The Puffin at Palazzo Tron by Michelle Lovric

If this post had a subtitle, it would be ‘in which the Royal Mail almost sabotages my debut at the Venice Biennale of Art and I’m made to understand that my artwork is “of no intrinsic value”.’

But in the end that’s just a commonplace tale of lost time, expense and heartbreak caused by an apparently uncaring, untrusted institution that also appears averse to the concept of answering the telephone. You can guess what happened and it reflects well only on the valiant Jack, manager of my local London branch and my lovely postie Neal, who honestly tried to swim against the tide and help.

So enough black bile. I’m not going to go all Ms Lovric versus the Post Office on you here.

This is actually a really lovely story.

And a simple one. 

My forthcoming novel, The Puffin, is as usual set in Venice.

And as has also become usual with my books, early on in the novel’s life, it began to exist in a series of poems that explored its ideas and totems: empire, coercion, hats, feathers, Habsburg Yellow, infidelity, poetry, language, animal consciousness, faith and even catastrophic plumbing, which is of course intrinsic to human unhappiness and therefore a special ornament to storytelling.

The Puffin also began to exist in the form of a hand-painted watercolour leporello. 

               

TThe leporello came courtesy of the gracious Venetian artist Matilde Dolcetti, who invites people to come to her beautiful home at the Palazzo Dandolo at San Tomà where we may work at her dining table on whatever we wish, using watercolours and the deliciously textured paper that she provides. I always make a leporello for the literary work-in-progress. It's a really precious use of time, and an exercise that invariably triggers thoughts, images, ideas and words. It even helps me with pace, as something tangible has to happen in each painted panel. It is time with the novel but not at the keyboard. It’s a full and happy refreshment.

The Puffin leporello performed its usual inspirational duties and I didn’t think any more of it – until I saw that the artist Emilia Kabakov was creating a collateral event at the Venice Biennale of Art this year. It was to be called Diario veneziano, a large-scale “total installation” curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate. The ambition was to transform the noble floor of Palazzo Tron into a collective narrative space: “not an exhibition about Venice, but an exhibition with Venice”. The artist and curators invited participants to contribute physical objects relating to their lives in the city, along with an explanation about why the object carried important memories, resonance and meaning.

I decided to submit the leporello, not so much as the story-model of a Venetian-based novel but as a tribute to Matilde’s grace and generosity in creating the ephemeral community of her dining table in the heart of Venice.

Diario veneziano was not a competition but I was still highly honoured and delighted to have The Puffin's leporello accepted. I’d never dreamt of being more than a regular and excited Biennale attendee (though I avoid the opening week parties). And I loved the idea of this exhibition. The Biennale is the province of international pavilions, big-name artists, publicity stunts and – more than ever this year – the art business. The crowds it draws are just one more thing Venice has to suffer. So I really appreciated the concept of giving the Venetians their own, private Biennale by them, about them and for them.

And it was even nicer to discover that my dear friend, the artist Déirdre Kelly, also has one of her works in Diario veneziano. We have collaborated as fellow Companions in the Guild of St George, the charity devoted to the works and ideas of John Ruskin. But this was the first time we have been in the same exhibition - Déirdre being a proper artist and me being just a writer who loves painting watercolours. And it was of course Déirdre who had taken me along to Matilde’s watercolour sessions in the first place.  

The Puffin, by the way, is a sequel to what's undoubtedly my best-known novel The Book of Human Skin. The Puffin works as a standalone, introducing new characters and new ideas – but readers who enjoyed Human Skin’s garrulous villain will perhaps feel pleasantly uncomfortable to welcome him back as one of a chorus of narrators. This time, not all of them are human.

The book is published on October 8th. Salt Publishing have designed my favourite-ever cover in a process that was joyfully collaborative. I’ll be doing some events to launch The Puffin, including the Venice Noir festival in November and being interviewed by our poetical Dean, Mark Oakley, at Southwark Cathedral on October 20th (Save the date!)

And of course I have other publicity duties ... 

Although I had for a long time despaired of social media, I worked out that Instagram was probably the most palatable for me. A Puffin in Venice Insta page was born. I acquired a life-size replica of a puffin and began to take him on my journeys around Venice. 

I was happy because it meant that I could work with David Winston, whose photographs of Venice tell incredible stories of their own. David has kindly done various puffin shoots with me, like this one at Benevento in the Strada Nuova, where we illustrated scenes from the book using their fabulous array of damasks, feathers, shoes and a very frightening mannequin.

I treated Instagram as I would a novel – not something personal, but part of my work as a writer. I found a voice for the puffin which means he writes himself. He gives historical insights, he comments wryly, he jokes, he points out the ridiculous. He meets local wildlife. He supports local causes like NoGrandiNavi, which opposes the cruise ships that pollute Venice. He is not exactly the same as the puffin of the novel because he has different work to do.  

And, after being very scared of AI, I found a use for it. Writing captions made use of my literary brain but hashtags rotted it. I use AI to generate the hashtags. So also, they are not my fault.

Despite my poor camera skills and cheap old phone, I went out on the streets to seek original material and I have to say that the puffin has brought me some completely unexpected pleasures. 

The first is seeing things from a different angle – in miniature and in detail. Puffin pictures work best that way. I have loved the chance to refocus.

The second is the joy, for a solitary writer, of interacting with living human beings. Whether I’m taking the puffin to be blessed by the local priest along with cats and dogs at Santa Marina, going shopping with him at antique fairs or smuggling him into exhibitions, people are always intrigued by him. Some do double-takes, thinking the resin model is real. Several people have said gloomily, ‘Now we have PUFFINS in Venice too? It must be Global Warming.’ Other ask if they can touch. Everyone wants to know what I am up to.

I was spending a lot of time explaining the puffin and, as you might have noticed, I don’t have a lot of time. So I went to Veneziastampa in Santa Maria Materdomini – where the wonderful Michele is still using antique machinery. I had some puffin cards printed, and that turned out to be another lovely experience. The cards are very popular. I have to keep reprinting them.

