A new mascot for an ancient city? - Michelle Lovric

Dolce and Gabbana held a Venetian costume ball at the Pisani Moretta palace last week – Dolce came as Arlecchino and Gabbana as a bullfighter  (not a figure I recall from the Commedia dell’Arte, strangely) – but the biggest celebrity in Venice at the moment is a supposed Mediterranean monk seal who has been baptized "Pryntyl".

He or she was first spotted near the church of San Geremia, where the remains of Saint Lucy rest, and has also been seen at Malamocco on the Lido. A windsurfer at Bibione reported a close encounter on July 7^th  with a creature who was last seen swimming in the direction of Venice. Its shape, size and colouring were those of a young adult male monk seal.

A video on YouTube shows a glimpse of a brown creature, who is definitely not a fish, disappearing underwater near Rialto.

Life imitates ‘art’ yet again. In my second children’s novel, The Mourning Emporium, monk seals are washed up in Venice after a great ice storm.

A mother seal helps my heroine, Teo, to escape from an iceberg on which she has been marooned. The seal meets a terrible fate at the hands of the villainous Miss Uish.

When researching The Mourning Emporium, I looked for a species of seal that might conceivably make its way to Venice as a result of a great turbulence in the Adriatic. And Mediterranean monk seals seemed to be the best candidates. They were common enough to be hunted during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. Fishermen regarded them as rivals, and suspected them of destroying their nets.

There are historical accounts of the seals gathering to mate and give birth on open beaches, but increasingly they have taken to underwater caves for breeding. There they are vulnerable to storm surges and can be washed miles away from their homes. Today Monachus monachus, a pinniped of the Phocidae family, is an endangered species. Only 500 are thought to remain, with a few colonies on the coast of Croatia.

How did "Pryntyl" arrive in Venice? There have been no recent turbulences in the Adriatic. Experts are theorizing that this seal inadvertently ended up in the city when chasing some prey, and then became lost in the labyrinth of Venice’s historic waterways.

Comments on the website of the Gazzettino newspaper have been skeptical, with some readers dismissing the filmed creature as a nutria (coypu) or a dead cat. Others have suspected a clever digital faking. You can judge for yourself towards the end of this short video, filmed in early July. To me, the diving beast looks much too large to be a coypu, and it’s definitely vigorous. The copypu is a herbivore, and would find slim pickings in Venice. So I vote for Mediterranean monk seal, being the more credulous because desirous. I would love to see it for myself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I6A8mKdjS6A

Coypu or seal, I like to think that the creature’s appearance is an encouraging sign of the relative health of the water in Venice these days. In the last ten years, egrets have become a common sight, gobbling little fish they catch while hunting from jetties at high tide. Large flocks of cormorants come to dry their wings on the paline. They too seem to find good eating in Venetian waters.

The monk seal feeds on fish, squid and eels. Squid are certainly more obvious on the canals than they used to be. The poor creatures are the prey of swooping seagulls. When locked in mortal combat with one of the yellow beaked “Magoghe”, the squid release their ink. Underwater, this would serve to blind a predator temporarily, but unfortunately the discharge of fluid lightens the squid so that the seagulls can more easily carry them off.

A gondolier friend has told me about a seagull dropping a slippery squid from a great height directly upon the head of one of his clients enjoying a romantic voyage down the Grand Canal.

How clean is Venice’s water now? I remember the historic year that Italy won the World Cup for some ball game or other, and the night air was filled with the sound of thuds and splashes. This was the soundtrack of Venetians jumping into the Grand Canal from the Academia Bridge and at Rialto, where they swam from the market to the other side and back. They had sworn that they would do this if Italy won.

I asked a Venetian friend if it was safe to immerse their bodies in the water of the Grand Canal, and he assured me that for natives of the city the water is completely healthy.

‘But you,’ he said, ‘as a foreigner, would dissolve on impact.’

In fact, it is also illegal to swim in the historical canals now. But in the nineteenth century, when my current adult novel is set, women would throw their children into the canals, attached to a piece of rope, so that they would learn to swim. There are archival photographs of this activity.

Personally, I hope that the monk seal stays in Venice. The amphibious city needs a healthy, lively mascot. The winged lion has served since 878, but we’re unlikely to see a real one flying around town.

PS. Blogger did not desire that I should add any pictures today, so please supply them from your imaginations, as well as the italics for book titles and foreign words. Thank you!

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

On accosting old ladies on the vaporetto on cold misty mornings - Michelle Lovric

I hope this post will not disappoint. Unlike the two preceding History Girls, I am not going to take my clothes off today, much as we all enjoyed Caroline Lawrence’s and H.M. Castor's historical stripteases. (Especially well done to Caroline for getting naked in her first line, and still being promiscuous in her last.)

For those of you still reading, I’m going pull on my huge fake-fur coat known as ‘Brown Boris’ and take you somewhere very, very cold.

