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.

Purple cow - Michelle Lovric

According to their own originary myth, the dawn of the last century saw the birth of the ‘Re-Echo’ Club, a group of literary bon-vivants in the Boston area. Initially they were inspired by a poem about an unseen and unfortunate purple cow. The poet was Gelett Burgess. The poem went as follows:

I never saw a Purple Cow
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you, anyhow
I’d rather see than be one.

The project of the Re-Echoers was to re-render this masterpiece in the style of their literary heroes. They produced a book of their re-renderings in 1913. Discovering it in the British Library at least two decades ago, I thought it would be fun to do an illustrated version and so produced some sample designs with the talented Lisa Pentreath who worked with me on all my books for many years. Our revamped version never quite got published, but I came across the designs the other day, and started reading the poems, and was again impressed by the wit and invention. So here are a few Purple Cows for a dull February morning.

                                                                           The Keats version:


John Keats, anonymous portrait
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 A cow of purple is a joy forever
Its loveliness increases. I have never
Seen this phenomenon. Yet ever keep
A brave lookout; lest I should be asleep
When she comes by. For, though I would not be one,
I’ve often imagined ‘twould be a joy to see one.

John Milton by
William Faithorn
courtesy of Wikimedia
Commons

The John Milton reworking:

Hence, vain deluding cows.
The herd of folly, without colour bright
How little you delight,
Or fill the Poet’s mind, or songs arouse!
But, hail! Thou goddess gay of feature!
Hail! Divinest purple creature!
Oh, Cow, thy visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight.
And though I’d like, just once, to see thee,
I'd never, never, never'd be thee.

                                 

 Percy Bysshe Shelley too salutes the purple cow in characteristic style:

Hail to thee, bright spirit!
Cow thou never wert;
But in life to cheer it
Playest thy full part
                             In purple lines of unpremeditated art …

 

And Wordsworth has his gentle way with the violet one:

 

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dee;

                                                        A cow whom there were few to praise
                                                         And very few to see.
                                                       A violet by a mossy stone
                                                         Greeting the smiling East
                                                           Is not so purple, I must own
                                                        As that erratic beast …

William Wordsworth by Robert Haydon
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 Thomas Gray’s rendition:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea;
I watched them slowly wend their weary way
But, ah, a Purple Cow I did not see.
Full many a cow of purplest ray serene
Is haply grazing where I may not see;
Full many a donkey writes of her, I ween,
But neither of these creatures would I be.


And Swinburne waxes lyrically and purply:

Oh, cow of rare rapturous vision,
Oh, purple, impalpable Cow,
Do you browse in a Dream Field Elysian,
Are you purpling pleasantly now?
By the side of wan waves do you languish?
Or in the lithe lush of the grove?
While vainly I search in my anguish,
O Bovine of mauve? ….

I’ll spare you the second stanza.

The papers of the Re-Echo Club (1913) – plus those of a later edition The Diversions of the Re-Echo Club – are classified under the editorship of one Carolyn Wells. In my days as an anthologist, I frequently had recourse to her work. She was a kind of proto-Dorothy Parker, holding her own in a circle of male writers. She was also prolific – 170 books are attributed to her. She wrote children’s books, crime, short stories, newspaper series and articles, an autobiography and much light verse.

The Re-Echo Club convened a number of times. It also rendered into the words of the greats the following limericks

‘There was a little girl
and she had a little curl …’

 ‘There was a young lady of Niger,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger …’

 And the nursery rhyme ‘Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater’.

 ‘Lally’ Tennyson, ‘Dan’ Rossetti and ‘Teddy’ Poe gamely took on Cubism, encouraged by ‘Rob’ Browning: ‘I was born cubic. You see, you just symbolize the liquefaction of the essence of an idea into its emotional constituents, and there you are!’

But as we are betwixt the retail frenzies of Christmas and those of Valentine’s Day, I think I’ll end with the Re-Echo club’s re-rendering of Shakespeare on the subject of seasonal gifts.


To give or not to give, that is the question;
Whether ‘tis nobler on the whole to suffer
The old exchange of trinkets, gauds and kickshaws,
Or to take arms against this Christmas nuisance,
And, by opposing, end it? To buy – to give –
No more’ and by that gift say we end
The Christmas obligations to our friends
We all are heir to! To buy – to give;
To give – perchance to get; ay, there’s the rub!
For in those bundles gay what frights may come
When we have shuffled off the ribbon bows
And tissue paper! Who would gifts receive
Of foolish books and little silver traps,
That make us rather keep the things we buy,
Than get these others that we know not of!
This Christmas doth make cowards of us all,
And, notwithstanding our good resolutions,
Each year we bandy gifts, and follow out
The same old Christmas programme.


