Tetchy Madonnas when you need them – Michelle Lovric

Make your way around any corner in Venice and you may lock eyes with a Madonna in a niche or a miniature chapel. She might be painted, sculpted or made from mosaic tiles. There may be a candle, a lamp or a vase in front of her. She usually cradles the Holy Infant. These street shrines are known capitelli (or capitèi in Venetian dialect). Many date back to the 15th century, a time when they provided not just metaphorical and spiritual illumination but actual street-lighting. Most are to be found, for that reason, in ‘sottoportici’ (tunnel-like passageways) or by bridges and near jetties.

The city appointed people to set a lantern in every capitello by night. There was a tradition of leaving flowers there too. To lend sanctity to business arrangements, contracts might be signed in front of them. And of course a Madonna might serve as a kind spiritual proto-security camera on the street: few would want to commit a crime in front of those steady eyes. Those were times when no one would have dreamed of stealing a holy image, but most often, these days, the Madonnas are behind bars, like solemn canaries in ornate cages.


There are more than 500 capitelli in Venice: 136 in Castello; 91 in Cannaregio; 43 in Santa Croce; 43 in San Polo; 114 in Dorsoduro, of which 35 are on Giudecca; 83 in San Marco. It is interesting to note that the highest proportion of the figures are in the poorer zones of Castello and Cannaregio. The painting above, by James Holland, is entitled A Shrine in Venice (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). It shows women of the city sewing, talking and praying in front of a capitello, which serves both as an extension of sacred space but also as a meeting place.

I’m not the only or even the first person to notice that the Virgins inside these little chapels often look rather disapproving. I discovered that my artist friend, Christine Morley, who’s recorded many of them, has also felt the aura of severity that radiates from some of these Virgins. To Christine, they seem like stern gate-keepers to a world beyond the wall, a secret place behind the forbidding bars and grates of their niches.

Of course, over hundreds of years these Venetian Madonnas have seen it all, which may account for their expressions. Meanwhile, full of grace She obviously is, but is not the Virgin Mary one of the most put-upon women ever?

A couple of years ago, I started holding conversations (in my head) with some of these dimly-lit ladies-of-the-night as I walked around the city. Those conversations took a turn I had not expected. This is why: although each street-Madonna is as individual as Her artist could render Her, each personifies the same Mother of God. So I felt that the Madonnas from Castello to Santa Croce would in fact talk with the same voice and have the same preoccupations – including annoyance at noisy passers-by waking the Holy Infant when She’d just got Him down.

No matter whether painted or carved, my Madonna-of-the-moment was always irreproachably virtuous in tone, but also just a little bit reproachful, not to say tetchy. Irritation is a gift for a writer: it scratches up interesting vocabulary. So you won’t be surprised to hear that this slightly vinegary Madonna-of-many-manifestations soon became a character in a children’s book, The Wishing Bones, which will be published next month.

Children have always had the run of Venice. It’s safer than cities with carriages and now cars. In The Wishing Bones, I write of the ‘secret sacred ties’ between Venetians, binding all her citizens to one another with affection. The picture below right shows mother holding her child up to a painted Madonna at capitello near the entrance to the Doges Palace (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). A slightly older Venetian child, on his or her daily journeys, would pass by dozens of Madonnas, and it seemed logical to me that their universal Mother would probably have a few things to say to them. I imagined that Our Lady would be keen on personal hygiene in a city that was obsessed with health matters (if Venice ever got the reputation of being a sick city, her international trade would have been in danger). So I thought She’d probably want Her supplicants to have clean hands. Running noses would be absolutely out.


 

Venice identifies comprehensively with the Virgin Mary. The city’s very founding date – March 25th – is the same as that of the Annunciation. This scene is depicted in marble on the Rialto Bridge. But in my book, Our (understandably Ornery) Lady has to deal with rival protectresses of the city: mermaids who live beneath it. Pagan mermaids and Madonnas – bound to be a problem. Then there’s a convent where fake relics of saints are churned out by orphans working as slaves in cruel conditions – an offence to any mother. Saint Lucy’s bones have been kidnapped. A prophecy dictates that, if this happens, the secret sacred ties between Venetians will break down, leading to blows and blood in the street. Really, for a Madonna in 1740, when The Wishing Bones is set, there’s a lot to be tetchy about.

The whole issue of mermaids and Madonnas is played out, in everyone’s favourite church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. Inside, Tullio Lombardo’s friezes of beautiful young mermaids enclose an ancient miracle-working painting of a Madonna. In The Wishing Bones, the young Miracoli mermaids, clearly victimized by adolescent hormones, briefly flee their frieze to join the villains. (Then they’re very sorry).

