“Art is above politics,” goes the common fantasy here every year when the Biennale international art exposition is about to open.  Those who were especially inclined to say (or imagine) it were the directors of the event this year, who invited not only Russia, but Israel, to join the starring lineup.

This struck the public and various political and/or cultural figures or groups as a very bad idea, and they spoke out against permitting Russia and Israel to participate. (“Spoke out” is code for “Pussy Riot made huge scenes with their bare breasts at the Russian pavilion.”) The jury resigned en masse in protest, what with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine and all.  They have not been replaced.  Off to a great start.

In fact, a new term has appeared to describe the art/politics connection in Venice this year: “Artwashing.”  That’s harsh but makes its point.  Skipping the politics and heading straight to the art, the critic from The Guardian in London mentioned the “art that stinks.”  Not figuratively, but literally.  In a world in which pretentious euphemisms stand in for thought and communication, that was an invigorating change.  It turns out that some artists were focusing on the excretory, with the addition in some cases of perfumes that reinforce the atmosphere.  Belarus, for example, commissioned the creation of a perfume with its artwork that replicated the smell of a “freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, laid with rotting flowers.”  Is this art?  Politics?  Their mutant love child?

As far as I can see, politics has long since taken the Biennale hostage.  Participants have something to say, and then they call it art.  We even had a real protest, complete with riot-geared police and a police helicopter roaring overhead for hours.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The “pre-opening” week is an experience in itself, protests or no.  It began more or less on May 4, with the always entertaining international swarms of journalists, critics, maybe even some artists.  They descend in their thousands on Castello for an early look at what is sometimes referred to as “the Olympics” of the art world.  I get what they mean, but considering that Italy is  currently evaluating the usual damage — financial and environmental — that the Winter Olympics inflicted on the Italian Alps only two months ago, it’s a term I’d suggest avoiding.

Seeing as much of the activity is concentrated outside our front door, the week is an assortment of sensations brought by streams of journalists and art-world people.  The sound of many rolling suitcases at all hours, the plundered  supermarket shelves, the clogging of streets and bridges by people who have to stop to talk, to consult their phones, to look at each other, or just look around.  You get the feeling that it isn’t that they have stepped into your world, but that you’ve been somehow transported into theirs.

The official inauguration was Saturday, May 9, so for the next seven months (closing November 22) Venice will be chugging along powered by the engine of the Biennale.  Here is an assortment of images from the week.

Friday afternoon saw the big protest against Israel’s participation in the Biennale.  Not only did we have people here on the street, 20 national pavilions were closed because their staff was on strike in solidarity.  For the record, they were Austria, Belgium, Egypt, Lithuania, Catalonia, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Finland, The Netherlands, Ireland, Qatar, Malta, Cyprus, Ecuador, and the UK.

Just remember — and I’m not being sarcastic — the Biennale is better than Carnevale.  Because Carnevale is full of people dressing up and pretending to be something or someone they’re not.  The Biennale people aren’t pretending anything.  They’re absolutely serious about all this.

Last November 22 the passageway under the Procuratie Vecchie at the Piazza San Marco lit up with 12 glowing glass chandeliers.  Yes, I’m very late to this subject, but I do not go to the Piazza every day, nor do I subscribe to the “Murano Glass Daily Astonisher” (totally made up).

Late as I may be, the lamps will be shining until March 1, so there is still time to see them if you’re in the neighborhood.

This year is the third edition of an annual invitation-only exhibition, “Murano Illuminates the World,” to showcase the collaboration of international glass masters with Muranese “furnaces” who were given the assignment “chandeliers.”

I admire the technical and creative talent that the artist and glassmaster displayed in this extraordinary collaboration.  As for the appeal of any individual piece, opinions will certainly be respected.  The mystical meaning of each work is elucidated in the excellent report from “Venezia Today” online (translated by me).

So as a bonus, here is a picture of faith and courage and hope delivered straight from the plum tree near the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello.  Emboldened by the sunshine yesterday, the somewhat reasonable temperature and no serious wind, this tree decided to throw caution overboard and just start putting out leaves.  Lino says they’re flowers.  We’ll say “greenery.”  I wouldn’t ever have thought I’d wish I could be a like a plum tree, but today they have put new heart into me.

So I squash any negative “Hope it works out for you” thoughts directed by grinchy spirits at the end of January.  And the comment that’s even worse (addressed to the tree):  “I guess you know what you’re doing………” (in the classic undertone conveying “You have lost your last shred of sense or survival, don’t come crying to me when it all goes belly-up”).

Excelsior.

If anyone were to imagine that Venice is made only of stone, brick and water, I’d like to correct that notion. Here is a very limited assortment of flowers I’ve seen in or near Venice over the years and seasons.  Does it seem like a lot?  I could have done more.  They say that when “War and Peace” was on the verge of being published, Tolstoy suddenly cried out “A yacht race!  I left out a yacht race!”  In this case, I have left out the magnolia and plum and pomegranate and daisies…. I had to stop somewhere, as Tolstoy must also have regretfully realized.

