In 1489, a special commission of “three of our honorable gentlemen, ready and enthusiastic” (later elevated to the rank of magistrates), was specifically charged to pursue spendthrift malefactors from its offices at the Rialto. The legislation must have been observed about as much as speed limits are today. You get a hint of this from a 1526 legal note: “And truly, those who would act so dishonestly as to throw bread or oranges at [the commission’s] employees, or push them or kick them out, will fall subject to a penalty of fifty ducats.”
The impression that Venice had been transformed from the hungry, hard-bitten merchant republic of Doge Dandolo’s time into a flabby, complacent party town by the early years of the sixteenth century would certainly be overstating the state of affairs. After all, the city had long had those prolonged periods of Carnevale, when indulgence temporarily replaced bookkeeping as the city’s main pastime. And business was still the city’s fountain of wealth in the sixteenth century. But changes both within the city and without presaged the twilight of its golden age.
THE BITTER END
In spite of the masks that Venetians are so expert at creating, it is still possible to peer behind the marble façades topped with cell phone antennae and find clues that point to an earlier Venice, a city that was once Europe’s spice emporium without peer. Among the edible hints and whispers that recall that glorious past, there is a dark cookie known as a pevarino that maintains a tenuous connection between the city of Saint Mark and the pepper woods of Malabar. This throwback to the spice-laced cuisine of the Renaissance is about the size of a hockey puck, studded with almonds and raisins, and faintly bitter with molasses. How much black pepper it contains depends on the baker. Some of the cookies burn the tongue with peppery pungency, while others are almost bland.
Venice developed many dry crispbreads, which wouldn’t spoil on long sea voyages. The taste persisted even as the port withered. Here, eighteenth-century vendors sell bussolai, a ring-shaped breadstick that is still sold in the city’s bakeries.
There are few as obsessed with these confections as Franco Colussi, whose bakery is tucked into a long alley off the Campo San Barnaba. As you open Colussi’s shop-front door, you are enveloped with the aroma of butter and spice, and yet the space and the selection here are simplicity itself. Modest baskets hold baìcoli, the crisp little biscotti that go back to the days when baking ship’s biscuit for sailors was a thriving industry. Panetoni of all sizes sit on a shelf like an army of Russian nesting dolls. Pevarini are displayed in orderly pyramids. Above all, though, the narrow room is dominated by a large oven and the irrepressible Franco. When he hears of my interest in peppery sweets, he skips from behind his marble slab, a jaunty chef ’s hat perched on his rosy head, all bubbling with enthusiasm about the subject. His pevarini are laced with nutmeg and cumin as well as pepper, he confides. But he doesn’t make them as often as he used to. Apparently, the demand just isn’t what it once was for these or other traditional Venetian pastries. With the passion of an archaeologist discussing a long-forgotten civilization, Franco describes a confection he now seldom makes called bussolà di Murano, a kind of super-pevarino that is in the form of a ring almost a foot across and weighs more than two pounds. It, too, is spiced with pepper, and cinnamon this time. “It is a savage thing,” he whispers, and then shakes his head, “But today, even the Venetians don’t recognize it. It [the island of Murano] is only five minutes from here, only five minutes, but they don’t know what it is!” Yet he insists on making his pastries the old way, because who knows if anyone else will? Though he hardly looks it, Franco is a grandfather, and despite all his best efforts, he can find no one to take over the store. Young people no longer want to stay in Venice, he tells me, launching into the standard complaint about the city’s decline. In the end, I thank the white-haired baker and close the door behind me. And as I walk away, loaded down with a panetone, a bag of pevarini, a satchel of baìcoli, I wonder if he really is the last of his line and if the little storefront will still be there when I next return.
Everyone in Venice complains about the disappearing stores, a result of an all too evident demographic collapse. Venice isn’t unique in this sense: Italy has the lowest birthrate in the world, and the country’s population is shrinking. As Luca points out over and over, Venice’s population always went up and down. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, plague would hit, wiping out enormous numbers of people, but others would quickly arrive to take advantage of the opportunities the city offered. But when the plague of 1575 laid waste to the vain city, it never quite recovered. It has been estimated that Venice hit its peak of about 180,000 in that fateful year (a census of 1581 showed only 134,000), a number it would not reach again until the 1950s. Since 1980, the slow trickle of exodus has turned into a flood. The city has lost more than a third of its inhabitants, and there are fewer people now than there were at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
The path to decline became inexorable in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks. Venice had succeeded in great part by taking over the maritime appendages of the Byzantine Empire but, in the process, made the fatal mistake avoided by all successful parasites—that you do not so weaken your host that it dies. The Venetians had so enfeebled the Byzantines that when the Ottomans arrived, the ancient realm gave up its last breath. From that point on, it was just a matter of time before Venice lost her empire in the Aegean.
