Venice Noir E-Book

Isabella Panfido

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The identity of Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, is inseparable from the waters of the lagoon by which she is surrounded. Isabella Panfido takes us on an exploration of those waters that since time immemorial have been Venice's refuge and defence, visiting some of its many islands (the names of a few - Fisolo, Sant'Arian, Lio Piccolo, San Secondo - will be unknown even to the most assiduous visitors to the city), and introducing us to their elusive magic and their well-kept secrets. We learn of haunting illusions created by the peculiar geography of the lagoon under certain climatic conditions; of the devastating plague of 1630 that led to the loss of 47,000 Venetian lives over a period of sixteen months; of the destruction by a bitter north wind of baskets full of carefully harvested soft-shelled crabs and their seemingly miraculous rebirth and metamorphosis from one delicacy into another; of thwarted yearnings and ambitions, of jealous rivalries and revenge, of the terrible price of vanity - and much, much more. An expert guide and consummate storyteller, the author draws on a deep and extensive knowledge of her native city past and present, and on her own personal experiences, weaving together myth and legend, imagination and historical fact, to capture the mystique of the phenomenon that is Venice. Venice Noir is the winner of two literary prizes: the Latisana per il Nord-Est Prize and the Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti Prize.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

The Author

The Translator

Premise

Fata Morgana

Islands

Fisolo

Sant’Ariano

Sant’Erasmo

Lio Piccolo

Murano

San Secondo

Poveglia

Lido

San Giorgio in Alga

San Clemente

San Michele

The Angel of San Giorgio Maggiore

Postscript

Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature 2018–2028

Recommended Reading

Copyright

THE AUTHOR

Isabella Panfido lives and works in Venice and the Veneto. She has a degree in Russian Literature and Language and is an arts correspondent for the Corriere del Veneto. She is also a poet (her poetry has been translated into English, Spanish, Slovenian and Croatian), translator (from English and Russian) and literary critic for various publications.

THE TRANSLATOR

Christine Donougher was born in England in 1954. She read English at Cambridge University and after a career in publishing is now a freelance translator of French and Italian. Her translation of The Book of Nights by Sylvie Germain won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and she has been shortlisted twice for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Night of Amber in 1996 and for Magnus in 2009, both also by Sylvie Germain.

Her translations for Dedalus from Italian are Senso (and other stories) by Camillo Boito, Sparrow (and other stories) by Giovanni Verga, Cleopatra goes to Prison by Claudia Durastanti and The Price of Dreams by Margherita Giacobino.

PREMISE

Venetorum urbs divina disponente providentia in aquis fundata, aquarum ambitu circumsepta, aquis pro muro munitur: quisque igitur quoquo modo detrimentum publicis aquis inferre ausus fuerit, et hostis patrie iudicetur: nec minore plectatur paena quam qui sanctos muros patriae violasset. Huius edicti ius ratum perpetuumque esto.

The city of the Veneti by the will of divine providence founded in water, surrounded by water, is protected by water instead of walls: and therefore let whosoever in whatsoever manner would dare to cause harm to the public waters be judged an enemy of the city and let him be punished with no less a penalty than if he had violated the sacred walls of a city: may the authority of this ruling be perpetually binding.

Words penned by the humanist Giovambattista Cipelli, known as Egnazio (Venice 1473-1553), and engraved in gold on a black marble plaque erected at the seat of the Magistrature for the Waters at Rialto, now in the Correr Museum.

When the Lion roared there was no alternative but to submit, trembling, to its law.

This edict leaves no room for doubt, the waters of the Lagoon were – and are (or should be) – sacred, inviolable as the precincts of a temple, the boundaries of the city. The most fascinating part of this dictat – expressed in such categorical and exemplary terms as even now to strike a chord in the heart of every Venetian, if any such still exists – lies in the incisive introductory description of the Urbs Venetorum: founded, perforce, by divine will, the conurbation of the Veneti rose from the water, sank its own foundations into the waters and was surrounded and embraced by the waters. As though in an amniotic fluid, contained within an invisible membrane of mestizza, water that is neither sea nor river, neither salt nor fresh, hybrid water, resulting from the constant interaction of sea tides and river flow, water that is progeny of Father Ocean and Mother Earth, the water of the Lagoon.

