by Polly Coles
Once Lily is installed in her Trenitalia wheelchair, and most of our luggage has been piled on her lap, we roll smoothly out of the station and down a concrete side ramp, acrid with the stench of urine. At the bottom, we turn the corner and find ourselves on a wide pavement, overlooking the Grand Canal.
All of a sudden, I smell the mineral sea, hear the soft cacophony of voices and footsteps, and feel the sharpness of sunlight off water. We have arrived.
Number 3460 Calle del Vin is a fortress-like palazzo, a great, dour, stone building which stands at the corner of a gloomy alley lined with similar tall, dark, ancient buildings. Calle del Vin is a street to be passed along, not lingered in, but the façade of the palazzo gives on to a bright, wide canal, lined with shops and bars – a pleasant, busy thoroughfare that somehow manages to keep out of the tourist mainstream.
Built in 1460, the palazzo spent the first 400 years of its existence in the hands of two wealthy families; the first were Venetian aristocrats, the second, Flemish merchants. Once, the palazzo had been famed for its large and beautiful gardens; now, it is divided into five apartments, with a number of windowless storerooms leading off the entrance hall. Each of these is the Venetian equivalent of one man’s garden shed and it is here that wine is stored and condominium plots are hatched. Through the doors, left ajar, you can glimpse shadowy interiors, where red-faced, elderly men fix things or bottle prosecco. Where the palace gardens once stretched along the canal, there is now a small, shady courtyard.
Up until now, I have only ever seen our new flat in photographs. In those frantically busy last months before we left England, it was Alberto who had flown out to Venice to look at the place and sign for it, while I stayed behind packing and endlessly packing. Now, I push open the heavy wooden street door, and we swarm into the shadowy hall, in a flurry of heat and effort and luggage. At first, I have only a sense of dusky space; then, as my eyes adjust, I see that the hall covers most of the ground floor of the palazzo. It is flanked by two marble benches, their curlicued backs set against walls of crumbling, dirty-pink stucco. At the far end are high double doors made up of roundels of opaque Venetian glass, the skewy swirls distorting the courtyard beyond into a dim and hectic cubism. Feeling around in the gloom, I find a light switch and suddenly a wrought-iron chandelier flings the patterns of the souk around the walls. In one corner, a pair of stone lions guard the foot of the marble staircase. We marshall our forces, and begin the final haul: Lily, luggage, boys, up the four steep flights to our new home.
The apartment, like many of the properties to let in Venice, is the home of the landlord’s dead mother. Pietburgo, our landlord, seems himself to be half dead: a hulking, bearded, dour-faced man, he is waiting, unsmiling, for the final signatures and the first instalment of rent.
The flat was solidly furnished in about 1950 and is, like its owner, large and awkward and gloomy. It has too much passageway and a series of odd-shaped rooms carved clumsily out of the grander fabric of the medieval building. Lumpen Murano glass chandeliers hang from the ceilings and the furniture is all dark polished wood. But the flat is high up; nobody looks down on us and we, in turn, have a view across red, pantiled rooftops and bell towers. And, what is best of all, we share this eyrie with bands of skydiving swallows.
PART 2: September
Living on Water
DURING THOSE EARLY days in Venice, my sleep is threaded through with dreams of living in precipitous tower blocks, far above the ground, with a longing for trees and for the feeling of earth underfoot. I wake disgruntled and uneasy.
Lily, who has grown up in the countryside, is having nightmares and screaming herself awake, convinced that the city will be swallowed up by the great wave of a tsunami. She talks about it for days, ‘What if…? What if…?’ but her tsunamis ebb when I show her the long, narrow island of the Lido and tell her: ‘That’s what stops the big waves; it’s a barrier against the sea and it makes the Lagoon.’
My own dreams take longer to go away. I feel the silence here as an absence. When I wake in the morning, only the crack of light through the shutters tells me it is time to get up; there are no other clues to help me refine that knowledge, to say whether it is 5 a.m. or 10 a.m. For the first time in my life I keep oversleeping. I miss the country birds, bantering at dawn, and the next-door chickens, roosting and fussing, then quietening, as the sun moves higher in the sky.
There are pigeons, of course, but other than in Piazza San Marco they keep a low profile. Certainly there are pockets in this city where the smaller birds chirrup, but there is hardly a teeming life of tree-dwellers, ivy-pickers, eaves-hoppers. The only constant birdcall here is the petulant shriek of gulls, those big, lone-ranging birds swooping down the canals or taking up imperious positions on chimney pots. No doubt if I can learn to understand their harsh, wheedling conversations, they would help me out, show me where I stand in the day, the season, the year. As it is, their habits are as alien to me as those of the Venetians.
When the gulls congregate they sound like people cackling with laughter, and you could almost mistake the bleak vowels of the Venetian ‘Ciao’ or ‘eeow’, that you hear repeated all day long in the streets, for the seabirds’ plaintive cries.
Sound rings differently here. Sometimes, there is a muffled quality to everything: the many walls are like full stops, cutting noise short. Or sometimes, they ricochet it back unexpectedly, so that you hear a full jazz band close by; then turn the corner and find just a couple of musicians in a narrow calle. Their modest fiddle and guitar are amplified by the surrounding buildings to something rousing and mysterious.
