Thorny sea-steeds - Michelle Lovric

This post was to be called ‘A Pillar of the Community’. It was designed as a campaigning piece about a fascinating but little-known Victorian horse hospital at Blows Yard by Borough Market in London.

 But I’m still lacking one crucial piece of information about the Blows Yard horses and their hospice, so that story will have to wait till next month. As I usually write about Venice, and I’m here (amid mist and acqua alta) now, my thoughts have turned instead to the only kind of horse one finds these days* in la Serenissima – seahorses.

Who isn’t intrigued by sea horses? They are unique in their tail twirling locomotion, the primitive inscrutability of their faces, and also in their breeding habits, which I regard as pioneering: the female deposits eggs in the male’s ‘brood pouch’ where he fertilizes and incubates his young until he goes into labour and gives birth to them.(‘Push, Papa! Push!’).

Here are some seahorses, twirled and untwirled, from the Wellcome Trust's collection.

And they have such wonderful names! Among the 54 known species of this animal, we find Hippocampus abdominalis (pot-bellied seahorse)

Hippocampus biocellatus (false-eyed seahorse)

Hippocampus comes (tiger-tail seahorse)

Hippocampus paradoxus (paradoxical seahorse)

In my last children’s novel, The Fate in the Box, I used blue glass sea horses as the talisman of trust passed between members of I Piccoli Pochi, secret freedom fighters trying to find a way to bring down the corrupt regime of a tyrant known as Fogfinger.

I wrote about the seahorses on this site two years ago.

But to recap briefly, seahorses really were used as good luck talismans in Venice where nursing fishwives sometimes kept a dried example tucked into their bodices to facility the flow of their milk. In 1902, the English folklore specialist Edward Lovett went to Venice where he commissioned some examples of Venetian seahorses in pink and blue glass, which can today be seen at London’s Wellcome Collection. Lovett, the author of Magic in Modern London (1925) believed that the distinctive shape of the gondola’s metal ferro was based on the form of a seahorse.

Venice’s own Natural History Museum keeps a miniature section of the Northern Adriatic Sea’s living natural history in an aquarium. Several graceful seahorses constantly make their way across the tank. John Ruskin, as I noted in another blog, recommended catching a few Venetian seahorses for observation of their movements, but was disappointed when they failed to grasp his pencil with their tails.

I commissioned some copies of Lovett’s sea horses from a proper Murano glass works - see the picture above. As I’m not a nursing mother, and a glass seahorse is a chilly object to stow in in a History Girl’s bodice, I had different plans for my commission. Instead I put a few glass seahorses in the window displays I was making for bookshops for The Fate in the Box. I blogged about that at The Other Place, in a post called Buying Crocodiles on Ebay.

In Italian, a seahorse is called ‘un cavallucio marino’, which has a courtly ring to it. On Wikimedia Commons I found this beautiful seahorse coat of arms designed by Sabine Cretella.

The seahorse is totemic to several towns and even a football club.

Given its otherworldly mystery, the seahorse would have featured in the cabinet of curiosities of any sixteenth century gentleman worth his salt. See the one middle right here in Frans Francken the Younger’s painting, now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

 

The man depicted is Abraham Ortelius (1527 –1598), the Flemish cartographer who invented the idea of the atlas. He is also thought to be the first scientist to pose the theory that the continents of the world were once joined together and eventually drifted apart. Who knows if the gentle drift of his pet seahorse influenced him in this radical idea?

Most of my children’s novels feature mermaids in Venice, and the current WIP also contains a few hippocamps, the great grand-daddies of seahorses, at least in size. Hippocamps differ from seahorses physiologically in that their heads are more equine in the Mammalian sense. The Venetian ones, such as this one on the tomb of Andrea Vendramin, at SS Giovanni e Paolo, often have forelegs streamlined into furry flippers.

 

One can imagine human-sized mermaids riding such a big beast. And indeed Frederick Church Stuart did, in Plate 6 in the book "Choice Etchings" (London: Alexander Strahan, 1887 – thanks to Wikimedia Commons again).

Hippocamps are all very grand, but there is something about the miniature nature of the real seahorse that fascinates me more.

