by Polly Coles
Signora Zambon spends much of her time in this garden. She is a dry, thin little woman, always dressed in a cardigan and pearls, even when she’s getting her hands dirty with the big sacks of soil, the plants and pots that are delivered at regular intervals and stacked up in the communal entrance hall, before being hulked out back.
She has planted jasmine in the sunny part of the courtyard and it appears to be flourishing, but it is, for the most part, difficult to see where all that money and time has gone. Well, I think, most gardens tend to be like that, and anyway Zambon is not to be downcast: Zambon has a dream. She confesses it to me one day, as we pass on the staircase.
‘I go to bed at night with the David Austin rose catalogue. There is nothing like it in Italy. I would like to fill my garden with English roses.’
I think of English roses in their English places: the white snowstorms of Kiftsgate; the heavy, odorous velvets staggering over village walls; smatterings of Dog Rose, tunnels of pink petals among the cobnuts, arcading hidden lanes.
‘I can only grow roses in the pots on my terrazza,’ she shakes her head mournfully; it is the nearest she can ever get to her dream, but still she won’t relinquish David Austin. Even Signora Zambon smiles at this.
I begin to think about people who, despite where they actually are, dream of being somewhere and something else altogether. In the Signora’s case, she may in fact be in the right place, but a few hundred years too late. The palazzo in which we both live was once famed for its beautiful garden. This dank, overhung courtyard is all that remains. I wish that for the shy, wary Zambon the clocks of Tom’s Midnight Garden could chime thirteen and she might find herself strolling through the scented gardens of the Marcellani, in the cool night air.
PART 7: February
Village Fete
IT IS A dull February morning and a huge crowd has packed into Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta, the space between the Doge’s Palace and the waterfront looking out over the Basin of San Marco.
I am standing with my four children on the edge of this great crush.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘link hands!’ and we start to wriggle our way through, finally coming to a halt beneath the bell tower of San Marco, the campanile.
Strung over our heads and stretching from campanile to palace there is a thick wire. Dangling from its highest point, at the top of the campanile, are six massive, three-dimensional, white letters:
A-N-G-E-L-O.
When the great bronze men on the clock tower step forward and hammer out the twelve strokes of midday on the side of the bell, the so-called Angel of the Carnival will, we are told, fly down this zip wire and land effortlessly on the balcony or loggia of the Doge’s palace – a fleet spirit, an Ariel, to inaugurate the Venetian Season of Misrule.
Every year, a celebrity of some kind or other performs what sounds like a not inconsiderable feat; this year, the Angel is a rapper, of whom I have never heard.
Now, the hammers are striking the bell and everyone is craning for a first glimpse of the Angel. Silence settles over the Piazza. Then, creakingly, the zip wire begins to move and the giant letters joggle slightly, then start to slip, rather jerkily and very slowly, downwards.
Now at last we can see the Angel. He is straddling the O, hands gripped tight around the wire from which it is suspended, his legs dangling in space. He is a large man, in a sparkly, white suit; even at this distance, he is visibly ill at ease.
The crowd cheers and the Angel cautiously raises one arm in salute. He and his letters continue to move clumsily, falteringly, down the wire, like an ancient ski lift in operation for the last time.
This is not the circus spectacular I had envisaged: the slick, horizontal swoop from campanile to loggia, and I am not the only one among the crowd to register surprise, albeit for a different reason. The people around me greet the Angel’s appearance with amazement:
‘Ma! E nero!’ – ‘But – he’s black!’
This is the conspicuous official face of the opening of Carnival. Specially laid-on vaporetti with names like Arlecchino and Colombina can be seen steaming purposefully up the Grand Canal towards San Marco, where more and more tourists are being unloaded into the already heaving Piazza. Here, dramatically masked and enrobed individuals are striking mannequins’ poses for the photographers – they are faceless and nameless celebrities for one day. From this point, thousands of visitors will soon set off around the city in search of Carnival happenings, both real and imagined.