In the last two years, I have also worked with a delightful milliner, Tina Giuntini (aka Bea Evie) who makes bespoke hats, as does Alva, the fiery heroine in my book. Tina lent me the antique millinery tools she collects, so I could feel them in my hands as I wrote the scenes in which they figure. Tina has checked the book for millinery faux pas. To illustrate a part of the plot, she even made me a Bergère bonnet with ribbon compartments for musket balls and rolled-up maps.

Tina also created a tiny Napoleon hat for the puffin and is working a turban with a miniature Barbary plume. All for Instagram, but also for joy.

Speaking of joy, now the leporello stands in a vitrine at the Palazzo Tron's Biennale event, surrounded by toys, handmade lace, wedding veils, antique fishing baskets, letters, schoolbooks and so many other things contributed by Venetians. My explanation of Matilde’s magical afternoons stands beside stories of school days, sporting events, family triumphs and tragedies. Naturally the puffin and I went along to see. It is hard to convey how happy this makes me. 

You were perhaps wondering about the melodramatic subtitle to this post … so I will explain. Yes, the Royal Mail lost the original leporello and my frantic attempts to track it down failed. With the deadline for delivering artwork by then three days way, I hastily repainted the leporello from photographs of the original and sent it to the curators by a reliable courier just in time to be included.

In the course of trying to fill out online forms, I discovered that Royal Mail apparently characterises my leporello as ‘of no intrinsic value’. You see, I was lending it, not selling it to the exhibition. The online forms do not consent to be completed so I sent an actual letter to the Royal Mail.

The leporello, I told them, ‘never was and never will be for sale. But it is a piece of original art that was judged interesting enough for the Venice Biennale of Art, so the Royal Mail’s estimation of “no intrinsic value” says more about the Royal Mail than it does about the artwork.’

Interestingly, the Royal Mail actually replied on May 12. ‘I’m happy to advise,’ wrote my correspondent, apparently without irony, ‘ … that your item was delivered on 11/05/2026.’ There was no mention of the fact that this date was nearly seven weeks after it was posted (via a 3 – 5 day tracked service), a Biblical 40 days after the deadline for exhibition submissions and two days after the Biennale actually opened. There was no explanation of the delay.

Who knows if the original leporello was ever really delivered? I have heard nothing from the curators. The Royal Mail has not to date answered my request for proof of delivery. 

Meanwhile, on a happier note, I have just discovered that my Insta puffin has fellow-travellers on the Isle of Man. The Manx Wildlife Trust (MWT) has used the same resin models to attract puffins back to the Calf of Man, a small island without human inhabitants. The marine conservation officer Lara Howe has explained that puffins are sociable and prefer to breed in colonies, so showing other puffins already in place convinces the living birds that the Calf is a good place to settle.

Perhaps I can attract a permanent colony of puffins to Venice this way? We already have beautiful egrets, cormorants, herons and even owls (none of which the tourists, lost in their phones, ever never seem to notice). 

The puffin is sometimes known as the northernmost Bird of Paradise. 

I think they would feel quite at home in what John Ruskin described as 'the Paradise of Cities'.

Michelle Lovric’s website

'Diario veneziano'
9 May — 28 June 2026
Ca' Tron, Sestiere Santa Croce 1957, Venice (two minutes from the San Stae vaporetto stop).

Jesus-in-a-bottle - Michelle Lovric

I’m spending most of spring in Venice this year. For the first six weeks I carried the usual A6 spiral-bound notebook everywhere. I kept adding lines and stanzas to a long poem I was building inside it. Occasionally I thought of tearing out the pages to type them up for my poem larder. But I never quite did.

Instead, I left the notebook in my local supermarket and the staff were adamant that a cleaner must have thrown it out. 

I feel very edited.

Was the poem good? I can’t tell you. But the cleaner saved me the agonies of transcribing my terrible handwriting it, cutting the poem, rebuilding it, making it squirm into a fashionable form.  I never put that poem through a workshop, never heard the embarrassed silence when I finished reading it. I was never subtly or openly questioned for daring to create it or present it. I never had to struggle to justify its length or the extravagance of its language. I never had to hear someone suggest that I put it aside to work on something more lucrative.

On the whole, I am better off without that poem. Terminally edited, it cannot harm me anymore. Thank you to the cleaner at the supermarket. All power to his or her hardworking elbow.

 

It has been a spring like this. My plan was to spend time in the archives of the Scuola Dalmata, researching one Giovanni Lovric, perhaps even finding a connection between myself and this writer from Sinj who was in Venice in the 1770s. It was hard to get an answer from the scuola but they were obviously on my wavelength because the very morning I was choosing scholarly attire to front up in person, I finally received an email to say that they too are closed for restoration. (Picture of the Scuola Dalmata from Wikimedia Commons).

My two current novels for adults and children are also closed for restoration and I’d been hoping to find refreshment in Giovanni’s story. Instead, I have resorted to imagining him. I suspect the imagined Giovanni Lovric is having much more fun than his real inspiration, locked in the archives. For a start, he has a ferocious girlfriend with a bear who drinks beetroot beer.

I too have been closed for restoration after a couple of surgeries, with more to come. Some parts of me will never be restored. But I have found solace in a new collection of folk-art objects. 

I found these first two below at the mercatino in Venice’s Campo San Maurizio. As often happens, I then started to see them all over the place. And I have now acquired two more for my collection. (Picture by Déirdre Kelly, my fellow Companion of The Guild of St George).

 

By collecting, you learn: language, culture, folklore, faith.

So I have learned that people used to refer to a bottle like this as a ‘Bottiglia Mistica’ (‘Mystical Bottle’) or a bottle containing ‘Arma Christi’ (‘Christ’s Weapons’). It might also be called a ‘Bottiglia della Passione di Cristo’ or ‘Bottiglia della/di Pazienza’. A ‘pazienza’, I have read somewhere, can be a nun’s robe. And the bottles are sometimes described as ‘lavoro conventuale o monastico’ – convent or monastery work or ‘Klosterarbeit’ in German, where many of the bottles are for sale. So, like many articles now considered or sold as religious folk art, the bottles could have been put together by nuns or monks. (I have a collection of Christmas decorations hand-painted by Italian nuns and studded with coloured foil from chocolate wrappings). The description could also, of course, refer to the patience required to set up these little scenes, building them to be folded flat, inserting them in the bottle and then erecting them with threads pulled through the neck. 

