Mouths of Truth - Michelle Lovric

It is so hot in Venice that the cats are melting.

 

The usual silly season stories abound in the city's press. But one story caught my eye this week, seeming more profound: the Gazzettino newspaper reported on the opening of a new ‘Sportello Antiabusivi’ in September.

This translates as a counter for denouncing people who are working ‘in nero’ – for cash that is not declared in any tax return. The state position is that this is about greed, basically: taking without giving. Officials point out that those who work in nero accept Italy's excellent free education and hospitals, policing and other services. But they choose not to contribute. Of course this position ignores the plight of those who are trapped without citizenship and paperwork, who are themselves exploited by employers.

Venice’s local government estimates that there are 20,000 living in nero in the city. Their number includes plumbers, hairdressers, and taxi drivers.

‘Spuntano come funghi’ says one official. ‘They are springing up like mushrooms.’

 But now it is promised that these tax dodgers will be ‘in mirino’ – in the mire.

A ‘sportello’ is hardly a romantic object. Nevertheless, it was strange to me that none of the Venetian newspapers drew any comparisons with a very similar institution in Venice’s past – the Bocche di Leone, the Lions' Mouths.

Several of these stone reliefs were placed around the city. Through the aperture of the lions’ jaws, citizens were encouraged to post denunciations of those who were committing frauds or crimes, who swore, or who posed a threat to public health – always a great issue in Venice whose capillaries of narrow streets efficiently transmitted any kind of disease, notably the great plague of 1575, which may have carried off a third of her citizens.

While these sculpted holes in the wall were called 'Lions’ Mouths', in fact they were not always in a recognisably leonine form. The allusion to the lion is thought to connect the righteous practice of outing wrong-doers with the city’s symbol – the lion of San Marco. Certainly the faces have the ferocity of lion, discouraging any idle or mischievous approach.

The magistrates of the city held the keys to the post-boxes behind the lion mouths. The denunciations inside would be investigated by the Savi (the Wise Men), the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten.

Anonymous denunciation were not taken seriously. Only if the salvation of the city was at stake would such letters be accepted, and then only by a majority vote by the officers. From 1387, the Council of Ten ordered the burning of letters without the signature of the accuser and without credible evidence. From 1542 onwards the denunciations would be accepted only if three eye-witnesses were also cited.

Otherwise, of course, anonymity might have masked those who were jealous or malicious. Letters that were anonymous or unsupported by proper evidence were simply burnt.

This one is inside the Palazzo Ducale. The text explains it is for secret denunciations against those who practice or collude in corruption in hiding real income. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)

This one is on the Zattere in Dorsoduro, by the old church of Santa Maria della Visitazione.

 

It is for anyone who wants to denounce health crimes. In fact, these days one can get behind the wall that hosts this mouth. When I did, I was rather hoping to find a basket full of current denunciations (sexually transmitted diseases, emotional abuse, drug peddling?) but there’s nothing there – not even the basket. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)

There’s nothing left of the special task for this lion’s mouth on the wall of the church of San Martino in Castello. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)

Why lions? It seems that lion mouths were our first lie detectors.

Here you see one working in a painting called The Mouth of Truth by Lucas Cranach the Elder, or his workshop. (Painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A woman accused of infidelity swears that she is chaste. She puts her hand in the mouth of the lion who refrains who biting it off because she has told the truth. Except in this case, she has actually fooled the lion, apparently.

The mouth lie detector can also be seen in a stone mask in of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, – the Bocca della Verità– which according to legend bites off the hand of every liar.

You may know this lion from the 1953 film Roman Holiday in which Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck play characters with things to hide. She flinches from putting her hand in; he makes a terrifying prank of it. There’s a clip here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6af1dAc9rXo

Frankly, I think it would be a grand idea to reinstate the idea of a fearsome test for emotional and financial liars, the greedy types with both hands in the honeypots of money and love. Something to scare the hands off them! It’s a good start that we can soon walk up to a sportello in Venice and denounce those who cheat on their taxes.

But what about the heart-cheats and the callous people who mistreat those who love them? Shouldn’t they be denounced too?

