Pasta Arrabbiata and High Water

Interesting day, with a couple firsts.

Was feeling a little down, a couple disappointments on the trip I won't get into, and bad weather. Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I woke up feeling a little groggy. Ate breakfast as usual -- folks at Alle Fondemente Nuove have been great and their breakfasts have been just what I need to get myself going. But not so much today. Mario said the weather was chilly, with a good chance of rain later in the day. I watched that dreary sky, finished my breakfast and crawled back into bed for another hour or two. But I got myself up, showered, decided to get out there and do Venice, no matter how iffy the weather outside or iffy the weather inside of me.

And so, my first first. Wandering around Rialto earlier this week, I found the traghetto stop. You pay 2 euro and you get gondolaed across the Grand Canal. Takes a few minutes and certainly beats walking. So I said to myself, hey, I can stand up like the Venetians do when they cross. So out we go into the Grand Canal, motorboats speeding by, it's a busy waterway, but the gondola has a wide, flat bottom and I'm feeling pretty OK. Well balanced? I wouldn't push that one. But OK, that is, until we end up in the middle of the canal, wedged between two vaporettos (big water buses) and suddenly the gondola is spinning around as the guy in the back is now at the lead and my balance is getting shakey. Like I said, the gondola is really stable and by the time I straightened up from my lurch, the boat was smacking against the dock and I was at the Rialto fish market. Cool!

Today was also a good art day. The walk to the church of San Polo was brisk, no rain but certainly as cold as it has gotten since I came here on Monday. San Polo was wonderful. A moderate-sized church, it features some very grand paintings by some very grand masters. Stand outs were a last supper by Tintoretto and a very powerful "Stations of the Cross" sequence by a young Giandomenico Tiepolo. I don't know anything about the art of the mid-16th century, but the Tintoretto work was full of contorted, straining bodies pulled towards the rising sun, symbolic, symbolic, with a solitary figure standing in the shadows, symbolic, symbolic. "The Stations of the Cross" were equally dramatic, each scene filled with deep pain and grief, as the weariness and anguish on Christ's face is played against the cruelty of Christ's tormentors and the impotent remorse of his followers. Tiepolo sets Christ and his tormentors against dense, compact crowds and very gestural, suggestive backgrounds that frame the drama without detracting from the action. Really impressive painting.

Then back into the chill. The wind started to pick up by the time I found Santa Marie dei Frari (Saint Mary of the Friars), a massive cathedral packed with grandiose sculptural installations, including a monument to Venetian sculptor Canova that I've seen in art books -- a huge pyramid tomb with angels and a parade of mourners marching towards the dark opening where the master has vanished. Next to this was a monument to a long gone Doge, the temporal leader of the Venetian Republic, featuring massive pillars representing Africans carrying cushions on their heads that support the shelf holding a bust of the dead Doge, quite bizarre and creepy. Not all Venetian art is high art or even very good.

But there were gems here. A huge assumption of Mary in the main altar by Titian, definitely a classic textbook work, but just stunning in scale and the balance between the weightiness of human throngs watching a weightless Mary floating into the glories of heaven accompanied by very human, chubby angels -- now that's a feat: fleshy, yet weightless cherubs. (There was also a rather bizarre work in which bearded Franciscans in big floppy hats and heavy brown robes are also weightlessly rising into Paradise, wisely listed in the church's little guide as a "minor work").

I love Giovanni Bellini's work and there was a very nice altar with panel paintings of "Madonna with Child and Saints" dedicated to the deceased mother of the Tron family. Bellini's figures always strike me as highly personalized portraits characterized by a somber formality that ritualizes and universalizes barely constrained feeling.

I also really liked another "Madonna with Child" panel painting by Paolo Veneziano, from the early 14th century.

OK. Back here for a rest and then off to supper. I noticed that the water around the vaporetto stops seemed agitated and high, but it was raining and the wind was blowing and I was hungry. When I got to the pizzeria, the manager was saying something to the couple ahead of me about the water. There was a good six inches of water at his doorstep and I thought he was complaining about customers bringing in wet coats and umbrellas. He certainly discouraged the couple and after they left, he was discouraging me. "Non capisco," I said and he pointed to the water outside and then to an imaginary waterline above his knee and said, "Aqua alta" (high water), as in the sea flooding Venice. "Ho fame," I said. I'm hungry, I'll deal with it later. So he let me in and the waiters took my order and while I'm shoveling down my salad, I notice no one else is coming in. The restaurant is doing a crash business in takeaway pizzas and then I notice that customers are getting up from the tables and putting on knee-high rubber boots and leaving. So I called the waiter over and asked, how high was the water supposed to get? He holds his hand up to his hip. "In Piazza San Marco. Adesso," Like, hip deep in Saint Mark's Square, right now. And at Fondemente Nuove, where I'm staying? "Non troppo." Not too bad, he says, holding his hand to above his knee caps. Wow, I'm thinking, I can just see it. Feeling content from a nice salad and pasta and washed out to sea at the vaporetto stop on my way home. Now, he brings out my plate of steaming pasta arrabbiata ("angry pasta," 'cause its got a spicy bite) and I say in fumbling Italian, "Can I get that to go?" He looks at me with a puzzled expression, asks the woman in charge of the orders if they even do that and she frowns at me but says OK. A couple minutes later, I've got a big plastic pail wrapped in foil and a plastic bag, I pay for my meal and start puddle jumping home. But for all of the panic in the restaurant, the streets aren't flooded. The water level is definitely high at the vaporetto stops which are right in front of the b&b. Then, as I'm eating my cold pasta, Anna and Mario come in and we have a funny conversation about Venice when it floods. Turns out our street is on high ground, the aqua alta is only going to rise a manageable amount and their street never floods. Almost never. Mario says in the 25 years they've lived here, he only saw a couple inches of water seep under their door frame, once or twice. But Saint Mark's Plaza does go deep because it is low to the sea. And the restaurant was going to get messy 'cause it's on low ground, too. I'm leaving on Monday, will this settle down by then? Mario laughs and makes like he's swimming. "No, no, don't worry, you won't have to swim to the train station!" And that's my second first -- aqua alta in Venezia. Even as I write this, I haven't actually seen any high water. I'm hoping that tomorrow when I get up, my boots will be dry, the sea will kindly go back to where it belongs and I can get to a couple more churches before I catch a train on Monday to Padua, or Padova as they say around here. High water and pissed-off pasta. What a great stay in Venice!