This enchanting statement is often attributed to Dante Alighieri; I regret to say that no evidence supports this.  So rather than waste time grappling amongst a thousand footnotes for the truth let’s agree that the very talented Anon. wrote it.

It came to mind because of Sophie’s arrival across the canal from us on January 4.  I don’t know her; I haven’t seen (and, strange to say, haven’t even heard) her.  I only know that she’s a new neighbor and she has brought joy with her.

So in the spirit of Anon.’s poetic observation, here are a few glimpses over the years of these particular remnants of paradise scattered around here.  Flowers and stars will follow.

CHILDREN

I’m always on the lookout for the welcome ribbons.  Pink for girls, blue for boys, as you know.  They always make me feel a bounce of hope.

INTERLUDE: A summer stroll around Pellestrina, August 7, 2022.   I was there on a typically sweltering summer Sunday to watch the annual local Venetian rowing races.  With at least two hours to spare, I had plenty of time to lollygag.  This was not at all my first time to this lagoon outpost of some 3,000 souls, so I wasn’t expecting surprises.

But surprised I was, to discover that the Stork had been working overtime.  The number of ribbons I found tied to so many houses seemed almost like some sort of game.  I won’t hazard any theories as to why a regiment of births had marched through this modest municipality in early August, though I’d like to know what had happened during the preceding November.  Massive power outage — no TV but lots of candles?  A village-wide festival of wine or grappa that got out of hand?  Did a whole cohort make some crazy bet?  Is it a cult?  Articles continually come out lamenting Italy’s falling birth rate.  Maybe they should come to Pellestrina and test the water?

Years ago I read a little report in the Gazzettino.  The parish priest of Pellestrina — I’m pretty sure that’s where he was — had just happily celebrated the baptism of a new arrival.  And he asked, “Why do we ring the church bells only when someone dies? We ought to ring them too when a baby is born.”

He’s not wrong.

The young man in the Coop supermarket yesterday was either a new kind of tourist, or a new kind of young man, or some prototype of either that I earnestly hope doesn’t move to the production phase.

It was simple, brief, insignificant encounter.  Now that I think of it, the moment could have made a moderately useful sketch for first-year acting students.

But we weren’t acting, we (including him) were just living our own banal little lives, stuck in the narrow, crowded aisle amid bottles of olive oil, cans of tuna, and containers of tomatoes in almost every form (the tomatoes, I mean) — tubes of dense concentrate, bottles of thick liquid passata, or puree; cans of tomatoes peeled or pulped.  Strange, now that I think of it, that tomato juice was missing.

Anyway, it’s always a challenge to shop in peak tourist season, and going late Saturday afternoon is just asking for trouble.  Not only does everybody suddenly realize they have to get yogurt or potato chips or a bag of lemons or 8 six-packs of beer or whatever right then, but it being winter, everybody is taking up twice their space thanks to their bulky down jackets.  Especially that tall, strapping young man with his back turned to me.

There was only one package left of three small cans of polpa, and it was far back on the top shelf.  Bonus points because at that spot there is a small ramp and I was halfway down the incline, so I had no chance of reaching it myself.  But I came for the polpa and I intended to get it.

Cue the tall, strapping young man!  Destiny calls!  You haven’t reached this height and weight just to waste time training for the varsity clean and jerk.  Fate has placed you between a high shelf and a small woman and if you mess with fate you’re doomed to live the last act of “The Flying Dutchman” forever.  I guess that’s a little redundant.

Did I mention he was German?  Nothing against Germans, honestly, but somehow it matters.  It went like this:

Me (one tap on very high shoulder).

He turns around.  So far, so normal.

“Puoi tirare giu’ quello?” (pointing to distant object).

“I don’t speak Italian.”  English, German accent.

“Could you pull that down for me?”  In most of the civilized world — I use the term loosely — that’s generally regarded as a rhetorical question.  But here I get a sublimely literal answer.

“Why?  I don’t work here.”  Completely serious.  I already knew that he didn’t work here — it’s the “Why?” that haunts me.  I will always regret not having thought to say “Neither do I.”  Instead I just said “Do me a favor?”  I’m so lame.

He reached up and pulled it down.  Turned away.  Moved on.

I started to laugh, it was so ridiculous.  I hope he heard me.

And so now I dream of Germany, where life is beautiful all the time, you obey the law, follow the rules, stay in your lane, where life is constructed entirely of square pegs and round holes which always fit in their correct and corresponding spaces.  This young man must feel like he’s come to a madhouse, here in Italy.

Still, he did leave me a present.  “Why?  I don’t work here” now sits in a very pretty little crystal box in my mind where I can admire it whenever I need a little boost.

