The announcement of her death, and funeral details, typically taped up on assorted walls. The portrait was made in 1997, when she was 76.

It’s a glorious spring morning, the sun is coruscating and the breeze is cool and the world is clean and happy.  Naturally I’d have to be going to a funeral.

By now I’ve gone to plenty of funerals, but they’ve always been people that Lino knew, whether I had made their acquaintance or not.  I’ve been here long enough now to go to funerals of my own.

Her full name was Countess Alma Lippi-Boncambi Messe di Casalpetraia.  I called her Signora Alma and had long since forgotten that she was a countess.  At the point I came to know her she was in her late 80s, and had accumulated enough physical problems that she needed a live-in, full-time caretaker: my friend and matron of honor, Anzhelika.

A few years ago she finally had to be installed in a long-term-care hospital (or whatever they’re called; it could have been a nursing home except that it seemed like a hospital to me). At that point Anzhelika had already planned a six-week trip home to Ukraine and was urgently seeking a temporary substitute to tend Alma from 10-12:30 and 3:30-6:30 every day except Sunday afternoon. I volunteered, and this became an annual engagement.  Last year I did this from January to August (time reduced to the afternoon only).

By then, of course, Signora Alma was loaded with what Italians call acciacchi (ah-CHAH-kee) — which literally means “afflictions,” but which usually refers to everything from a chronic cough to a bum knee, a bruised rib, extreme bunions, osteoporosis, cataracts, and so on. In short, physical deterioration which is assumed not to be fatal in itself but which degrades your life in various ways. I won’t list her assorted acciachi here because I don’t think any one of them carried her away, it was all of them together.  And besides, her extraordinary forceful character pushed her acciacchi up against the wall, where she told them to sit still and be quiet, except when she wanted to be pampered and coddled and there-there’d.

She was born in Trieste, the only child of older parents who were extremely unhappily married, slept in separate bedrooms and rarely spoke to each other.  Her mother was  jealous, suspicious, and domineering, and also psychopathically possessive. She accompanied her daughter  to school every day till Alma entered the University of Padova, but there she merely waited at home for her, watching the clock.

Alma’s salvation was her brain. By the time she was 13 she was already tutoring students in Latin, and making good money. She earned her doctorate degree in literature at the age of 22. She made a career of private instruction in Latin and Greek, following her own particular method which was clear, rigorous, and effective, as her former students attest.  They also attest to her total lack of tolerance for ignorance, verbal clumsiness, mental blundering, uncertainty, approximation, and any intellectual or personal trait that wasn’t first-class.

I know this because I was in her cross-hairs every day.  My mistakes in grammar would exasperate and even enrage her; I would come home exhausted from what amounted to private tutoring by a Marine drill sergeant. She forbade me to speak in Venetian; it had to be the language of the divine Dante, or nothing.  She couldn’t believe I couldn’t get rid of my American accent — I guess she thought it was either laziness or stupidity on my part, but she didn’t comment often, thank God. Though there was the time she was feeling poorly, and I asked if she’d like for me to read to her.  ”Per carita’!” she blurted, which in this case meant something like “Heaven forfend!” That stung.

My duties weren’t merely to keep her company. Her left arm was essentially useless at this point, so in the early days I bathed her eyes with boric acid, and wrangled her dentures — taking them out, scrubbing them, gluing them back in her mouth — and feeding her when she was laid up with one of her spells. It took years to learn how to put her glasses on JUST RIGHT.

But gradually we created a friendship.  She loved to talk about books, music and travel, and the hospital didn’t contain anybody who knew or cared about any of it.  I even made her quirks work for me. If I wanted to rouse her from one of her occasional afternoon torpors, I’d deliberately make some grammatical error and she’d leap to life, eyes aflame, like an old warhorse who had suddenly heard the distant trumpet call.  It was fabulous — it never failed. But unfortunately I made plenty of inadvertent mistakes and not a single one ever got a pass. When the last grim shades of senility close my brain down forever, the last thing flickering in there will be the words “lo scialle” — the shawl. I screwed that up often enough to drive her one day to shout it at me. That was an exciting and effective moment.

One of her greatest passions was for the classic Italian novel, “I Promessi Sposi,” by Alessandro Manzoni.  She nagged me for most of one year’s stint to read it.  It wasn’t a request, or a suggestion, it was an order.  I finally started the book just to get her to quit hounding me. After the first page, I was hooked.  And we had finally found a real connection.

When we went downstairs in the morning for a cup of hot chocolate from the vending machine, she would ask me how far I’d gotten, and we’d talk about the characters and what they were up to.  Then I’d start asking her to explain certain words to me.  I could have used the dictionary, but she was better, because she understood the nuances of words that nobody uses anymore, and could explain them with clarity and with pleasure.  I was happy because I was learning so much, and she was happy because she was teaching again. And we were both crazy about this book. When I’d leave in the evening, she’d sometimes say, “Wait till you see what happens next.”  It was better than TV.

