Wolves exist in two different ways – as the living creatures that they are, and as figures in people’s imagination. Humans have always projected many feelings and fears onto wolves, perhaps because they are so much like us – omnivores who have strong emotions, who like to live in communities, share their food, and train and care for their young communally. In Italy, where this novel is set, attitudes towards wolves have changed dramatically over the centuries. Once they were positive models – a wolf suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. But Christian writings tended to paint the wolf as a savage, dishonest and greedy creature, and it features as an enemy in the stories of some saints. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, bounties were paid for wolf carcasses. Farmers hunted wolves not just to protect their animals but also for their pelts. And Italian wolves were nearly exterminated – by the late 1800s there were none left in the Alps. In 1973, it was estimated that there were no more than a hundred left in the country.
Scientific books treated wolves the same way for many years. The quote about the Ravageurs being the most useless and hated animals is adapted from real text in The Natural History of Quadrupeds, published in 1828.
The same book described an animal infected with rabies thus: ‘The continual agitations of this restless animal render him so furious, that he frequently ends his life in madness.’
The idea of the ceremony of saluting the hindparts of the Ravageur Lord was inspired by a witchcraft trial in northern Germany in 1232. In the account of the initiation ceremonies, the novices were required to kiss the hindparts of a frog and an enormous cat.
In modern times, wolves have become quite fashionable as a symbol of a wild, free existence. There are wolf sanctuaries and centres. The children’s author Michelle Paver has helped to make the wolf the object of both fascination and compassion in her award-winning series, The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.
Wolves in Venice
‘Lupo’ is the Italian word for ‘wolf’. In Venetian dialect, this changes to ‘lovo’. There are still plenty of traces of wolves in Venice, starting with the Bar Gelateria Ai Lupi, at 5546 Cannaregio. There’s also the Farmacia al Lupo Coronato at Castello 2715 – which features in my children’s novel The Undrowned Child. And every tourist to Venice at some point must cross over the tiny, crowded Ponte del Lovo, near Rialto.
Luprio was indeed the name of one of the lagoon islands on which humans settled in the early days. Human refugees fled from the Lombards in the sixth century, taking refuge on the island. By 774 they had a parish church, Santa Croce in Luprio. This was occupied by French monks during the twelfth century. It later became a convent for the ‘Poor Clares’, which was suppressed in 1810. The church was demolished at the beginning of the twentieth century, to make way for the Papadopoli Gardens, but at the time this book is set it would have been used as a warehouse.
The embankment in front of the (now demolished) church of Santa Marta used to accumulate silt carried down from the River Brenta. Eventually the silt formed a peninsula all the way to the mainland. This became overgrown with bushes, and formed a convenient passageway for wolves to enter the city. It became known as ‘il Ponte dei Lovi, the Bridge of Wolves’. It was removed in 1509, when Venice was at war with the League of Cambrai: the Venetians feared a land invasion by their human enemies.
Dunking Babies
In Venice of Today and Yesterday (1936), Harrison Rhodes recorded that on very hot days Venetian women were known to dunk their babies in the canals, by lowering them from their windows in baskets tied with rope.
Cat Sanctuaries in Venice
A famous Italian song ‘Quarantaquattro Gatti’ tells the story of forty-four cats without a home. A cartoon video of the song can be seen on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E8ucqvDVlY
These days, many visitors complain about the lack of visible cats in Venice. Once, colonies of cats were to be seen all over the city, living wild. Today, there are many Venetian cats, but most live in private homes and few are seen on the streets. A massive cull of street cats was initiated in the 1970s by an English campaigner, Helen Sanders, on the grounds that many of them were diseased and starving. Now stray cats are usually captured and taken away to sanctuaries. There are several private ‘gattili’ in the historic centre. The sanctuary in Talina in the Tower is based on the one in San Marcuola, now sadly diminished in numbers. The biggest cat refuge is run by the charity DINGO, at Malamocco on the Lido.
There is a move afoot to set up a petting cat café, which would not only raise money for cat charities, but also provide pleasure for cat-hungry tourists.
But it is never easy to do something new in Venice.
The Funeral of Venice
On November 14th, 2009, a funeral was held for Venice. That month, for the first time in modern memory, the city’s population fell below 60,000. A group of Venetians had promised to hold a funeral if that happened, because they considered the city no longer sustainable at that level. The organizers wanted to protest against the city being turned into a museum, and to show the world that behind the picture-postcard romanticism of Venice there are serious problems – particularly a shortage of housing for young families.
Like all Venetian funerals, this one was water-borne, and very theatrical. A procession rowed a pink coffin from the railway station to Ca’ Farsetti, the town hall, where a funeral service was held. Some researchers from America also took swabs from the mouths of Venetian citizens, to see if they could trace the DNA of the city’s population.
Unlike the Ravageurs’ ‘Sad Event’, this funeral had a happy ending. At the close of ceremonies, the participants destroyed the pink coffin by jumping on it. From the shattered box, they drew out a flag painted with a phoenix – a bird reborn from the ashes. In a solemn oration, the death of Venice was pronounced dead.