That public official in Venice, describing the need for the Sportello Antiabusivi, describes the cheating as ‘a wound that spreads a stain everywhere’.

We’ve all known people who inflicted those.

I wrote about one such, a certain Minguillo Fasan, in my novel, The Book of Human Skin. Doctor Santo observes, ‘There are people who are a disease, and it is purely our indulgence that makes a plague out of them.’

So should we cease in our indulgence of unmitigated villainy?

Public denunciation will be a good start. The internet has plenty of virtual denunciations but I see a need for something tangible, something which must be approached righteously, in a physical sense. A wall with photographs of philanderers? A column of infamy on which names could be carved? A tree hung with poems of heartbreak, naming names? Even a public counter in Trafalgar Square, manned by someone fierce as a lion?

Or does anyone have a better idea?



Michelle Lovric's website

Five and a Half Inches - Michelle Lovric

Some measure their lives in teaspoons, but I measure mine in cat litter.

My cats perform their piccoli bisogni in an air-conditioned stainless steel chamber accessed via a Venetian arch copied from John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. For the sake of their dignity, I shall refrain from illustrating this paragraph.

Every Wednesday and every Saturday I empty the cats’ litter tray. This is one task it’s better not to execute mindfully. So I use the time to consider what I have achieved literarily and personally between Wednesday and Saturday or between Saturday and Wednesday.

For a long time I marked off the grim stages of a personal matter now elegantly and happily resolved, then a broken foot treated, a children’s book written, series of workshops completed, a second broken foot treated (yes, I know), another draft written.

This Wednesday I something else to think about. There’s nothing quite like the relaunch of a backlist to make a writer feel quite chuffed at having achieved five and half inches of printed, published word.

This week, my backlist was relaunched by Bloomsbury with new covers.

Given my habit of measuring my life in cat litter, it seems appropriate to use my cats to measure the achievement. There are cats all through my books.

Carnevale, which is the story of the portrait painter Cecilia Cornaro, features a talking cat who provides commentary on the artist’s lovers, who include Casanova and Byron.

In The Floating Book, the story of Venice’s nascent publishing industry, the publisher’s wife Lussieta follows Italian tradition by acquiring a tabby cat when she becomes pregnant. Tabby cats have the ‘M’ of the Madonna on their stripy foreheads, and it is said that a cat birthed her kittens under the manger where Jesus was born, providing a lesson in perfect maternity for a Virgin inexperienced in childcare. The Floating Book’ s cat is not as virtuous as it might be, however. It is a incorrigible thief.

In The Remedy, a medical murder mystery set in Venice and seedy Bankside, I was constrained to a couple of mummified cats as my wonderful literary agent, Victoria Hobbs, was at that time wont to decry the number of cats in my books and asked me to desist. But she is now the owner of two cats. Just saying. Don’t need to gloat or anything.

The Book of Human Skin is still in print with its original cover. In it, there are several cats including a kitten who suffers a sad fate, illustrating how sociopathic individuals often display their dangerous lack of empathy at a very young age by cruelty to helpless animals.

In The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, a cat teaches Ida, the youngest and perhaps the maddest of the siblings, not to eat her hair, by offering the example of furballs. Enough to make a cat laugh?

As is traditional with a publication, or a relaunch, this blog now offers a complete set of the relaunched titles – all five and a half inches of printed text – as a prize for the answer to this question:

"What is your favourite feline character in literature and why?"

Put your answers in the Comments section below and copy them to readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so that winners can be contacted.

Closing date is 27 June. We are sorry but our competitions are open only to UK readers.



Michelle Lovric's website

Once upon a time in a tower, Part One – Michelle Lovric

Once upon a time, my architect husband wanted to take over a deconsecrated bell tower in Venice and turn the top floor into a studio. Venice’s skyline is punctuated by dozens of empty bell-towers, now slowly crumbling into the lagoon. Inhabiting a building is the best way to keep it alive, and we were prepared to invest in the restoration of a tower even though we knew that we would never actually own one. But Byzantine negotiations with the church finally deprived our idea of the will to live. So Project Venice Bell-Tower was consigned to the imagination. I expiated my frustration in the usual writerly way – I wrote a novel about it. Talina in the Tower is the story of a girl, a cat, three dogs and an elderly writer who inhabit an imaginary bell-tower on the northernmost edge of Venice. I enjoyed myself immensely, fantasizing about the layout of each single room on each successive floor, furnishing it with every comfort and accoutrement I’d once desired for my own tower.