These days, Carnival is not a Venetian festival; it is a recent revival of the old tradition, designed to squeeze yet more money from the insatiable tourists and is, as far as I can see, universally disliked by the inhabitants of the city. It goes on for days and has no real centre or purpose, but is a sprawling, random spread of events, among which tourists wander aimlessly in ridiculous masks.
For Venetians, Carnival is a another example of their perennial, nightmarish problem: somebody has organized an enormous party in your backyard but it’s not your party and you don’t know any of the guests. All you want to do is get on with your daily life in peace, but all around you there are millions of strangers doing just the opposite.
Not surprisingly, there is a mass exodus of residents from the city during these joyless festivities.
Still, as ever, real Venice clings on valiantly like a tenacious little limpet. On this first day of the Carnival and at the same time as the big, tacky public show, there is another, smaller and genuinely Venetian event taking place, nearby and on the water. The various rowing clubs of the city have gathered in the Basin of San Marco and are taking their own Carnival procession back down the Grand Canal, against the rising tide of tourists converging on the Piazza.
Earlier this morning, Jane and I decorated her lovely wooden boat, the prawn-tailed sanpierota, with strings of cotton flags and balloons. We have filled it with six children and two adults, all of whom are dressed up in hastily cut and stuck masks and headdresses. Jane is at the back, steering in a large Mad Hatter’s top hat, and I am rowing prua (at the front), in a black nylon Batman cloak I found in the dressing-up box, and a gold mask that covers my whole face so that I am having a certain amount of difficulty in breathing even before I begin rowing a heavy boatload of people up the Grand Canal. We are a motley and cheerful crew as we join the string of thirty Venetian rowing boats of various sizes and shapes bobbing about in the little waves of the bacino.
The only close encounter between these two Carnival events takes place as the boat club rowers pass under the Accademia Bridge. Here, hundreds of tourists lean on the wooden rail and photograph us for all they are worth. What perhaps they cannot fully understand is that, moving under the famous bridge, processing between the venerable and fantastical palaces of the Grand Canal, is a small, waterborne village fete.
One boat, a topo is packed with people in crepe paper octopus hats, the multi-coloured tendrils falling over their shoulders. In another, a band of merrily un-PC cannibals are dancing to Bob Marley, blacked-up like minstrels, with woollen dreadlocks and crepe paper grass skirts over purple nylon tracksuits. A large batelo is crewed by six hefty men in blond wigs and Ugly Sister finery. They manage to row the whole length of the Grand Canal without smiling once.
On another boat, a wooden frame has been erected and then lavishly draped with plastic vines and plastic oranges and lemons. Under this lopsided Bacchic pergola four fat, bearded men in aprons are busily frying fish in a cauldron, precariously balanced on a single gas ring. As the Carnival flotilla goes by, the four cooks use long slatted spoons to dredge up the fish from the spitting oil. They drop it into cones of white paper, which they fold shut and then lob across the water into our outstretched hands.
‘Vino?’ they shout and we lean over the edge of our boat towards them, holding out our plastic cups, precariously, across the water. From unlabelled bottles they lustily slug red wine in our direction – half of it reaches the cups, half slops into the Grand Canal.
Because th
ere are so few bridges over the Canal and so few points of public access to the water’s edge, this procession has few witnesses. The atmosphere down here at water level is friendly, informal, local and light-hearted – not much different, really, from any Sunday afternoon fancy-dress parade in any other village in Europe.
Dressing Up
EARLY MORNING IS the only time of day in Venice when you can be certain that the ratio of tourists to residents will be weighted in the residents’ favour. It is, for me, the most magical time in any city; there is a sleep-tousled, unguarded, good-naturedness in the early morning streets that you find at no other hour of the day. In Venice this is more starkly the case than anywhere else simply because as the morning advances, the balance of tourists and residents undergoes a violent destabilizing swing, to the point where the life you observe on the streets after, say, 10 a.m., is in no way guaranteed ‘authentic’ and is much more likely to consist of the few limited transactions in the repertoire of tourism: food, souvenirs, sightseeing, food again, and so on.