But what in actual fact was the Lagoon?

A brackish basin of some 550 square kilometres, extending south-west to north-east, enclosed and separated from the sea by a thin cordon of sandbars punctuated by three Lagoon inlets: the ports of San Nicolò, Malamocco and Chioggia; divided, in relation to Venice, into the northern Lagoon and the southern Lagoon.

This is what we can see today when the aeroplane in which we are hypothetically flying circles over that variegated patch of water, speckled with little morsels of land, singed with graduated shades of blue green.

But what today lies beneath our shining eyes, which just cannot get used to the sight of this miniaturised marvel and its patent heart-rending fragility, has not always been like this.

Without presuming to speak for the geographer or the historian, we will simply note that the Lagoon is a landscape in every sense of the word, that is to say the result of human intervention in a natural environment, which is inherently unstable. We know it is about six thousand years old – this the experts have established with some degree of certainty, thanks to a “birth certificate”, consisting of a core sample obtained in 1971 by drilling into the floor of the Lagoon to a depth of 950 metres in the area of the island of Tronchetto: it showed a first layer of about 9 metres of foraminiferal deposits – that is, protozoa with shells – of Lagoon origin, dating to the Holocene epoch, but beneath this, and extending 63 metres into the core, the sediment is of continental origin dating back to the Pleistocene; so the identity card of our beloved, brackish Eden-in-miniature tells us that the Lagoon is very young compared with the age-old Earth.

And traces of artefacts attest to a human presence from the second millenium BC; we know that the Romans were well acquainted with some of the Lagoon’s attractions but it is only from the sixth century AD that permanent settlements were established. Places grew up of legendary fame, sites of resistance to the barbarian invasions but also small centres of civilisation that left extremely fertile seeds: Altino, Spina, Costanziaca, Ammiana, populated by peoples who came from the hinterland to the north and south of the Lagoon basin.

The strange thing – as related to us by the writer Jacomo Filiasi (who knew a great deal and what he did not know he imagined) – is that a sort of Lagoon aristocracy soon became established, a kind of division between indigenes and outsiders, based on areas of provenance and settlement: so in the old chronicles the Patavini, Atestini, Montesilicani and Vicentini, who had settled in the central and lower Lagoon, were considered non-Venetian, whereas on the other hand the Aquilejesi, Concordiesi, Opitergini, Altinati, Feltrini and Acelani could claim to be of Venetian origin. It is difficult to get into the mindset of that time, but after all there is nothing new under the sun if even today the residents of Upper Castello, true heirs of the founders of the City distance themselves from the residents of Lower Castello, a motley crew of Greeks, Armenians, Dalmatians and more generally Levantines who only arrived in the City six or seven centuries ago, not to mention the feud – now laid to rest not by reconciliation but by depopulation – between the Arsenalotti and the Barnabotti.

But let us leave to its inauspicious fate the City that every day sees the countdown of its residents recorded in the implacable flashing-red digital figures in the little window of the pharmacy in Campo San Bartolomeo, alias San Bartolo, at the feet of a snickering Carlo Goldoni, one who was far-sighted with regard to the degeneracy of his fellow citizens. Triggering furious anger alternating with resigned discouragement, the bitter observation, every day and at every step, of the irredeemable vulgarity that has now destroyed this blessed plot, fallen from heaven or risen from the abyss, prevents me from finding any way to speak of the ineffable magic I still recognise, at night when it is inhabited only by rats and by its few citizens – rather less numerous and bold than the rats – or in the thick November fog when the more crass and tacky local commerce is temporarily hidden from view, allowing the seeping, fading stucco renderings to emerge, the only true heirs of the glorious age of Venetian colourism.

Too many pages, words, images have been heaped on the Unnamed wonder for me to dare add any more: every syllable about the City, in the writing or the reading, would sound trivial, banal, inadequate. And Calvino’s Marco Polo has taught us the only way to speak of it is to do so indirectly.

So I will not say another word about the agony and the ecstasy of the Unnamed, that miracle of equilibrium built on a few millimetres of grey silty clay, the “caranto”, a providential stratum, resulting from the leaching through rainwater of surface carbonates during the Holocene epoch. Were it not for the caranto, my Thaïs of white stone, you would never have existed.