I became interested in the seahorse population not just of of the Grand Canal but of the Thames, which flows beneath my home in London. In that great grey-green, greasy river, all set about with skyscrapers, we too have seahorses nosing through the churn of mud: hippocampus hippocampus, or ‘short snouted seahorse’, a protected species that dines on shrimp and baby eel. The London Zoological Society reported finding this rare seahorse in the Thames in 2008. The creatures are now part of a breeding programme at London Zoo. You can see some of 918 baby seahorses being born in one day in this video. (Push, Papa!)

At the time of my seahorse researches, I was part of a Poetry School masterclass taught by the wonderful Robert Vas Dias. I produced this poem as one of my weekly homeworks, bringing the Thames seahorse into a love triangle. In this poem about good faith and fidelity, notions betrayed by everyone except, perhaps, that thorny sea-steed, hippocampus hippocampus.

                                                 Crusaders

Professor Mann’s at war with faithfulness.

He’s paddling heart-deep in the midnight Thames

with Dr Jane Kettle, who deployed a thesis

on doomed whales in the estuary to lure him

from his Californian wife. At first

Kettle seemed cold, would not permit a kiss

in the laboratory but now she lets Mann handle

her hotly and in scientific detail by the river

where mist steams from the roiling water.

When they crawl back from Eternity to here,

bashful on the brick-flecked, pungent shore,

it’s to see a rare short-snouted sea-horse,

gallant in ancestral armour, has threesomed their tryst.

While they ploughed the river-bank with warlike cries,

hippocampus hippocampus also pitched his spiny woo.

Blood enemy to the tribes of eel and Mysis shrimp,

the horse has lanced his fretted hook to the hairs on the

professor’s sweet, salty, faithless wrist.



Michelle Lovric’s website



*Noblemen used to keep up to seventy horses at the Cavallizeria near SS Giovanni e Paolo.

Befanissima - Michelle Lovric

In Italy, children put their stocking out not on Christmas Eve but the night before January 6th, the Christian Feast of the Epiphany. Here’s one version of the traditional Italian poem about the Befana, the gap-toothed old hag who patrols the world on her broomstick that night, searching out youngsters.

La Befana vien di notte,
con le scarpe tutte rotte,
col vestito tutto blu, la Befana viene giù.
Viene giù dal caminetto con un sacco pieno zeppo.
Ai bambini buoni buoni caramelle e confettoni.
Ai bambini cattivoni solo cenere e carboni.

The Befana arrives by night
in shoes all tattered and torn,
all dressed in blue, the Befana comes down.
She comes down the chimney with a sack packed full of stuff.
For the good, nice children, there are sweets and candy.
For the bold, bad children, only ashes and coal.

This week, I asked an enchanting little Venetian girl, Martina, what she expected in her stocking that night - coal or candy?

‘Have you been good all year?’ I inquired. 'Really good?'

With engaging honesty, she told me, ‘Così così.’ So-so.

I happen to know she received candy.

In shops all over Italy, the end of the Christmas season is signalled by the arrival in the shops of gap-toothed witch dolls on broomsticks, each hag bearing a stocking (“calza”) full of sweets, sometimes in the form of black, glittering sugar-coal.

The link with the Christian calendar is that this is the date when the Three Kings came to the Baby Jesus, with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Modern children, of course, prefer sugar.

There are many versions of the Befana story, but most agree that she was an intensely house-proud woman who hosted the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem. In the usual story, she was invited to join them but claimed that she was far too busy with sweeping the house – hence her broomstick. But afterwards she was sorry, and went out to find the Holy Infant. She never did, and still roams the earth on her broomstick, looking for Him, and meanwhile distributing gustatory justice to children all over the world.

We do everything differently in Venice. It is not just that you sometimes see a Befana made entirely of garlic cloves at the Rialto Market. Or that the Befana often goes by the name ‘marantega’ in Venetian dialect. This is a word that could be translated a number of ways but I’ll go for ‘miserable old bezzom’. The maranteghe are the wailing widows of Venetian society, the diffusers of bad news, the walking death-notices, the scandalmongers and the mealy-mouthed mistresses of schadenfreude.

But the greatest difference between the Italian and the Venetian manifestations of the old bezzom is this: in Venice the Befana arrives not down the chimney but by water.

And she’s a man in a drag. Or five men in drag.

 

 

The Regata della Befana is organised every year by senior members of the most ancient rowing club in the city, the Bucintoro. The club is named after the glorious golden boat used during the Republic to take the Doge out into the lagoon to drop a golden ring into the water, symbolizing Venice’s marriage to the sea. Napoleon disposed of the boat, stripping down the gold for cash to feed his army, at the same time he arranged the burning of the golden book of Venetian nobles under a ‘Liberty Tree’ in San Marco.