Every morning, I walk with my children across the wide campo that runs along one side of the church of the Frari. In the convoluted Venetian world of narrow alleyways, this space allows a fine opening of perspectives and reveals the great brick church silhouetted against the wider sky. Perhaps it is precisely because of this sense of an open space – an arena inviting display – that a curious phenomenon is to be observed here during the midwinter weeks of Carnival.
In the early morning, the campo is full of people hurrying diagonally across it and disappearing, one way, into the network of calli leading towards the Accademia bridge, and the other, over a bridge that leads to the station and Piazzale Roma. There are sharply suited businessmen and businesswomen with briefcases and mobiles; there are parents and children heading for the various schools in the neighbourhood, and students on their way to the university at Cà Foscari. The green-suited street cleaners are brushing rhythmically over the pavements with their old-fashioned brooms, bunches of long twigs bound with string to a knobbly wooden handle.
As the children and I are crossing the campo, in the middle of all this bustle there suddenly appears a large and imposing figure. He is dressed from head to foot in the clothes of an eighteenth-century Venetian aristocrat: a skirted, violet satin top coat and violet breeches and an elaborately embroidered apple-green waistcoat. Lace froths at his collar and wrists and his thick cream stockings are fancily gartered with yellow satin. His shoes have handsome brass buckles, two-inch heels and long, squared-tipped toes. In one extravagantly be-ringed hand, he holds a pair of cream leather gloves. He has a wispy little twizzle of a moustache, his powdered cheeks are rouged, and a giant beauty spot is pencilled on to his upper lip.
How tall he really is, I cannot say, but the general impression is of prominence and display. He holds his head high and steps deliberately, ceremoniously across the campo, his toes turned out, his silver-topped cane showily extended. He is acutely conscious of whatever impression he thinks he is making on the brisk dog-walkers, the schoolchildren with their rucksacks, and the waitresses having a fag outside the bar. He seems also a little lost – and this not only in time, but also in his own particular fantasy of who he is and where he is. Just peeping over the top of his coat pocket is a German guide book to Venice.
On another morning in the same week, our rush for school is hopelessly slowed by a lady in a vast powdered periwig and a geometrically skirted dress of the seventeenth century. She rustles up the calle, brushing both walls with her rectangular skirts, and making it impossible for anybody to squeeze past her. The barrier is in fact a double one, as another lady, similarly skirted, similarly bewigged, paces regally ahead of her. Both women are very fat; their bulging, powdered bosoms, stuck all over with fake beauty spots, are bursting out of a damask corsellage and strings of pearls have been wrapped round and round their fleshy necks. The lady at the front flutters an embroidered fan and chats amiably back over her shoulder to her friend.
I wonder how these people, so consummately and elaborately dressed up, should come to be wandering the streets so very early in the morning? Have they not been to bed at all, but been pacing the city all night long in their finery? Or did they wake hours before dawn and begin the long business of primping and colouring and struggling into corsets? Did they then sally forth into the streets in their splendid bubbles of Venetianness and sail through the commuter crowds, the kids, the students, the twenty-first-century rubbish collectors, blissfully unaware that the year was not in fact 1711, but 2011?
How pleasing that, just for once, it is Venice that provides the workaday backdrop, the banal and the modern, while these petticoated and periwigged visitors, like absurd and over-blown birds of paradise, bring with them, in their overnight bags and their imaginations, some waking dream of a glorious past.
The Venice Effect
HOLLYWOOD HAS, ON various occasions, cast Venice in the unlikely role of a heart-thumping, high-octane action movie location. In the West Coast depictions of this east coast city, speed boats scream up the Grand Canal in a lather of white water, and deep sea divers breathe raspingly through masks as they grapple with gold ingots among the subaqueous foundations of palaces.