We did watch a lot of TV in her room in the winter afternoons; she liked police crime programs, most of them German, dubbed in Italian.  She liked documentaries, and she loathed cooking programs. In the summer, we spent most of our time outside in the garden. We’d sit under the trees and play infinite rounds of scopa, an Italian card game, and smoke cigarettes.  Neither one of us inhaled; it was just something she liked to do. It was like we were teenagers, pretending. In the winter, when she was stuck inside, we’d quit.

Unfortunately for me, she had begun to forget a lot of particulars that would have interested me about her life.  But sometimes she’d startle me with a gem.

Knowing that she had grown up in Trieste, I asked her casually one day — grasping for a topic — if she could hear the bells of San Giusto from her house. There is a famous song called “La Campana di San Giusto.”

“No,” she replied; “I could hear the firing squads.”

Excuse me?  ”I would lie in bed in the early morning and listen to the firing squads.”  I counted backward.  The Fascist dictatorship took power in 1925, when she was four years old.  A little girl could easily have heard the sound of organized reprisals in the dawn.  Gad.

Then there was the episode of the laurel wreath.  When she graduated from the University of Padova, she was awarded a genuine laurel wreath according to the custom in the Veneto and Friuli.  Naturally she was very proud of this, and hung it on the wall in the living room, carefully wrapped in its original cellophane.  Time passed.  Sometimes she’d glance at it and think, “Strange….my wreath seems to be thinning out somehow.”  By the time there were almost no leaves left on it, she asked her mother if she knew what might be happening.

“You’ve been eating them,” her mother replied.  ”In the beans.”

What could be simpler?  Every time her mother cooked some fagioli, she’d take the necessary laurel leaves from her daughter’s hard-won victory crown and toss them in the pot.  I did mention that her mother was borderline.

Alma married late, had no children, and was widowed early.  She lived in Perugia with her husband till he died at her feet of a heart attack, at which point she returned to Venice — or rather, the Lido.  She began to fall too often; there were the bedrails, the canes, the walker, the wheelchair, the emergency room, the nursing home, the end.

If I get to meet her in heaven, we’re going to sit in the shade and she’ll beat me at scopa because she always draws the king, drat her.  And we’ll talk about what a sleazebag Don Abbondio was, and  I’m going to show her I can finally say gli.

Bianca, her former student and sole heir, wrote this the night before. But what can you really say?

Ciao Alma…and you answered me, I love you very much.

You had a very eventful life.

You were born in Trieste. In ’42 the degree in literature at Padova at only 22 years old.

Then Venice, the teaching, the care of your parents, and when you were left alone, the trips, many trips.

To reach another level you moved to Perugia, and you met Carlo, the companion you had always longed for, but after only a few years you were left alone again.

You came back to the Lido, and again many trips, with me and your friends.

After the last trip, to China, on your return you said, “That was the last one.”

Then the Third, and the Fourth Age, and unfortunately the nursing home.

You were a severe teacher; your students, when they grew up, came to appreciate your efforts.

And Angelica, who helped you with affection and dedication, an angel who came from Ukraine.

And then…. then you surrendered.

Ciao Alma….I love you so much too.

Bon voyage (“buon viaggio”).

Alma in the garden of the nursing home in 2010.

Addio Alma is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

I must go down to the blog again, to the lonely blog and the sky…..

More time has passed than I intended between my last post and this, though as usual many of the reasons had to do with putting down slave revolts in the technological departments of my life.  (Apologies to anyone offended by the word “slave.”)  My computer seized up.  The espresso machine has had a nervous breakdown.  Transferring my cell phone number from one company to another was an adventure within an adventure. My cloud backup service has gone into a semi-permanent stall.  My photos stopped uploading to Flickr. We’re still waiting for the boiler-repair company to come repair the repair of April 16.  The kitchen clock died.

But all this is no more preposterous or tiresome than what’s been going on all around the most-beautiful-booby-hatch in the world.  The past two weeks have seen the return of many well-worn themes.  If they were music, they would be familiar tunes — perhaps transposed into another key, or performed by different instruments, or converted from pieces usually played on a lone kazoo into swelling symphonic creations. But the same tunes, nevertheless.  They practically qualify as folk songs.

The ACTV is always prime territory for the absurd.

An annoying number of the turnstiles keep breaking at the docks on the Lido, causing commuters to miss their boats to work.  Sebastiano Costalonga, a city councilor who has made squaring away the ACTV part of his mission on earth, has pointed out that there are seven turnstiles at a typical London Underground stop, through which millions of people pass each day, while on the Lido there are 48 turnstiles, through which, on a really big day, perhaps 20,000 people will pass.