I have also seen them called ‘Calvary Bottles’. Or ‘Impossible Bottles’ – though this title was also applied to the ships in bottles created by Venetian glass masters like Francesco Biondi in the early 19th century. I particularly like ‘God-in-a-Bottle’. And ‘Jesus-in-a-Bottle.’ (It sounds like a profane exclamation, doesn’t it? As in, ‘Jesus-in-a-bottle! I left my notebook in the supermarket and the cleaner threw it out!’)

The Bottles of Passion share many elements, most of which place them as folk-art objects. They use mixed media and sometimes found objects: carved wood, pre-made Victorian chromolithographs, fabric, bone, printed paper, even bread and rice. The bottles are often recycled: once used for common foodstuffs and even alcohol. Most date to the late 19th century or early 20th century when glass bottles became cheaply and commonly available.

They all show some combination of the symbols of Christ’s Passion:

  

- the whip and the whipping post

- the reed sceptre

- the crown of thorns

- the cross

- the dice with which the soldiers played for His robe

- the hammer that drove the nails into Christ’s hands and feet

- the ladder

- the shroud

- the cock that crowed

- the spear of Destiny

 - the sponge held up to His lips

- the pincers that removed the nails

 - the holy grail or chalice

- the sign INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews)

Some bottles add angels, Mary and Mary Magdalen. One of mine has three Christs, or two particularly holy-looking thieves. (Picture at right by Deirdre Kelly)

These Instruments of Passion, inside a bottle, might be believed to create a spiritual tool-kit that can be used to defeat Satan. Some were sold at religious shrines, such as that of the Black Madonna of Liesse in France. Some were filled with holy water – a portable blessing.

My own thought on this is that the stations of the cross are a journey, and that these little bottles provided the comfort of a portable shrine for those undertaking their own pilgrimages in hazardous times or places.

It is also said that these bottles forfended against particular superstitions about places where waters and roads meet, as it was thought that evil spirits lurked there in wait for the innocent traveller; such places also presented risks in the form of cross-currents, ambush or the possibility of taking the wrong way, physically or metaphorically.

Some times things go the right way. 

To those of you who kindly kept up with the Oceandiva saga in my various posts here at the History Girls, the threat has gone away. Five years after we first discovered the ambition of Europe’s biggest party boat to come to the Thames, the owners have announced they were fed up with the ‘regulatory system’ in the UK and were consciously uncoupling from London and happily going back to EU waters. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my tireless, hilarious colleagues in the campaign, the odd bunch of Londoners who sacrificed so much time and energy to keep the Thames more safe, less commodified and less greenwashed. There's plenty more for us to do. The Oceandiva has proved to be only symptomatic of problems that need addressing on the River Thames. 

More detail about this on the River Residents Group website.

What else am I thinking about? One thing is the anniversary of the terror attack on my London village on June 3rd 2017, when eight young people were killed and another 48 injured by three terrorists using large kitchen knives. For many days afterwards, residents were locked up inside their homes or excluded from them by a police cordon around our neighbourhood, which had become a crime scene.

I’ve been thinking about my friends and neighbours who were caught up in the attack or who witnessed it. I worry that the memorializing of the attack has not always happened in ways that are appropriate or disinterested. Indeed, it sometimes feels appropriated. I wonder to what extent we community members will be included in memorials this year, if at all. We're going to try something do-it-yourself, but heartfelt, I hope, instead. I am not going to say more. The point is, to do it away from publicity and photo-shoots. 

And there is one more thing that concerns some of us: just a few hundred paces from the attacks, a kitchen shop has put up a huge display of knives that are not protected by a case. It gives me a shiver each time I pass. Over many  months, my neighbours and I have protested to the shop, to their landlords at Borough Yards and to the police. But the display is still there, still far too easily accessible to anyone with violent intentions or to someone whose judgement is blurred by the beer with which the area is awash, this being the most intensive conglomeration in Southwark of premises that sell alcohol. It is sobering that, as the seventh anniversary of the attack approaches, we still can’t find anyone to care enough about the potential danger of this knife display to do something about it. 

Instead, there are plans to close a road or two, potentially marooning hundreds of residents, but no desire, it seems, to remove the bars' pavement licences that narrow the streets, causing serious bottlenecks for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the narrow canyon-like streets of the Borough Market. The topography eerily recalls the photos of Itaewon, in Seoul, where 160 died in a crowd crush of 100,000 visitors in October 2022. In Borough Market, in fact, the crowds can be 50 percent larger than Itaewon. And they have nowhere to go if something were to go wrong. 

Meanwhile, the fight against over-tourism goes on in Venice, with NoGrandiNavi unleashing a picturesque new protest against the latest moves to excavate the lagoon in order to speed the return of the monster ships to the Stazione Marittima in Venice. A demonstration took place at nearby Zattere, and I was there with some colleagues from our Thames River Residents Group to cheer them on. A few weeks earlier, several artist activists had crafted the banners you see below and created a marine creature to protect the lagoon - seen arriving below. 

You can hear NGN's Marta Sottoriva eloquently explaining the new battle and the locals' reaction to the tourist access tax in the first episode of BBC Radio 4's The Tourist Trap, an investigation into over-tourism all over the world. (You can listen again on BBC RADIO SOUNDS).

Banners created by artists for the demonstration

It took three boats to transport the symbolic creature 

Above, some if the River Residents Group contingent in Venice last weekend.

NoGrandiNavi website (donation page)

Michelle Lovric's website

River Residents Group websitewebsite 

These are not the hands - Michelle Lovric

I’m making this short, as Covid-brain has inoculated me with attention deficit disorder, hop-skipping eyes and a dislike of detail. I don’t believe I am speaking just for myself when I say that I flinch away from length and complication the way we used to recoil from a mosquito when on holiday in the Mediterranean …

In 2020, my hands took a Great Leap Forward, not in a good way. They aged twenty years faster than the rest of my body. They don’t look like my hands any more.