At the end of Talina in the Tower, I wrote an historical note about towers and their uses in Venice, enviously noting that some people had succeeded where we had failed: These days, parts of some bell towers are being used as dwellings. San Marcuola’s tower is partly residential now, as is the tower of Santa Margherita (which lost its spire in 1810) and those of San Boldu and San Stae. San Vidal’s lower floors are used as offices. The top floors of the abandoned towers would, of course, make wonderful studios for architects . . . or writers.

Truth is relentlessly stranger than fiction, of course. Before Talina in the Tower is even published, I’ve discovered that another mind at work on the same idea of making a creative studio in at the top of a disused bell-tower. But Alex Scott-Whitby had done more than imagine it. He is actually doing it.

I first met Alex Scott-Whitby in Venice eighteen months ago, when he was part of a team of young architects invigilating at the British Pavilion at the architecture Biennale. (Rather flatteringly, it happened that Alex and his colleagues whiled away some of their long hours at the reception desk reading my novel The Book of Human Skin.)

Over a dinner on the Zattere, we talked about Alex’s project called (IN)Spires – an idea to create a series of creative studios for a new generation of St Jeromes nesting within the belfries of the City of London's churches. By that time, Alex had already taken possession of a tower himself – that of St Mary Woolnoth in Lombard St – and was using it as a studio, from which he was already dreaming of even greater things.

To demonstrate the spirituality as well as the materiality of his aspiration, Alex recreated Dürer’s depiction of Saint Jerome in his study. (I am not sure how he persuaded the lion to walk up the hundred steps to the tower. Perhaps there was a steak at the top, or a gazelle.)


Alex’s plan is facilitate a layer of creativity floating like cream above London’s economic engine room – a new intellectual community in these airy eyries with their strange and wonderful perspective on the city. The 51 churches in the City of London serve just 11,000 residents. Alex believes that 38 of them have St Jerome potential. There is an urgent need, too, to protect the towers from globalization and commercialization: Alex explains that ‘mobile phone company circle like vultures around a carcass,’ waiting to fill them with broadcasting antennae.


Over the next 30 years, Alex envisages, suitable applicants will be appointed both curates and curators of these towers. His own experiment has shown the worth of this human investment: ‘By acting as a curator of this place and becoming a keyholder to the church, I am also protecting it through occupation and as a tenant I provide a small income and so help to preserve and enliven this historic monument.’

And Alex looks beyond London too – foreseeing a global network of artists, designers and writers nesting in abandoned monuments.

In late October, I was delighted (though not surprised) to see that Alex’s (IN)Spires had won first prize in the RIBA Forgotten Spaces competition, which asked architects, artists, local groups and designers to nominate an abandoned place in Greater London and conceive an imaginative and inspiring proposal for its regeneration.

You can now see Alex’s and other architects’ ideas in an exhibition staged in some of Somerset House's own forgotten spaces – the lightwells and coalholes that lurk beneath the Edmond J Safra Fountain Court and in the evocative space known as the Deadhouse. The visitor makes his way in and out of these dim, mysterious niches and passageways, finding installations, images and multimedia that illustrate proposals for, amongst many other things, an urban climbing tunnel under Clapham High Street, a physic garden in Nag’s Head Yard, a Fish Ladder and salmon hatchery in the River Wandle, a Bee Farm and agro-forest in Neasden and a project to re-invent Crystal Palace as a Northern version of the scintillating market square of Djema el Fna in Marrakesh.

The Forgotten Spaces exhibition is open daily January 29th, 2012, 10am – 6pm. Admission is free. I suggest it would be an excellent place for novelists to go to refresh their sense of place, and for fantasy novelists to refresh their sense of the imaginable.