The ferryboats connecting the Lido to the rest of the world continue to fall apart and be taken out of service for repairs (one boat has been in the shop for nearly a year.  Are they plating it with rhodium?).

The personnel of the ticket booths went on strike for two days, April 30 and May 1, when storm surges of tourists were naturally expected to overwhelm the city, which meant that tickets were sold only by the individual on each vaporetto who ties up the boat at each stop.  You can imagine how many he/she managed to sell.  Or even tried to sell.

The company is 17 million euros in the red, but the ACTV drivers are the highest-paid in the entire Veneto region.  The ACTV is like the Energizer Bunny — it just keeps going.

On April 25, National Liberation Day, the city places laurel wreaths at important civic monuments. Here the wreath got as far as the plaque recalling the “Seven Martyrs,” but whoever was wrangling the wreath didn’t realize it was supposed to be right-side up.

Then there are the Illegal Vendors:  Whatever they’re selling, they’re everywhere, and there are more of them every day.

First (and still) were the West Africans, who sell counterfeit designer handbags from bedsheets spread on the pavement.  While this squad continues to proliferate, it has been joined by Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan vendors of gimcracks such as fluorescent darts which gleam when flung skyward and balls of gelatinous rubber which flatten when hurled to the ground, then re-form themselves before your eyes.

A sub-division of these ethnic entities has taken over the wandering sale of long-stemmed red roses, which used to be offered mainly from table to table in restaurants, but which are now available all day long in the Piazza San Marco, and environs. Illegal corn for the pigeons: After years of struggle, the city finally convinced the vendors with their little trolleys in the Piazza to switch from grain to gewgaws — this being the only effective way to limit, or even reduce, the plague of feathered rats which had passed the 100,000 mark and was still growing.  So now corn is being sold surreptitiously by the handful from the pockets of the red-rose vendors. Still, on April 25, a blitz by the police in the Piazza San Marco netted plenty of swag abandoned by the fleeing vendors, leading off with 1,408 roses. The day before that, the police got hold of 22 kilos (48 pounds) of illegal corn.

But these are temporary events. Stashes of illegal pigeon-corn have been found hidden in the garbage around San Marco.  Intermittent reports of these discoveries and confiscations, whether of goods or of people, imply progress, but they would be the intermittent reports of emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. Uncollected fines have reached some three million euros; one illegal rose seller was reported to have laughed and shown some employees of a shop near Rialto his collection of tickets — five so far, one of them for 5,000 euros.  ”Stupid police,” he said, “I don’t have anything and I’m not paying anything.”

The complaints of exasperated merchants and citizens have finally caused the city to increase surveillance by putting officers on patrol, from police in plainclothes to carabinieri in full battle gear.  But only on the weekend!  Still, there was plenty to do: Twenty-eight illegal vendors spread across the Bridge of the Scalzi were nabbed with their bags and sunglasses and camera mini-tripods! (I know from personal examination that the bridge is 40 steps on each side, so that comes to one vendor every 3 steps. But somehow it must be hard to see, because citizen outcry was needed in order to focus the city fathers’ eyes on it.)

Sometimes there are violent altercations between vendors, based on subtleties of territory and rights thereto — though the concept of someone claiming the right to something illegal is kind of special. Many are often without papers, so they’re already in tricky territory where the concept of rights is concerned.  One recent nabbee, from Senegal, was discovered to already have been sentenced to five months in prison, by the court of Florence.

The city council dusted off a year-old  proposal to issue residence permits (permesso di soggiorno) with points, like a driver’s license. It didn’t pass, for various reasons, some of which verged on silly: “What are supposed to do,” asked one councilor — “expel the women caretakers because they get a fine for illegal parking?”  But another summed up what everybody has long since recognized: “Even the police can’t manage to do much if there isn’t collaboration from the local politicians. The message which has been sent out is that here there isn’t the kind of determination there might be in other cities because of a misunderstood sense of solidarity.”  (Translation: We feel sorry for the poor foreigners.)

Speaking of illegal vendors, the mendicants from Rome who dress up as Roman centurions and pose for pictures near the Colosseum attempted to set themselves up here. Some of you might wonder at the congruence of fake Roman soldiers with fake swords and breastplates in Venice, but the tourist-guide association didn’t need to wonder.  It managed to drive them decisively out of the city in a matter of a few days.  Instead of police and carabinieri, why don’t we just pay the tourist-guide association something extra to clear out the illegal vendors of everything?  Or better yet, send them roses?

As Roberto Gervaso noted in his satirical column in the Gazzettino not long ago, “Our generals manage to lose even the wars they’re not fighting.”