Covid cleanliness is not next to pellicular loveliness. Add regular hand-washing to Corona-brain daydreaming, and I often find myself washing my hands for far too long. I can never remember when I last sanitized, so it’s always the right time to do it again. Result: mummification.

My messed-up hands had more use than normal during the lockdowns. They made many meals. They produced battalions of home-made cards collaged from antique ephemera and beads. They set up a guerrilla garden in my London street (only to have it stripped, night by night, by a thief); they spent quite a lot of time in the belly-puff of my fur-friend Caramella. They grew herbs and planted exotic tulip bulbs. They dispensed picnics on night-time boat trips in Venice.

But month by month, they looked more and more like leather carved out of a butcher’s apron. Caramella the cat, normally up for a belly rub at any time, began to cringe from my thorny touch.

I researched all kinds of moisturisers – finding ‘Hand Jam’, ‘Crack Attack’, ‘French Lavender Goat Lotion’, ingredients including chocolate-orange, pumpkin and Parma violets.

I was reminded that I’d been here before.

In an anthology about quack medical cures for women, produced some 20 years ago, I’d included a section on the products sold to women eager to keep their hands supple, soft and elegant. Ironically, marketing for such potions was targeted at the gullible rich, and were likely to have been beyond the pockets of the women whose hands were regularly punished by washing and scrubbing.

As ever, with quack medicine, the charm for me lay in the language. Quacks were the poets of their day, tellers of adult fairytales of the perfectability of health and beauty.

Skin treatments for women have always been sold as more than simple creams or lotions: they are magical solutions to life’s problems, if the advertisers are to be believed. No metaphor was too extreme, no allusion too exotic, no caution too terrifying.

As Carl A. Naether observed his book Advertising to Women (1928): ‘I can think of no commodity field in which superlatives are used more excessively than in cosmetics.’

One must add these superlatives to the quack’s usual arsenal of terms that sound scientific, and may well be scientific in origin but have nothing to do with rejuvenating ageing skin – and also, perhaps more than in any other field, the quacks have always scoured the world for exotic ingredients, or at least the names of them, when it comes to beauty preparations. A skin tonic could hardly expected to be effective without containing some ‘May-dew sublimated’, or ‘Ready-drawn Spirit of Mint and Saffron’. Precious stones and flower essences were favourite stated ingredients, but often the contents were more prosaic, as was demonstrated in a series of books published in the early 20th century. 

Secret Remedies analysed the contents of various well-known products. Part of the remit was to show how much very cheap ingredients were marked up by the manufactures (very much). Boric acid, maize starch, paraffin were popular ingredients but the most common one was … water. ‘Rino Curative Ointment’ was advertised as containing ‘napthalan, Peru balsam, chrysarobin’ but was found to consist of turpentine, oil of cade, boric acid and egg yolk.

Secret Remedies also pointed out that prices often started low, but those who wrote off for a simple cream would receive an answer that specified a complete treatment including a special soap, a medicine to be taken internally and a dusting powder. The treatment could not be expected to work unless all four products were used together, of course. 

Preparations for women were often sold with a female name in the title, such as ‘Mrs Merroll’s Face Bleach and Skin Food’. Lady beauticians handbills survive from as early as the seventeenth century. Naturally, none but ‘Gentlewomen’ pursued this elegant trade. In London they were usually to be found in the upper-class parts of town, like Mayfair and Bond Street. Their handbills invariably boasted that they were patronised by ‘Persons of the Highest Quality’. Like the medical quacks, these ladies often claimed to have trained in France, Italy or Germany, and to be the possessors of certain secrets and special formulas, created by all kinds of scientific processes, ‘chymical’, ‘hermetical’, ‘chirurgical’ etc.

An advertisement for a miracle worker in London’s Bond Street is typical: ‘… this Lady preserves Youth and Beauty. She beautifies without any paint and increases the Radical Humour in some and restores it in others, corroborating the spirits, animals or vitals and the whole body…’

Restoration ladies had a horror of yellowing complexions, sometimes described as a ‘wainscot’ colour, and of red hair. Unmarried girls could easily look pasty – victims of the ‘green-sickness.’ Help was always at hand.

One of the most picturesque preparations to come out of the 17th century beauty industry was the so-called ‘Water of Talk and Pearl.’ Ground pearls were claimed to be the ingredients of many beautifying powders but ‘Talk’ (talc) was more likely to be the real basis for this kind of tonic, which, it was claimed, could turn an unfashionably brown complexion to clear, bright white.

Victorian advertising cast different kinds of veils, with pseudo-scientific terms appearing in the names and marketing, as in ‘Scurfgofus – ‘a scurf preparation’ and ‘Emollio Tablet’ for ‘softening and whitening’ the hands’.

‘Otto of Rose’ (‘cooling, healing, emollient’) was a popular scent for Victorian hand creams. There were also glycerine and benzoin preparations ‘unrivalled for softening, whitening and preserving the skin. 

courtesy of Wellcome Images

But these ingredients were too cheap and accessible on their own. An exotic name or ingredient was still required to ‘sex it up’. Hence, Snowfire Glycerine Jelly, Holloway’s Glyco-Vazin Cream for Eczema’, ‘The Egyptian Salve’ ‘Machin’s Infallible Pearl Ointment’, ‘Northern Foam’ whereas ‘Sootheen’ has a rather Irish flavour to it, ‘Saponaceous Cream of Almonds’. Number 1 Mannina Ointment claimed to cure not just skin lesions but cancer and tumours. ‘Zam-buk’, made of beeswax and oils of eucalyptus, camphor, red thyme and pine, first appeared in 1903 in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The name is said to come from a ridge of mountains in South Africa. This product is still available to buy.

In my own research for something to cure my hands, I finally discovered a cheap, greasy, fragrant supermarket product that worked far better and smelled much nicer than so many creams on which the marketing dollar had been lavished. There was nothing tricksy about its packaging. There were no grand claims for the expense and exoticism of its ingredients, most of which I could have found on my own balcony or in my fridge.

