Veniceblog

Strange Noises In The Bedroom

We noticed it the first night we slept in our upstairs apartment in the Accademia dei Nobili. It started subtly, then ratcheted up, up, higher, until it sounded like a wagon full of tin pans rolling unsteered down a bumpy hill.

It was the windows in our bedroom rattling as vaporettos (Venetian water busses) passed by four stories below on the Canale della Giudecca. We had the convenient luck to be a ball’s bounce from two different vaporetto stops – one at La Palanca, the other at Santa Eufemia. But unfortunately for us, vaporettos are driven by bear-throated diesel engines that broadcast on a sub-bass frequency finely tuned to vibrate Venetian window panes.

Did I mention that it was loud? I immediately thought of the sound I heard that night in Santa Monica in January, 1994, when the Northridge Earthquake reminded me of my mortality by relocating my refrigerator to the dining room and stirred my worldly possessions into a huge gumbo on the floor.

Our apartment’s previous occupant was an old lady. We know very little about her, but I have concluded there is a strong possibility she was fully deaf, since a hearing person could not possibly have cohabited with the noise. Despite everything, that first night, we actually managed to snag a few snatches of sleep between vaporetto runs, since they operate at a mercifully reduced schedule in the early morning hours – every 45 minutes or so. Still, something had to be done.

In the light of day, I was assigned the job of solving the problem. After a couple of strong coffees, brilliant inspiration struck: I would take pieces of newspaper and jam them in the cracks between the frames. Smug with my resourceful originality, I stood on a chair and went to work.

Someone had gotten there first. About half the panes already had wads of paper holding the glass in place. One yellowed slip fell to the ground, so I opened it. It was a piece of the newspaper, La Nuova Venezia, and you could still read a date from 1972. If I’d checked, I imagine I would have found newspaper crammed in there dating to the dawn of diesel vaporettos after World War II.

While the paper cramming method solved the rattle problem, there were two new bedroom sound challenges we would eventually discover.

I was able to overcome one– the squeakiest bed I have ever encountered – by pouring extra virgin olive oil over a wobbly, dried out joint (a crack-pot idea that Lorraine said would never work, and for once, actually did).

The other problem never got solved. It was Dour Undershirt Man, our next-door neighbor, and his high-decibel, cartoon snoring. We came to accept it, bitterly at first, but ultimately, found it had a gently lulling effect, kind of like the ships passing on the canale below.

POSTED AT THE TED 2004 CONFERENCE, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA

Get Veniceblog on Your My Yahoo Home Page

Yahoo has launched support for blogs and newgroups that use the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) protocol. Without getting technical about it (which I am not sure I could be anyway), it means you can get Veniceblog headlines on your My Yahoo home page. It's pretty cool. You can see listings of recent posts, then click through to the post itself.

I got hooked on My Yahoo in 1996 or so, and have used it as my starting-off place ever since. Follow the link above if you want to set up a My Yahoo home page.

If you are a My Yahoo (free) subscriber, you can make Veniceblog headlines appear easily. It takes about a minute, or less.

Click the button at the top of the page that says "Choose Content". Scroll down the page and look on the right side under the Web & Internet section. Check the box that says "RSS Headlines", then click "Finished" at the bottom of the page. Now go to your regular My Yahoo home page. There will be a new module there called RSS Headlines. Type our address: veniceblog.typepad.com into the module, and hit return. This takes you to a final page. Click "Add" and you're home free.

Sounds complex. Isn't.

Techno Music and Elderly Baristas

We were outside San Zanipolo (San Giovanni e Paolo), visiting Verrocchio's equestrian statue of Colleoni one boiling summer day. Seeking emergency cold fluids, we ducked into Bar Colleoni 100 feet away. As we hydrated in front of a rotating fan, we were treated to throbbing trance music that was blowing out of a vintage stereo system behind the bar. The only other person in the joint was the proprietor, a gentleman in his 70's, calmly cleaning glasses and tidying up.

To be honest, it didn't strike me as odd until Lorraine mentioned it to me. She said that she seen the same thing all over Venice: elderly baristas, storekeeps, and restaurant owners kicking it to the driving sounds of House, Techno, Breakbeat, Jungle and Drum and Bass.

Sure enough, I started noticing it myself. It's not like it was every septuagenerian-plus in every store you walked in. But it was a phenomenon all right. Whenever it happened, Lorraine would shoot me a knowing look. How to explain this? Q-Burns and Orbital where there should be Kenny G and John Tesh.

My theory: it's all about Venetian pride. Pride of place like I have seen nowhere else. Author Jan Morris wrote a hilarious bit on this subject in The World Of Venice :

"Every Venetian is a connoissuer, with a strong bias towards the local product. The guides at the Doge's Palace rarely bother to mention the startling paintings by Hieronymus Bosch that hang near the Bridge of Sighs -- he was not, after all, a Venetian. The Venetian libraries concern themselves assidiously with Venice. The pictures in the Venetian houses are nearly always of Venetian scenes. Venice is a shamelessly self-centered place, in the constant glow of elderly narcissism".