The only antidote I know to all this is to go places and do things which only give pleasure.  And there are plenty of them, in spite of all the weirdity. All you have to do is pull the plug on that part of your brain that concerns other human beings. Here are some views of what we’ve done or seen that have made the past few days more than usually pleasant.

Lino isn’t looking for clams, he’s looking for scallops (canestrelli, or Chlamys opercularis), and it was a great morning to do it.

And he did surprisingly well. These little critters reached their apotheosis that evening, fried.

My activity of choice is often to sit in the boat and look over the side. It’s pretty busy down there, what with crabs and snails and so on. These two were moving right along.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen this creature in the fish market. The label here calls it “pesce sciabola,” or saberfish, but I see that it is known in English as scabbardfish (Lepidopus caudatus). It was brilliantly silver and shiny, just the kind of saber I’d rather not confront.

And despite all the rain in March, the wisteria has come out right on time. Along with the laundry, and the trash.

Lilac is here so briefly that I took a mass of pictures. Bonus: Lilac-shadow.

 

Back to blogging is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

This is a view of as much of the mass of fishermen as I could fit into my camera frame, as I look toward the Lido. It’s like the Milan Central train station out there, but floating. People said that there were even more today.

The diluvian spring seems to finally have wrung itself out and today we had sun.  We’ve had intermittent sun recently but it didn’t give the impression that it was sincere.

But suddenly, the sun was out.  Therefore the laundry was out — I mean, out rejoicing, not out wailing and repenting, and begging to be let back in, as it has been for quite a while. Small but delectable milestone today: Bringing in the laundry and smelling that sun-and-fresh-air aroma in its folds for the first time in 2013.  (Someone will tell me it’s nothing more than the detergent I’m inhaling, but they would be wrong.)

And more to the truly cosmic point, the seppie are out.  ”Out” in the way that a solar flare could be called “out.”  A few years ago there were only one or two forlorn little seppie in the entire lagoon, and there were scarcely any to be had in the market, not even for ready money. It was a veritable drought of seppie.  Now we’re making up for lost time.

The past few days have seen what must be an underwater stampede of the little nimnods, swarming in from the Adriatic to spawn, because  out on the water that stretches from San Nicolo’ on the Lido up the wide canal that goes to Murano there has been a daily conglomeration of boats the like of which I’ve never seen, boats full of men fishing for seppie.  I have it on several good authorities that virtually every boat has been going home with something like ten kilos (20 pounds) of cuttlefish.

Then there are the insatiable seagulls, who are out there with the rest of the city, looking for chow.  You’ll see the gulls pulling their prey to some nearby surface in order to pierce the seppia’s body sufficiently with their beak to allow the extraction of the very hard-to-chew inner bone.  These pale-white ovals of various sizes can frequently be seen floating in the canals, and out in the lagoon, the marine version of the ox-bones flung aside by Viking gorgers.

Looking toward the sunset isn’t the best moment to reveal the ranks of fishermen lining the Riva dei Sette Martiri, but perhaps this will give you a small idea.

For the many boatless anglers, there’s plenty of room along the fondamente to strew murder and mayhem in the depths. It’s a virtual chorus line of men and children with fishing rods and buckets, and the stones are wildly bespattered with black stains, the parting shots from the truculent creatures unwilling to admit defeat, but whose sac of ink is impotent against the hooks and nets.  Of course, they themselves make no effort to resist the lure of whatever’s on the end of the hook, so no use crying afterward.  Lino once attracted scores of seppie merely by snagging a piece of white plastic onto his hook and pulling it through the water.  They thought it was a seppia, and they were coming to eat it too.  Little cannibals.

So spring doesn’t just mean peach blossoms and the dawn trilling of the blackbirds. This year, at least, it means hecatombs of eight-armed mollusks (technically, that’s what they are).  I’ll be kind of glad when it’s over.  It’s like the tulip craze or something, and only God knows who’s going to eat them all.  Nobody can consume everything that’s being hauled out of the water these days, and eventually all the freezers are going to be full.

Just one more thing to worry about.

First time I’ve ever seen a girl fishing, but she’s doing all right too. I don’t assume the ink-stains on the stones are all from her victims, but they show she’s picked what’s probably a good spot.

And of course there are always plenty of old guys, like this one totally prepared with rod, bucket (some people just use plastic bags), and a very black and experienced volega, or net on a long pole. No wonder he’s smiling.

I managed to get two shots of this pair of boys before the smaller one very firmly told me “No photos.” “Why?” I asked. “Because it makes bad luck,” he said. “That’s just a story he invented,” the older one said, shrugging. But I left anyway. No point risking being thrown into the bucket with the seppie.

One Asian man couldn’t be bothered to stop to put them in his bag; he just unhooked each one and threw it on the pavement, where they lay there slowly expiring, spewing and sputtering, till he got ready to collect them and take them home. Or wherever they were destined to end up.