My formerly mummified scrag-ends are now so soft that the cat once more consents to hold hands on the sofa while we watch her preferred bird documentaries. All good.

I hope you’ve found your equivalent, or even made it. 

Michelle Lovric's website

How to read a painting of the plague - Michelle Lovric

Today I should be flying from London to Venice. But obviously I won't be. And even if I could get there, I would be confined to my home, required to fill out a form if I wanted to cross the city to see my friends. I could not go to the library or to see an exhibition. I could not go to my local bar for a cappuccino. A Venetian friend told me yesterday morning, 'It's as if we've all been sent to jail.' 

I wish I was on my way, though. I'd love to see Venice without the crowds and most of all without the cruise ships: restored thereby to the beauty of a Canaletto painting. Without the cruise ships, the air of Venice must be safer to breathe, paradoxically, than it has been ever since the cruise ship blight fell on the city.

So, yes, beauty, but at what cost? 

Northern Italy is now paralysed not just by the corona virus but by fear of the corona virus.

This is not a new condition for la Serenissima. She is a city to some extent shaped by epidemics. As the crossroads and crucible of trade for centuries, Venice was also the place to which all major diseases eventually made a pilgrimage.

Plague, of course, was the sickness that terrified Venice above all others. When the disease struck in April 1464, the senate decreed that prayers should be said continuously in all the convents, monasteries and churches – for the plague was seen as a divine scourge. Two major plague outbreaks, in 1575 and 1630, killed off between a quarter and a third of the population each time. In 1575, one in two Venetians fell sick.

Historically, Venetians liked to portray their city as healthy in body and spirit. So it was a matter of scrupulous record that plague always arrived from the outside. The 1630 plague was said to have been imported via an ambassador of the Duke of Mantua when he was staying on the island of San Clemente. The ambassador seems to have contaminated a carpenter from Dorsoduro who happened to be working on San Clemente. That carpenter’s family were the first Venetian victims of this incarnation of the disease, one of the worst visitations on the city. (I noted this week that a Veneto politician has been keeping up the xenophobe blame tradition by asserting that corona virus was caused by Chinese people eating live mice. He himself is eating humble pie now, fortunately, and perhaps choking on it.)

Apart from plague, Venice was also subject to typhus, smallpox and cholera epidemics. Every ten years or so, sickness crippled the city. Sometimes, cruelly, two diseases arrived at once. Typhus and the plague were often twinned in the winter months. So it’s hard to write historical novels set in Venice without having your plots being contaminated by one illness or the other. Thus far, I’ve kept the plague fairly peripheral in my books, partly because it’s been done before and partly because the mechanics of the Venetian health measures were so detailed that they are laborious to explain and therefore somewhat fatal to novelistic pace. (Some things, like pageantry, are almost impossible to keep alive in words). However, I’ve needed to get closer to Venetian plague over the last couple of years when devising medical history tours of Venice for London’s Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, founded by Royal Charter in 1617 to promote the healing arts. (To this day, 85 percent of members are professionals in medical fields).

During last year’s visit, the Apothecaries were lucky enough to catch the end of Tintoretto’s 500th birthday party, magnificently celebrated in the Palazzo Ducale, the Accademia, various churches. The Scuola Medica at SS Giovanni e Paolo – always on our itineraries – hosted an excellent exhibition entitled Art, Faith and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice, which was also recorded in a superb book of essays by the same name (see left).

I saw the exhibition several times. From the first, I was captivated by a painting I’d never seen before. It’s by Domenico, son of the more famous Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto. Although Domenico’s work is generally decried as more workmanlike and of less combustible genius than his father’s, I think that this particular painting touches on greatness because of the simple pathos of its storytelling. You can read it like a book. And that's what I propose to do in this post.

Below is the painting, reproduced courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu).

The emotional message and story arc are very clear. Yet there is also so much going on here in the detail. Even its title is a short story in itself: Venice supplicating the Virgin Mary to intercede with Christ for the Cessation of the Plague, 1630–31.

This painting was commissioned for the congregation members at San Francesco della Vigna in Castello. Incidentally, at this church, the apothecary-priests made Four Thieves Vinegar, which they promoted as a cure for the plague. The apothecary shop there was so popular that the priests had to construct a separate entrance so that the customers did not disturb the prayers of the religious order. 

The striking central banner (above) reads: “Pray for me, I pray to your son for health, with the highest pity give aid to us against this cruel wound that devours us – placate His wrath, ceasing our sighs.” This banner separates the composition into two parts. Below, we see Venice personified, as usual, in a blonde, beautiful woman. She holds her arms open, showing both her considerable bosom (another Venetian trope) and her utter vulnerability. 

At her side is the lion of Venice’s patron saint, the healer Mark. The lion’s darkened face is contorted with grief. 

Above, in the heavens, the figure of Venezia finds her counterpoint in that of the Madonna, who in turn begs God to intercede on Venice’s behalf to close the ‘cruel wound’ of the plague. The city’s wound is of course spiritual and physical – she is haemorrhaging citizens; moreover, the plague manifests in the wounds known as buboes.

This painting shows also the practical side of mass death. Venice was supremely organised during episodes of plagues. Rules were laid down by the Magistrato alla Sanità and they worked all the way to street level. When it came to carrying away the dead, only licensed bearers, known as pizzegamorti, were allowed to handle the corpses. And so the painting fades to a miserable brown in the background behind the feminine personification of Venezia. Here you see the pizzegamorti at work, wearing their distinctive tunics marked with long red crosses. 

One of the essays in the exhibition's book explains how this painting developed. The modello or sketch (above) portrayed sprawled and splayed corpses piled up in the foreground. The final version replaced that grim sight with images of two female donors, whose beautiful faces (one of which is seen at left) show signs of graceful grief, echoing that of their patron saint. The essay theorizes that perhaps the donors had something to do with the sanitizing of the art.

Indeed other painters did not scruple to or were not prevented from showing the harrowing details of Venice in the grip of plague, as in this painting by Antonio Zanchi from the Scuola di San Rocco (courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu). It shows bodies being unloaded into boats and scenes of graphic distress and chaos that echo contemporary written accounts of the disaster.