But back to the Befana ... At ten am, every January 6th, not at all punctually, the maranteghe, splendid in mop caps, handknitted shawls and long dresses, climb into boats in which an erect broomstick has been has been fixed.

They pole through the limpid Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge. In the bridge’s curved ‘armpit’ (there is probably an excellent architectural word for this, but a sunny armpit is what it looks like), a choir splendidly dressed in red warbles a welcome. Less welcome to the ears of the spectators are the interminable addresses by various interested parties broadcast on a squealing microphone.


This year the man addicted to the microphone announced 30 seconds of silence for the German tourist who lost his life just at this spot during the summer. But of course the tourists did not understand, and talked right through it. Indeed, some young tourists showed their most brutal side, elbowing older people off slippery pontili because they clearly felt so entitled to get that one essential photograph for their Facebook page. All too often one witnesses these 'scontri' or culture clashes between the dwindling Venetian population (now down to 57,000) and the vast tourist population - which numbers 352 for every local.

After the poorly observed silence, other boats begin to arrive, some with Santas, some with more witches.

Finally came the boat with the traditional stocking of the Befana, bulging with either coal or caramelle. Since I last saw the Regata della Befana, the stocking has been upgraded to a handsome red damask that looks rather like Smaug when coiled up on the deck.

The stocking was, as ever, hoisted up to the arch of the Rialto Bridge and dangled there in triumph while the choir sang its heart out.

Members of the public were offered crunchy galani biscuits, mulled wine and thick hot chocolate.

And that was the Regata della Befana done for another year.

Another magical happening marks the Epiphany in a grander part of Venice. At the Clock tower on Piazza San Marco, three model kings totter out of a door heralded by a trumpeter. They make a gesture of respect to the Madonna and child, and then disappear through another door, not to be seen again till next January 6th. There’s a video here.

But most magical of all for us this year was the evening before the Befana, when a group of friends met in an engineer’s studio at Ca’ Rezzonico to paint and draw a collection of ‘art’ stockings. In a way, we were replicating the idea of the Compagnie della Calza, the guilds of young men devoted to fashion and poetry, who sported fanciful, highly decorated stockings, as seen in the paintings of Vettor Carpaccio and others. It was these noble young men who founded Venice’s Carnevale, which originally featured erotic poetry readings and games. The ‘Companies of the Fancy Stockings’ feature in my children’s book, The Fate in the Box, and it was nice to come to grips with them not just in words but in pictures.

Our ‘opere’ were exhibited in the window for the whole day of the Befana, to bambini buoni buoni and bambini cattivoni alike.

Photos by Michelle Lovric and Jenny Lovric

Befana poem courtesy of Elena Romano

Stockings by Ross Frassanito, Claudia Marturano, Elena Romano, Susie Palmarin, Jenny and Michelle Lovric

Michelle Lovric’s website

Blue glass seahorses, hair sandwiches and veiled statues - Michelle Lovric

In 1902, the English folklore specialist Edward Lovett went to Venice. He wrote, ‘"I found itinerant hawkers of curios selling the hippocampus, tied in bundles of three with red worsted. These were sold for luck, a poor survival of a very old and grander legend ... I found that the wives of fishermen, nursing babies, kept a dried sea horse on their breasts to facilitate the flow of milk … I am very much inclined to believe that the curious white metal prow of this remarkable boat [the gondola] is evolved from the seahorse.’

Folkloric objects such as dried seahorses, or even glass ones, live hard because of frequent handling. They often don’t survive except in records of anthropologists. So Lovett, wishing to preserve Venetian seahorsery for posterity, commissioned some glass seahorses, which can still be seen today at London’s Wellcome Collection.

Lovett (1852-1933) was best known for his publication Magic in Modern London (1925), which deals with both good-luck objects and folk remedies for various afflictions. One of my favourite recipes collected by Lovett is the Whooping Cough hair sandwich. The idea was that the parents of a child with the disease should trim some hair from the nape of their son or daughter, put it between two pieces of bread and throw it out of doors for an animal to eat.

Lovett’s connections with the Wellcome were strong and continue to be so. He himself curated an exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum called The Folklore of London in 1916.

