The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  The original I Antichi was founded by a group of Venetian nobles in 1541 with the motto Divertire divertendosi, which might be roughly translated as “Throw parties so you can party.” The group was reinvented by a Venetian lawyer and antiquarian named Paolo Zancopè in the late 1970s and subsequently passed into Luca’s hands upon the founder’s death. Zancopè’s residence, where our canoce feast was held, has become a kind of clubhouse for I Antichi, presided over by the effervescent presence of his Brazilian widow, Jurubeba.

  Emptying yet another bottle of fizzy Prosecco, Luca recounts a golden past of grand regattas and mask-filled balls. The membership of I Antichi ranges from street sweepers to multimillionaires, from butchers to poets. They come together for the many official festivals that mark the Venetian calendar: for the Festa della Salute, which commemorates the end of the plague of 1631, when a third of Venice perished; for the Festa di Redentore, another party in memory of an epidemic; for the Festa della Sensa, when Venice recalls a time when the doge, the elected Venetian leader, would symbolically marry the sea; and, of course, for Carnevale, the pre-Lenten festival that overruns Venice and can seem as execrable as a plague when the narrow alleys swarm with the tourist hordes. The menu for every holiday follows age-old traditions: cured, spiced mutton for the Salute; artichokes for the Sensa; bigoli for the Redentore.

  Jurubeba interrupts Luca’s reminiscences to consult on the state of our bigoli. (The canoce were only one course among many.) He breaks off midsentence to attend to the important matter at hand. Bigoli are a kind of thick whole wheat spaghetti that are typically served entangled in a sauce of caramelized onions and anchovies, the saltiness of the fish and sweetness of the onion providing the perfect, if unsubtle, condiment for the rough pasta. They are very traditional, especially to the Jews of the Ghetto Nuovo, the original “ghetto.” (The Jewish variant uses garlic instead of onions.) But today, it seems, all that’s left of the Ghetto’s ancient community are Hassidic Jews from Brooklyn—and they know about as much about bigoli as they do about prosciutto. These days, there is little traditional food to be found in Venice. When I invite Luca to a restaurant, he grimaces, insisting that there are no more “honest” restaurants left, that they’re all for the tourists now.

  All the same, Venetian food hasn’t entirely disappeared (yet), and if you dig hard enough, you can still unearth hints and clues of what food might have tasted like two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. Many restaurants still serve sarde in saor, a dish of fried sardines mounded with onions and raisins, seasoned with vinegar, sugar, and occasionally even cinnamon. Its combination of sweet and sour is typical of the Middle Ages; there’s even a fourteenth-century recipe for much the same dish. You can also taste the past in the confections called pevarini, sold in every Venetian pasticceria. They are barely sweet with molasses but distinctly seasoned with pepper, the pungency a faint echo of the city’s past renown as spice supplier to the Western world.

  Still, most of the food that Venetians call their own, the cooking of their grandmothers, is of much more recent vintage. In Marco Polo’s day, our canoce would have been showered with a medieval blend of spices on top of today’s salt and pepper; even as late as the seventeen hundreds, Casanova sprinkled his pasta with sugar and cinnamon. Indeed, the very idea of Venetian food as a regional Italian cuisine is largely an invention of the nineteenth century, much like the Italian state itself. It was only when Venice lost her overseas empire that her cuisine became dependent on local “Italian” ingredients. The occasional spiced dishes of the Renaissance held on, but only as obscure local specialties. Pelegrino Artusi, who wrote the nineteenth-century bible of Italian bourgeois cooking, is bemused and a little horrified when he writes of the way spices were used in the past.

