The Taste of Conquest (16 page)

The Italian interest in food wasn’t always appreciated. The visiting French writer Michel de Montaigne was clearly fed up with all the food lectures he had received on his 1580 visit to Italy when he penned a portrait of the obsessive head cook, or
scalco:

I asked him about his job, and he replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling, delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he had been expounding some great point of theology. He spelled out to me the differences in appetites: the one we have before eating, the one we have after the second and third course; the means now of simply gratifying it, now of arousing and stimulating it; the organization of his sauces, first in general, and then particularizing the qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences in salads according to the season, which one should be warmed up and which served cold, the way of adorning and embellishing them to make them also pleasant to the sight. After that he entered upon the order of serving, full of beautiful and important considerations.

Hand in hand with a desire to ape the sophisticated Venetian, Roman, and Florentine fashions came a reaction against the decadent ways of the Italians. For every courtier trying to flatter Catherine de Médicis by having his cooks re-create dishes from Messisbugo’s
Banchetti,
there was another who wanted to return to an idealized French simplicity. Venice, in particular, was both admired and reviled. Like New York, the city was considered the paradigm of sophistication and the incarnation of sin. Also a little like New York, its role as fashion center came somewhat late in the day.

When we look at Carpaccio’s paintings from the late fourteen hundreds, we see a society dressed to the nines and ready to party. While perhaps not the most cultured city in fifteenth-century Europe, Venice was the continent’s wealthiest. Its position as international entrepôt made it the best place in Europe to shop not only for spices but for every other ornament to wealth as well. The Milanese priest Pietro Casola noted the abundance on a visit in 1494:

Something may be said about the quantity of merchandise in the said city, although not nearly the whole truth, because it is inestimable. Indeed it seems as if the whole world flocks there, and that human beings have concentrated there all their force for trading. I was taken to see various warehouses, beginning with that of the Germans—which it appears to me would suffice alone to supply all Italy with the goods that come and go—and so many others that it can be said they are innumerable…. And who could count the many shops so well furnished that they also seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax! These things stupefy the beholder, and cannot be fully described to those who have not seen them.

That the city was fantastically rich is without question. The wealth, however, was increasingly settling in the purses of fewer people as the moneymen turned away from buying and selling. At the height of the spice trade, everyone made at least something, from the rowers on the galleys to the wealthy widows who invested their gold ducats in pepper. But now that profits were more often sunk into real estate and manufacturing than commerce, a smaller fragment of the population benefited. In this climate, the old, powerful, but not always flush families became especially prickly when the nouveaux riches and even the middling classes began to flaunt their affluence by building great big mansions on the terra firma and throwing lavish bashes at their canal-side palazzi. So laws were passed over and over in a vain attempt to limit conspicuous consumption. Excessive expenses for weddings and banquets organized by the
compagnie de calza
were specifically singled out in legislation passed in 1460, then again in 1466. The government set a maximum limit of half a ducat per guest, and anyone breaking the rules would get nailed with a hefty penalty of two hundred ducats, or worse.
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Informants got to keep half the fine, and if the snitch happened to be an indentured servant or slave, he would get his freedom, too. Then, since the monetary limit didn’t seem to be working, the grumpy bureaucrats started to set rules about just what could be cooked. Doves, peacocks, partridge, pheasants, and other game birds were inscribed on the forbidden-food index. No more than three dishes were to be allowed, not counting confections, and the gilding of food was outlawed. (That spices don’t show up on this list of banished delights seems to reinforce Luca’s contention that they were not considered especially luxurious.) Dinners in public, the kind of parties today’s I Antichi regularly throw on the Campo San Maurizio outside of Jurubeba’s house, would also no longer be tolerated: “rather only private ones in the chambers as the ancients were accustomed to do, and only with small sweets [served].”

In 1489, a special commission of “three of our honorable gentlemen, ready and enthusiastic” (later elevated to the rank of magistrates), was specifically charged to pursue spendthrift malefactors from its offices at the Rialto. The legislation must have been observed about as much as speed limits are today. You get a hint of this from a 1526 legal note: “And truly, those who would act so dishonestly as to throw bread or oranges at [the commission’s] employees, or push them or kick them out, will fall subject to a penalty of fifty ducats.”

