Venice-Art-Tours Blog

The colour is....RED!

That was Saturday in Roma. A huge demonstration (papers say 1,000,000) against the Prodi government's reforms of social programmes. The two communist parties here account for 58 deputies in the legislature which enables them to hold the government hostage (with the help of some other radical parties). In the last general election the two Red parties accounted for almost 15% of the vote. So the prime minister Prodi must hold his nose and suck up to the Reds or else his government will fall (and it will fall fairly soon, anyway). As I mentioned in a blog earlier this year, the current Italian government is a loosely stitched pastiche of more than a dozen parties, each with an agenda widely divergent from one another. It is bound to fail...

More importantly is the unbelievable cheek and gall these marchers have in flying the hammer and sickle, the symbol of a failed system responsible for untold misery and death which makes Nazism look like a walk in the park. It is nauseating to see the human bacillus, VI Lenin, on display. Some memorable death statistics should make those marchers cringe:

Soviet Gulag:                    61,911,000 Murdered

Communist Chinese:         35,236,000 Murdered   

"Great Leap Forward" in China           30,000,000 died                                                

Khymer Rouge:                     2,000,000 murdered

Vietnamese purges:            1,670,000 Murdered

Look below, does the word "thug" come to mind? 

I suggest that if Italy had been victimised by communism, the Hammer & Sickle would be in hiding. But Italian students and politicians who have no personal experience with deadly communism and who do not know its tragic history rally around the symbols of death in some sort of weekend juvenile amnesia. 

Shame on them.   

Below is the current president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, as he was in 1975 as spokesman for the Italian Communist Party. More proud moments.

   

End of season report

I met lots of lovely people this year on the tours (I have some left to do). Most of my customers were from the USA but also from Canada, England, Ireland, and Australia. All of them had great attitudes, they were witty, funny, energetic, and great company. When I see tour guides like a Venetian tourguide I witnessed today with her 100 people walking five feet behind her, I ask myself how can anyone do this job if you do not get to know your customers, have coffee with them, make them your friends? Those hundred people can't even ask questions.

My tourists this year have been school teachers, lawyers, artists, financiers, retired folks, doctors, writers, farmers, airline pilots, politicians, musicians, salesmen, homemakers, parents, grandparents, kids. All interesting in themselves and also interested in Venice. Great fun. My job is easy. (Pic on left shows me with the McAllisters and on the right novelist Richard Russo and wife Barbara and figlie.)

As the water rises here and the visitors drain away, it is the time for our holiday (although Laurie is writing a new book)...trips to New York, Dublin, and England for friends and family, home repair projects which means buying new tools (yeah!), restarting a painting career, improving my Italian (haha), trying to catch an opera or two, doting over the new grandson to be born 8 December, reading more, rehearsing my part in Laurie's new pantomime ("Dick Whittington in Venice") for the January performances, badgering my wife to put me in her new novel, and most of all enjoying Venice in the winter, a beautiful place. You can get a feel of the medieval city as it empties..dark evenings, misty air, footsteps echoing, a few Venetians hunched over as they walk homeward, water lapping in the canals, fish mongers and vegetable and fruit stands in Campo S. Margarita, almost empty vaporettos. Byron provides my coda:

                             I saw from out the wave her structures rise

                             As from the stroke of the Enchanter's wand!                                             

                             A thousand Years their cloudy wings expand

                             Around me, and a dying  glory smiles...

   

      

 

Come hell or high water, or both

For those of you who were in Piazza S. Marco last weekend, it was bad news. Flooding arrived early and the city and the tourists were unprepared. City unprepared? Well, acqua alta usually happens in the months of October and November and it can happen as few as 5 times per annum to 30 times. It all depends on air pressure, wind direction, moon position, and other meteorological phenomena. It is all fairly predictable. In fact, the city has a website which tracks sea levels hourly and provides flooding forecasts.

I diligently reviewed said website (http://www.ilmeteo.it/marea.htm) early that morning. The sea was high, but not flooding high. No wellies needed, no problems. ...Wrong.

When I arrived at S Marco at noon with my customers, four terrific couples from Wake Forest, N.C., it was a silver sea with hundreds (more?) of people trapped and/or huddled on the one metre wide catwalks, called passarelle, which takes one, say, from the edge of the square into the Basilica S. Marco. Because it was 27 September only, all the passarelle were not available in the square. So civilised human behaviour was somewhat wanting as people struggled to ascend or descend a passarella.Pushing and some shoving, tempers running as high as the sea. The city says the surprise high water was due to the heavy rain of the previous 36 hours. Whatever the reason for the acqua alta, the sirens announcing the arrival of acqua alta sounded while we were on the passarelle. Two hours late.

Travellers coming here to shop in the next ten weeks or so, do not worry, shops stay open with customers and staff wearing boots should acqua alta occur; merchandise in Venice is never near the floor. Of course, you could wait the flooding out for four hours, go to a museum, have an aperitivo at Florian if you are Bill Gates, otherwise at one of the other 1000 cafès in Venice.

The net of it is that Acqua Alta is like snow: it's charming the first time only.