  While there’s no way to know just how the food of the past tasted (the meat, the wine, even the onions, were different from what we have today), the spiced mutton served at the festival of the Madonna della Salute probably comes the closest in flavor to the food eaten by Shakespeare’s merchants of Venice. Preparations for the November holiday begin in the spring, when the meat is prepared by curing a castrated ram with salt, pepper, and cloves before it is smoked and then air-dried for several months. It is still exported from Dalmatia (better known today as the countries of Albania and Croatia), as it would have been when the ancient republic used the preserved meat to feed her sailors. The flavor is strong and complex—and anachronistic. It is entirely alien to Luca’s four-hour feast of simply seasoned bigoli, canoce, roast triglie (red mullets), shrimp, and grilled radicchio and a world apart from the simple dessert of mascarpone and biscotti that arrived to finish our memorable evening.

  I can’t help but see a parallel between today’s cooking, with its absence of spice, and the general amnesia you find in Venice about the importance of the spice trade. It didn’t used to be like that. When Venetians found out that the Portuguese had arrived in India, at the very source of the pepper that made the city’s economy hum, many panicked. The loss of the spice trade “would be like the loss of milk and nourishment to an infant,” wrote the spice dealer Girolamo Priuli in his journal in July 1501. And in many ways, it was, though it wouldn’t be until a hundred years later that the Dutch finally choked off the teat of prosperity.

  Bemoaning the city’s fate has been a favorite pastime ever since. But there may be more to it now. The city’s population has shrunk by a third in the last twenty years. Foreigners do arrive to settle in the city, just as they have always done, but they are a trickle compared to the exodus. Jurubeba, in her mellifluous Brazilian accent, murmurs how, yes, Venice is shrinking but how the community is più profondo, “deeper.” I don’t ask if becoming deeper in a city that is sinking is necessarily the best thing. Luca shakes his head as he finishes his Prosecco: “The shrinking of the population is a shock to the system. All the food stores are closing so that they can sell masks, but not only masks. Lately, for some reason, everyone is opening lingerie stores. A great explosion of intimate apparel!” Luca bursts into laughter—he doesn’t find this entirely displeasing.

  DOGES AND FISHERMEN

  Luca is right about the lingerie stores: I counted four as I made my way—a little unsteadily—to the Museo Correr the next morning. The musty civic history museum is tucked into one of the homely, neoclassical palaces that hem in the much-photographed Piazza San Marco. Like Venice itself, the Correr is all hype and illusion. Every society is a Potemkin village to some degree, built to appear as it would like to be seen, but nowhere is this more true than in the city that sprouted from the lagoon, where marble façades mask simple brick structures teetering on wooden sticks stuck in mud. When Venice’s role on the world stage shrank to insignificance in the sixteenth—but most especially, the seventeenth—century, its inhabitants rewrote her history and rebuilt the backdrop to reflect the new story line. As with the cuisine, the myth of Venice was fossilized into its current form in the nineteenth century, and much to my frustration, the spices are almost as absent from the myth as they are from the cooking.

  The Museo Correr is an institution devoted to this willful amnesia, its permanent exhibition a particularly bombastic staging of the nineteenth-century myth. Grand pictures of battles and displays of guns and armor tell a magnificent epic of a mighty imperial power ruled by great doges resplendent as any European prince. In the Correr’s version of history, the most glorious moment came in 1571, at the Battle of Lepanto, when a Venetian-led navy cleared the Mediterranean of the infidel Turk. What you won’t get from the operatic paintings of dueling triremes plunging through roiling waves is that the famous skirmish is widely seen as Venice’s last gasp of power in the inland sea, that in its aftermath, the Turks systematically annexed Venice’s overseas possessions. As you walk from room to room, staring up at portrait after portrait of majestic doges done up in kingly, gold-stitched robes, you never find out that, before Lepanto, just about every one of them had started out as a businessman dealing in grain, wine, c
heese, salt, but above all, in spices. As you admire vitrines filled with shiny gold ducats, zecchini, and scudi d’oro, you may notice the plaque that explains that the coins circulated from Europe to India—though, of course, it doesn’t mention why Indian museums are chockablock with old Venetian coins.