Part two of this blog is to follow – because I am lucky enough to have received an invitation to dinner in Alex’s bell-tower and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to tell you about that.


You can see more images of Alex’s airy desk here
Alex’s website
RIBA website
Somerset House website
Michelle Lovric’s website

Talina in the Tower is published February 2nd, 2012, by Orion Children’s Books

In Praise of Dirty Books – Michelle Lovric

Am I the only person who finds the trade in pristine first editions somewhat distasteful? Who thinks it a little degrading? That it manifests a necrophilic love of books rather than a living joy in reading?

For years, the cry has been ‘Forsooth, let us desist from treating women as objects! It’s not all about looks or age!’ I also have issues with valuing books according to meretricious criteria. The outward condition, the publication date, the edition number and print run are NOT the most interesting things about a book. Unless, of course, it is an extremely boring book. Surely, in all other cases, it’s what’s between the pages that should interest us, not the state of those pages or the untouched appearance of the cover.

No book should be untouched! What could be sadder than an aged but pristine children’s book? One of my main objections to any electronic reader is that I cannot make my mark on the pages!

I have sterner objections still to the concept that a book without a mark on it – and therefore likely unread – is more valuable than a volume with the patina of pleasure on it. That patina should consist of fingerprints, chocolate smudges and dried orange juice rivulets. A wine stain is always pleasant to behold. Blood is intriguing. Even a squashed mosquito with its meteor trail of rusty red is quite gratifying. The highest honour that can be awarded to a summer holiday read is to be brought home from the beach, even if blistered with sea-spray and anointed with suntan lotion.

The best kinds of ‘dirt’ that can befall a book, in my opinion, are interventions from other readers. One of the great joys of borrowing from the London Library is finding the emphatic annotations of previous readers – sometimes scholars from a century past. I love finding a thick wiggly line beside a paragraph and a large ‘NO!’ beside it. (Imagine the mutton chops quivering with indignation.) And I’ve been helped by a time-travelling comment from an antique reader: ‘Interesting. But see also …’

And what writer could fail to find more joy in the expression (and the manifestation) of ‘slightly foxed’ (dappled with brown age spots) than in ‘pristine’? To me, ‘pristine’ has redolences of the freshly mopped hospital corridor or the embalmer’s sponge. And so to me, the trade in first editions reduces books to carcasses.

When I look at my own face, I do not find it ‘in pristine condition’ and nor do I wish to do so. I’m quite fond of that Harry Potter-type scar above my left eye; my head wound was sewed up by a doctor-friend while my husband held my hand – in the end, that’s the memory that remains. There’s the little pit in my cheek in the place where a dodgy mole flowered and darkened and was then safely removed without pain. I’m also quite happy with my laughter lines – even though you might say my crow’s feet have the imprint of a larger and heavier bird – a pterodactyl, perhaps. Then there are the freckles and blemishes: dealer in the carcasses of writers would definitely have to advertise this one as ‘slightly foxed’.

If I were botoxed, dermo-peeled and surgically perfected, would I be more interesting?

Or, to put it another way, would I value the opinion of someone who thought me so?

So why this obsession with denatured books? Books that have for decades preserved their reading virginity like aged nuns? Are such books expecting their wedding night in heaven? Who is their intended bridegroom? Someone who will never open or read them but cloister them in a silent glassed bookshelf among other unread trophies?

I wrote an anthropodermic bibliophegist into my novel The Book of Human Skin. But even the sociopathic Minguillo Fasan enjoys handling his treasures. Sometimes he even reads them. At least he loves them for their intimate and pungent juxtaposition of subject and binding: he does actually care about what’s inside. His collection is personal to his interests, vile as they are. About the value, Minguillo cares nothing at all. I could write someone who loved books bound in human skin, but I could not quite bring myself to write a character who was interested purely in the value as objects.

Perhaps someone in the rare books trade can explain the first edition trade to me? Or a printer who sees it as the curating and exalting of the highest forms of printed art? Or a collector, even, who can love their books in ways not yet understood by me?

I may or may not be open to reasoned argument, but I am quite curious.