Naturally I intended to get this out before Christmas, but Christmas itself tangled me up.  (Pretty bold move to blame an entire holiday for my own lapses.)  Still, I wanted to squeak this into the calendar before 2025 reaches its expiration date.

Just a few glimpses of what I saw as I wandered around.  Seems like the holiday was composed mainly of scraps, but they were good scraps.

Heartfelt best wishes to everyone for a peaceful, healthy, safe, nutritionally balanced, philosophically harmonious 2026.

The wodewose is not some tiny creature burrowing into the walnut paneling.  It’s the Middle English term for a character that has been around since the ancient of days: The “wild man,” or Wilder Mann, homme sauvage, or in Italian uomo selvadego, “forest man” (the same etymology of wodewose).  If anyone is keeping track, this personage was first seen as “Enkidu” in the Epic of Gilgamesh c. 2100 BC.

The forest man (sometimes a woman) was well-known in the art and literature of medieval Europe.  They are generally shown as large, covered with hair, and living in the wilderness or woods.  They usually wield a club or hold an uprooted tree as a staff.  They’re more of a mountain phenomenon; you don’t tend to see them around Venice.

All this wondering started one morning when I was innocently loitering in Campiello Santa Maria Nova and noticed what I supposed to be a very hairy Bembo perched on his eponymous palace.  Note to self: If you’ll just put your dang phone away for a few minutes and look around, Venice is one place in the world where you can count on discovering something a little, or even a lot, wild.

Giovanni Matteo Bembo (1491-1570) was reasonably remarkable, but that seems not to be why he commissioned this monument.  This is not a literal portrait, you understand; it may represent Saturn, or Time.  He was known to be very interested in alchemy, and this construction contains recognizeable references, not only for the depiction of an old man but the scallop-shell shape of the top of the niche, and the shell beneath the marble tablet at his feet.  Alchemists used the scallop shell as a coded sign of recognition among them, symbolizing their search for universal consciousness. Or so I’ve been told.

I’m all for mythic elements, but patting yourself on your back was very un-Venetian; whatever you did was for the glory of Venice, not you.  The inscription at his feet gives the game away.

Interpretation: “As long as the sun turns around the poles, the cities of  Iadera (Zadar), Ascrivium (Kotor), Iustinopolis (Capodistria), Verona (Verona), Salamis (Cyprus), and Creta Iovis (Crete, the cradle of Jove) will testify to his actions (Actorum).”  The final four abbreviations are for the names Paolo Iovio, or Giovio, and Sebastiano Munstero, who in their histories had mentioned Bembo’s accomplishments.

Alchemy aside, Bembo was a conscientious and capable administrator.  As governor of Heraklion, the capital city of Crete (“the cradle of Jove”), he showed himself at his best.  Between 1552-54 he built not only the city’s first aqueduct but also this lovely and very useful fountain in Cornaro Square.  It was the first time that running water was seen in the city, so big respect to him for this.  Anyone who has ever spent a blazing summer day in Greece doesn’t need to be told what a glorious thing this fountain was.  Note: Undoubtedly there was water already in the city, probably via wells.  Not fountains.

But back to our man on his plinth.

Why so hairy?  The wodewose represents the Id, the indomitable antagonist of culture, civilization, rationality, and his pelt perfectly symbolizes his animalistic nature.  Unfettered, untrammeled, un-whatever you want.  He is humanity’s natural self — raw strength, passion, aggression — the opposite of civilized society, but also embodying deep, primal energy, an image of our darker, instinctual side.  You know — before razors.

I’m glad I discovered a worthy Venetian and his equally worthy alter ego.  A day without learning something useless is a day just thrown away.  And I’m guessing that woodwoses (wosi?) throw nothing away.

Fiber optic cable is no newcomer to Venice — we’ve had it at home for years now.  But clearly our neighborhood is on track for extreme upgrading to intergalactic ultra-fast ultra-wide broadband.  Venice might give the impression (briefly, from afar, with your eyes half-closed) of a city left adrift in the backwash of the Renaissance.  Yet men have been hard at work these past few days making Venice ever more modern.  And I say thanks, but Venice has always been modern.

Today progress in Venice takes so many forms, though by now they’re not what you might call surprising or original.  But over the centuries Venice became rich and powerful in large part because it was alert to innovation of many different sorts.

On the social side, the Venetian government passed a law in 1258 requiring doctors, even the most illustrious, to treat poor patients for free.  Shocking then, perhaps still somewhat startling.  In 1443 the government guaranteed the services of a lawyer to poor defendants at no charge; the lawyer would be chosen by a judge from among the best lawyers in Venice (no fobbing the case off on your newest recruit) and was required to follow the case with maximum care or risk a large fine.  That’s become normal, I think, in concept if not in practice.  I don’t know about fines today, though.