Venetian Sweets
The names of all the sweets came from a lovely little book by A. Jarrin called The Italian Confectioner (1820). Golosi’s at Rialto is invented. ‘Golosi’ means ‘The Greedy Ones’. But there is still a wonderful old-fashioned confectioner at Rialto called the Antica Drogheria Mascari. You can see its colourful piles of spices in the window in the Calle degli Spezieri (which means ‘the street of the spice merchants’).
Mostarda is still very popular in Venice. It’s a thick mustardy chutney often served with cheese or cold meats. It is usually yellow or orange in colour.
Venice in 1866
Venice was governed by foreign powers for more than half of the nineteenth century. The city surrendered to the French troops of Napoleon in 1797, but he signed her over to the Austrians, who took possession in January of the following year. Napoleon claimed Venice back in 1805 and made her part of his new ‘Kingdom of Italy’. However, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, Venice joined the Austrian-held Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Venice was liberated from more than fifty years of Austrian rule in the autumn of 1866 when citizens voted overwhelmingly to become part of the new Kingdom of Italy.
Talina’s Tower and Other Towers in Venice
Once Venice boasted 103 bell-towers. Sadly, today only fifty remain, several of them decapitated, though none by Ravageurs. Some fell down through neglect; very many were demolished in the early nineteenth century after Napoleon closed down their churches. Without maintenance, they crumbled away. They were frequently struck by lightning, or collapsed because of unsteady foundations in the mud. When the campanile of Santa Maria della Carità collapsed in 1744, it threw some gondolas right across the Grand Canal into the square of San Vidal, an event I transposed to San Barnaba for this story.
Some towers, like that of Santo Stefano, have survived but with a dangerous lean like the tower of Pisa. The tower of San Pietro in Castello, destroyed in this book, remains safely standing today. It was last restored in 2000.
Uberto Flangini’s twittering tower is invented – there was never a tower on that site. I imagined it in Quintavalle on the remote edge of Venice, looking over the lagoon, where t
he vaporetto stop of San Pietro is now situated. Even by Talina’s time, the nearby towers of Sant’Anna and San Daniele had already been demolished.
In Venice, it was quite normal for bell-towers to stand apart from their churches: given the fragile structure of the city, it was considered safer that way, as the towers were the first things to fall down in fires or earthquakes.
These days, parts of some bell-towers are being used as dwellings. San Marcuola’s tower is partly residential now, as is the tower of Santa Margherita (which lost its spire in 1810) and those of San Boldu and San Stae. San Vidal’s lower floors are used as offices. The top floors of the abandoned towers would, of course, make wonderful studios for architects … or writers.
Signorina Tiozzo and the Old Ladies of Venice
Tiozzo is a very common name in Chioggia.
Venice is still a town with a large population of old ladies. Some have never left the city, or even their own sestiere or district, in their whole lives. A few rarely leave their homes. Instead, they lower a basket into which helpful neighbours put their groceries.
Horatio Brown, a historian who lived in Venice for many years, wrote about the old ladies of Venice in his book, Life on the Lagoons. He explained that it was the old ladies who kept up the traditions and superstitions of the town. There were certain families who had the reputation of breeding witches, who could perform spells to bring happiness back to those crossed in love, for example. On the more sinister side, he reported a belief that witches could steal the hair combings of babies and cause the infants to waste away and die.
Also in Life in the Lagoons, Brown wrote that Venetians believed that all animals could talk once a year – on the day of the Epiphany. He also mentions the Venetian belief that new witches can be created only once a year, on Christmas Eve.
Scuola del Cristo e della Buona Morte
The building belonging to the ‘Company of Christ and of the Good Death’ was built in around 1644. As Giuseppe Tassini tells us in his Curiosità Veneziane, one of the jobs entrusted to this religious and charitable company was that of taking dead bodies out of the water and giving a decent burial to those who could not be identified. You can still see the beautiful little building, near the vaporetto stop of San Marcuola, at Cannaregio 1750.
Quintavalle
The island of Quintavalle is also referred to as the island of San Pietro in Castello, after the church which is its landmark, and was in fact the original cathedral of Venice.
The first bishops of Venice had their palace on the island, near the place where my invented tower stands, from the eighth till the fifteenth centuries.
There are also a squero, ponte and fondamenta (a boatyard, a bridge and a street) named Quintavalle.
Quintavalle probably takes its name from a noble family who made their home there from around AD 430. The Quintavalle coat of arms was a blue background, a mountain with six golden peaks, and a black eagle above.
The family were members of the Great Council, and some achieved positions of power in the church. Pietro Marturio Quintavalle was made bishop of Venice in 955. The Venetian branch of the family died out in 1328, though some members lived in Crete until 1582.
The name Quintavalle seems to have developed from an earlier one, ‘Marturio’, which means ‘martyr’. But there is another theory that the island’s name came from the word ‘quinavalle’, meaning ‘there below’, referring to the remoteness of Quintavalle from the centre of Venice. And it does still feel remote from the tourist throngs.