So what does Venetian pride have to do with house music? There is one radio station in Venice: Radio Venezia. And they often program blocks of electronica. I'm betting that if Radio Venezia programmed Chilean marching music, that's what we would have heard in Bar Colleoni that blistering day.

Web Cams In Venice

As far as I know, here are the active web cams in Venice at the moment. Let me know if you find others.

Piazza San Marco, from the Procuratie Nuove

At the time of this shot, Carnevale was in full swing and the Piazza was jammed with revelers. This cam looks especially cool at night.

The Piazzetta From The Clock Tower

WEBCAM OFFLINE

If this cam goes back online, please leave me a comment and I will update the list.

This cam looks toward the harbor (Molo) with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in the distance. You can see the Basilica and Doge's Palace on the left, the Sansovino loggia at the base of the Campanile on the right. In the distance on the right, you can also see the buildings that comprise the Biblioteca Marciana (also a Sansovino masterpiece) and the Zecca, the old Venetian mint. This cam looks incredible, 24/7, but is especially magical at night.

Ala Napoleonica

WEBCAM OFFLINE

If this cam goes back online, please leave me a comment and I will update the list.

It's not much to look at at night (when I grabbed this shot), and is blinded by the sun at other times of day, nonetheless, this cam is pretty cool the rest of the time. It's also perched atop the clock tower in the Piazza, and is pointed at Ala Napoleonica, the part of Piazza San Marco that is opposite the Basilica (home to the Correr Museum).

With these first three cams, you can pretty much monitor the entire Piazza.

The Grand Canal, from Palazzo Balbi

This cam looks down at the San Toma' vaporetto stop. Highly detailed, large (640 x 480) image. You're looking toward the Rialto. Virtually useless after dark.

Canale di Noale, Strada Nuova

It's lit at night, so this is a 24/7 view. Every now and again, a gondola slips by.

Overlooking the Rialto Bridge from the hotel Locanda Sturion.

Theoretically, I guess, you could follow a boat's progress from the from the Rialto to the San Toma' vaporetto stop then to the Bacino (see below), or vice versa. But then again, you probably have a life. This is a low res-cam, too, and seems to update every two minutes or so.

The Bacino di San Marco

WEBCAM OFFLINE

If this cam goes back online, please leave me a comment and I will update the list. 

This one cropped up in October 2004. It looks over the Bacino (the Basin of St. Mark's) as seen from Ca Giustinian on the San Marco side of the Canal Grande. You can see the island of San Giorgio with its campanile and Palladian jewel of a church. There's another Palladian church on the right, Le Zitelle, perched on the island of La Giudecca, my former home. The ex-customs house, La Dogana can be seen in the center right. A cool thing: this cam updates extremely fast ... about every second. So lean on the refresh button.

Ponte Cappello, Sestiere of Castello

WEBCAM OFFLINE

If this cam goes back online, please leave me a comment and I will update the list.

Thanks to Marisa, who helped me ID the location of this bridge.

Other cams pop up. There once was a street-level cam (which I prefer) in an Internet service bureau on a calle that led into Campo Santa Maria Formosa. I used to point my webcam out the window of the Accademia dei Nobili from time to time to amuse people I was webchatting with over CUSeeMe.

Palazzo Ducale Restoration Finished

Good news for photographers. According to today's Gazzettino, the restoration of the facade of the Palazzo Ducale/Doge's Palace was completed yesterday. When I was last in Venice, in September, it was still under scaffolding.

Ceremonies took place yesterday. "It lived, suffered, asked for attention and care, resources were devoted, and it has given back much more than it has received", said sentimentalist, Giandomenico Romanelli, director of the Musei Civici, of which the Palazzo Ducale is a part.

I have a series of photos of each (heavily restored) capital atop the columns on the Piazzetta side of the Palace. They are highly detailed shots ... something like 15 or 16 in total. I'll scan them in the next month or so and put them up on the site.

Venetian Exhibition in Birmingham, England: Eric Uhlfelder and Christopher Le Brun

If you happen to near Birmingham, England, stop in the New Gallery for a look at Eric Uhlfelder's wonderful black and white photography of Venice, and engraver Christopher Le Brun's Venice-inspired prints. Both artists frequently show their work in Venice, too. In fact, Uhlfelder's got a permanent exhibition next to Piazza San Marco at Gallery Venice Design.

Here's a look at Eric and Christopher's work.

The Venice Exhibition
The New Gallery
Birmingham, England
until February 21,
open for viewing from 11-7pm, Mon-Fri,
and 11-4pm on Sat.

Monsters in the Venetian Lagoon

Every now and again, a truly enormous cruise ship is tugged down the Canale della Giudecca and into the Bacino di San Marco on its way to the Porto di Lido and the Adriatic. You can see a more modestly sized one bobbing around in the Bacino in the above photo I shot late one night last September from the Accademia Bridge (click on the picture for a hi-res view). Some of these monsters can range 14 or more stories high, and dwarf just about everything except the campanile in Piazza San Marco.