The exhibition revealed that the words on the central banner of the Tintoretto painting were also adopted in litanies composed by Claudio Monteverdi who was the musical director of the Basilica San Marco in 1630, the time of this plague.

Paintings invoking Christ and the Madonna to intercede against disease were thought to have health-giving qualities. They were carried around the plague-plagued streets to sanitize them while such litanies were chanted by the priests. A miracle-working painting, the Madonna Nicopeia (looted from Constantinople in 1204), was borne around the piazza of San Marco in times of severe plague. It’s likely that Domenico Tintoretto’s painting was also paraded around the parish of San Francesco della Vigna. The shape and size of the painting makes this easy to imagine.

At that same time, the year of Domenico Tintoretto’s important painting, the city promised to build a votive church and establish a procession if the Madonna would intervene to save them from the plague.

The church of Santa Maria della Salute (Our Lady of Good Health) was the result. And in 1575, a similar prayer, this time to Christ the Redeemer, had already led to the construction of the church of the Redentore, or Redeemer on Giudecca. The festival of the Redentore is still celebrated today every July with a votive bridge for processions built in front of the church and massive fireworks at night.

When planning for the Apothecary tour last year, I was very excited at the prospect of showing them both the exhibition and the Domenico Tintoretto painting. So imagine my despair when I discovered that the Londoners would arrive in Venice one day after the closing of the exhibition. I couldn’t quite bear to deprive them of this painting. So I began to speak to people I know, working my way through a series of Venetian ‘no’s’ until I was directed by the eminent art historian Patricia Fortini Brown to Melissa Conn, the on-the-ground director of Save Venice, where she has thirty years’ experience overseeing the works of this American charity devoted to the restoration of buildings, monuments, manuscripts and more in the city. You can see Melissa here, talking about the restoration of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula Cycle, also explaining modern philosophies and techniques of art conservation.

Save Venice had funded the Art, Faith and Medicine exhibition and the scholarship that was put into the book of essays, as well as restoring sixteen Tintoretto works in Venice. To my enormous relief, Melissa agreed to open the exhibition privately, two days after its official closure so that the London Apothecaries could witness the plague painting for themselves, the day before we set off in a boat to see for ourselves the mist-shrouded lazzaretto islands in the lagoon that once housed those afflicted with the plague or suspected of it.

Melissa not only arranged for us to see the painting, but accompanied us. As Managing Curator of the exhibition, not to mention a noted art historian, she was a font of wonderful insights into this picture, some of which I have recorded above.

So did this votive painting have effect? The 1630/1 plague did indeed dwindle. The sighs of the city ceased. Life returned to normal, for a while. 

In our current difficulties, it does not appear that anyone is commissioning any art, votive or otherwise, to represent a hope of redemption from the corona virus. If someone did so, I wonder what it would look like? A collage of selfies? An internet meme? So far I have seen a photo of a cake cooked in the shape of the virus and a few not-very-funny cartoons to do with a brand of beer.

And even if there were a meme that caught this moment and the world’s anxiety with any accuracy, would it have the staying power, profundity and beauty of Domenico Tintoretto’s painting? 

And is this because we no longer join faith, art and medicine as Venetians did in Tintoretto's day?

Perhaps.

The churches of the Veneto are now closed by corona virus, along with the bars and shops. However, there's one parish priest on the Venetian mainland who has found a way to revive the trinity of faith, art and medicine.

Don Andrea Vena with his 'furgoncino dai fideli'

A video here shows Don Andrea Vena travelling around Bibione with a statue of the Madonna in a van, broadcasting prayers for all those affected by the virus, including the worried tourists. A modern priest, Don Andrea posts his itineraries on Facebook and keeps in touch with his parishioners that way too. Father Andrea pauses in front of cross-roads, shops and also the homes of the elderly, so they may be brought out to hear his comforting corona virus invocation to the Madonna, patron saint of Bibione. (Picture courtesy of Veneto Vox).

'Forte!' observes a man in the video, as Father Andrea finishes his prayer. 'Just great!'

Michelle Lovric’s website

Save Venice’s website

A play about love, lust and flour - Michelle Lovric

Linda Wilkinson

Under our new regime, today should have a post by Joan Lennon. But Joan kindly lent me her space so I could introduce a piece about a fascinating historical project set in my own part of London, near Blackfriars.

I am honoured to be a part of the Living Bankside History Committee. One of my fellow committee members is Adrian Chappell, an artist, educator and researcher. Adrian has collaborated to create a play about one of the great historical debacles of the late 18th century: the dramatic burning of the Albion Flour Mill at Blackfriars. Albion-in-Flames will be staged in the last week of September, close to the historical site of the fire, as part of the Totally Thames Festival.

Adrian worked with playwright, historian, scientist and memoirist, Linda Wilkinson to create the play and this is her account of how Albion in Flames came to be.

                                                         ALBION-IN-FLAMES

                                           “Who thought flour could be so interesting?”

 A rather forlorn and lonely patch of land by the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge seems an unlikely place from which the Industrial Revolution was kick-started in London in the late 18th century.

Myself and artist Adrian Chappell have been investigating the history of areas that abut the Thames for some time. As a playwright and historian, London is my playground as it is his. We met many moons ago on a project in East London and have remained friends ever since. As colleagues, he does the talking and the images, I do the words. It’s a fun and fruitful relationship.

A couple of years ago we devised a prototype app about a walk along the Thames linking the two Tate Galleries. Arising from this we uncovered the depth of Southwark’s importance in the industrialisation of London: the story of one building in particular piqued our interest.

The Albion Flour Mill stood on the south bank of the Thames at 245 Blackfriars Road. Today the site is being redeveloped having been occupied until recently by the Daily Express’s HQ at Ludgate House.

As the traffic thunders by and the announcements from the railway station punctuate the air it is hard to imagine the presence and stately grandeur of this once impressive building as it sat directly on the river.

The Albion was the world’s first steam-powered flour mill and London’s first great wonder of the Industrial Revolution. Using the new steam technology, developed by pioneering Midlands’ based engineering company Boulton & Watt, the Albion Mill opened in 1786 and aimed to meet London’s ever-increasing demand for bread. Since the middle of the 18th century London’s population had grown from three quarters of a million to well over one million.