But if we circumnavigate the tortured wonder with indirect words, like concentric circles round the point of origin, talking of something else, we will nevertheless remain within its echo range, caught in the snare of the place’s magic, of its violent and glorious history, of its proud and shrewd people, at the heights of yesteryear and in the depths of the present day.

We will keep away from the dense nucleus of ineffable beauty and instead roam the sacred walls that are its waters, with a strange chart that does not follow any predetermined routes but those of caprice and imagination, getting about in a little boat suited to the shallow floor of the Lagoon, along canals and ghebi (creeks), skirting barene (saltmarshes) and velme (mudflats), without a nautical map, without a marine licence, aquatic flâneurs, abandoning ourselves to the calming atmosphere of the Lagoon; to its seductive and innocent mutability (closed in by long fingers of sand and yet ever open, with its mouths receptive to the wooing of the Adriatic) to being what is, land and water in constant evolution; to its elusiveness, like that of a scent that lingers and disappears, like music that fades away without visible trace.

So how can one describe the volatile essence of an organism in perpetual mutation, of a shimmering reflection on a liquid surface in continuous minimal motion, of a body of water and light? By starting with the solid reality of facts.

The starkness of the figures is much more dramatic and explicit than any comment: in the last three centuries the barene have been reduced from 160 to 47 square kilometres; in the years from 1979 to 1990 the Lagoon lost 25 million cubic metres of its solid mass, washed out to the open sea – this has also led to its invasion by a million more cubic metres of water per year, thereby causing an increasing flattening of the Lagoon floor, with the silting-up of the deep canals and the erosion of the shallows, with the obvious transformation of animal and vegetable habitats. And we prefer not to think of what will happen – but is already happening – with the new steel palisade of biblical nomenclature.1

But the fascination of this ever-changing environment, of this little womb of earth and water that has given birth to the great City that was the Serenissima, is so commanding, so resurgent at every outing on the Lagoon, and the continually disavowed but never eradicated pride of belonging to this place is so strong, that I will try to describe it, by telling little stories, some based on events, historical facts or personal memories, some entirely invented, since, as we know, the truth of the imagination is the most comforting of possible truths.

1Translator’s note: A reference to the controversial MOSE scheme (the acronym derives from the name of a prototype floodgate, the (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), consisting of 78 mobile gates intended to block the flow of sea water into the lagoon in the event of exceptionally high tides. Critics include those who fear a negative environmental impact as well as those opposed to its design and to its funding, which has given rise to legal accusations and prosecutions for fraud and corruption. Mose is the Italian spelling of the Biblical prophet Moses.

FATA MORGANA

Today I am breaking a promise.

And the person who bound me to silence when he confided to me the mysterious event will, from the seamen’s empyrean where he now dwells, forgive me; but the chance encounter in the library with some memorable pages by nobleman Jacomo Filiasi has convinced me that what happened to Captain Amedeo Piazza was not the fruit of a colourful imagination or of a celestial vision but a very rare yet recurrent phenomenon in the Lagoon.

So, drawing on an oral account heard by a little girl – some decades ago, therefore – I will now try to relate as accurately as I can the extraordinary occurrence witnessed by Captain Piazza.

One afternoon in late November some forty years ago, the famed, unforgettable tugboat captain Amedeo Piazza, in the small wheelhouse of the Strenuus, moored on the Riva dei Sette Martiri, with the basin of San Marco before it immersed in a milky obscurity that muffled every sound and blanketed everything within sight, related to a little girl bundled up in a loden coat, the amazing thing that, as I have discovered today, the nobleman Filiasi, too, stumbled upon one hundred and fifty years earlier, more or less in the same place.

You need to know that Captain Piazza, a little under two metres tall, with a gaunt face divided in half by a blond drooping moustache above a mouth almost as thin as a scratch line, was widowed at a very young age, when his wife died delivering a stillborn, first child. A tragedy for which Amedeo Piazza had only partly consoled himself, blotting out his personal life in manic and grief-crazed work as a seaman. His was an illustrious and unblemished career: already a master mariner by the age of twenty-three, right from the outset, first as second pilot, very soon afterwards as captain, he had always worked on Venetian tugboats, even during the Second World War when the tugboat service in the port was used solely by the naval fleet, all the vessels still in operation after sinkings and various other losses in the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean having been requisitioned.