The fact of the matter is, of course, that about the most difficult thing to do in Venice is move fast, let alone get away. To every holiday we organize, we must add at least an hour just to get out of the city and join whichever means of land transport we have planned for the next leg of the journey.
Once our suitcases, bags and last-minute bits and pieces have been heaped up on the landing, we have to lug them down four flights of stairs, across the hall and into the calle. We then drag and heave them, over uneven pavements, to the vaporetto stop where we pile everything into the boat.
This particular section of the journey is a source of squirming embarrassment to me. The mountains of non-Venetian luggage inevitably set off a xenophobic riff from someone in the vaporetto. Nothing about us – our language, our clothes, our plastic bags stuffed full of stuff – say anything except Pesky Foreigner, although the more acute observer has, more than once, been visibly intrigued by these tourists who have a large Italian board game sticking out of a box, or a pair of skis, or a bunch of flowers. I tend, pathetically, to speak Italian with the children on these miserable trips and to flaunt my season ticket.
At Piazzale Roma, we must drag and heave everything off again and then, on the pavement, with all our worldly goods spread around us, we wait for the arrival of the green van, which Alberto has gone ahead to fetch from its semi-retirement on a quiet, suburban street in Mestre.
Crime is not a major problem in Venice. Not being able to make a swift getaway from the scene of the crime is a serious deterrent to criminals. When the heist must be followed by a longish walk, a very slow boat ride and a bus journey, the chances of (literally) getting away with it are considerably lowered.
The most successful criminal in Venice will be of the melting-away type, skilled at operating in a crowd; it is rare to go unobserved in this city, even when you think you are alone. This is why there is one particular crime that does flourish here, and within six weeks of my arrival I have fallen victim to it.
It’s a Wednesday lunchtime and I’m walking briskly to fetch Freddie from school. I stop briefly at the school door, lean over to kiss him, and we set off for home. It is only during those few seconds of greeting outside the school that anyone could have slipped a hand into my bag and taken my purse. Whoever does it is a pro – not the James Bond sort – but one of the Artful Dodger variety. I feel nothing, and even in those confused first moments of realizing that what should have been there has in fact vanished, I can only admire the slick-fingered technician who has relieved me of forty euros and a sheaf of cards.
Later that afternoon, I return to the school to fetch my other children and I tell some of the waiting parents what has happened. They instantly rally into indignant and purposeful action.
‘Gypsies,
’ says Flavia. ‘They send children in squads. They’re so small and quick, you notice nothing until you realize that your wallet’s gone.’
‘They’re not interested in the cards,’ says Cecilia. ‘They throw those away – into the canals or letter boxes. All they want is the cash.’
Another mother, Sara, a quietly spoken and gentle woman, galvanizes into action in that emphatic way that seems to come naturally even to the most pacific Italians.
‘Come on!’ she says. ‘Let’s look in the bin.’
She strides across the calle towards the rubbish bin.
‘Do the rubbish collectors have keys?’ I ask in English anguish as she digs her own keys out of her bag and starts to wiggle and manoeuvre one along the edge of the locked front section of the bin. She says nothing, but keeps on fiddling expertly until the lock has been picked and the bin opened. There is no purse inside, but the vigilante parents are still on the case.
‘Walk around all the area and look along the ledges on buildings. They quite often dump them up there, once they’ve taken the cash out.’
‘Go to the post office. They’ve got a room full of wallets that they’ve found stuffed into letter boxes.’
‘My purse was taken once,’ Flavia tells me. ‘I found it in a boat on the canal. They’d chucked it over the edge. No money in it, of course.’
Grateful and embarrassed in equal measure by the public drama I have triggered, I go, as directed, to report the theft to the police.
The office is in Piazzale Roma and I spend some time walking up and down among buses and taxies before going into a bar for directions. I have already passed the place, but it is poorly marked and fronted with reflecting glass out of which the carabinieri can see, without in turn being observed.