them running into each other and chatting in their various guises, speaking German or French or English. 

It wasn't till I left the Piazza and was on my way elsewhere that I was struck by how much this most Venetian of festivities is, for the most part, a foreign affair, especially in and around Piazza San Marco. Which is fine, as I think most of the people who come to Venice for Carnevale are the best kind of visitors Venice could ask for: people who stay overnight in the city, and think about the city and its customs, and have a real affection for both, rather than those 75% of the city's visitors who merely tramp through the city for just a few hours, doing more damage en masse than their scant expenditures in the city pay for. 

But as pleasant as the whole scene was, something about it unsettled me a bit--I didn't know what. Then it hit me: Never before had I found myself thinking of the Piazza San Marco so much as a convention center. One of those vast empty spaces in which events are staged: cat shows, or dog shows, or car or boat or (in America) gun(!) shows, or annual meetings of divorce lawyers or accountants or computer salesmen.

Perhaps this sense of things is unavoidable in a city in which the vast majority of city's shrinking population of residents no longer participates in festivities in the Piazza. It reminded me of something the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1858 about a festival he witnessed in Florence, after experiencing Carnevale in Rome: 
But the Feast of St John [in Florence], like the Carnival, is but a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death of centuries. It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to keep its holidays alive.
Of course this is not the fault of the visiting revelers in and around Piazza San Marco, and it's not up to them to do anything about it. In fact, one might easily say they are doing all they can for the city by staying in the city and bringing costumed life into it.

No, it's not the visitors' fault, but those with power in the city and the region who themselves seem to prefer a convention center to a city.

But forgive me for going on about such things again. My sense of things is no doubt influenced by the fact that our son needs to see an optometrist and to do so he must travel to Mestre. With only "half of a hospital" in Venice itself (as my physician puts it), even the most basic medical needs often require a trip to the mainland.

Of course, why would one ever expect to find an optometrist in a convention center? 




Photographers--lots of them--are ever-present at Carnevale, like this one (which is not me) reflected in the glass of Florian

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Don't Look Now: A Frogman in a Canal on Sunday

A scuba diver--just visible above the gondolier's hat--in a canal near the church of I Frari
It's not often in the course of going around Venice that I find myself reminded of the Nicholas Roeg/Julie Christie/Donald Sutherland film Don't Look Now, at least not during the day. For while the city is, sadly, far less populated these days, the buildings--including famous ones such as the "jewel-box" church of Miracoli--tend to be far better maintained, their facades nowhere near as sooty as they are in the 1973 film. Nor is the city saturated in the eery brown and pea-soup green look of  cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond's Venice.

A frame from the 1973 film Don't Look Now
But Sunday, on the way to a kids' Carnevale party in Campo San Giacomo dall'Orio, Sandro and I happened upon a fire boat in a canal near the church of I Frari, its crew focused on a scuba diver in the water nearby, and I flashed back (though with nothing like the trauma involved in Donald Sutherland's flashbacks in the movie) to a scene in the film involving a scuba diver. (Actually two scuba divers, as you can see in the still at right).

Considering it's a corpse that is brought out of the water in the film, I wasn't sure we should linger and watch what the firemen were busying themselves about. But we have a friend in the fire department here and based upon what he's told me it's much more likely the Venetian FD is called upon to bring a cat (or iguana, as you can read here: http://some-tails-of-venice-fire-department) down out of a tree than a corpse up out of the water.

So we stuck around and, as happens anytime you stop and look at anything in Venice, other passersby stopped and watched, too. (Try it: people are so primed to look in Venice that you need only stop off to one side of a tourist thoroughfare, stare at a blank wall, and you'll soon have company). Then a gondoliere with his fares arrived and, finding his usual route blocked by the fire boat, stopped and watched. Then another gondoliere and his passengers, who also was told to stop by the firemen--as the water taxi in which Sutherland rides in another scene in the film is blocked by police detectives in a small canal.  

After a few minutes the two gondolieri got tired of waiting and set off in the direction they'd come from. There was still no indication of what the firemen and scuba diver were up to. There was nothing happening at all, really, as far as we could see, except for the frogman disappearing beneath the water for short periods of time, then reappearing. Sandro wanted to get to his kids' party and I'd gone through whatever frisson was available to me in watching a scene in real life that recalled a scene in a film.

How much of what we are able to see, or notice, or recognize, or value is determined by what we've seen before? Almost everything, I sometimes think, even if the precursor is a cinematic scene of death and you have, in the present, your vibrant child beside you.

And so we resumed our course to the party, to a small ragtag eruption of life in a city of art.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Behind the Mask of Carnevale: A Bit on Schools in Venice

Venice is a great place to be a child, but one with very limited quality educational options
We recently were notified by the public school our son attends here in Venice that his second grade class next year will be sticking to the same three half-day two full-day weekly schedule it follows this year. We were pleased to hear this, as we saw no need to increase the number of full days each week to three for second graders, as had been discussed as a possibility.

We were not pleased to find out, though, that the decision was not based upon any pedagogical considerations. No, the educators believed the third full day was necessary, but it turned out that there was simply no money in the city budget to pay for staffing it. 

This is the reality of living in the "fairy tale city" of Venice.

Last year parents literally took to the streets more than once in public marches to protest the fact that budget cuts to school maintenance had left the schools so filthy that some literally had to be closed as unfit for classes.

Of course nation-wide Italy already spends the least on education of any EU country (http://www.ansamed.info/italy-bottom-in-european-education-spending-ranking-report). Not surprising, perhaps, in a country run for nearly two decades by Silvio Berlusconi. For in the blithely cynical and remorselessly corrupt world view of Berlusconi, in which (to use a line from Eugene O'Neill) "every man is a knave with his soul for sale, and every woman who isn't a whore is a fool," what use, really, is education?