At the time this story was told in that floating little tower of sturdy sheet metal, suspended eight metres above the surface of the water and surrounded by fog, Captain Piazza must have been about fifty years old, but that is a calculation I make today, certainly not based on the impression of a child to whom of course that austere and imposing man with the gentlest blue eyes appeared an old man.

Given his age, on the verge of retirement, those in charge of the work rosters tried to spare him the night shifts and long trips in the southern Mediterranean, assigning him however the more difficult jobs, those rescue operations on the high seas, especially with the bora wind raging, and fortunately very rare, which only he could tackle and accomplish without loss of life or vessel.

When it came to rescuing men and watercraft in impossible conditions, no one was better acquainted than he with the treacherousness of the Adriatic and its shallows, no one had better mastery than he of the heroic resources of those funny squat boats with the rounded bows and orange funnels. His mere presence drew attention, his slightly gravelly voice, always low-pitched, more from instinctive reserve than a natural tonality, cut through any background noise, whether human or mechanical.

No one knew better than Captain Piazza how, in a few words – brevity being a quality of leadership – to get to the nub of the matter and to the hearts of his crew. The seamen under his command perhaps feared him a little but they obeyed, first out of duty, then out of respect and absolute trust.

In that late afternoon the little girl in the loden coat had been taken to visit the Strenuus, which had only just arrived from the shipyard in Chioggia, a brand-new technological gem and flagship of the fleet moored at Riva dei Sette Martiri, right in front of the Cornoldi Barracks, formerly known as Palazzo Molin delle Due Torri, where, according to a stone inscription, Francesco Petrarch lived for seven years as a guest of the government of La Serenissima.

Captain Piazza, who always showed an understandable, touching attentiveness towards children, had taken charge of the little girl and brought her into his wheelhouse, holding in his own long bony hand – that of a violinist rather than a seaman – the little red-gloved hand at the end of a recently fractured and badly mended right arm. The over-sized loden trailed on the metal rungs of the steep ladder leading from the deck to the wheelhouse, but the captain’s firm and secure grip brought the coat safely up the steps to the door of the wheelhouse. In the quiet hum of that wheelhouse, illuminated by little red and green control lights, Amedeo Piazza sat the child on the pilot’s tall wooden stool and, with narrowed blue eyes staring out at the blanket of fog on the other side of the turret window, began to describe the invisible geography of an evanescent and silent Lagoon.

The child followed Captain Piazza’s long figure as it drew on the glass a secret map of islands. On every detail of this phantom map the index finger rested for a moment, the time it took for a voice roughened by long nights of salt wind to disclose in a whisper the names of those invisible places: San Servolo, San Lazzaro degli Armeni, San Clemente, and then up in a straight line, out to the right Santo Spirito, Poveglia… then the finger with a nail like a perfect almond, moved to the left: La Certosa, Le Vignole – the child liked the fruity sound of this name – Sant’Erasmo.

After a pause Captain Piazza, turning his face a few degrees, said, “San Michele.” The little girl in the loden coat wriggled a bit and for the first time, opening a breach in the wall of her timidity, chipped in, saying, “I know that place, that’s where papa is, mamma takes me there every Sunday morning.”

Amedeo Piazza, standing with his back against the big pale wooden wheel of the helm in the restricted space of the wheelhouse, reaches out his hand and lightly touches her head with the hint of a caress: “I know, I knew your papa well. Every now and then I go and pay a visit to him as well. That’s where my little boy is, on San Michele.”

A long pause follows, fortunately interrupted by an indecipherable crackling of electrical discharge emanating from the tugboat’s radio. And at that very moment Captain Piazza decides to tell her a secret.

This is the way he begins: “Now I’m going to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone else. It’s a real secret, but I trust you and I am sure you won’t tell a soul.”

Wrapped in her loden coat the little girl starts to shiver.

No one had ever told her a secret before, no one had ever treated her with such seriousness, it meant assuming enormous responsibility, keeping the words all to herself for ever, held in the wide-meshed net of memory.