 Albion’s creation was one of a long-list of firsts from that era but as a Londoner it surprised me that this mill was here, in my town, and not in the industrial North, the heartland of steam and steel.

 Precisely because of its location in the middle of London, the Albion Flour Mill quickly became the talk of the town, attracting large crowds from home and abroad who watched in awe as the gigantic arms and condensers of the mill’s steam engines were winched into place. Steam was harnessed to power the millstones and engines for fanning, sifting and dressing wheat, as well as loading and unloading barges moored alongside on the Thames. 20 pairs of millstones could grind 10 bushels of wheat per hour, day and night. The owners were also determined that the modernity of the interior should be reflected in the external façade. The frontage was executed in an elegant neo-classical style with huge Venetian windows that made the Mill look like a well-appointed country house.

But not everyone was happy. London’s traditional millers (wind and water) watched in horror as this five-storey titan rose over the rooftops of Bankside and beyond. They were well aware of the blaze of publicity regarding the Mill’s production capability. It was said that the Mill could produce as much flour in a month as their own mills could in an entire year.

On the morning of March 2nd 1791, the Albion Flour Mill caught fire and burnt down. Foul play was suspected immediately, not least because of the quick responses with which London’s traditional millers greeted the news of the fire and the fact that the tide was so low the water boats could not pump onto the flames. The poet Robert Southey walked among the crowds that lined Blackfriars Bridge that morning and noted that there were groups of millers dancing with joy by the light of the flames. The sudden appearance of placards bearing slogans such as Success to the mills of Albion but NO to Albion Mill seemed to provide evidence that the occasion was pre-planned. However, while many speculated that the fire was the work of machine-breaking radicals, the cause of the fire was never firmly established. Samuel Wyatt, the Mill’s owner, and John Rennie, its youthful engineer, insisted that the cause was due to poor lubrication in the grinding mechanisms which created friction leading to the fire. It was known that corn dust was highly combustible.

The charred remains of the Albion Flour Mill stood for 19 years on the banks of the Thames before Rennie himself built an iron works on the site. However, this was not before William Blake, who regularly walked over Blackfriars Bridge between his home in north Lambeth and the City, coined the infamous phrase that dark satanic mill.

We wanted to share this interesting and seemingly unknown history with a wider audience. As a playwright I thought I could potentially write a drama about it. Truth be told I am not very excited by pistons and engineering, imaginative or not, so I did wonder how I was going to turn it into an entertainment. Happily, as we delved further into the cast of characters who lived in and around Bankside during that period it became obvious that there was a provocative tale to tell.

The play Albion-in-Flames interleaves the short history of the Mill and its owners with the contemporary events of the French Revolution and the loss of the American Colonies. The lives, and loves, of local luminaries such as William Blake, Dr Samuel Johnson and diarist Hester Thrale provide the dramatic backdrop to social unrest and the emerging feminism of the period. A future American President and amorous music masters enliven the proceedings and a working-class woman called Annie, speaking for the traditional millers, grounds the play in the reality of the times.

It seems fitting that the play is being staged at the Union Theatre just a stone’s throw from the site of the Albion Mills.

 Albion-in-Flames is at the Union Theatre in Southwark 24-28 September 2019. The play is part of the Totally Thames Festival and supported by Southwark Council’s Blackfriars Stories fund. To find out more and book see below:

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/albion-in-flames.html and

 https://totallythames.org/event/albion-in-flames-a-play-about-love-lust-and-flour

Finally, a piece of good news about the inimitable Pasta Grannies, about whom I wrote here back in 2017. I was privileged to interview Vicky Bennison who conceived the project and has spent years tracking down the Italian grandmothers who hold the secrets of the best home-cooking. Vicky has persuaded these fascinating ladies to share both their recipes and the stories of their lives.

The Pasta Grannies book is out next month. It's beautiful and I warmly recommend it, not just for the recipes but for the joyous photographs and the biographies of the nonne themselves.

The Pasta Grannies YouTube channel now has hundreds of thousands of followers, and you'll be seeing lots about the book in the media over the next few weeks.

Michelle Lovric's website

Casanova and me, and Me Too - Michelle Lovric

My first novel, Carnevale, published eighteen years ago. I was anxious then – because I was daring to be the first female writer to describe how it might have felt to be loved by a man like Casanova. Today I would be much more afraid. For Casanova has fallen foul of the Me Too movement, something I learned at a fascinating symposium held in Venice last month.

Delegates explained how last year’s touring exhibition about Casanova met with fierce criticism in the United States. Some galleries even stoked the fire to court publicity. Today’s sensibility has judged him harshly on his interest in very young girls, the avidness of his seductions and two cases of violence against women (for which he also condemned himself).

I cannot defend him on any of those points, but those who now vilify him would find some surprising material if they went so far as to read any of his 3000 pages of memoirs. Casanova was no Don Giovanni. He deplored cold-hearted notchers of bedposts. He thought women had more pleasure from sex than men, ‘because the feast takes place in their own house’ and because they risked the pain and danger of childbirth with each sexual act. As Malina Stefanovska observed during the symposium, Casanova may have been projecting somewhat when he declared that the visible pleasure of his lovers made up four-fifths of his own. However, he took responsibility for contraception. He would stay celibate rather than transmit a sexual disease. He would not sleep with England’s premier courtesan Kitty Fisher because his English would not have allowed for the all-important post-coital chatting. For these reasons, and because he once declared that he would like to be reincarnated as a woman, I suspect that he might have been rather on the side of the Me Too movement.

'Casanova in Place', beautifully choreographed by Kathleen González, was a multidisciplinary event, uniting an international cohort of academics, biographers and novelists in a spirit of amity, curiosity and sometimes hilarity. In this, it would have delighted the man who inspired it.

I was honoured to sit on a panel of writers discussing how to render in fiction or biography a man who had written 3000 pages about himself. The day before, novelist and academic Gregory Dowling had delivered a lecture about Casanova in fiction, in which I found my work discussed in rather starry company. Then it was time for the writers to speak for ourselves.