Michelle Lovric’s website
For info on the Slightly Foxed Quarterly and London Bookshop, see www.foxedbooks.com

Window shopping in the museum - Michelle Lovric

So I was writing the scene in which Catullus stammers out his first love poem to Clodia. I was residing in his head, writing with his hand, but I suddenly realized that I couldn’t feel the paper under his fingers and I didn’t know how the stylus felt in his hands. And how bright was the light in his room where he scribbled after midnight?

No problem. In those days I lived at the intellectual end of Covent Garden. In five minutes I was in the Roman domestic department of the British Museum. I had my choice of oil lamps, found the perfect stylus, peered at the simulations of the rolled books. While I was there, I chose a divan on which the luscious but vicious Clodia would brutally seduce my young poet. Greedily, I noted the details of its decoration. Mentally, I told the guard, ‘I’ll take these. Bag ’em up.’

Physically, I took them home in my notebook, and now you'll find them in my novel, The Floating Book.

As an historical writer, I’ve always window-shopped in museums. You get to a certain point in writing a scene – often the second draft – when you need a more hands-on contact with the past. Many museums these days have Writers-in-Residence. But I am sure that for every paid Writer-in-Residence, you’ll find ten times as many writers of historical fiction window-shopping for their novels.

Conspicuous consumption is often a part of historical fiction. I think there’s a reason for that. Human nature has not changed over the centuries, and it’s generally agreed amongst modern writers that we should not render our written conversations incomprehensible to the modern reader by the use of period-perfect and hence now-archaic language. Therefore it’s the accessories that define the period and infuse our books with the provoking perfumes and stenches of the past.

So the writer of historical fiction turns interior decorator. We furnish our castles in time-correct taste, set our groaning banquet tables with non-anachronistic cutlery, polish our period-perfect weapons. We become bankers – filling our purses or pouches with the right coins of the realm.

We also become couturiers, dressing our characters in authentic costume (the names of the fabrics are so delicious: tarlatan, dimity, bombazine…) As my books are set in Venice, my characters tend to fall in the water or otherwise get themselves soaked, so I particularly need to look at the underwear to which they are frequently forced to strip.

At the moment most of my window-shopping is being done at the Natural History Museum in Venice. The delightful curator, Margherita Fusco, has shared so much with me; not least an 1898 abstract on ‘The Skeleton of the Monstrous Bird’ – but that’s another blog. For The Book of Human Skin, I’ve shopped for leather strait-jackets in the Museum of Madness on the island of San Servolo, and in the secret medical museum above Venice’s Ospedale Civile for diabolical obstetrical tools. The Querini Stampalia is good for 18th-century coffee cups, and the Correr Museum is currently helpful with accessories for the venditori ambulanti – street traders who walked around Venice hawking their peaches, figs, pasta and cherries. I found a finger-twitchingly handle-able book bound in human skin at the Wellcome Trust in London. For The Mourning Emporium’s quack medicines for women, I shopped at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s archives in Lambeth, where the curators hold valuable sessions during which you can sniff drugs from the past and handle their delicate, beautiful packaging. The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons gave me a graphic illustration of ‘Phossy Jaw’ – phosphorus necrosis – the disease that afflicted the poor girls and women who worked in Victorian match factories – and provided the name for my tragic character Fossy, whose jaw is so damaged that she can express herself only with notes on her violin.

We writers can find much of what we need to furnish our books in published historical tomes. But I would contend that the pseudo-retail experience can generate fresher descriptions and be a great deal more enjoyable as well.

Any other writers out there willing to share their museum window-shopping expeditions? Looking at what I’ve written, I’ll admit that the contents of my window-shopping bag are on the grim side. Hopefully, some of you look for and find much prettier things than I do?


www.michellelovric.com

The Mourning Emporium came out in paperback on August 4th.

Museum bags from www.Treehugger.com

How the baccalà got its tale – Michelle Lovric

After all these years of writing about Venice, my list of must-tell tales from her past just grows longer and more tantalizing.