By 1500, the geopolitical constellations that had long favored the Republic’s fortune were beginning to predict a not-so-happy future. The fall of Constantinople made the strategy that had been so effective since 1204—to protect and secure Venice’s route to the Orient—no longer feasible. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498 seemed as if it would throttle the spice trade at its very source. Even in its own neighborhood, the city couldn’t muster the resources to police the Adriatic Sea, where thugs and pirates now lay in wait to mug unsuspecting traders as they passed by. As the mercantile empire withered, the city shifted its gaze from the eastern Mediterranean, where it had been firmly fixed since the first Venetians loaded salt onto their galleys, to western Europe and the terra firma.
In this new climate, what was a young Venetian with money to do? Trade, and especially the still-lucrative but increasingly less predictable spice trade, now seemed too risky. As a result, more and more Venetian profits were pumped into real estate as well as into new luxury industries. Better to sink your money into growing grapes or making glass or setting up a publishing business than risk your shirt, or worse, by chancing the voyage to Alexandria. Venice was abuzz with stories of its citizens abroad abducted by Barbary corsairs (mostly, though not exclusively, Arab pirates from North Africa), sold into slavery, and forced to work under the most inhuman conditions for their godless captors.
All the same, Venetian merchants did not retire en masse from the spice trade to stay home eating contraband gilded pigeons. After a brief collapse of the Mediterranean spice business in the early sixteenth century—more a result of the wars against Turkey than the incursions of the Portuguese—Venice regained a huge portion of the spice trade for most of the remaining hundred years. (Both the Turks and the Venetians realized soon enough that it was better to exchange profitable trade goods than deadly volleys.) Partially as a result of the renewed fashion for spices that had been, to some extent, fueled by modish Venetian cookbook publishers, the Europe-wide demand for spices kept growing. Even while Lisbon was bringing in some 21/2 million pounds of pepper a year directly from India, the Venetians were still able to sell more than half that amount picked up from their usual suppliers in the Near East, even if fewer merchants were willing to run the increased risks.
It wasn’t the Portuguese but the Dutch who wiped out Venice’s role as spice merchant to Europe—not so much because they cut off the supply but because they lowered the price so much that spices bought in the Middle East were simply not competitive. Even the Ottomans mostly found it cheaper to buy spices from the Dutch and English rath
er than get their supplies by way of Persia and Arabia (even though some continued to arrive by the ancient caravan routes well into the eighteenth century). Consequently, by the first decades of the seventeenth century, the flow of spices through Venice had shrunk to a bare trickle. But the Rialto traders might still have been able to recover if it hadn’t been for the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which had sucked in almost all of Venice’s most profitable customers in central Europe and thereby wiped out what remained of a market north of the Alps. Even as the opening salvos of the long conflict were fired, it was clear that the merchant republic was out of the spice business for good.
In the wake of the first collapse of the spice business after 1498, the number of young nobles who, like Alessandro Magno, were still willing to follow the old Venetian pattern of a few years in trade followed by a political career began to dwindle. In part, it explains why groups such as I Antichi were such a draw. Venice, always a gerontocracy, offered no system for young men to clamber up the political ladder, and now that their traditional jobs as apprentice merchants had shriveled away, what were they supposed to do? One option was to organize public parties to show off to their peers and, along the way, make friends and influence people. It’s worth mentioning that unlike today’s I Antichi, the original confraternities were bachelors’ clubs. The demise of the commercial culture in Venice had resulted in a peculiar custom that discouraged all but one son from marrying so that the inheritance would not be spread too thin. Obviously, there is a close connection here to the widespread prostitution for which the city was renowned. I also wonder, though, about the effects of venereal disease on sapping the vigor of the population. This was the era when syphilis was first epidemic in Europe, and Venice would have made the perfect petri dish for STDs.*18 Whatever the explanation, the young aristocrats of Venice had plenty of time, and inclination, for wine, women, and song.
Art, literature, food, and music were the talk of Venice by the late fifteen hundreds. By the sixteen hundreds, when the city definitively lost her place in the pepper trade, visitors to Venice came as much to gamble at the card tables as to risk money on commerce. By the seventeen hundreds, Venice had become Europe’s Las Vegas, a city of brothels and casinos, a gorgeous vacation getaway where tourists would buy expensive trinkets and return home with postcard views of La Serenissima cranked out by the deft studios of painters such as Guardi and Canaletto. The Venetian aristocracy began to look to French chefs for inspiration, and spicy cuisine, which had characterized the Republic almost from the beginning, was relegated to just a few traditional specialties: the peverada, a pepper-laced sauce found mostly on the terra firma; the gnocchi still occasionally sprinkled with cheese and cinnamon in out-of-the-way villages in the Alpine foothills; the still-ubiquitous sarde in saor, the sardines smothered with a vinegary mix of raisins and onions, even though they are seldom finished with cinnamon as the more old-fashioned cookbooks suggest.
When Mark Twain visited in the late nineteenth century, there was little left to remind the visitor of the famed pepper fleets:
Today her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,—a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.