Michelle Lovric's website

Monk-ey business – Michelle Lovric

According to my hero, Giuseppe Tassini, the palazzo shown below right once hosted a devil in the form of a monkey-butler. The simian Satan was outed and cast out by a clever Franciscan monk.

Ca' Soranzo de l'Anzolo

The clever monk was Matteo Serafini da Bascio (1495 – 1552). Born in the Papal States, he was ordained in 1520. He espoused the barefoot poverty of his order’s founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, also adopting the saint’s pointed hood and beard. Father Matteo attracted his own followers, who became known as the Capuchin (hooded) order, and were awarded canonical approbation by Pope Clement VII in 1528. But the comfortable desk-life of the order’s first vicar general did not appeal to da Bascio, who preferred more strenuous and austere missionary work. He accompanied the papal troops in Germany in 1546, where he was said to have spurred the soldiers to victory with his inspired preaching. These sermons he continued thereafter in Venice, which is where he came to attend at the Ca’ Soranzo de l’Anzolo just behind the Piazza San Marco.

At that time, the palazzo belonged to Iseppo Pasini, lawyer of the Ducal Curia. This man was well known for his grasping and unscrupulous ways, by which he had earned hugely. Nevertheless, he pretended to great piety. So he invited the celebrated preacher to dinner at his elegant home. Before proceeding to table, Pasini told Father Matteo that he had in his home a most extraordinary and highly skilled monkey. This unusual servant had full command of his domestic matters.

Father Matteo
da Bascio, courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons
(anonymous)

Father Matteo knew immediately, by divine grace, that something was far from right about the monkey – such a beast was surely a manifestation of the devil. He desired to confront it immediately. The monkey must have known a holy man was in the house, for it was discovered hiding under a bed. Father Matteo told it, ‘I command you in the name of God to explain who you are, and for what reason you entered this house.’

The monkey replied, ‘I am the devil. I have brought myself here to take away the soul of this lawyer, which is owed to me on account of many sins.'

Father Matteo continued, ‘And why, therefore, being so hungry for his soul, have you not yet killed him, and brought back with you to hell?’

‘Only because, before going to bed, the lawyer always prays to God and the Virgin. If he had only once omitted his usual prayer, I could have without delay carried him to eternal torment.’

 Hearing this, Father Matteo hastened to command the enemy of God to leave the house immediately. The monkey informed him that he had his own instructions: he might not leave this dishonoured house without doing some kind of damage.

‘Very well,’ said Father Matteo. ‘You may do some damage, but only what I shall prescribe you, and no more! You will leave via this wall, and the resulting hole will serve as testimony to what has happened here.’

The devil obeyed. Father Matteo, sitting down dinner with the lawyer, made him review his past life. Finally, picking up a corner of the tablecloth, he twisted it. Miraculously, copious quantities of blood flowed out. ‘This,’ said Father Matteo sternly, ‘is the blood of the poor whom you exsanguinated with so many unjust extortions.’

The lawyer repented and lamented his crimes, and warmly thanked the Capuchin for leading him back to grace. But when he saw the hole left by the devil, he declared that he could not be free of fear if his proud adversary remained free. But Father Matteo was reassuring, commanding him to place the image of an angel in that hole, as any fallen angels (like the devil) would flee from a saintly one.

 The relief may still be seen today. It consists of a sculpted tabernacle containing two gothic shields above which presides the lushly winged angel.

 

 

 The angel holds a ‘crusader orb’ – a globe with the cross carved upon it – and is blessing it. There are traces of colour, probably not original to the sculpture. Above the angel, there are also the remains of a 14th century fresco of the Madonna and Child with angels. The angel still lends its name to the street and bridge adjacent to it.

Michelle Lovric's website
Image of the devilish monkey above courtesy of Wellcome Images: a  monkey holding a clyster in an apothecary's shop; satirizing physicians who gave enemas to ladies. (How much more devilish does a monkey need to be?) Engraving by F. Basan after D. Teniers the Younger.