Back to the real-lifeVenetian capitelli. They have their own story arc. While loved and maintained by the state and the public, the street-Madonnas have not been immune to passing time. By the middle of the nineteenth century the little chapels were under threat, some degraded by the centuries, some removed or damaged during restructuring and renovations. So in 1870 a group of young Catholics set up an organisation to defend them. The city was divided into sections and groups of young Venetians patrolled the streets, making sure all was well with the capitelli.

By the twentieth century, the chapels were under a different threat – chemicals coming from the factory suburb of Marghera. A new generation of capitelli protectors, the Amici dei capitèi, was formed but later absorbed into one of the bigger organisations that protect sacred monuments, I.R.S.E.P.S.

It's not surprising that the gondoliers still have their own waterborne capitelli. These little green shrines are to be seen at the stazioni where the traghetto services run. Inside their mullioned windows you can make out tiny Madonnas. If Venice were living her best life right now, those Madonnas would be doing something to protect her from the cruise liners.

But this is real life, and fiction can only imagine away the brutal ugliness and danger of the cruise ships. That’s increasingly hard, with the news of the massive Viking Sigyn running down a smaller vessel on the Danube in Budapest two weeks ago; with the vast MSC Opera smashing, out of control, into a river-cruise boat and then into the Zattere in Venice on June 2nd; with the 30th anniversary of Marchioness disaster approaching in August; with the Thames now threatened with the arrival of Europe’s biggest party boat, the Ocean Diva, which is the length of a football pitch and hosts 1500 revellers. The great historic cities of Europe are succumbing to Dubai-ification.

 

Not just Venice but Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bergen and many others have succumbed to this brutal commodification by the mega-companies that run fleets of vast boats. The protest movements are energetic and creative, but what Venetians called 'interessi' are deeply entrenched. Too many people, it seems, have fingers in the pie: not just the cruise operators but also those institutions that licence piers and party boats; also, those companies that service and provide catering for them.

 

Too much greed leads to too many monsters cramming into the same far-too-finite waterways. The danger to life and the ruination of heritage views are all too visible; possibly worse are the invisible dangers of nitrogen oxide, sulphur and particulates, for marine fuel is many times more toxic that land diesel. These poisons make their ways into the lungs of the citizens and they also destroy public art. The statue at right, on the Gesuati church, is just a few hundred yards from where the MSC Opera struck the shore. In a city without cars, boat emissions are the only reason for the blackening and blunting of this saintly figure.

Writing about, and so living in the 18th century, I can blot the mega-ships off my horizons. However, into my next book, currently entitled The Palace that Ate Boys, has crept the notion of certain public offices in the city – those charged with protecting Venice – instead welcoming in a terrible blight in exchange for sackfuls of money …

Michelle Lovric's website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th in the UK.

Last week marked the second anniversary of the terror attack at London Bridge and the Borough Market. Five hundred people were locked in or out of their homes for days, as their streets became a crime scene. A year ago, at Southwark Cathedral, members of the community performed a play made up of excerpts of their longer testimonies. This year, the Cathedral has posted the text of Testimony online so everyone can read it.

If Venice dies – Michelle Lovric

 

 

In my library, there’s a curious book called Giorno per giorno, tanti anni fa (Almanacco della Regione Veneta) which I’d translate as Day by Day, Many Years Past (Almanac of the Veneto). Its contents, originally curated for radio, were cherry-picked by Luciano Filippi for publication in this volume.

Today, March 10th, is marked by several entries, but the one that seems most significant is that, on this date in 1924, the nation of Italy ceded the Doges’ Palace to the Comune of Venice. A ceremonial handing-over of the keys took place in the presence of civil, military and religious officers of the city.

It crossed my mind that this transfer may not have been a cause for unadulterated joy among the Venetians; it may also have been canny on the part of the Italian state. As anyone who's custodian of a centuries-old house could tell you, such a gift was always going to prove brutally expensive to the city.

But what moved me was the reason recorded for the gift. Italy’s representative declared: ‘I hand over to Venice the keys to this palace which has seen the highest form of statecraft in Italy. This people – its navigators, artists, merchants – shall once more own this seat of power where the whole political life of Venice has been enacted.’

Salvatore Settis

I read those two sentences mindful of a book I’ve just finished reading and with the voice of its author still ringing in my head. Salvatore Settis presents the Venetians of 2018 as anything but masters of statecraft, navigators or artists. Instead, he shows a city gasping feebly for life amid the onslaught of mass tourism and crass globalization, a city from which her citizens are fleeing, a city mired in corruption and under threat of toxic development.