And his own collection featured in a 2011-12 exhibition called Charmed Life: the Solace of Objects, curated by the artist Felicity Powell. Her undulating display of tiny charms and amulets included a miniature Venetian gondola ferro as well as several of the pink and blue glass seahorses that were thought to be good luck talismans in Venice in the nineteenth century.

            I was very much taken aback at the sight of the cavallucio marino in the London exhibition because at that point I was writing blue glass seahorses into a dystopian alternative 18^th century Venice for a children’s novel. In The Fate in the Box, I was imagining a city where automata were replacing the poor of every parish, who were consequently starving, and in which children were sacrificed in a barbaric ceremony known as the Lambing devised by my villain Fogfinger. Those who rebel against the regime form a band known as The Piccoli Pochi, or The Tiny Few, and their talisman is …. a blue glass seahorse.

            As I often create window displays for bookshops, I decided to see if I could find some blue glass seahorses, like Lovett’s. Countless tramps around Venice revealed only lurid multicoloured seahorses with labels that claimed a Murano provenance, but very obviously lied.

            Inspired by Lovett, I decided to commission some proper seahorses of my own. I took a photograph of Lovett’s hundred-year-old seahorses to Marco Vettor, a proper Venetian glass merchant. A few weeks later he presented me with this beauty, almost an exact replica of those that Lovett had commissioned, also based on the real size of the original nineteenth century amulets.

            I’m now working on the next book, and thought seahorses were behind me. But I was rereading my Ruskin this week for a television programme and came across a charming letter to Charles Eliot Norton, in which he wrote about keeping Venetian seahorses in a basin in his lodgings during a stay in 1857.

            I love coincidences and loved that letter for what it showed of the humour and tenderness of this much misjudged man. Ruskin was disappointed because the seahorses would not curl their tails around his pencil when he wanted them to do so. Nevertheless he advised Norton to get a fishermen to bring him two or three cavalluci next time he was in Venice and to put them in a basin so he could have the pleasure of watching them swim.

            ‘But don’t keep them more than a day,’ he urged, ‘or they’ll die, put them them into the canal again.’

            Here is a video of a Venetian cavallucio being released to the wilds of the lagoon, just as Ruskin wished. 

              In the Miracles & Charms exhibition held in the Wellcome at the same time as Lovett’s, I noticed that the statue of Saint Jude in the church of San Hippolito in Mexico City was given a cloth mask during the Swine Flu epidemic – which was what gave me the idea of the saints having their faces veiled during the reign of terror in Venice created by Fogfinger in The Fate in the Box. 

And from this week, a rare joy has been permitted to the public in Venice – admission to the Conservatorium of Music, which is hosting one of the Biennale exhibitions.

In one of the courtyards I found this statue, veiled just as I had imagined.

None of the staff with whom I talked could tell me anything about the statue.

They were amused that I wanted to know.

‘Un mistero,’ I was told conclusively.

And that was just what I wanted.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Marco Vettor's website 

The Wellcome has made a treasure hunt app using the amulets collected by Edward Lovett and set in Edwardian London.

Lambs to the Slaughter – Michelle Lovric

My favourite piece of physical research for my new novel, The Fate in the Box, took place here, at the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. Locals refer to it simply as the ‘Frari’.
This is the brick-built Gothic church where the gruesome ‘Lambing’ ceremony happens in my book. Poor Venetian children are forced to walk to the top of the tower and wind the handle of the Fate in the Box, a sinister toy like a Jack in the Box. There are two possibilities when the tune stops tinkling and the lid springs open. A lovely Madonna-like face will mean that the child can skip back down to his or her family. But if a skull bursts out of the box, then the child is doomed to instant death.

Of course the real church, one of the biggest and most beautiful in Venice, has never been the site of anything so barbaric.

The Frari is a church of the Franciscans, who were given the land to construct it in 1250. Building took place in several stages and over several centuries. Its walls are vivid with works by Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Vivarini and other Venetian masters. There is also a magnificent collection of reliquaries containing the bones and hairs of various saints all jumbled up in a vast cupboard with glass doors. There’s a provisional look to these dusty shelves, as if someone plans to sort the collection out into arms, legs, fingers and patellas one day soon.