This was the first time I ever saw the iridescent dots on the tentacles. This is part of their extremely efficient system of camouflage, going very well with the iridescent stripes of blue-green which I know well from the fresh seppie in the fish market.  But I was dazzled by the dots.  I’m just sorry they turned out to be so futile.

The slaughter of the innocents — I mean, seppie is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, 1936, a year before she became the Duchess of Windsor.

This is too good to keep to myself.

A reader in New York occasionally sends me some reminiscences, observations, and corrections, when necessary.  We’ve long since abandoned limiting ourselves to the subject of Venice; his life, by now in its eighth decade, is far too interesting to be crammed into the “V” cubbyhole alone.

He recently wrote me this, apropos of nothing whatever:

A letter came from a grand niece of my uncle (by marriage) Morris and was followed by a long call from CA in which I learned that he had won a couple of years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts after leaving the U of PA. He had never mentioned it. He was an architect for the chief of engineers and built hospitals all over the world during WWII, member of the Cosmos Club, the equivalent of the Century in NY and one of the founders of the Arts Club of Washington. My other architect uncle went to E des BA too and wore the little red ribbon (I presume he’s referring to the Legion of Honor) for having instituted a memorial for one of his teachers. The first was a real gentleman. The other once used the first’s name to use the Cosmos and had great airs. I call him my “let them eat cake” uncle.

My uncle came from Lutherville MD and one time was talking to an old colored family retainer who asked, “Mr. Morris, is it true that Miss Wally is going to marry the King of England?”

“It looks that way.”

“Is it true that he has to give up the throne to do it?”

“Yes, Jim, that seems to be so.”

There was a long pause, and Jim said, “I wouldn’t.”

He knew Miss Wally.

Miss Wally is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

This is the one thing in my trip that I really wanted to see:  ”The Hole” at Gorgazzo. So far, the deepest any cave diver has reached is 695 feet (212 meters).  Below that, there may be the Hall of the Mountain King. Nobody knows.

For the chronically curious, here is a rendering of the path of the abyss as far divers have gone. I’m guessing that there may be so many similar subterranean chasms everywhere on Earth that the planet is probably one big wiffle ball.

The silence from my end has been too long and also not explained.  I can’t do anything about the length (except to break the silence now and stop the clock), but I can explain.

I’ve been in a car — how un-Venetian — with some friends for a week, stravaging around northern Italy from Milan to Pordenone and down to Venice.  They were here from Virginia to watch their son play some soccer matches against their Italian counterparts.

This trip gave me a chance to visit, if only briefly, plenty of places I’d never been, several I’d never even heard of, only one of which I’d ever really wanted to see (see photo above), and also the chance to stand interminably in the rain on the muddy sidelines of even muddier soccer fields.

The Veneto has just been through the rainiest March in 20 years — three times more water fell everywhere than is usual.  The vintners can’t prune their vineyards, the artichokes are a month behind, and the boys who ran and slid around drenched by the frigid deluge can tell you that they discovered a degree of wetness which nobody, not even skindivers, has ever experienced.

As for our itinerary, “We past through some of the damdes plases ever saw by mortel eyes,” as a Confederate soldier put it in a letter home.  At the top of the list is the Hotel Antares in Villafranca di Verona.  If you’ve ever wondered where the occupants of UFO’s go when their intergalactic aircraft run out of fuel, I can give you the address.

Now that I’m back and most of the laundry has been done, I confess that I feel very little urge to write anything about Venice at the moment.  Catching up with the news here over the past few days has subjected me to a downpour, so to speak, of non-news even more monotonous than the record rain (see above).

What’s been happening in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world is what has always happened, and what, apparently, ever will happen. By now it appears that there’s hardly any point in mentioning current events, because the same stories will keep turning up every week till Jesus comes back.

The procession of news by now is so repetitive, and so demoralizing, that the 1.20 euros we spend for the daily Gazzettino have become a sort of charity contribution to keep it in business.  The national chronicle is stuck in an endless loop of the same names and the same chicanery, and the local reports form one interminable droning chorus about as interesting as singing “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”

Classic themes: The constant deterioration of the city — palaces, churches, and bridges are falling to pieces, sometimes near or even on the heads of passersby, and the snaggly paving stones are so untrustworthy in some places that they trip as many people as they can each day and then snicker because they know they’re not going to be punished. There is the phenomenal inefficiency of the public health service.  The occasional little old person found dead in his/her home after days/weeks/months. The closing of generations-old stores that can’t pay the insane rent increase, which has typically been raised in order to install yet another glass/mask/pizza-by-the-slice business.  These shops sell glass and masks as being made in Venice, which in a sense they are;  not by Venetians, though, but by swelling numbers of Chinese immigrants who toil in sweatshops and live in little mainland hellholes.