A map of Quintavalle in 1846 shows the single V-shaped street of this story, with buildings on the south side and orchards on the north. Behind the church of San Pietro was an old cemetery. There was also a tar factory. The island today is much moredensely populated and there are buildings on the north side of the street too. A puppet-maker has a workshop in a small courtyard. The military owns part of the island.
But there are plenty of kind and chatty old ladies and their cats there still, too.
Giuseppe Tassini and his Curiosità Veneziane
Giuseppe Tassini, unlike everyone else in this book, was a real person, a Venetian who lived between 1827 and 1899. So he was nearly forty years old at the time of this story and already very well known in the city.
Tassini was the son of a solid middle-class family. His mother was Austrian, his father Venetian. Originally he studied to be a lawyer. But he inherited a fortune large enough to enable him to leave the law and devote himself solely to his passion for Venetian history. He spent the rest of his life burrowing through public and private archives.
His most famous book is called Curiosità Veneziane – Curiosities of Venice. It was originally published in 1863, and has always stayed in print.
Curiosità Veneziane recounts the stories of the streets and squares, bridges and palaces of Tassini’s beloved city, all listed in alphabetical order and meticulously cross-referenced. Tassini’s charm and verve as a writer, however, blow the dust off history. The joy of the book is in its anecdotes, like the tale of the time the devil took the shape of a monkey and jumped out of a palace behind San Marco: the angel who marks the hole in the wall, like almost every other Venetian curiosity, is still there to see. Curiosità weaves hauntings, gossip, graffiti and scandal into history.
The historian himself was quite a character – a perpetual bachelor (unusual in Italy) and a great gourmand. A sketch of him shows a good-humoured-looking man with a little goatee beard and thick black-rimmed glasses. He lived in Calle dei Spechieri (San Marco 635/634).
To this day, nearly every Venetian home has a copy of his book on its shelves.
Tassini would have been able to tell you everything about the addresses of the other characters in this book and others in this series:
Professor Marìn’s tall crooked house is at Santa Croce 1011. It would be hard to give the house a proper ‘street’ address as it lurches with contrary leanings between the Calle del Caustico and the Calle Gradisca. Even these two street names are contrary – ‘caustico’ being a corrosive substance (or something offensive) and ‘gradisca’ meaning something that pleases. So in effect the professor’s home is sandwiched between ‘Nice Street’ and ‘Bitingly Nasty Street’. Small wonder, then, that it lurches.
The Gasperin bookshop is in the Calle de Fuseri. Ambrogio and his family live above the shop.
The Ostello delle Gattemiagole, Rio Terra Farsetti, Cannaregio 1839.
The Molin family live at San Marco 3070 in the Calle del Teatro, between San Samuele and Santo Stefano.
The Antonello family (Renzo from The Undrowned Child) live at Corte del Tagiapietra, Santa Croce 1557.
Tassini also records a Palazzo Flangini on the Grand Canal, and also a calle and a campiello (a street and a little square) called Flangini, in the San Geremia area of the city. One member of the Flangini family was a war hero in the battles against the Turks. The last of the line was a Lodovico Flangini, who died in 1804, a cardinal.
Rovigo and its Pastry-Bandits
There’s an old nursery rhyme that sums up the characters of the people of Venice and nearby towns on the mainland. It starts like this:
Veneziani gran signori,
Padovani gran dottori,
Visentini magnagati,
Veronesi tuti mati …
which means:
The Venetians – great lords
The Paduans – great scholars
The Vicentini – cat-eaters
The Veronesi – all crazies …
The claim that the ‘Visentini’ – people from Vicenza – eat cats probably originates from a historic siege in which the starving populace had to consume their beloved pets. Another version claims Venice originally lent some of her fine cats to Vicenza to help with the city’s rat problem. The cats were never returned, and so the Venetians made up this horrible nickname.
As for the people of Verona being ‘crazy’, this probably derives from the hat-making trade in the city. Poisonous chemicals in the pro
duction of hats in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often had a bad effect on the workers’ brain function.
The stanza ends with the town of Rovigo, and the line is:
A Rovigo, non m’intrigo!
which means
About Rovigo … I just don’t want to know!
This reflects Rovigo’s very bad – and certainly unfair – reputation as a town of roughnecks and trouble-makers.
Animal Senses
Much more research needs to be done on how animals see the world, but they definitely have a different colour sense from humans, and I have tried to reflect this in the story.
Dogs and wolves seem to be colour-blind for red and green. But they see quite vividly in blue and yellow. They can see more shades of grey than we can. Their distance vision is not as good as humans’ and they often identify things only if they move – and by the way they move. The hearing of dogs and wolves is less acute than their sense of smell.
Cats are also red-green colour-blind, it seems. Red things look dark and green things look light to a cat. So where we might see a green leafy branch with red apples, a cat would see a whitish branch with dark apples. Cats see best in low light – in the evening and early morning. Their vision is impeded by very bright sunshine. A cat can also see more out of the sides of its eyes than we can. It is also true that a cat’s heart beats twice as fast as a human’s – between 110 and 140 beats per minute.
Talina in the Tower Page 26