I remember the MS Disney Magic’s inaugural voyage to Venice in 1998. It’s fair to say that its unprecedented size -- its preposterous scale -- truly shocked the city. It was front page news. As it crept by, people numbly walked out of their houses onto the Fondamenta Santa Eufemia looking upward, mouths open. Stores emptied. Shutters were thrown open. Every balcony was full. All other navigation simply stopped. Venetians -- probably the single most photographed residents of any city in the world -- were themselves actually taking pictures of the boat, just like the first-time tourists they all joked about.

Ah, but as is always the case in Venice, there is a group that objects passionately. In this case it is a committee called Arco, comprised of residents who live on the Eastern end of the Sestiere of Castello, the closest part of the historic center to the Porto di Lido. These “floating mountains” say the residents, “block the incomparable panorama of the lagoon”, “make the palazzi seem Lilliputian and out of place”. Beyond these aesthetic crimes, they further allege that the cruise ships screw up their radio and TV reception, smell bad, make destructive waves (moto ondoso), and cause dangerous vibrations measurable on a seismograph.

Not that my vote counts for much, but I think I agree with Arco. It's like a 400 pound man sitting on an fragile antique piano bench. Something's going to break, I just know it. Sorry, but these manatees are just too big to be splashing around in Venice's bathtub.

The Homepage of St. Mark's Basilica

I stumbled across the official website for St. Mark's Basilica/ Basilica San Marco. It looks to have kicked off quite recently, perhaps this month. It is rather small and has a humble bearing, but is nonetheless fun to click through. (I wish I could design their site for them ... there is such rich potential.)

I suggest starting with the site map, which, since the site is so small, is really a better home page than their actual home page.

Also worth a look is the links section. I will be putting together the mother of all Venice link lists eventually (something that really doesn't exist in a coherant way on line at the moment), and I'll poach from the Basilica's list for sure. It's mostly official sites they link to ... governmental/associations/religious etc., but still has some interesting stuff (much is in Italiano, but some English, too).

Click on the picture above for a higher res version. I have many, many photos of the Basilica ... mostly from outside ... lots of details.

Residents Rally to Change Street Name

At the top of every page of this website, you'll find a "nizioleto". That's the Venetian word for those black on white street signs painted on the sides of buildings all over the city. I created the Veniceblog masthead by compositing photos of various different nizioleti I until I had enough letters to do the job.

According to a recent article in the Gazzettino, in an area of Dorsoduro close to the Piazzale Roma bus terminal, a group of residents have banded together to petition the city to change the nizioleto in their neighborhood. Nobody seems to know how Calle Sporca -- which translates to "Dirty Street" -- got its name, but nobody who lives on it is happy about it. They want a nizioleto with a little class: Calle San Rocco.

According to the residents, Calle Sporca is more than just an undignified name. It seems that the nizioleto literally invites filth to the street. People dump garbage there. Streetsweepers skip it all together. Midnight drunks relieve themselves on it.

To this last "outrage", one resident suggested that perhaps if these shadowy miscreants were to read "Calle San Rocco" on the wall instead of Sporca, they might be "taken by sudden starts of devotion" and "might arrest their physiological processes, turning instead to more suitable and private places".

State of the Blog Report: Veniceblog is Thriving!

Veniceblog is getting amazing placement in Google and other search engines. As a result, it’s been steadily building traffic on a daily basis. And little by little, we’re getting linked to … most recently by about.com’s Euro travel section. This is a good thing, since I've yet to go out and solicit links (or put a "links" section in the blog).

Unlike most blogs, 90%+ of Veniceblog’s content is “evergreen”, that is, it doesn’t really lose its value over time. This increases the chance that someone poking through Google looking for info on, say, La Giudecca or Veronese, will bump in to a Veniceblog posting and wander into the site. Looking at the stats on Veniceblog, you can see that these folks almost always stick around for a few minutes to read other posts. Before you know it, you have a growing number of regular readers, many who have emailed me in the last few months.

I’m in no huge hurry. After all, Venice has been there for more than a millennium. In a few months, I’ll be making some changes that will be designed to build site traffic. More on that later. But for the moment, my strategy is to keep building content that works for regular readers and draws in new ones through its “googleworthiness”.

If you’re a reader, email me or leave a comment and let me know how the blog is doing. I tend to get a great deal more email than comments, but either are welcome.

For fun, here’s a list of search engine referrals that led to Veniceblog in the last 24 hours. I have only included the search terms in which Veniceblog is on Page One of the search engine (usually Google).

Piazza San Marco
Photo San Marco Venice
Giudecca
Carnevale 2004, Venice Carnevale, Venice Carnevale 2004
Il Redentore
Sansovino Library Venice
Venice 2004
Mosquitoes Venice
Venetian dialect
Veronese, the Last Supper
Venice snow
Sacca Fisola
Cortellazzo
Lions Venice
La Fenice Venice 2004
High resolution Venice photos
High resolution Venice
Statue San Marco pictures
Venice imagery
Satellite images of Venice, Italy
Save Venice
new year Venice
Venice acqua alta
Venice campanile reconstruction
Com'era Dov'era