  All the same, there is a certain logic to the Correr myth. By 1571, the Republic was on its way out as a commercial superpower, and so it only made sense for Venetians to reinvent themselves. The great trading entrepôt turned itself into the entertainment capital of Europe. Gambling at the casinos took the place of speculating on the spice market, and shopping for local gimcracks replaced dealing in exotic merchandise. The museum’s back rooms are full of roulette wheels and card games, acrobats tumbling out of pictures, and fantastic human pyramids, eight men high. In 1523, even as the old pepper-laden fleet had shrunk to the odd, pathetic boatload of spice, the new doge, Andrea Gritti, started to invite poets, artists, and musicians to a city better known for its merchants and insurance underwriters. Stone bridges and civic monuments were scenically arranged to reflect the city’s splendor in the milky waters of the canals. This is the Venice you see today; it’s what draws the visitors and pays the bills. Under Gritti, Carnevale, long the disorderly flip side to the city’s carefully constructed social order, came under central control. Where now tourists compete for the privilege of being smothered by the Piazza San Marco’s famous pigeons, the doges used to sit on their reviewing stands watching official parades that were part church procession and part Fourth of July parade (bands and all). The razzle-dazzle kept the tourists coming even while overseas Venice was washed up.

  So if the Correr is all sham and show, where can you find out about the city’s history? The best place to start may not be a museum at all; it may be a fish market. To get there, follow the signs to the Rialto Bridge, then go down the Ruga Orefici and Ruga Speziali (the goldsmith and spice seller streets) until you see a large neo-Gothic pavilion. This is the Pescaria, the city’s ancient fish market. It’s a place where you can get an almost visceral sense of Venice’s origins and its first real source of wealth. You can see it in the masses of sparkling seafood, in the wriggling live shrimp no bigger than a roach and the giant six-inch shrimp that belie the name, in the translucent canoce and bags of razor clams the color of mother-of-pearl, in the giant tuna whose eyes glisten in the morning light, and in the scorfano whose pink getup seems hardly appropriate to a fish with such a fearsome grimace. Here, you understand how the Queen of the Adriatic was spawned in the wriggling lagoon just like the fishy bounty beneath the canopy of the Pescaria.

  Recent archaeological digs under the murky waters of the canals have revealed that the dependable riches of the local tides drew people here as early as the third century. The proudly separate Venetians like to think that their city was founded by Italians from the mainland escaping marauding barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries. (Luca still refers to the mainlanders, those from the terra firma, as barbarians.) But more likely, those early marsh dwellers were just looking for a spot to set up camp near the fertile fishing grounds. They eventually settled on one of the few islands that remained dry during high tide. They called it Rivo Alto, meaning “high bank,” later shortened to Rialto.

  At first, the city of Venice was no more than a stretch of wetland, scattered with a handful of boggy islands. Streams meandered through the marsh, one of which would eventually become the Grand Canal. It was a highly improbable place to build a town. Those early Venetians had to drain the boggy landscape, shore up banks, transport soil from miles away, and drive wooden stakes into the sludge. The city was built first of mud and wattle; then bricks; and finally, to give the impression of solidity, sheets of marble facing were shipped in to cover the plain brick. Nevertheless, the city kept sinking, even as it does today. Archaeologists calculate that by the eleventh century, when the mosaic floors of the great churches at Torcello and San Marco were laid, the ground level had already been raised by more than six feet at the two sites. For the city to remain above water, neither the people nor the government could ever let up on their efforts to keep the houses from flooding and the canals from silting up. This kind of cooperative spirit would come in handy when Venetians started to go into business overseas.

  That lagoon not only brought piscatory plenitude but also provided the first Venetians with a salable commodity in the form of salt. Needless to say, this naturally occurring chemical was critical to every human economy before the advent of refrigeration. While food might be preserved by other methods, salt was essential to keeping meat and fish from one season to the next. This is hard to appreciate when, on our tables, salted foods like ham, anchovies, and capers are no more than incidental accessories. But for most Europeans, until very recently, fresh meat was a rare luxury. Salted meats, prepared much like the holiday specialty of spiced mutton, used to be the norm.*1 Whereas in northern Europe, salt came from deep mines, in the Mediterranean, the supply came from evaporating seawater. Just about anyone with a suitable spot could produce salt, and trying to control production was a virtual impossibility.