On the commercial side, the Venetians established the Patent Statute on March 19, 1474, now considered the earliest codified patent system in the world.  These patents were granted for “any new and ingenious device, not previously made,” provided it was useful.

However “useful” may have been defined, suddenly useful was everywhere: Between 1500 and 1600 Venice granted 593 patents.  (In the same period the Kingdom of France granted 100.)  By 1788, Venice had certified 1896 patents.

Speaking of useful, pharmacists were forbidden to sell their medicines without a doctor’s prescription.  If this is normal now, credit goes to the old Venetians to whom quality control was an obsession.  Maybe they loved quality for itself, but control ensured that their myriad products were not only good, but reliable, hence valuable.  It was always all about money.

No, they didn’t invent money.  But the Venetian gold ducat, later called the zecchino, became arguably the closest thing to what you might call a monetary “gold standard” for 500 years.  The coin maintained a consistent weight (approximately 24 carats) and high gold purity (99.7 percent) from 1284 to 1797.  Venice’s strong trading network ensured the zecchino’s circulation throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, from the Netherlands to India.  It is the only coin in the world that retained, for the over five centuries of its uninterrupted existence, the same images, the same epigraphs, the same weight and the same purity of the metal.  I sometimes complain that in Venice money is king, but that’s freaking impressive.

Back to fiber optic cables.  Ninety percent of Venice and its satellite towns and hamlets are served by FTTC connections, while 79 percent has FTTH and the by-now quaint but still serviceable ADSL covers 99 percent.  If you’d like to know more, here’s Open Fiber.

So progress jackhammers on.  The bridge has been left with scars from the intervention, because there are rectangles of cement where stone used to be and I cannot understand it.  We have ultra-fast broadband, but we also still have people who just carry things off, things that aren’t even theirs.  Doesn’t feel like progress to me.

I started this post with glowing eyes looking toward the future, and I indulged myself by recalling a smattering of examples of Venetian greatness.  But here we are today.  You’ve got your interstellar communications cables, and you’ve got steps now made of concrete where a week ago there was stone.

It’s not that I go out looking for trivia, it just seems to drift into my lane.  And by the way, I’m not convinced that “trivia” deserves its negative connotations.  Mount Everest is made of atoms, after all, and it appears that much of life is composed of trivia.

There once was a cemetery in the campo next to the basilica of Saints Giovanni and Paolo.  Plenty of churches here had cemeteries, but these dear departed weren’t Venetians. They were Ledrensi, people from the Ledro valley near Lake Garda.  (Not to classify them as trivia.)  Six hundred years ago they had become so important to Venice and its Arsenal that they were given many important privileges, up to and including their own burial ground.  I can’t tell you why the Ledrensi would have chosen to spend eternity here rather than their home parish up in the mountains, but let’s be impressed that the Venetian government wanted to bestow this honor on them.

The people in the Ledro Valley enjoyed a few important advantages — geography, for one thing. The valley offered the fastest route between the area near Lake Garda and Brescia, and this was of huge strategic importance to Venice during the war with the Visconti, the lords of Milan.  (Of course you remember the Lombard Wars that went on for an invigorating 31 years from 1423 to 1454.)  Furthermore, the Ledrensi fought for Venice in a few important battles up in their valley.  As early as 1426 doge Francesco Foscari, in recognition of their valor, granted them various benefits and exemptions that were confirmed in 1440 and 1445.  Venetian troops remained in the Ledro valley till 1509.

But the Ledrensi’s greatest advantage was their forests.  Venetian archives show that from the 1200’s there were workers in Venice from the Ledro valley, but by the 1500’s the relationship had evolved.  Venice depended on the Ledro valley for the resin tapped from the area’s larch and Scots pine.  By  the 1600’s the town of Tiarno di Sopra had become famous for its clay ovens that transformed the resin into pitch, essential for caulking the ships in the Arsenal.

More and more men of Ledro — also referred to as the Trentina Nation, as coming from the area near Trento — began to migrate to Venice to work.  They were allowed to work as bastasi and cargadori (porters and stevedores) in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the association of the Germanic merchants.  Even more important, they worked in the Arsenal as segadori (sawyers reducing tree trunks to planks for building ships), and as ligadori, exclusively responsible for loading and unloading of the ships in the Arsenal.  And of course, as caulkers.  Some of these men didn’t return to the mountains but stayed in Venice permanently, becoming better-off certainly than they’d been back home.

I suppose it’s not strange that they’d have wanted to be interred in Venice, which had been for some a sort of Promised Land.   At least we still have the lintel.

This hidden jewel of Venetian history was carefully explained on a site I discovered by chance, and I offer sincere admiration to its creator.  His name is Alfonso Bussolin and his life’s work is Conoscere Venezia (know Venice).  If you read Italian you’re going to have a fabulous time wandering around this man’s research.