Even so, visitors continue to be seduced by the well-practiced charms of the dowager of the lagoon. And as a rule, the Venetians don’t complain about the tourists; they understand how important foreigners have always been to the city’s economy. No, they complain about the shopping. “This transformation is ruining our lives,” says Luca when I mention that bakers such as Franco Colussi can’t find anyone to take over their business. In Venice, there is little alternative to shopping on foot, and as the stores disappear, you have to walk farther and farther. From a transportation standpoint, the city makes absolutely no sense unless you are traveling by boat. If you look at Carpaccio’s painting of the Rialto, you notice that the crossing is a drawbridge, designed for the easy passage of cargo. It was replaced by immovable stone between 1588 and 1591. Early depictions of the city show floating bridges, one-piece flying bridges, pivoting bridges, and, of course, the usual kind of drawbridges that allowed sailing ships free passage. Every single one of these was gradually replaced by permanent footbridges, transforming a city of sailors into a town of boatless pedestrians stranded on sinking islands in the middle of a lagoon. The reality of Venice’s maritime patrimony became as insubstantial as all her other myths.
There is at least one holiday, though, when thousands of Venetians still sail out onto the sea. The city’s loveliest celebration is the Festa di Redentore (the Feast of the Redeemer), the party held to commemorate that most demoralizing plague of 1575. This particular plague hit the city at its precarious peak, just four years after the rout of the Turkish navy at Lepanto. It soon became evident that while the Venetian ships may have won the battle, the war against the Turk was lost and Venice would once and for all be shut out of the riches of the Orient. Soon after, the Ottomans took her colony of Cyprus, with its sugar and cotton plantations, and then the fluttering flags of Saint Mark started falling like dominoes across the remaining Aegean Islands. Meanwhile, back in Venice, many thought the plague had come as a punishment for the city’s ungodly ways, and a wave of newfound piety swept the population. As a result, the government, so long resistant to the power of Rome, was convinced to let in the Inquisition. The city’s university at Padua, the home to independent thinkers such as Galileo, now succumbed to the Jesuits, and the Queen of the Adriatic became a foot soldier in the Counter-Reformation.
Today, the sociopolitical details of the holiday’s origin are mostly forgotten, as half the population of Venice clambers into boats and paddles into the lagoon to picnic and wait for the midnight fireworks that mark the date. For the occasion, the members of I Antichi dress in radiant white and perch like seagulls on their banner-bedecked boat, the Manissa. As they drift in the lagoon, they spread the decks with fine damask and dine on a meal of bigoli in salsa, the sweet-and-sour sarde in saor, roast duck, and baked peaches filled with almonds, butter, and amaretti. Luca stuffs his duck with cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and rosemary, among other seasonings. “Fantastico!” he exclaims as he details the menu from last year’s event. “The Venetians always say how beautiful this year’s holiday was.” He laughs. “But the next sentence—and they just have to say it—is always the same. They murmur, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, yes. But last year, it was more beautiful.’”
Luca tells me this last story as we finish our long meal, which began with the canoce and bigoli at the old Zancopè house on Campo San Maurizio. For dessert, we spread creamy mascarpone and mostarda veneta on baìcoli, the crisp little biscotti from Franco Colussi’s pastry shop. The sweet and spicy mostarda is reminiscent of a Martino recipe (“Grind…together mustard, raisins, dates, soaked bread and a little cinnamon”), except that here the mustard is combined with pears and quinces instead of dry fruit and bread. The condiment comes from the last spezieria, or spice shop, in the city, the Drogheria Mascari, just over the Rialto Bridge from the once great spice emporium at the Campo San Bartolomeo. These stores once specialized in the spices and other “drugs” of the Orient, but gradually, as spices became less prized, they branched out into other foodstuffs. Still, this is where the grandmothers go shopping for their spices and mostarda. Jurubeba confides in me that she is planning to open another spice shop, “the old-fashioned Venetian kind,” on the Campo San Maurizio with an American friend, a longtime resident of the ancient city. To supply her shop, though, she needs to turn to a wholesaler on the terra firma, who, no doubt, is getting his spices from a
trader in Rotterdam. The members of I Antichi work hard for their whiff of authenticity.
As our dinner in Jurubeba’s dining room moved from one course to the next, the group of diners slowly grew. We were joined by Mizue, Luca’s Japanese tutor and onetime lover, and then by Jurubeba’s half-Brazilian, half-Venetian son. I was reminded of a description by a seventeenth-century French visitor who commented on the “mighty concourse of strangers” in the city. Jurubeba insists that there are people moving to Venice: Brazilians and Japanese and Americans. She maintains that the city remains a magnet as it has been since Turk and German and Jew negotiated the price of pepper on the Rialto. But when I ask Luca, the only full-blooded Venetian here, what he sees of the future, his giant’s shoulders droop. “Son vecio…,” this vigorous forty-three-year-old says in Venetian dialect, only half in jest. “I am old….”
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice Page 12