  Nevertheless, the Venetians gave it a try. The fishermen who had settled on the islands around the Rialto had been working local salt pans since at least the sixth century; however, they could never keep up with the region’s main salt producer, which was the town of Comacchio, some fifty miles down the coast. The Venetians’ solution was as simple as it was brutal. In 932, they rowed their galleys up to Comacchio, burned its citadel, massacred the inhabitants, and carried off the survivors. Once in Venice, the Comacchians were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to the doge before they were freed. While differing in the particulars, these harsh methods developed by the racketeers who ran the Venetian salt business became a template for the violent strategies of later spice traders—and not only Italians in the Mediterranean but also their Portuguese and Dutch successors as they rampaged through Asia.

  Venice did eventually give up trying to control salt production, but trade was another matter. Through a combination of business smarts, diplomacy, and murder, the city eventually controlled all the salt that passed through the region. In much the same way as they later set up a government unit to control the spice trade, the Republic’s leaders organized a department to determine how, where, and when salt could be sold.*2

  The men who devised these policies came from a loose cluster of prominent families. They were generally old, experienced businessmen, much like the patricians who sit on American boards of directors, and like those corporate board members, they periodically elected a chief executive officer, the doge, to run the day-to-day operations of Venice Inc. This CEO was expected to fill the role for life; though, when it seemed like the boss was pursuing vainglorious adventures that could jeopardize the bottom line, he could be reined in and, at times, even sacked. (In 1355, when Doge Marin Falier got too high and mighty, the ruling Council of Ten’s idea of a golden parachute was to slice off the chief bureaucrat’s head on his own palace stairs.) Even though the Republic of Saint Mark could never be confused with a democracy, it was also nothing like the usual feudal medieval state. Here, the ruling class was made of merchants intent on making a buck rather than armed knights more interested in hunting one. It was a government of businessmen by businessmen for businessmen. Which is not to say they had much use for free trade. Nevertheless, they did keep an eye on the little guy and set ground rules under which even small-time merchants could prosper. In this business-friendly environment, ambitious young men with no capital could set up partnerships with established financiers and wealthy widows. With a dose of savvy and a little luck, both sides could profit from the arrangement. But it wasn’t just the entrepreneurs who benefited from a government organized to maximize commercial profits. Shipbuilders and sailmakers, sailors and stevedores, provisioners and prostitutes, along with the bankers and insurance underwriters, all had a direct stake in the merchant republic.

  In other places, princes and caliphs s
kimmed as much of the surplus as they could from their own merchants, but not in Venice. Here, money bred money. As a result, the relatively puny republic could take on vastly bigger and more populous powers such as the kingdom of Hungary, which repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) tried to muscle in on Venice’s backyard, and more fatefully, even populous Byzantium. The vast sums that eddied and flowed down the Grand Canal made it possible for a city of fewer than one hundred thousand souls to take on an empire of millions.

  When it comes to the Byzantines, once again, La Serenissima suffers from selective memory. In the beginning, Venice had been a part of that Eastern realm—though, admittedly, an inconsequential little town on its western periphery. The city was officially a part of the empire until the early ninth century, when, through a series of treaties, it entered a kind of legalistic limbo, still technically a province of Byzantium but paying tribute to the German emperors. As late as 1082, the emperor would refer to the Venetians as “true and faithful servants,” and at least theoretically, they remained subject to the same laws as Byzantines. In the early years, Venetians took full advantage of this intimate relationship; later, they ruthlessly exploited it and then finally slit the throat of their once-great overlord. Yet you don’t hear much about this in Venice. There is an almost Oedipal reluctance to discuss the city’s indebtedness to Byzantium. Still, much of the history of Venice, and especially her role as the spice merchant of Europe, makes sense only when you remember her origins in that ancient empire.