When I’m tired of the library, and can’t bear squinting at the screen for a moment longer, there’s no need to stop researching. For me, there is always the vaporetto. At certain times of day, before the tourists make it impossible to breathe, talk or move aboard, a tribe of translucent ladies in their upper eighties take to the ferries in Venice. I consider them a valuable resource.

It is easy to engage them in conversation. A smile will do it. Or a small comment. They don’t flinch away. They don’t think you must be touched in the head to want to talk to them. Unlike many extremely old ladies in England, for example, they are not apologetic, self-deprecating creatures, accustomed to being overlooked or insulted. No woman is ever non-viable in Italy. She may at any age demonstrate self-respect, being elegantly shod and immaculately groomed, without accusations of being pecora dressed as agnello.

I love to talk to these waterborne old ladies. If one is available, I’ll always go and sit next to her. And my favourite conversations begin when they sigh, ‘Ah, non è come era una volta’: ‘It’s not like it was once upon a time.’ When my old lady of choice says that, I hope that she’s not getting out at any stop soon.

For when they say those words, you’re about to hear how it was once upon a time in Venice. And it is magical.

One old lady told me very proudly about an antique soup tureen she bought at auction. It was more than she could afford, but it was a superb piece, a remnant from a noble palazzo, all hand-painted with meadow flowers and herbs, perfect for a cold summer soup. She would never use it, as she didn’t really entertain ‘come una volta’, but it would look exactly right on her credenza and give the whole dining-room an air. She told me how she’d clutched that tureen all the way home in the vaporetto, and how everyone had given her space because she was holding such a precious object. It wouldn’t be like that now, she shook her silky head sadly, pointing at the backpackers using their kit as weapons to bash other passengers out of their way. One blow from those backpacks could stun or kill an old lady like her, and smash a precious tureen to smithereens. That tureen will soon have a place in one of my books.

It is to another old lady on the vaporetto that I owe a central image in The Mourning Emporium, my novel set in Venice and London in the winter of Queen Victoria’s decline and death. It was a cold and humid day three years ago (yes, in Venice it can be both cold and humid at once). The Bora wind pounced on the city, pummelling the citizens with rough cold paws. Ice crackled underfoot. Mist blurred the palazzi rising out of the water. I crouched in the steamy cabin, fragrant with old ladies apparently marinated in lavender water and inflated to twice their normal volume in sweetly musty mink.

I was writing about an ice-storm that engulfs Venice on the night of December 24th, 1901, stealing Christmas and carrying many Venetians away. So my freezing vaporetto trip was by way of research.

‘Che freddo infernale!’ I said hopefully to my nearest old lady. ‘What hellish cold!’

‘Ah si,’ she replied. ‘Ma non è come una volta.’

And we were away.

She told me about the winter of 1929. ‘I was just a little girl, a tiny little thing. We lived near the Fondamenta Nuova. You never saw anything like it. The ice was so thick on the little canals that the gondolas popped up on top like grape pips!’

‘Was the Grand Canal frozen?’ I asked, reaching for my notebook, scribbling ‘1929’.

‘Non totalmente. But great ice floes like whales floated just under the water. Where I lived the shore was frozen solid. People walked right into the middle of the water between the House of the Spirits and the cemetery island.’

My mind raced. In my stories, the House of the Spirits covers a cavern inhabited by greedy, foul-mouthed warrior mermaids. How could my mermaids survive? Would they too pop out of the ice like grape pips? No, I realized, they would have to swim away from Venice. But where would they go?

The old lady continued to reminisce but I was already in the writers’ land of ‘What if’.

What if the Venetian mermaids swam all the way to London? What if the ice-storm was caused by baddened magic? What if two child characters, Teo and Renzo, ended up in London too? What if Renzo’s mother …? I turned back to my companion, with more questions.

Eventually, drained of memories, my old lady rose and shuffled towards the exit, giving me that special Venetian upside-down wave by which the hand becomes a castanet. I waved her goodbye.

At home, I googled 1929 Venezia and was rewarded with a YouTube video of the city engulfed by ice (see link below). But it was the old lady’s own images that would stay with me and colour what I wrote in The Mourning Emporium.

Shall I one day sit on the vaporetto and be engaged in conversation by a young writer wanting to know what it was like here once upon a time? Shall I wave that writer goodbye with a castanet motion?

I hope so. I have a debt to repay.

Anyone else like to admit to a habit of accosting old ladies or gentlemen on buses or trains? Or other vampirical tendencies? Is anywhere, in fact, safe for innocent members of the public, with historical novelists everywhere ravening for fresh story-blood?


LINKS

Michelle Lovric’s website

You can see the footage of an iced Venice in 1929 on YouTube where there’s also a trailer for The Mourning Emporium and The Undrowned Child

The photo of the vaporetto in the mist is from the excellent pensierospensierato.blogspot.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.

plate pictured