It's an old trope that Venice shall surely sink one day. And indeed danger has lately come to her by sea. However Venice is not drowning. She's being strangled by earthly greed. The monstrous cruise ships function as a symbol for everything that menaces the existence of a place held up for centuries as a model for all cities. As Professor Settis says, from the high decks of these ‘skyscrapers of the seas’, tourists literally look down on little Venice, oblivious to the fact that their very presence diminishes and endangers the city.

When ignorance, contempt and arrogance are thus allied with a ruthless desire for profit, it is the equivalent of a hostile invasion or a plague.

Professor Settis's book bears an ominous title: If Venice Dies. And the reason for the ‘if’ in the title is this: ‘if Venice dies, it won’t be the only thing that dies: the very idea of the city – as an open space where diversity and social life can unfold, as the supreme creation of our civilization, as a commitment to and promise of democracy – will also die with it.’ Fragile Venice, meanwhile, teeters on the brink. At least one funeral has already been held for the city.

I was privileged to be present when Professor Settis brought his vision of a city on the precipice to a tribal gathering of Venice in Peril in London last month. It would do a disservice to the eloquence of the author, who’s been described as ‘the conscience of Italy’, to try to encapsulate his book in a few paragraphs. Instead, I'll pick up on just a few ideas he raises.

Firstly, how do cities die?

In three ways: when invaders physically destroy them; when they are aggressively colonized; and finally, ‘when their citizens forget who they are and become strangers to themselves and thereby their own worst enemies without even realizing it’. Venice, argues Professor Settis, is losing her identity, suffering from the kind of dementia that leads only to a slow extinction of consciousness. When that ‘hesitant, final curtain’ falls, then the tangible horizon also darkens, because ‘the same air and blood binds the great monuments of art, nature, and history to those who created them, or look after them, or dwell in them.’

It will require not just awareness but active measures to save the beauty of Venice, which – as John Ruskin would argue – inevitably also represents its virtue.

A city has a soul, is a thinking machine.

The body of the city is made of walls, buildings, squares. The soul is found in its living inhabitants but also in ‘a living tapestry of stories, memories, principles, languages, desires, institutions and plans.’ This inner city remains largely invisible to the uninformed eye, but its conflicts, triumphs and visions are in fact inscribed on the walls, buildings and squares. You just need to pause, look, read. The city is a theatre of memory, both individual and collective – or it should be. The very voids tell stories.

the forgotten slab with a mortar and pestle,
symbol of the defeat of the conspiracy

Why, for example, is there a (relatively) modern building in Calle Baiamonte Tiepolo near Sant’Agostin? It’s because the palace of Baiamonte Tiepolo, originally on that site, was razed as a punishment for his conspiracy in 1310. In response to the plot, Venice created its Council of Ten. A column of infamy was erected in Sant-Agostin, precisely to preserve those events in civic memory ... but now sits in a dusty store-room of the Doges Palace, where no-one may see it, despite passionate appeals for its restitution. The only trace that remains is a broken flagstone, usually covered with cigarette butts. This is what happens when a city forgets itself. It does not even remember why it needs not to forget.

Venice is the paradigm of the historical city, argues Professor Settis. Moreover, like ‘a celebrity patient’, its ills attract more attention than other places. Yet Venice is also the paradigm ‘of the modern city like Manhattan. It’s a thinking machine that allows us to ponder the very idea of the city, citizen practices, urban life as sediments of history, as the experience of the here and now, as well as a project for a possible future.’

A servile monoculture cannot save the city.

Venetians are outnumbered 140 to 1 by tourists at present. Residents must shackle themselves in service or subjugation to the monoculture of tourism - or leave. The plurality of dignified work is thus lost in a city once famous for her craftsmen, architects and artists. Many foreigners have second (or third, or fourth) homes in Venice. But a majority of those spend just a few days a year in the city. These are not the citizens whom Venice needs, not ‘the makers and guardians of its memories’.

A hit-and-run tourist monoculture is also inimical to the nuance of memory, and to dignity. In fact, it humiliates the city. ‘The skyscraper ships that pass by Venice constantly proclaim that Venice isn’t forever young and yet still perfectly formed, but is instead old, moribund, and poor, and must stretch its hand out to tourists and ask for alms.’