When I open the shutters in the morning I hear footsteps, dogs barking, cats wailing, gulls, and the heave and wash of the Lagoon as boats groan or buzz or slip along the waterways. At night, if I open the window and lean out to look along the fondamenta below, the silence of my closed room is all of a sudden filled with the murmur of human voices and I have the unexpected impression that I have just walked through a door, into a party.
In these early days, I find myself keenly aware, relying almost, on the cycles of the moon. At the top of this big, old building, looking out over roofs, to towers and belfries and terraces, the moon, flying high, seems the only thing left of the natural world and I follow its waxing and waning with a new attention.
The fact is, I miss my version of nature: the trees, the grass, the soil. This is when I begin to understand how visual my particular sense of the natural world is: that abundant green of the British countryside and the changes in the colour and density of vegetation that signal the changing seasons. I notice how the foliage becomes lighter or thicker or more brittle; how it begins in spring with a pale green so translucently fine that it seems to vibrate; how, in the late summer sun, it works into depths of dull olive that render the landscape almost black; how, in autumn, it thins, then dries, moving through red and gold to brown. In winter, when the trees are at last bare, the blackened corpses of leaves curl into mulch, like foetal, prehistoric bog men.
These are the signs I happen to recognize. Now that they are gone and I find myself in an environment of stone, punctuated by water, I feel their absence viscerally and I can’t settle. My body has to learn the new clues and how to respond instinctively to different rhythms of the natural world.
One morning, I am sitting out at the back of the vaporetto. The day is mild and I gaze at the passing palaces, not yet able to play the blasé Venetian and sit reading a book or staring vacantly ahead. Then, all of a sudden, there is a change; I feel it in the pores of my face. It is as if a very thin veil has drifted across the sun and the air has become heavier, softer, wetter. There is a chill, a mutedness and I remember, almost with surprise, that this city sits in the middle of the sea. What has fallen is a sea mist; here, nature is expressing itself neither with colour, nor form, but elementally, in the texture of the air, through subtle modulations of light, temperature and humidity.
On another morning, there is a monumental thunderstorm. I
t has been raining all night, so that as I leave the building to take the children to school, the wooden front door is difficult to shut behind us. It is swollen and distorted with water, like a drowned man. Out in the calle, the day is iron-grey, lights reflected in puddles and on the wet-black stone. We soon reach the bigger thoroughfare with which our street intersects. On a normal day, it is full of people, hurrying to work, university or school. The Sri Lankans who keep stalls there would usually be rigging up swathes of cheap pashminas and cheerfully crude boxer shorts, and further along the fruit and vegetable stalls would be opening for business, while the first tourists dribble in from the direction of the station. But today it is empty, except for a few solitary figures walking fast, heads down, hooded, umbrellas parrying the gusts of rain. The trinket vendors have stayed at home, the wandering holidaymakers are not tripping up the workaday folk. The weather, it seems, has given Venice back to the Venetians.
The vaporetto we take labours up the Grand Canal, weighed down with people who would generally be walking to work. Rain clatters on the metal roof of the boat. I look out of the steamy window and see that even at this early hour, in the grim storm-light, the empty interiors of the palaces are lavishly ablaze. Who is that person in the vast room on the piano nobile, with the loops of Murano chandeliers receding? It must be the Filipino woman who polishes the expanses of parquet or marble, or the Moldovian caretaker opening up.
We get off the boat and walk over the Accademia Bridge. The wood is dark and slippery. At the windy summit, my umbrella flips inside out; I wonder if anyone is ever struck by lightning in Venice.
By the time I have left the children at their school door, it has stopped raining and I decide to go home on foot. Despite the occasional spots of rain, I close my umbrella. This distinguishes me instantly as a foreigner and, most particularly, a British one; no Italian would roll up their brolley till the very last drop has fallen, upon which, they emerge, bone-dry. Italians are never damp and slightly flustered.
I walk across Campo Santa Margherita and over the bridge at San Pantalon. I have not gone much further when the rain starts again and this time it is serious. Within minutes, it is sheeting, deluging, as if a vast bucket of water is being emptied from above, at point blank range. My umbrella is useless: the rain is flying upwards from the paving stones. I stop in a doorway to wait out the storm. After a quarter of an hour, nothing has changed: the rain is coming down harder than ever and I am soaked through; I might as well keep going. I strike out across the small campo, wading through water. With both hands, I cling on to my umbrella which acts like the lid of a vessel, stoppered over me and submerging me in liquid. I realize that I am lost. The familiar lines and co-ordinates of the city have dissolved under the improbable quantities of water. I begin to head in what I assume to be the right direction and push down a long, narrow calle that does indeed bring me to the edge of the Grand Canal, but also to a dead end. I look across to my destination; short of diving into the murky depths and swimming, it is unreachable. The Grand Canal has reverted to its true nature: it is the pitching and rocking sea.