I’ve always been attracted to ancient relics (yes, the obvious comments apply, sigh) but it was in fact a stone relief that first gave me the idea for The Fate in the Box: a larger-than-life relief of a lamb in the Corner Chapel off the Frari’s left transept. This lamb wears a smile. His undocked tail is as bushy as a fox’s. He bears a tall cross. He marches proudly in a ring of rope held by two angels. He looks as if he might easily step out of it and take a little trot around the nave. I began to think about the idea of lambs being led to the slaughter, about the meekness of lambs and the helplessness of children … scribbled down a sketch of the Lamb in my notebook, and that was the start of this book and a year of many visits to the Frari as a writer rather than a relic-tourist.

As soon as I had my idea of sacrifice, I started looking for a spectacular way of performing it. At the Frari, I didn't have far to look.

On the left of the nave, you see the three steps descending to small door that gives access to the ramp of the square bell-tower, which was started in 1361 by the Venetian architect Jacopo Celega and completed in 1396 by his son Pier Paolo. (Outside, a stone plaque at the base explains these facts). Funds were raised by the Bishop of Trebizond, and the Viaro family. (I wonder if this was a way for the Viaro clan to ‘clean’ their family name, as they were implicated in the murderous Bajamonte Tiepolo conspiracy of 1310 that lies behind the events of my first two children’s novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium.)

At 70 metres, only the bell-tower of San Marco is taller than the Frari’s, which is built of terracotta with horizontal stripes of white stone to mark of the three orders. White stone is also used for the arches of the belfry. A bolt of lightning struck the tower in 1490, which resulted in a partial reconstruction of the upper part. Once a lead pyramid (like San Marco’s tower), it is now a polygonal tambour. The Frari’s was one of the four towers in Venice whose bells announced meetings of the Grand Council. (The others were San Marco, San Geremia, and San Francesco della Vigna.)

The Frari’s bell-tower is not open to the public.

I lurked outside several times, making this drawing of the door to the tower, but never found it ajar. I had plenty of time to wonder if the clerical gentleman pictured on the right of the relief might be Bishop of Trebizond who had contributed to the cost.

But eventually, because of the kindness of Father Apollonio Tottoli, I was able to enter that low door and enter the shaft of the tower, discovering its unusual and fascinating construction for myself on one of those perfect Venetian days when everything seems to conspire to make a writer produce a good story, whether she had it inside her or not when she woke up that morning. I blogged about it  here – somewhat breathlessly - at the time.

In that blog, I teased, promising to reveal later what was inside the forbidden tower. Now that The Fate is published, I can tell you, as the book does, that Frari’s stern campanile hides a rather lovely secret – it is, in fact, a double tower.

The inner tower has arched windows three times the height of a man.

The outer tower has tiny arched windows, which are, of course visible from the outside. A pale light inches in through the deep niches.

Another surprise: no stairs. Instead, there’s a brick-tiled ramp –designed for wheeling construction materials to the top. The ramp winds up between inner and outer towers.

With each new circuit of the four walls, you’re presented with a different view – at first the back of a canvas hung on the left nave wall, then the inside of the church glowing through a little window. One strange sight is the plain black box high up to the right of the nave . It’s the tomb of Abbot Luigi delle Torre who was murdered in 1549 by Tristano da Savorgnan. There is a false story that the coffin contains the body of Carmagnola, who died a century earlier. The painting behind shows two angels who are opening the curtains of the baldacchino, paying respect to the remains below.

Eventually you find yourself in the roof of the church ... then above it ...

The city starts to unfold beneath you

Finally you reach the bells

and the full view of Venice, starting with cloisters below

Spreading out to a panorama of rooftops

Reaching out to the lagoon.

My heroine Amneris, as you might guess, leaves the Frari tower’s top rather more quickly than she arrives there. And in fact, the tower made such an impression on me that I chose it for the penultimate scene of my villain, Fogfinger, who is pursued up its dark ramp with two angry Sea-Saurs literally nipping at his heels.

Climbing that tower was one of my favourite pieces of research in Venice. However, there is an easier way to get to the top and enjoy that three hundred and sixty degree view. The cult video game, Assassin’s Creed, offers a climb up the OUTSIDE of the Frari bell-tower. I’ve never played the game, but I have enjoyed looking at the clever pastiches of a mediaeval Venice. The artwork is amazingly detailed, including many real features. There’s a fascinating video of a protagonist scaling the bell-tower on Youtube here . Fast forward to the last scenes, where the view is wondrous, as in life.

