Monsters and Mermaids in the Orchard - Michelle Lovric

A few weeks ago I received a delightful letter from Mariagrazia Dammicco, garden historian and writer. In her company, I have spent many idyllic hours over the years learning about the historical and hidden gardens of Venice, courtesy of tours organised by the Wigwam Club for Historic Gardens, of which Mariagrazia is president.

Many of the scenes in my stories are set in these Venetians gardens, so naturally I sent Mariagrazia my first children’s book, The Undrowned Child, as soon as it was translated into Italian by Salani in 2011. The book’s protagonists are greedy foul-mouthed mermaids, a monster in the lagoon, the ghost of an historical traitor and some extremely clever children.

Mariagrazia’s letter said: ‘Sometimes fruit needs time to mature … and so finally it seems that I will be able to present your book in Venice, or rather propose a reading of it and a workshop for children in the great garden of Thetis at the Arsenale.



the Garden of Thetis

‘But let’s do this in order,' continued Mariagrazia. 'Wigwam was recently asked by the Comune of Venice and the Garden of Thetis to organise some events for the public, and in particular for families and children. The first day will be Saturday April 25th, an open day at the Arsenale. There will be workshops, games, activities in the orchard, tastings … and I immediately thought of your book: because Thetis was a marine divinity (like your own mermaids) and because we will be at the Arsenale, where you set some epic scenes of your book.’

The actor, musician and artist Oreste Sabadin, she told me, had offered his voice and his clarinet to perform a musical reading of some extracts of the book. And Mariagrazia’s daughter, the artist and photographer Francesca Saccani, would work with the children to paint watercolours of monsters and mermaids. Francesca and Anna Saccani had designed Wigwam’s first calendar.

I leave you to imagine how excited I was about this. Especially when I saw the beautiful poster.

Now the Italian edition of The Undrowned Child is called Il Grimorio di Venezia … roughly translated as The Magical Almanac of Venice. It has a rather provocative cover.

Don’t you think this mermaid looks as if she has really lived? Lived in ways beyond the realm of the intended 9-12 readers of the book? Or is it just that I need to get out more? (I’m sure you’ll tell me.)

the original 'Papy'

I suppose the ‘Papy’ market must be catered for in Italian bookshops. Indeed I’m increasingly pleased to note that most Italian men still seem quite fond of mature female breasts and don’t go seeking androgyny or embryonic ages in their women. There used to be a wonderful programme on Italian television called Festa in Piazza, where the rustic set mimicked everyone’s dream idea of a village square. (I believe there is new decorating term called ‘Rough Luxe’, which would cover it). The piazza was accessorized with plastic plants and barely dressed beauties, gratuitously placed. The cameraman used his equipment as a heat-seeking device. It was always panning in on some mammaries, the more ‘prosperosa’ the better. We always knew if the alternative cameraman was working, because he was a thigh and buttock man. On his days, we really got to know the loins and rear ends of the ladies on the show.

The audience were mostly in their later middle ages, as were, delightfully, many of the performers, and the songs. At moments of extreme sentimentality, the audience would stream onto the stage and start dancing, becoming part of the phenomenon, and the breast-favouring cameraman enjoyed himself with the mature voluntary bosoms as much as he had with the paid ones.

Anyway, perhaps this long digression explains the difference between the Italian and the British cover (left) of The Undrowned Child, which takes a more innocent approach to the idea of a teen mermaid in a hist-fic book.

Getting back to exciting news that my book was to be presented in Venice … naturally I planned to be there, and secretly hoped to be asked to judge the best mermaid drawing, or even just to paint a mermaid of my own. I couldn’t help noticing that Oreste Sabadin was a ferociously handsome man.

I rehearsed my impromptu speeches and off the cuff jokes in the bath for a week; I’d chosen the outfit; I’d had my hair cut and my toenails were freshly gelled in the kind of courtesanly red that the Italian cover’s mermaid would have favoured, had she owned toes to paint instead of a tail.

As it happened, a last-minute logistical hitch meant that I was unable to get to Venice but I received reports of the event in image, word and sound. I am pleased to report that this was an occasion properly dedicated to the imagination, to innocence and to children - and to gardens.

My lovely friends, the artist Deirdre Kelly and the architect Rosato Frassanito sent me texts, emails, photos and videos all through the performance, during which Oreste read from the book, and played,

while Francesca created images in watercolour using, appropriately, brushes fashioned from vegetables.

The children sat around in a neat semi circle. I would love to show them but it’s never a good idea to publish photographs of children on the internet, sadly. With permission, however, I can show you a talented young Venetian friend of mine, Martina, who attended the event.

Sheets of paper were also laid out for the children, with generous dollops of colour and vegetable paintbrushes.

I was informed of everything minute by minute - even my own round of applause at the end.

So, sitting looking over the Thames, I could feel myself by the lagoon in Venice.

Many, many thanks to all involved.


Michelle Lovric’s website


You can learn more about the work of Wigwam, and find a schedule of their private garden openings and visits here

Mariagrazia Dammico’s latest book is A Guide to the Gardens of Venice, La Toletta Edizioni 2013.

It also features illustrations by Francesca Saccani.


Photos by Rosato Frassanito and Deirdre Kelly, the collage artist, who is currently preparing a new exhibition of her work for the Scuola Grafica in Venice.

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