I have not seen anybody for ten minutes or more. Emptied of people, Venice gives me no indication as to whether I have been dashed ashore here in 1408 or 1608 or 1908. This underwater world is monochrome and, itself, adrift in time. The garish clutter of tourism, the thin veneer of modernity, has been washed away and all that is left is a deserted, ageing edifice, jutting out of the Adriatic. For a few hours this morning, the city has been taken back in time. Or is it forwards? One day, Venice, like Atlantis, will be engulfed by water and the fish will be its birds.
In the Giant’s Castle
OUR CHILDREN WERE born and bred in England. They have the language and the culture of Britain running through their veins. But they are also half Italian and that is why we have made this decision to move to Italy, taken them from their English world and submerged them in their father’s culture and language. Because five members of the family have no knowledge or experience of the system and Alberto’s Italian school days ended twenty-five years ago, we are more or less starting from scratch. Inevitably, understanding school and all its ways is the biggest challenge we have in these first weeks.
The Scuola Elementare Canova, like all Venetian schools, is a forbidding building: a stone palazzo with massive double doors, heavily studded with iron bolts, which give no impression of having shed their original purpose of keeping people, aggressively, out.
On my first visit, I feel that I have walked into a giant’s castle. The hall is shadowy and echoing, with a wide staircase that curves up to the first floor; the ceilings are toweringly high; the pavement, big, cold stone flags. It would be difficult to imagine a less welcoming environment for a small child arriving for his or her first day at school. If even I, a dullard adult, suspect that the grotesque, lumpen figure of the ogre’s wife might crash into view at any moment, the effect on a tremulous five-year-old is unimaginable.
Fanciful as all of this may sound, there really is something of the giant’s castle in the wider Italian school system. Education in this country is emphatically not child-centred. It is believed that each child, like Jack, fresh off his beanstalk and sneaking around the ogre’s halls, must be captured and subdued by the system.
On the first day of term, a teacher marches into Michael’s class at the middle school.
‘I’, she announces grimly to the assembled twelve-year-olds, ‘have a university degree. You are still at school. You will do what I tell you because I am in charge.’
In these first few weeks of our life in Venice, I go to see one or another of my children’s teachers, carrying with me a certain set of assumptions about children and education. And over and over again, I find myself sitting across the table from another adult whose ideas about children and education are not just different to my own, but diametrically opposed.
This is not always a problem and not always the case: there are many fine teachers in Italy, working their guts out on pitiful pay and against all the odds. They contend, daily, with ever more swingeing cuts. An already starving infrastructure becomes weaker and weaker. Several of these teachers are my friends and I am in awe of their selflessness and their energy in the face of such overwhelming adversity.
It seems to me that the Italian system, which is strict and dry and demanding, has some of the qualities one would have found in schools in Britain in the 1950s. There is still room for eccentrics. The legendary Raguso with his pipe in hand (sometimes, it is rumoured, lit and in his mouth) often doesn’t bother with the music lessons he is meant to be teaching, but talks about morality and psychology and chess tactics and the best tobacco, and shocks and delights the kids with his dogged refusal to go by the book.
Or there is Gasparini with his unnerving wall eye, stentorian voice and famed skill in the launching of rubbers to wake up or silence inattentive students. One teacher apparently suffers from narcolepsy and falls asleep mid-sentence. I think of the old pre-Ofsted, pre-regulation days, when the British education system also polarized between teachers of pure, anarchic genius and teachers of often appalling inadequacy.
The problems arise when an already deeply inflexible system falls into the hands of angry people. At that point there is too much potential for unkindness and, on occasion, brutality. As with so much else in Italy, the situation is the opposite of what one might find in Britain.
In Britain, the current educational ethos is more or less liberal, and one of its attendant dangers is an excess of ‘liberality’ – in which teachers run the risk of losing their authority and control over their classes. In Italy, where the system is essentially authoritarian, the greatest danger is the reverse: that unscrupulous teachers will abuse their power over the children they teach.
This situation reflects the wider Italian culture. In a country in which individuals are often forced to survive on their wits, playing as best they can a chaotic and sometimes unfair system, there is great scope for abuse of power.
By the same count, the decent people – the intelligent and committed and humane – are often admirably vocal, and beacons of social conscience and political determination. Similarly, the Italian education system exhibits, in a very public manner, all that is best and worst in human nature.
Six-year-old Freddie has had a rocky start at school. His work has been poor, but then, one day, the class goes on a trip to a wildlife sanctuary, in a remote spot far out in the Lagoon. The children spend the morning wandering among the grassy dunes with their binoculars, searching for the little scuttling brown birds that nest there. Suddenly something lights up for Freddie and he writes a lively and enthusiastic piece about the visit. I am so happy.
At the first parents’ evening, I talk with one of his teachers, Martina. She is coming to the end of her career and is in a permanent state of sour fury, like milk perpetually going off. Today, true to form, she is complaining bitterly about Freddie: his handwriting is a disaster, he doesn’t listen in class but fiddles with bits of paper, he forgets everything, his homework is badly done or not done at all.
‘But what about this lovely piece of writing?’ I say, ‘It’s full of enthusiasm and good description, clear handwriting and it’s two whole pages long: it’s such an improvement.’
Martina looks at me coldly: ‘It’s on the wrong paper,’ she says.