 

Michelle Lovric’s website

New pages on The Fate in the Box are here

PS Good news on the Venetian Bookshop campaign. It seems that the Goldoni bookshop has been bought by a new patron and saved from closure.



Of saurs and simians and sudden death – Michelle Lovric

Few tourists realize that Venice, perhaps unfairly stuffed with so many other attractions, also boasts an extremely splendid Museum of Natural History in the old Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal.

            Researching my latest children’s book, The Fate in the Box, has necessitating my passing many pleasant and distressing hours there. I have borrowed liberally from the premises for my historical fantasy: it was there that I found the Sea-Saurs who are the dread of all the Venetians, and the mounted insects and stuffed baboons who come to life at the climax of the story. I also chose the Fondaco as the living quarters for my villain, Fogfinger, a great trophy hunter, as therefore as the setting for several terrifying encounters.

A visit to the museum begins via a small garden.

If you are lucky, you may meet this unusually coiffed cat, who frequents the grounds, and who of course became the cat 'Shaveling' in The Fate in the Box.

On entering, you climb immediately to the second floor to see the skeletons of a wonderful ancient crocodile Sarcosuchus imperator and a crested dinosaur Ouranosaurus  nigeriensis, both from the Cretaceous period, 110 millions years ago.  Sarcosaurus, on whom my Sea-Saurs are based, was a long as a bus and weighed eight tons. Its jaw was a metre long. At the end was a bulbous protuberance, the size of a large watermelon. This was the cavity for its nostrils, allowing it to take in air and hide underater for its prey. The curators also think that this large chamber would have given the Sarcosaurus a wonderful sense of smell and also allowed it to make terrifying noises (in my book, of course, it allows them to sing love songs to one another). It had a hundred sharp teeth. Unlike my Saurs, it used them on fish and perhaps also other animals.

After the Sarcosaurus, the museum traces ‘The Path of Life’ from the Precambrian to the Cenozoic periods, spelled out in a rich collection of fossils, beautifully displayed.

This leads into the older parts of the museum, where things take on a completely different character. Suddenly, you are in the world of ‘ethnographic collections’ of tribal weapons, musical instruments, tools and dress, collected by the poet, musicologist and explorer Gianni Miani (1810 – 1872), who adopted Venice as his home. His collection of 1800 objects includes a priestess mummified with her two crocodiles, which he found on an expedition to trace the source of the Nile in 1859. His handwritten, illustrated journal of his expedition also belongs to the museum. Miani died in Africa on another safari, this time to look for rare and unknown animals.

The next two rooms are rather more disturbing, especially for a vegetarian. I have taken parties of poets and writers there for workshop exercises, and seen them break down in tears. So I am not going to show you pictures: I shall describe the the rooms in words.

They are lined with stuffed ‘trophies’ (dead animals) slaughtered by Giuseppe de Reali (1877–1937) a rich Venetian land-owner, politician and financier, who undertook twelve big-game hunting expeditions to Africa between 1898 and 1929. Many of Reali’s victims – some now extinct – are displayed decapitated or flayed with just their heads stuffed. Below the mounted heads of giraffes, rhinos, lions and antelopes are photographs of the animals dying: Reali liked to record the moment of their death.

Even worse than the mounted heads, in my opinion, is the way in which Reali fused parts of animals together to make bizarre ornaments and home furnishings. Some of the descriptions in this story are taken from what you can see in the museum today. The gorilla with the flattened belly is there – his plaque says he was killed in the French Congo in 1925. (The curator Margherita Fusco told me that his belly is bald because too many Venetian children have stroked it over the decades.) The billiard table with rhinoceros legs is in my book, coming to life and lumbering down the stairs to liberty.

The Reali rooms reflect an attitude of their time that now seems quite inappropriate: that the ‘white man’ was entitled, by virtue of his ‘superiority’ to colonize and ‘civilize’ the world. The process included the conquest of the great creatures of nature.

The curators have done what they can to show sensitivity in today’s display. The walls are painted blood red – a colour that seems like a comment. And Reali’s photographs of the whole animals, dead, are arranged at eye level, so you can see just what it cost to decorate this room. And most affecting of all are the sounds that you hear in the room: recordings of live animals making their natural noises in the wild. Instead of being a monument to death, the rooms remind you very vividly of what was lost every time Reali added another trophy to his collection.