If you tire of those stories, you can always read about the spectacular mismanagement, in myriad and ever-more-imaginative forms, of the public transport system. It’s amazing how many ways the ACTV finds to throw away money it insists it doesn’t have. And tomorrow there will be yet another transit strike: no buses, no vaporettos, a 24-hour dislocation of life which will produce no results. So there will have to be another one.

Speaking of money, it continues to gush, like water from a busted pipe, out of the Venice Casino, which once was one of the top three contributors to the entire city budget. Then there are the pitiful protests, as tiring and pointless as the wailing of a baby with colic, against the big cruise ships — “pitiful” not because I agree or don’t, but because cruise ships are now such a crucial part of the municipal economy that driving them away would kick the last leg out from under the tottering financial stool of the city’s economy. And “pitiful” because all the schemes which have been proposed to solve this so-called problem will create real, tangible, measurable problems for all eternity.

To sum up, the news from here is a ceaseless litany of the same issues, the same excuses, the same inertia, the same blithe, extravagant, “who, me?” waste of everything including now even my patience and my curiosity.

Oh: And the “Boy with the Frog,” claimed to be scheduled for removal on March 18? It’s still standing there. I let myself get excited by what sounded like a real decision, and now I’m embarrassed. I evidently had more hope than good sense, even after all this time.

If I were a reporter for the Gazzettino, I’d write my stories sitting at home in my underwear listening to old Janis Joplin tracks. I’m not saying anybody actually does that.  But they could.

The only interesting thing I’ve heard in a week was about the ten-year-old boy who snuck out of his house in the middle of the night in his pajamas to go smash the window of a toy store with a brick in order to get his hands on the thing he wanted that his parents had refused to buy for him.  That was different!  But it wasn’t in Venice — it was in Vicenza.

This face isn’t from Venice, but it could be. In fact, it should be.

On a side street in Polcenigo, there is someone better than Geppetto: It’s Franco, who not only can repair all sorts of things, but makes enough money from it to be able to afford this nice little shop.  People probably come from all over the EU.

Here’s something even more astonishing: The city of Pordenone had a mayor who was also a saint: Blessed Daniele D’Ungrispach. That was back in 1384 and 1404, but still — it was possible for at least one person in human history to pull it off.

One elegant pastry shop in Pordenone had some remarkable Easter cakes. I like the chick and the broken eggshell, but it’s the basketweave icing that really fascinates me. It’s not that somebody COULD do it, it’s that they had the PATIENCE to do it. But then again, I didn’t check the price.  It was probably worth the effort.

The rain, the cold, and all the flimflammery in the world are powerless to slow, stop, detour, or otherwise ruin the astonishing beauty of spring.  This is a great thing and I need to remember it.

Where have I gone? is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

It started out like this, with me admiring my fantastic R. Crumb legs. Then I began to notice lots of other people had them too.

Yesterday was the first day of spring (“Hold the One-Star!” an old newspaper friend of mine would yell here).  But the weather yesterday didn’t seem very convinced.

Today, though, we had all the early warning signs of spring: clear skies, fresh breeze, warm sun, everything within sight looking as if it were taking a figurative luxurious deep breath and throwing open its windows. On a less poetic, but no less significant level, every woman in the neighborhood appeared to have washed every item of clothing in the house, down to the dog socks, because then she could hang it all out and literally watch it dry.

You all know my fixation on laundry.  Maybe March 22 should be called the First Day of Laundry. Or better yet, we’ll reassign the feast day of St. Hunna of Alsace (“The Holy Washerwoman”) from April 15 to March 22.  Just a thought.

But I had a feast day of sun and shadows, myself. This afternoon I had to walk to the end of via Garibaldi to pick up a shirt from Rosie, the young Moldovan seamstress with fingers of gold, who had finished turning its collar.  I was happy to have the shirt, along with its additional two years of useful life, but I was even happier to see the sun going down. Because at 5:00 PM or so it had reached the perfect level to create a wilderness of shadows along the broad strip of pavement.

People, dogs, children, assorted objects from pigeons to dog poop, each came attached to its own dark silhouette clinging to whatever point was touching the ground.  Roller skates, sneakers, skateboards, paws, flagpoles, old ladies, shopping bags, toddlers — everything had its own personal doppelganger.

Watching all this as I walked home was hugely entertaining.  Some people were pulling their shadows along behind them, others were pushing them in front, but whether the shadows were being made to frolic or to stand stock still, or walk smartly along or  stretch out into long exaggerated strips of black, or go all shapeless and run into other nearby shadows and disappear, they were all over the place.

Some people look at the sun; I was looking at where the sun was not.

Pigeons join the shadowfest.