One of my current favourites is attached to something I look at every day – the pink palace just opposite. This story, like all the best ones, is about food and sex, and it also has some wine and shipwreck thrown in. As it simply cannot end up in a children’s book, and since it all unfolded 400 years too early for The Book of Human Skin, my latest adult novel, where better place to share it than in a History Girls’ Blog?

So pour yourself a prosecco, or a glass of freshly squeezed blood-orange juice, and I'll you the story of the way in which celebrated Venetian dish of baccalà mantecato arrived in our city.

Baccalà is the Venetian word for stoccafisso, meaning stockfish or cod. To make baccalà mantecato, dried salted cod is boiled and whipped up to a fluffy consistency with olive oil, salt and pepper. It’s served on rounds of bread or with polenta. These days it’s so popular that there’s even a Confraternity of the Baccalà with its own website. But neither the fish nor the recipe is native to Venice. Venetian baccalà, to quote numerous punners, is the piece of cod that surpasseth all understanding.

So what’s this to do with the palace opposite ours? Well, that pink palace once belonged to a branch of the Querini clan, patricians from the early days of the Venetian republic. I’ve spent a lot of time with this family over the last few years, as Marco Querini was the father-in-law of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the villain of my two children’s novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. In 1310, Marco Querini conspired with Bajamonte to kill the Doge and take over the state. They failed, comprehensively. Their palaces were razed to the ground (this was the Rialto branch of the Querini family) and the Querini and Tiepolo crests hammered off every building in the city.

But our current story starts more than two hundred years later, by which time both families were somewhat rehabilitated. In April of 1431, sixty-eight Venetians set sail from Candia in Crete. Their vessel was the Gemma Quirinia, laden down with barrels of sweet Malvasia wine and spices for trade with Flanders. Their leader was the merchant nobleman Pietro Querini. All went swimmingly until some days out of Cadiz, when a terrible tempest broke the Gemma’s mast, ripped her sails and blew her off course. The ship was doomed. Querini boarded his men into two tenders – one of which was immediately swallowed by the sea. Seven weeks later, the survivors found themselves near the Lofoten archipelago inside the Arctic Circle. The Venetians were rescued by local fishermen and taken to the remote island of Rost. Querini described it in his diary as in culo mundi, the backside of the world.

But he soon changed his mind. The 120 islanders proved exceptionally hospitable: they fed, clothed and housed the Venetians. And their wives offered a quite outstanding amount of hospitality.

The men of Rost would depart before daylight on their fishing expeditions, leaving their wives in bed. Everyone slept naked on Rost in those days. It appears that when the husbands had vacated those beds, the Venetians were welcome to take their places. And they were expected to take part in the weekly communal hot bath, every Thursday, also, naturally, naked.

Not surprisingly, the Venetians tarried quite some time on Rost – four months’ worth of Thursday baths, it seems – and meanwhile became quite fond of the local cuisine. The islanders fed on a kind of codfish that could be eaten fresh or dried. Perhaps the Venetians had an interest in sending those Rost fishermen out to sea to replenish stocks as often as possible.

Eventually – in October 1432 – Querini and his friends returned to Venice, bringing with them some pleasant memories, including a recipe for whipped-up dried codfish.
Perhaps, for these men, the baccalà had the same evocative and synaesthetic texture as Proust’s Madeleine cake?

Of course the returning sailors still had to convince the Venetians of the joy of stockfish. The ripe smell was initially a little strong for their delicate nostrils and refined palates. But Venice came to love its baccalà. And a year later Querini returned to Lofoten with a shipful of wine and spices to trade for dried cod.

The success of baccalà was reinforced by the Councils of Trent in 1545 and 1563, when the dish was decreed an acceptable item of consumption on Wednesdays and Fridays during the lean days of Lent.

And now you'll find it on every counter of every bar in Venice.

I hope you enjoyed this little taste.



LINKS

Michelle Lovric’s website

The Book of Human Skin will be featured on the TV Book Club on More4 July 24th and Channel 4 July 25.

Video trailer for The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium on YouTube

I’m grateful to the elegant Alberto Toso Fei for alerting me to the stockfish story, and many others.

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