You can see us here above, left to right. Malina, our facilitator, had previously treated the symposium to a reading from one of her own letters to Casanova, in this case on the subject of exile. (This hybrid form, part personal essay, part academic study, proved a moving and apt way to encounter Casanova. I was so inspired by Malina’s rendering that I wrote a poem in response.) Next right there’s myself, author of Carnevale and The Wishing Bones. Then Ian Kelly, who wrote and researched Casanova, a biography, which has been turned into a ballet by Kenneth Tindall , which was also screened for the symposium. Barbara Lynn-Davis wrote Casanova’s Secret Wife, an intense and lyrical first-person account of one of his most famous love affairs through the eyes of his teenage lover Caterina Capretta. Kathleen González is the author of Seductive Venice: In Casanova’s Footsteps (published in Italy by Supernova Edizioni as Casanova’s Venice: A Walking Guide).

Kathleen herself has written here a precis of our discussions about how, as a writer, one handles the hot property that is Casanova’s life.

I was the unicorn in the room, not because I wrote about Casanova in a novel, but because I’d put him into a novel for children aged nine to twelve. So I had the opportunity to explain why, against all expectation, I felt that Casanova was not just an acceptable but even an excellent protagonist for a children’s book.

The Casanova of The Wishing Bones is thirteen rising fourteen, and on cusp of adulthood. All transitions are potentially perilous. You need lots of peril in a children’s book. The symposium seemed rather bemused when I explained that the rule in all children’s books is that you must immediately get rid of the parents - otherwise, someone is looking out for the children and they cannot have proper adventures. Well, Zanetta and Gaetano, Casanova’s parents, delivered that for me without being asked. Gaetano died when Casanova was eight. Zanetta took little notice of her son, regularly abandoning him to travel the courts of Europe as an actress/courtesan/whatever, and even despatching him to the mainland as a very young child to board in terrible conditions on the pretext that the air in Venice was bad for his frequent nosebleeds.

I then explained that the child-protagonist must have an urgent agenda of their own - an inconsolable need or want. As Malina eloquently pointed out the day before, Casanova needed to make the world pay for his abandonment. His issues triggered behaviours that I could use as storylines.

Casanova’s unusually intense youthful physicality made him a useful character. Children can identify with Casanova’s sense of being an outsider, in a bodily and emotional sense, till he was eight. This was manifested in his muteness, his outrageously prolific nosebleeds and the strange cure he underwent for them. In The Wishing Bones, I originally used the entire episode of the trip to Murano with his adoring grandmother, who put him in the hands of a witch who cured his muteness and his bleeding in a series of picturesque acts and visions. However, in the end, this part of my book was abbreviated and accessorised with other elements more appropriate to this age range, such as beating hearts in buckets and rude talking cats. (Casanova's own witch had black cats, but they were silent).

Casanova’s frank greed for particular foods makes him a suitable character for children’s book. Children are very interested in food. It is one of the few things in which they can exercise power, even if it is the power of 'NO!' And Casanova's totemic foods - his ‘Madeleine moments’ - are even character-aligned … the crab soup his abandoning mother craved when he was in the womb, for example.

I explained that I write for children in the specific genre of junior ‘histfantfic’, which allows for magic. Casanova dabbled for profit and pleasure in occult practices, notably with the elderly Marquise d'Urfé, the richest woman in France, whom he pretended to impregnate with her own cloned spirit. In so far as his memoirs are an act of self-creation, there are many metaphorical rabbits pulled out of many plumed hats. He even wrote his own magical-real novel, with science-fiction elements. So I think Casanova would have enjoyed histfantfic.

His love of novelty also made Casanova an ideal candidate to be the protagonist of a children’s novel. Most of my children’s books feature young, lovely and rather rude mermaids, who speak sea-salt slang because how else would they learn Humantongue except by eavesdropping on pirates? Casanova loved new faces - new ‘title pages’, as he styled them – so imagine Casanova with a cavern full of beautiful young women whose ‘treasure’ (as he would put it), is mysteriously situated – almost like that of the Bellino of his memoirs. Obsessively attracted to this young ‘castrato’ male singer, Casanova unmasked Bellino as a girl masquerading as a boy using an ingenious rubber device that rendered her a virtual hermaphrodite.

Moreover, the mermaids of The Wishing Bones are compelling, strong women who wear scallop shells on their breasts. How is Casanova not going to be fascinated by them? For me, it was a kind of chemistry experiment: put young Casanova with magical creatures possessing a powerful femininity – and see what bubbles up.

I was also able to make use of Casanova’s invention of himself as an extrovert, a larger-than-life person. People like that always mess up. In The Wishing Bones, Casanova’s innocent enthusiasm for the witch on Murano – the one who stopped his nosebleeds - leads him to betray his friends, almost fatally.

I was asked to keep Casanova rather polite in The Wishing Bones. My original draft included verbal hints of his burgeoning sexual awareness, but that did not survive into the final manuscript. Even though in real life he had already acquired sexual experience by the age I show him in the novel, that side of his life is not visible. Instead, I tried to show the abundance of his joys, his lively greed, his charm and his desire to please ladies. He is attracted to one of my young female protagonists, and she takes pleasure in his warmth. But there is no question of precocious sexual activity being allowed when writing for this age group.

Among my embellishments is Casanova pre-shadowing his work as a violinist. He is hired to entertain the English guests at their Venetian 'Hotel of What You Want’ with singing, violin-playing and heart-tugging recitals of romantic verse. The violin – restrung with mermaid hair – becomes young Casanova’s tool for repainting the colour in a city that has been drained of its beauty by the enactment of an ancient prophecy.

Of course he needs to stare deeply into the eyes of a lovely girl while he goes about this important work.

Will this site me in the sights of Me Too? I hope not.

Michelle Lovric’s website

P.S. Apologies to anyone who was planning to attend my Wishing Bones event at the Finchley Road O2 Waterstones on this coming Sunday August 4th. Almost appropriately, for a book set in Venice, this event has been delayed by a flood. It will be reconvened as soon as possible.