But as we know, a small child’s memory is an inviolable safe, all the events of a whole lifetime leave some childhood memories absolutely intact, perfect in their fullness of detail and in their verbal accuracy. All the more so in the case of a secret.

Captain Piazza’s face in the shadows of the wheelhouse had become solemn and, if possible, even longer and thinner.

“The Lagoon is a strange place,” he began, opening wide his arms inside the sleeves of a jacket of dark blue cloth that he wore on board – it was double-breasted and had gold buttons that gleamed in the dimness of the wheelhouse, “it’s like a huge labyrinth of water with long thin strips of sand akin to snakes curled up in the shallows. There are areas you can only get to in small flat-bottomed rowing boats because any normal vessel would run aground, some channels allowing a draught of only twenty, thirty centimetres.

“And being as I am, unable to remain on dry land when I am not on a tug, I get into my little s’ciopon – you know, one of those small boats that were used for duck shooting – and I go out into this beautiful labyrinth of water, taking a fishing rod with me, and a net, for you never know, I might catch something for my supper, then I’ll cook it at home in the evening.”

He uses a great many expansive, controlled gestures to season his words with the greatest possible detail: for “fishing” he raises the palm of his hand vertically, spreading his thumb and little finger as wide apart as possible; for “flat-bottomed” he leans forward from the waist drawing in the long neck that emerges from his shirt collar; for “labyrinth” he wiggles all ten fingers at the same time, as if playing a piano.

The child is totally captivated, just like one of those fish that Captain Piazza would hook from his s’ciopon.

“I go wherever the boat takes me, I try to go with the flow, in other words with the movement of the incoming and outgoing tides in the Lagoon, so sometimes I find myself where I would not have expected to be. But the beauty of it is exactly that: to lose track a little, to forget everything else and just look at what is around you.”

A little voice asks, “But aren’t you afraid of not finding the way home?”

What a naive question to put to someone like Captain Piazza. The answer comes in the form of a smile, followed by the words, “No, there’s no danger of really losing your way in the Lagoon, all you have to do is take your bearings from the bell towers on the islands, you know, the way people used to in the countryside. The Lagoon is basically like the countryside only instead of land there’s water, big fields of water. So you just have to look for a belltower, there are lots all around us, and you soon get your bearings: of course you need to be a little familiar with this waterland, but I know my way around pretty well. However, what I wanted to tell you happened not far from that island we both know well: San Michele.

“I had gone to take a rose to my son and to his mother, who keep each other company beneath a little white cross. When I came out of the cemetery, I got back into my s’ciopon, which I had left moored on the waterfront, and going with the current, I headed the boat in the direction of San Francesco del Deserto. I rowed, trying to keep out of the main channels because of the waves, but there was no disturbance, there was no one to be seen out in that heat. The air was still, as still as the water, which looked like glass.

“It must have been six in the evening because the cemetery had closed its gates right behind me; but in summer – it was the end of June – the sun was still beating down.

“That stretch of Lagoon is wild, the odd barena” – he breaks off to see if there is a questioning look in the child’s eyes, then carries on – “the odd strip of sand with tufts of grass on it and only far, far away towards south can you make out a darker line, which is the island of Sant’Erasmo. However, on that particular late afternoon there was nothing visible on the horizon, perhaps because of the heat creating a veil of haze, and not a sound, just like it is now. I was rowing and listening to the drip from the oars and the little splash when they went into the water alternating with the backwash when they came out – that was the only sound around me. A good rhythm that accompanied my thoughts. They were not dark thoughts, just a bit sad: I wondered why my little boy should never have been able to learn from his father to do something as wonderful as go out on the Lagoon in a boat. And I pictured the imaginary scene of him standing, as big as you are now, with me behind him in the stern, pushing on the crossed oars, with my hands on top of his to guide his movements.

“In short, I was sad and also angry with life, with God, with the world. And I rowed more energetically to give vent to my feelings, heading for San Francesco del Deserto, where I would stay overnight with the monks, as I sometimes did. It is a place that does the heart good, that island, with its tranquillity, the peacocks under the cypress trees, in the midst of the deep silence of the Lagoon; it was just the right place to bring a bit of serenity to my thoughts.