            Beyond Reali’s mounted massacre is a room devoted to Giancarlo Ligabue, a Venetian businessman and palaeontologist born in 1931. He established the Ligabue Centre of Research Studies, which undertakes expeditions and digs all over the world.

Next, the visitor finds a ‘Wunderkammer’ or ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ – a little circular room containing such strange things as a four-legged chicken, a fake mermaid, consisting of half a monkey thrust into half a fish, a basilisk made out of shark skin, a real two-headed calf, a mummified cat, which I believe once belonged to Doge Francesco Morosini - a conclusion the curators think quite possible. It has a rat between its paws. (In the Fate in the Box, they come back to life and make for the wonderful smells of cheese and fish at the Rialto market.)

This crowded little room is inspired by the famous Wunderkammer of Imperato Ferrante in Naples and shows the preference for the strange kinds of creatures described with wonder in Mediaeval bestiaries or in fanciful travellers’ tales. It was, in fact, little collections of curiosities like this, dating from the 17^th century, which launched the concept of displays of natural specimens for education and pleasure, paving the way for the great public museums of the present.

            Through this room you reach the collection of endearingly shabby stuffed animals – sharks with crossed eyes, mouldy egrets – not hunting trophies but part of a scientific collection donated by Alessandro Ninni (1837 – 1892) and others. Penetrating deeper into the room, you find embryos and body parts mysteriously preserved by a plastination technique that was lost with its inventor, the museum’s long-term curator, Enrico Filippo Trois. There you can also see the skeleton of the bell-ringer, Campanaro, who was a giant. The story is that Trois won the right to this skeleton when he took on the bell-ringer’s gambling debts.

            The newest part of the museum follows, a series of beautifully arranged and curated rooms illustrating ‘Strategies of Life,’ including locomotion, feeding and migration.

In my story, I write as if the museum and all its exhibits already existed just as they are in the 1780s, when The Fate in the Box is set. But the truth is that the museum was not always at the Fondaco de Turchi, and it did not contain quite so much until very recent times. The Fondaco was originally built in the 14^th century as a private warehouse and residence. It also hosted important foreign visitors. In 1621, it was allotted to the Turkish community who traded oil, wax, wool, leather and later tobacco in Venice. They occupied it (dividing it into sections for the Bosnians and Albanians, and the Persians and the Armenians) until 1838, and the city acquired it in 1858, subjecting it to a drastic restoration that caused howls of protest among the art and architectural historians.

In 1866, some of the current natural history collection came to the Fondaco, and was exhibited on the ground floor in 1880, the year that the building became the first home of the Correr Museum, though the artistic and historical materials were transferred to the current premises in the Piazza San Marco in 1922.

This left space at the Fondaco. Gradually, more of the private scientific collections found their way there, including that of Count Alessandro Pericle Ninni. From 1923, the Fondaco dei Turchi became the official Natural History Museum in Venice. In 1930, the older collection was put in the rooms it occupies now. Extensive refurbishment and the creation of the new displays kept the museum closed for many years. But now it is open again, and provides one of the most interesting and unexpected experiences you can have in Venice.

One of the nicest features of the museum is the Tegnùe Aquarium. This five-metre tank holds 5000 litres of water and contains a miniature section of the Northern Adriatic Sea’s living natural history. Several graceful seahorses constantly make their way across the tank. In Italian, a seahorse is called ‘un cavallucio marino’. The acquarium's little cavallucio also has a role to play in The Fate in the Box too, but that’s another blog ...

Michelle Lovric’s website.

The Fate in the Box is published by Orion Children’s Books on May 2^nd 

The Venice Natural History Museum’s site  

Hints for my Christmas Stocking – Michelle Lovric

This blog is for any patron of the arts, well-wisher, vecchio amante danaroso letterario ( ‘literary Sugardaddy’) or rich uncle wishing to curry favour with his favourite niece or anyone else waiting for some hints about what this particular History Girl would like in her Christmas stocking ….


Just a couple of books, honestly, such as

 Le Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia – 1753

The greasy fritter (holeless doughnut)
sellers on the streets of Venice

I’d translate this as Street Trades of the City of Venice, but really there is an element of art to it all, in the same sense that Venice herself may be described as a beautiful working puppet theatre on a grand scale. Le Arte is a collection of 60 etchings designed by the artist Gaetano Gherardo Zompini. Below each lively illustration is a rhymed triplet by Don Questini, parish priest of Santa Maria Mater Domini.