Then things began to get a little cluttered. I was good with the dogshadow, then I began to notice that the chairs, the tables, the sandwich-board, were all throwing their shadows into the crowd. It was starting to look like there were even shadows without objects attached to them. I wouldn’t put it past them.

Before long, via Garibaldi had more shadows than things. I don’t understand how that works.

Bringing it back to the basics: Two men with the Modigliani approach to their shadows.

Shine and shadow is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

There is no way that photographs can convey the magnitude of this mountain. Happily, this is one rock I didn’t have to climb over.

I went, I saw, I climbed, I did not conquer.

Actually, I didn’t intend to conquer anything — it’s always annoyed the hoo out of me to hear mountains referred to as being conquered.  As far I (and some mountaineers I’ve talked with over the years) am concerned, the mountain lets you climb it. If it doesn’t, you go home, preferably not on a stretcher.

What conceivably could be conquered is altitude sickness, but one needs to have several weapons at hand which I did not, primarily more time to acclimatize.  While  our eight days is longer than some treks, it wasn’t enough for me.

I did four days, or half the trek, and stopped at 13,665 feet (4,165 meters). Palpitations. Shortness of breath, otherwise known as panting.  Even when I didn’t have those, on Day 2 (“the Day from Hell”) I felt as if I were walking in knee-high water against a powerful current. That was when the trail was flat.  On any upward incline — and especially any rocks to climb over, of which there were far too many that day — I had the strength and capability of a garden slug.  It wasn’t anything like normal tiredness, with which I am deeply familiar.  It was like having faded away till I became my shadow, wafting gently near the bulk of my body.

Finally a voice came to me that said, “If you ever want to see home and hearth and family and the gas bill and that cranky lady in the housewares store again, turn around now.”

We continued to walk, but we never seemed to get any closer to the mountain.  I didn’t have any sense of it, but we were already on the mountain.

Seeing that the only 100 percent guaranteed remedy for this condition is to descend (many sources add “immediately,” which I didn’t do), down I went, along with my friend and colleague, veteran photographer Karen Kasmauski, who was also feeling the effects.

I don’t know how the other people in our small group avoided or overcame this condition.  I know that they all made it to the summit except for one girl, who stopped with an hour yet to climb because of intense diarrhea.  Another side effect, if you want to know.  And that was after they’d been climbing for ten hours.  Ten (10) hours.

Two other members who made it to the summit had to have oxygen and were basically carried down by their porters for a while.  One of these trekkers, a young woman with more competitiveness than sense, saw that her friend was going to reach the top before her, and consequently started to run in order to pass her and get there first.

You cannot run at 19,000 feet.  On the master list of crazy, potentially life-threatening things to do, this ranks up there with poking at a family of blue-ringed octopi. I don’t know how she managed to keep going, but the result was that not only did she need oxygen, she doesn’t remember anything of what happened after that for a while.

True, she can now say she climbed Kilimanjaro.  (Of course, I also can say she climbed Kilimanjaro.)  I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about not be able to say I climbed it. But let’s move on — the world is full of all sorts of mountains.

For example, education.  After the trek, we spent a day visiting two schools which were benefiting from our group. At the first, an elementary school more than an hour outside Arusha, we delivered cartons of schoolbooks. Schoolbooks, I’ve concluded, bear a strong resemblance to oxygen tanks for any child who wants to climb up in life.  It’s not that your village child must become prime minister, but without books it’s no more likely to happen than that I would reach the top of Kilimanjaro on roller skates.

This is a class at the primary school where we brought several cartons of books.

At the second, Mwedo Girls Secondary School, which is exclusively for Maasai girls, our group is sponsoring two daughters of one of our group members, Theresia Ismaili Majuka. We got a tour of the school, and saw Theresia’s joyful reunion with her girls after four months.  Theresia lives on Zanzibar, where she makes and sells handicrafts to tourists on the beach.  She doesn’t let the girls come back to her village on breaks or vacations, because of the high probability that some family members (male) will contrive to marry them off and that will be the end of that.  It happened to her.

I believe that Theresia is the first Maasai woman (perhaps first Maasai, period) to climb Oldonyo Oibor, the “White Mountain.”  She did it to promote the message of our group, which is “Everybody has a right to education.”

I admire her for seeing it through, but not as much as I admire her dedication to her daughters’ future. The size of that makes any mere mountain look pretty puny.

Theresia just gave it up on the ride back to Arusha.

She came down the mountain walking like one of Napoleon’s soldiers on the retreat from Moscow, but she did it.

Naturally she got all dressed up to see her girls. It was a wonderful moment.

