Tiziano Scarpa - Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide

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Tiziano Scarpa was born in Venice in 1963. He is a poet, novelist, playwright and essayist. He has written a number of acclaimed novels including Eyes On the Broiler and Western Kamikaze. His radio play Popcorn received international critical acclaim and was aired by the BBC and other European radio stations. He regularly speaks at creative writing conferences and writes as a journalist for national newspapers. In 1997 he won the 49th Italia Prize for his writing. He lives in Venice.

VENICE IS A FISH. Just look at it on a map. Its like a vast sole stretched out against the deep. How did this marvellous beast make its way up the Adriatic and fetch up here, of all places? It could set off on its travels at any time, it could call in just about anywhere, following its fancy: it could migrate, travel, frolic as it has always liked to do: Dalmatia this weekend, Istanbul the day after next, summer in Cyprus. If its anchored hereabouts, there must be a reason for it. Salmon wear themselves out swimming against the current, climbing waterfalls to make love in the mountains. Sirens and swordfish and seahorses go to the Sargasso Sea to die.

Other books would laugh at what Im telling you. They speak of the birth of the city from nothing, its resounding commercial and military success, its decadence: poppycock. It wasnt like that, believe me. Venice has always existed as you see it today, more or less. Its been sailing since the dawn of time; its put in at every port, its rubbed up against every shore, quay and landing-stage: Middle Eastern pearls, transparent Phoenician sand, Greek seashells, Byzantine seaweed all accreted on its scales. But one day it felt all the weight of those scales, those fragments and splinters that had permanently accumulated on its skin; it felt the weight of the incrustations it was carrying around. Its flippers grew too heavy to slip among the currents. It decided to climb once and for all into one of the most northerly and sheltered inlets of the Mediterranean, and rest there.

On the map, the bridge connecting it to terra firma looks like a fishing-line: Venice looks as if its swallowed the bait. Its doubly bound: a steel platform and a strip of tarmac; but that happened afterwards, just a century ago. We were worried that Venice might one day change its mind and go off travelling again; we fastened it to the lagoon so that it wouldnt suddenly get it into its head to weigh anchor and leave, this time forever. We tell everyone else we did it for its own protection, because after all those years in its moorings, its lost the knack of swimming: it would be caught straight away, it would end up on some Japanese whaling ship, or on display in a Disneyland aquarium. The truth is that we can no longer do without it. Were jealous. And even sadistic and violent, when it comes to keeping someone we love. Weve done something worse than tying it to terra firma: weve literally nailed it to the sea bed.

In a novel by Bohumil Hrabal theres a child whos obsessed with nails. He constantly hammers them into the floor: at home, in a hotel, when visiting other peoples houses. All the parquet floors that come within his reach are hammered away at from dawn till dusk. As though the child wanted to fix the houses to the ground, as a way of feeling more secure. Venice is made just like that; except that the nails are made not of iron but of wood, and theyre enormous, between two and ten metres in length, with a diameter of twenty or thirty centimetres. Theyre planted in the slime of the seabed.

These buildings that you see, the marble palazzi, the brick houses, couldnt have been built on water, they would have sunk into the mud. How do you lay solid foundations on slime? The Venetians thrust hundreds of thousands, millions of poles into the lagoon. Underneath the Basilica della Salute there are at least a hundred thousand; and also at the feet of the Rialto Bridge, to support the thrust of the stone arch. St Marks Basilica rests on big oaken rafts, supported by elm-wood stilts. The trunks were floated down to the lagoon along the River Piave, from the Selva di Cadore on the slopes of the Venetian Alps. There are larches, elms, alders, pines and oaks. La Serenissima was very shrewd, she always kept a close eye on her wooden possessions; the forests were protected by laws of draconian severity.

Upside-down trees, hammered in with a kind of anvil hoisted on pulleys. I had the chance to see them as a child: I heard the songs of the pile-drivers, sung to the rhythm of the slow and powerful percussion of those cylindrical mallets suspended in the air, running on vertical rails, slowly rising and then crashing back down again. The trunks are mineralised precisely because of the mud, which has wrapped them in its protective sheath, preventing them from rotting in contact with oxygen: breathless for centuries, the wood has been turned almost to stone.

Youre walking on a vast upside-down forest, strolling above an incredible inverted wood. Its like something dreamed up by a mediocre science-fiction writer, and yet its true. Let me tell you what happens to your body in Venice, starting with your feet.

feet

VENICE IS A TORTOISE: its stone shell is made of grey trachite boulders (masgni in Venetian), which pave the streets. All the stone comes from elsewhere: as Paolo Barbaro has written, almost everything you see in Venice comes from somewhere else, its been imported or traded, if not actually plundered. The surface you are treading on is smooth, although many of the stones have been beaten with a small milled hammer to keep you from slipping when it rains.

Where are you going? Throw away your map! Why do you so desperately need to know where you are right now? OK: in all cities, in the commercial centres, at bus stops or underground stations, youre used to having signs that hold you by the hand; theres almost always a big map with a coloured dot, an arrow to bellow at you, You are here. In Venice, too, you need only look up to see lots of yellow signs with arrows telling you: youve got to go this way, dont get confused, To the Railway Station, To San Marco, To the Accademia. Forget it, just ignore them. Why fight the labyrinth? Follow it, for once. Dont worry, let the streets decide your journey for you, rather than the other way round. Learn to wander, to dawdle. Lose your bearings. Just drift.

Do what we call acting Venetian: after the war the phrase alluded to our football team, doing the Venetian, doing a Venice. Our footballers had an exasperating, selfish style of play, always with the ball at their feet, loads of dribbling and hardly any passing, a limited vision of the game. Of course they did: theyd grown up in that varicose whirlpool of alleyways, little streets, sharp turns, bottlenecks. So obviously, even when they took to the field in shorts and jerseys, they went on seeing calli and campielli - streets and squares - everywhere, and struggled to disentangle themselves from a private labyrinthine hallucination between the midfield and the penalty area.

Imagine youre a red blood cell running along some veins: you follow the heartbeat, you allow yourself to be pumped by that invisible heart. Or else youre a mouthful of food being carried along by the intestine: the oesophagus of an extremely narrow

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