These depictions of the working class in Venice are lovely because they show professions that speak of the city’s picturesque past. I love the combinations of the trades such as

Conza Lavezzi (Tinker and Cat Gelder);

Inchiostro (Ink and Rat Poison Seller);

And the glimpses into Venetian appetites provided by specialists like the

Caraguoi (Snail Vendor);

Dolce de Vedeletto (Blood Pudding Seller);

Frittole (Fritter Maker);

One can see the ways Venetians enjoyed themselves in these professions:

Fitta Palchi (Keeper of Theatre Boxes);

Coro d'Orbi (Blind Musicians);

Mondo Novo (Peep Box Operator).

And of sadly lost jobs like the

Marmotina (Marmot Keeper);

Metti Massere (Maidservants' Agent)

This is a book to give pleasure for years … and OMI in New York just happen to have a lovely facsimile edition for just 1900 euros 

If it’s not too much to ask, I’d also like a work by Gaultier de Coste, Seigneur de la Calprenède, called Hymen’s Præludia: or Love’s Master-Piece. Being that So-much-Admired Romance, intituled, Cleopatra. In Twelve Parts. Written originally in the French, and now rendered into English, by Robert Loveday [and John Coles, James Webb and John Davies].

This dark, speckled jewel may be had for just 2000 of your finest English pounds from Blackwell’s Rare Books, a site well worth a wistful pre-Christmas browse.

I’d be overjoyed to find in my stocking a copy of Automata, by Alfred Chapuis, Edmond Droz and Alec Reid, Editions du Griffon, 1958. My next book, The Fate in the Box, is set in a fantasy Venice of 1783, when a shadowy slave army of Winder-Uppers is forced to keep the mechanical devices of the city ticking, and in researching it, I discovered many outrageous and hilarious devices that were fascinating the public before batteries were invented.

There’s a particularly fine version of Automata at Classic Rare Books, bound in full crimson morocco gilt, with crimson watered silk endpapers, and all edges gilt, with 18 full-page colour plates, and 488 monochrome illustrations and diagrams within the text.

It’s only £1000 and you can find it here 

I could not help being attracted to Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, (Hodder & Stoughton) a relative youngster with a 1990 publications date, and the very reasonable price of £20 at RFG Hollett & Son.

I’d love all three volumes of Wilkie Collins’s lesser-known masterpiece, Armadale (1866)about a bigamous, murderous, heartless opium-addicted redhead, Lydia Gwilt, and her many male victims, all of whom seem to sleepwalk into her cruel clutches, while the reader cries out ‘No! No! Just look at those serpentine coils of blood-red hair! Can't you see she's evil on legs?’ Haven’t seen an edition anywhere yet, outside of the London Library, but still hoping.

And, failing that, an amusing little volume by ‘Unknown’ from 1848: The Sinks of London Laid Open - A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated, to Which is Added a Modern Flash Dictionary Containing all the Cant Words, Slang Terms, and Flash Phrases Now in Vogue, with a List of the Sixty Orders of Prime Coves.

Now if someone really wanted to push the boat out, how about an immensely covetable first edition of John Donne, published just two years after his death, with elegies and Juvenilia?

There’s just a bit of rebinding and spot of worm damage to the lower cover. I don’t want to tell you the price, because the value is beyond rubies for those of us whose adolescent passion for Donne has never slackened. Visit it anyway, just to imagine, at Peter Harrington.

Now, the bibliophile’s equivalent of Terry’s Chocolate Orange for the heel of the stocking?

For me, it would be The Jelly Book by Ralph Steadman (not to be confused with Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly! by Nick Sharratt). No, this is a proper History Girls’ jelly book, dealing with the natural and social history of jelly, explaining how it grows on trees, and is picked by kind people. At factories the good jelly is sorted from the bad (the bad jelly is use to stuff pillows and mattresses). Thereafter jelly’s progress up the social scale is pretty triumphant, all the way to the Mayor’s table, carried there between the horns of a cow who provides fresh cream on the spot. As I remember, the mayor’s favourite flavour is lemon …

There’s an American edition of The Jelly Book available at Eastman Books in Albany, Oregon, USA for around £30 including p&p. 

Would anyone else like to share their Christmas stocking list?