But Venice has its own particular problems. As Ana Somers Cocks has diligently reminded whomever will listen, the federal money that once came to Venice for the special maintenance required in a city like this (592 million euros in 2002) has been reduced to less than 1/20th of that amount. If it shows up at all (http://www.nybooks.com/2013/jun/20/coming-death-venice/).

The rest of the funds from Rome have been poured into the great slop trough that is the MOSE mobile tidal barrier project: a trough surrounded by a legion of ravenous venal swine whose behavior might shock even Dante, familiar though he was with characters who richly merited a spot in the lowest depths of hell. (See Venetian artist Elena Tagliapietra's recent site-specific performance piece depicting corruption as the new plague on the city: http://www.thevenicetimes.com/new-plague-in-venice.)

Indeed, one might argue that this Grand Project to, purportedly, save the city has done more to kill it as a city for residents than any of the lagoon's well-documented economic environmental challenges. Of the 5.6 billion euros funneled into the project, it has been estimated that as much as 1 billion was siphoned off for graft.

That was not a typo: at least 1 billion euros swallowed up by corruption.

(And, incidentally, I saw that Matteo Renzi was recently in California's Silicon Valley, hat in hand, talking up Italy as an excellent destination for investors. Good luck with that, Matty. See: http://www.ft.com/italian-corruption-scares-off-investors)

Oh, and by the way, the barrier gates that will save the city from high tides are nowhere near functional. Their operational date has been pushed off, once again, until 2017. And, of course, billions of euros more will be needed to meet even that deadline.

Or to not meet it. As, really, deadlines come and go here without consequences, just as large criminals pursue their crimes, and are arrested, also without any consequences. More than 100 people were arrested last spring, including the head of the powerful Consorzio Venezia Nuova (Giovanni Mazzacurati), a conglomerate of companies with a monopolistic no-bid right to all MOSE contracts, but who has gone to jail? The mayor of Venice lost his job for corruption, but his punishment was nothing more than a few days of house arrest.

Mazzacurati himself, called "the mastermind" of the system of corruption, has been deemed too old to serve a prison term even if he were convicted of anything.

But Venetian children are not the only ones profoundly affected by this criminality at the highest levels. For while they must make do with schools of dubious quality--finding a good school in Venice is quite difficult--other residents, including the city's large elderly population, must make do with what my Venetian physician bitterly refers to as "half of a hospital."

And we are lucky to have that. Only a concerted opposition by determined citizens was able to change the regional government's plan to essentially close Venice's hospital and move most of it to the mainland.

In other words, for all the choreographed evocations and celebration of Venetian culture on offer to visitors (for a price) during Carnevale, it's pretty easy for residents to feel that those with real power over the city not only care nothing for those who live here full-time, but would find the city much more profitable and efficient if we were gone completely.

A city devoid of actual residents would mean no more money "wasted" on educating children, on facilities for the sick or aged. All the big money of transporting tourists to and from the city--on big ships, on planes, trains, buses, lancioni (the large boats that shuttle tour groups from outlying landing areas to the city center)--could still be made, all the things people come to see would see be here.        

Indeed, a city of commuting employees, not residents, seems, ultimately, to be the implicit ideal for most of those with power, whatever they may sometimes sentimentally, even operatically claim.

I sometimes think about what could be done for the city with just the 1 billion euros that went to corruption--not to mention the other 4.6 billion or so that supposedly found its way to legitimate MOSE-related uses (if any money toward MOSE can be considered well spent anymore). But then I remind myself that the criterion for a huge money project such as MOSE (and not only in Italy) is not whether it benefits citizens, or in this case "saves" the city of Venice, but whether the money ends up in the right well-connected hands and bank accounts. And in these terms, no doubt, MOSE has been a smashing--or should I say, crushing?--success.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Quiet Evening in Campo San Trovaso

Carnevale festivities may have begun Sunday night, but two nights later Campo San Trovaso was perfectly tranquil
  





Sunday, February 1, 2015

Carnevale Kicks Off With a Splash, or Two

This impressive performer balanced on, swam in, and (as you can see further below) leapt into in a Venetian-themed cup of coffee, complete with saucer and the half dozen or so sugar cubes Italians like to drink it with
The 2015 Carnevale officially began last night with the Festa veneziana sull' acqua, a parade of boats down the Cannaregio Canal. The theme was Il magico banquetto: una favola del cibo a Venezia (The Magic Banquet: A Fable of Food in Venice) , and though I can't tell you the first thing about the story that may have been being related by the passing floats, I can tell you that the various acrobats who cavorted about them--or, in the case of one, floated high above them--were quite entertaining.

It's a good (and obvious) idea to arrive a little early for this event. I did not and found myself taking photos above the heads of those lining the fondamenta in front of me, but it was one of the best spectacles I've seen for Carnevale. 

A giant onion floats above a transparent strawberry pulled by a swan a short distance from the crowded Ponte delle Guglie
I'm assuming the steaming brown liquid this performer cavorted in was tinted water, not actual espresso--but, then again, she did have amazing energy
A performer appears to dangle from a large balloon with an image of a festival of the glorious old Republic of Venice
In the front yard of what I came to think of as the Casa di Carbs, two pizza chefs admire their colleague's acrobatic way of spinning out a new pie
While from the back door of the Casa di Carbs, Miss Pastry tosses muffins to an appreciative crowd
A hot pepper barge plies the Cannaregio Canal in front of what is supposed to be a large pale olive floating above the mototopo celebrating that beloved fruit
Miss Peperoncino
Inside the transparent strawberry
Just a glimpse of this bacchus inspired me to stop for a vin brule before heading home
Catch of the evening