A couple of days ago I saw a water taxi go past the
vaporetto I was in with a coffin strapped to the back and the widow sitting
next to it; today I saw a bride being helped into a taxi, train and all, on the
Grand Canal, and further down saw the groom waiting on the landing where the ceremony
was evidently going to take place (fixing his hair in a window; he must have
been Italian)! Now all I need to see is
someone giving birth and I’ll really believe everything here happens on the
water. It’s still a little surprising to
see someone go zipping past in a crappy little skiff, talking on their cell
phone while zig-zagging between bigger boats.
I mean, if you mentally shift the vehicles to cars it’s nothing strange
at all, just city traffic, but when you see a vaporetto gliding confidently
through the water with just a tiny distance between it and one of the biggest
ocean liners you’ve ever seen, it’s impossible to make a comparison to our way
of life. I mean, cars aren’t moving
within a medium that can buffet them about at will like a boat. I keep waiting to see a gondola that has just
cut precipitously in front of a
vaporetto get overturned, but those gondoliers are quite skilled at keeping the
boat afloat.
On Thursday I was exploring the quietest district of Venice,
Cannareggio, where you can walk for minutes at a time with no sound but your
own footfalls and the slap of the boats bumping the sides of the canals. I went
to a bunch of churches as well as the Jewish Ghetto. All of Venice is made up of tiny islands, but
this one had only one way in or out, back in the 15th century. It was the iron foundry, and gettare is the verb they use for
ironwork, so its name was the ghetto, which it then passed to other
neighborhoods where Jews lived, like Warsaw.
Medieval Venice was in one way more accommodating to the Jews than other
European cities, since they let them in when they were being expelled elsewhere,
but they also forced them to live in the ghetto and to pay for Christian guards
who guarded the bridge after nightfall, in addition to having to wear special
clothing and other restrictions typically placed on them. The result of this crowding is that the
Ghetto has some of the first high-rise apartment buildings in the world—some are
eight stories tall. A plaque on one of
the walls commemorates the two hundred Venetian Jews who were handed over to
the Nazis during WWII. Most of the shops
and restaurants there now cater to Jewish tourists; there was even a Jewish
hotel.
A little later that afternoon, I was standing on a bridge at
Fondamenta Nuova (so-named because they literally added land to the city’s
northern edge in the 16th century by dredging the lagoon) looking at
the cemetery island of S. Michele, and reached for my camera to take a
picture. La camera non c’e’. I frantically
tried to remember when I had last taken a picture, and realized I took a
picture of myself (awkward, I know, but I don’t want to be totally without record
of myself in these photos!) in front of S. Maria dell’Orto before I sat down on
a secluded stoop off to one side of the piazza to have a snack, nearly thirty
minutes or so earlier. I realized I must
have left my brand-new, $400 camera just sitting there like candy to a
thief. I was so fucking pissed at
myself, as I literally raced through the calli
and back alleys that make Venice so frustratingly picturesque—they wind, they
stop, they abruptly become a gated courtyard with no exit, etc. etc. Cute when you’re wandering, incredibly
frustrating when you’re trying to get somewhere that is not that far away, as
the crow flies, but which seems eternally distant. In the end, I raced into the piazza to
discover my camera sitting innocently on the stoop where I’d left it! Thank God I’d decided to visit the
least-touristed corner of Venice that morning, because probably only a handful
of people had been around in my absence, and no one apparently noticed, or at
least wanted to steal the camera. Crisis
averted. I will be more careful in the
future, you’d better believe it.
After that I decided to head over to S. Michele. The church, designed by Mauro Codussi, was
closed, but the cemetery itself was peaceful and full of cypress trees, making
it a rarity on the skyline of the lagoon.
The cemetery goes back to the 19th century (maybe 18th?)
and is still being used today, so no pictures were technically allowed. While most of the monuments lacked the
personality of the cimitero accatolico
in Rome, still one of my favorite places, there were some I still found moving,
like the tomb of a 15 year old Swiss boy who died on a trip to Venice in the 19th
century, or the monument to the mother and sister who perished in some kind of
boating accident on the Lido (the slab was quite specific). Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky are buried
there, although I didn’t manage to find either.
I noticed a couple of things about Italian graves of more recent
vintage: they all include photographs of
the deceased behind glass, and the slabs frequently record who put the stone
there: “your grieving wife,” or “your inconsolable mother,” some of which
seemed to be trying to out-grieve the ones around them, I swear. Why don’t we do the photographs? I think it would be nice. Most people had photos of themselves in old
age, but quite a few had photos of them in their prime. I couldn’t decide which I’d choose. Is it vanity to want to be remembered
young?
Yesterday was the day of my internet quest, so most of the
day was tied up therein. The afternoon I
spent on Burano—or rather, most of my afternoon was spent getting to and from
Burano, which is about an hour away, not because it’s distant but because the
boats go at a snail’s pace! I didn’t
need to spend much time there because I’d forgotten, from my one previous visit
with our school in 2006, that there is nothing on Burano but candy-colored
fisherman’s houses and shops selling Burano lace. I mean, it was pretty, but I probably could
have just looked at my photos from then and saved myself two hours on a ferry!
This morning I left early to get to San Marco before the
crowds. Alas, they don’t open the church
till 945, shockingly late considering it’s the number one tourist attraction,
and I got there at 845. People were
already lined up outside to wait, but I decided to go through the Palazzo
Ducale, which was pleasantly scarce of tourists at the early hour. From there I went toward the public gardens,
bought some cherries from a quayside vendor, and read the Corriere della Sera
on a park bench. Then I went to the
technical cathedral of Venice, S. Pietro in Castello, banished to the fringes
of the city (people think San Marco is the cathedral, but it’s really just the
doge’s chapel, which gives you an idea of where the Republic saw the institution
of the Church relative to their own authority), walked by the Arsenale, the
great boatyard of the Venetian Republic, and then decided I might head back to
the Lido to eat lunch and then return to try to slip into S. Marco after
evening crowds had left. When I made my
way to a vaporetto stop, however, I found there was nothing doing; because of
the America’s Cup regatta, which according to the paper brought 80,000 people
to the quays to watch, all the vaporetti to the Lido were cancelled till
evening. I was rather annoyed. I don’t know what the hell those people
thought they were watching (you could see the sails in the distance, but not a
whole lot else, unless you were lucky enough to be on a boat or floating
stadium—there was one--in the bay), but it definitely felt like 80,000 as I
fought my way from the Arsenale stop all the way past piazza S. Marco. I was already tired by this point, and
hungry, but somehow I found myself walking all the way to the top of Dorsoduro
looking for a likely place to eat. I
still haven’t had a sit-down restaurant or café meal yet, mostly because I don’t
really want to eat alone, surrounded by hordes of noisy tourists and noisier
Italians, but I was so tired and hungry that I bought another, different paper
and decided to find a place and brave it.
Ultimately I actually stopped in a pizza joint that happened to have a
couple of chairs, so certainly nothing fancy, but they were actually nice to me—the
guy smiled!—which is so rare that I’m going to go back if I’m in the
neighborhood.
It ended up taking me two hours to get home, since the
vaporetti were absolutely crowded once they started running again. It’s only 9pm and I’m exhausted!
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