For a moment at dawn at Moir Camp the rising sun spreads the shadow of Kilimanjaro over the high escarpment. “I always had this vivid dream that I was a professional woman,” Theresia wrote in her account of the trek. “But after being married off, my school days were gone forever. I still have this dream, as vivid as when I was a little girl. It will follow me forever, like a shadow.”

Back from Kilimanjaro is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

That means “goodbye” in Swahili.  It’s the second word I’ve learned, right after “hello.”  I’m taking this in easy stages.

There is a fascinating website called Omniglot which has gone so far as to provide a translation of  ”My hovercraft is full of eels” into Swahili, but I don’t think I’ll need to know that. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing many eels.

But I am going to try to climb up onto the Roof of Africa to see if anything needs to be repaired.

Back in two weeks.

Kwaheri for now is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Sharp-eyed reader Janys Hyde, who has lived in Venice twice as long as I have, read my report on Ricky and his mania for dropping things off the Accademia Bridge. She sent me a copy of the story as it was recounted in an article in 2011, which ran in the Nuova Venezia.  I wanted to add these particulars to the sketch (it was all I knew at the time) I wrote a few days ago.

Here it is, translated by me:

May 31, 1973

Two finance officers and the folly in the Grand Canal 

It’s May 31 of 1973, toward 2:50 AM, when the boat that was in service, with the Commandant of the Operative Naval Section of the Guardia di Finanza, Lieutenant Carmine Scarano, and two finanzieri, Alberto Calascione and Vincenzo Di Stefano, is traveling along the Grand Canal on their way to an intervention, passing under the Accademia Bridge.

A few individuals launch from the bridge a slab of travertine which strikes the boat and the two finanzieri dead center.  They were moments of terror; the only one to remain unhurt is the Commandant who immediately realizes that the boat, without anyone steering, is heading for the embankment.

With a rapid movement he gains control of the boat and stops it, perceiving at this point the lifeless body of finanziere Calascione and hearing the cries and groans from finanziere Di Stefano who is wounded on the arm.

The Commandant manages to give the alarm and call for help, but unfortunately there is nothing that could be done for Alberto Calascione who, because of the grave injuries to his head, dies shortly after his arrival at the hospital.

Finanziere Di Stefano is kept in the hospital, his physical condition improves, but the memory of what has happened will never fade.

Alberto Calascione and Vincenzo Di Stefano were recognized as Victims of Duty (“wounded in the line of duty”) and of organized crime.

In various editions of Memory Day that have followed (I am still on the track of this commemoration; the paper uses the English phrase which is hard to back-translate into holidays I recognize), Vincenzo Di Stefano has never missed the occasion to commemorate, at the place of the attack, his colleague Alberto. 

Ricky: Names and dates is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

…is a good offense.  As we know.  Not social offensiveness, but what is also called by the disphoneous term “pro-active.”

I just made up that word, because the inventors of language have overlooked creating an opposite to “euphoneous.”  They offer “cacophony,” which is completely wrong here.

Why am I even talking about offense/defense?

Because of a little event in Lino’s life which is an excellent illustration of how this works. He’s very good at these gambits.

I don’t remember what we were talking about, but it brought back to his mind a small but perfectly formed encounter years and years ago.

It was a Friday, and on Sunday the annual corteo on the Brenta known as the Riveria Fiorita was coming up.  The club’s gondolone, or 8-oar gondola, was on the list to participate and the rowers were all signed up.

But the boat had to be at Tronchetto at 8:00 the next (Saturday) morning, which — considering that the club was on the Lido — would have meant going to the Lido in the middle of the night to have enough time to put the boat in the water and traverse the lagoon.  This didn’t seem like the most entertaining thing to do.

So he and his son went to the club on Friday and rowed the gondolone to Venice, to the canal that went by their home. Then they looked for a place to tie up.

They found a spot on an empty stretch of his canal, just under the fence marking off a bit of garden. The space was ample, and it was available to the public.  He wasn’t encroaching on any boat-owner’s parking place.  He wasn’t encroaching on anything.

But a man came out of a domicile facing the garden, and it was clear that he felt extremely encroached upon.

“You can’t tie the boat there,” he stated.

“Why is that?” Lino asked.

“Because”(some vague reason here — maybe narrowing the space for other boats, or something.  Anyway, he didn’t want the boat there.)

“If you leave this boat here,” he finished in high dudgeon, “I’m going to come and sink it.”

“Be my guest,” was Lino’s immediate reply.  ”Because if anything happens to this boat between now and tomorrow morning, I’ll know exactly who did it, and then we can go to the Carabinieri together.”

Silence. Not the silence of a quibble that was squashed, but the profound silence of deep space.  The man went back inside and was never seen or heard from again.

But Lino was now more than tranquil.  Because, as he explained it, “He probably came out to check on the boat every 30 minutes all night long.

“I got my own night watchman, for free.”

The best defense… is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up