An image used by the campaigners NOGrandiNavi who
seek to divert the huge cruise ships away from the heart of the city

Moreover, these ships distort and destroy Venice’s historic skyline. They ‘parade their pompous arrogance and trespass into Saint Mark’s basin, defying with their tacky bulkiness the ancient basilica, the Doges’ Palace and the horses stolen from Byzantium.’ The city is colonized and wrecked by these ‘veritable spaceships of modernity, temples of consumerism.’ They are ‘cookie-cutter machines that produce standardized pleasures … portray the blandest sort of mass tourism as a highly personalized experience.’

Meanwhile, after the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia in 2012, a new law has forced all cruise ships to stay 2.3 miles from Italian shorelines. The only exception: Venice.

Venice has a price-tag and her patrimony is for sale.

An act signed into law in 2010 by Silvio Berlusconi and Roberto Calderoli turned Italy into ‘a gigantic real estate supermarket’. The ownership of heritage sites was transferred from the nation to individual authorities, including Venice. At the same time, the values were quantified and the ‘assets’ became available for sale to private interests. In Venice, whole islands were thus put up for land-grabs – Certosa and Poveglia; also, many buildings in the historic centre. A law requires Venice to provide yearly reports on her real estate disposals alongside her city budget. Venetians, like the inhabitants of other historic cities in Italy, no longer have a right to their own city. Market forces have robbed her citizens of those rights.

Venice is a glove thrown down to the modernity.

 Professor Settis quotes the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri: ‘Even in its current cadaverous state, Venice is still an unbearable challenge to the world of modernity. Venice only manages to make its heard in a whisper, but this is still simply unbearable to our technological world …’ Only the lagoon has protected Venice from suburbanization and the ‘fatuous rhetoric’ of skyscrapers. Instead, the state allows the floating skyscrapers unfettered access. Meanwhile, the scandal of MOSE exemplifies ‘how Venice’s problems have been used as a pretext to invoke empty rhetorical formulas of preservation, while actually allowing private interests to rob the city blind.’

Professor Settis outlines various projects to modernize Venice, using her fragility as a pretext for punishing her. ‘In each case, it is seen as essential to desecrate this this glorious city which has proved so annoying to the preachers of modernity in the same way that a virgin might frustrate a Don Juan who thinks himself irresistible.’

 A Vitruvian Oath for architects?

Doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, which forbids them to do harm to those they tend. Professor Settis has conceived the idea of a Vitruvian Oath for architects, to ensure that they serve the built environment and its citizens – privileging good work over profit and devotion to virtuous place-making over the narcissistic demands of commercial clients. More than anything, a Vitruvian Oath would require an architect to undertake a scrupulous study of history before imposing his creativity on a precious context. This is increasingly not the case in today’s architectural schools: ‘it’s almost as if the memory of our past were a burden to rid oneself of in order to live in a mindless present’.

On the contrary, Professor Settis argues, ‘the urgency of the present prompts us to re-examine the events of the past not as a mere accumulation of data, or as dusty archive, but as the critical living memory of human communities. This would be the only way in which the past could be leavening for the present, a reservoir of energy and ideas that we could use to build our future.’ When Professor Settis conceived this idea, it was contemplative and playful. But institutions are starting to take it seriously.

What can be done to save Venice?

Professor Settis told Venice in Peril that it is not enough to simply stop bad development. Active measures are needed to ensure that the city does not become a mummified tourist attraction. He sees hope in a limit on second homes, and in positive incentives to rebuild the small industries that once thrived in the city, creating both dignified and creative employment for Venetians. In the book, he writes also of re-utilizing the many vacant buildings in Venice, and of incentivizing research, training and apprentice schemes. These things cannot be achieved without a new pact between citizens and their city. He does not discriminate against incomers. You don’t have to be born in Venice to be part of this. You simply need to be committed to bringing the city back to life, which also entails restoring her memories and her self-respect before it is too late.

As I wrote the above, I noticed Giorno per giorno still lying on my desk. Picking it up, I discovered that it started with a list of Patron Saints. I think Patron Saints are another aspect of Venetian life that could do with revivification. Perhaps we shall not lay too many offerings on the altars of San Giuliano l’Ospedaliere or Santa Marta … protectors of hoteliers. But Venice would profit from the intervention of the following:
San Tommaso apostolo – architects
San Giovanni evangelista and San Luca – artists
San Crispino and San Aniano – shoemakers
San Eligio – ironmongers, clockmakers and jewellers
San Giovanni Bosco – publishers
San Giuseppe – carpenters
San Omobono – tailors
Sant’Elena – dyers
Sant’Agostino di Ippona – typographers
Santa Chiara d’Assisi – glassmakers

And yes … San Nicola di Mira – navigators.

Michelle Lovric’s website

If Venice Dies is published in English by Pallas Athene.