The impression that Venice had been transformed from the hungry, hard-bitten merchant republic of Doge Dandolo’s time into a flabby, complacent party town by the early years of the sixteenth century would certainly be overstating the state of affairs. After all, the city had long had those prolonged periods of
Carnevale,
when indulgence temporarily replaced bookkeeping as the city’s main pastime. And business was still the city’s fountain of wealth in the sixteenth century. But changes both within the city and without presaged the twilight of its golden age.

T
HE
B
ITTER
E
ND

In spite of the masks that Venetians are so expert at creating, it is still possible to peer behind the marble façades topped with cell phone antennae and find clues that point to an earlier Venice, a city that was once Europe’s spice emporium without peer. Among the edible hints and whispers that recall that glorious past, there is a dark cookie known as a
pevarino
that maintains a tenuous connection between the city of Saint Mark and the pepper woods of Malabar. This throwback to the spice-laced cuisine of the Renaissance is about the size of a hockey puck, studded with almonds and raisins, and faintly bitter with molasses. How much black pepper it contains depends on the baker. Some of the cookies burn the tongue with peppery pungency, while others are almost bland.

Venice developed many dry crispbreads, which wouldn’t spoil on long sea voyages. The taste persisted even as the port withered. Here, eighteenth-century vendors sell bussolai, a ring-shaped breadstick that is still sold in the city’s bakeries.

There are few as obsessed with these confections as Franco Colussi, whose bakery is tucked into a long alley off the Campo San Barnaba. As you open Colussi’s shop-front door, you are enveloped with the aroma of butter and spice, and yet the space and the selection here are simplicity itself. Modest baskets hold
baìcoli,
the crisp little biscotti that go back to the days when baking ship’s biscuit for sailors was a thriving industry. Panetoni of all sizes sit on a shelf like an army of Russian nesting dolls.
Pevarini
are displayed in orderly pyramids. Above all, though, the narrow room is dominated by a large oven and the irrepressible Franco. When he hears of my interest in peppery sweets, he skips from behind his marble slab, a jaunty chef ’s hat perched on his rosy head, all bubbling with enthusiasm about the subject. His
pevarini
are laced with nutmeg and cumin as well as pepper, he confides. But he doesn’t make them as often as he used to. Apparently, the demand just isn’t what it once was for these or other traditional Venetian pastries. With the passion of an archaeologist discussing a long-forgotten civilization, Franco describes a confection he now seldom makes called
bussolà di Murano,
a kind of super-
pevarino
that is in the form of a ring almost a foot across and weighs more than two pounds. It, too, is spiced with pepper, and cinnamon this time. “It is a savage thing,” he whispers, and then shakes his head, “But today, even the Venetians don’t recognize it. It [the island of Murano] is only five minutes from here, only five minutes, but they don’t know what it is!” Yet he insists on making his pastries the old way, because who knows if anyone else will? Though he hardly looks it, Franco is a grandfather, and despite all his best efforts, he can find no one to take over the store. Young people no longer want to stay in Venice, he tells me, launching into the standard complaint about the city’s decline. In the end, I thank the white-haired baker and close the door behind me. And as I walk away, loaded down with a panetone, a bag of
pevarini,
a satchel of
baìcoli,
I wonder if he really is the last of his line and if the little storefront will still be there when I next return.

Everyone in Venice complains about the disappearing stores, a result of an all too evident demographic collapse. Venice isn’t unique in this sense: Italy has the lowest birthrate in the world, and the country’s population is shrinking. As Luca points out over and over, Venice’s population always went up and down. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, plague would hit, wiping out enormous numbers of people, but others would quickly arrive to take advantage of the opportunities the city offered. But when the plague of 1575 laid waste to the vain city, it never quite recovered. It has been estimated that Venice hit its peak of about 180,000 in that fateful year (a census of 1581 showed only 134,000), a number it would not reach again until the 1950s. Since 1980, the slow trickle of exodus has turned into a flood. The city has lost more than a third of its inhabitants, and there are fewer people now than there were at the time of the Fourth Crusade.

The path to decline became inexorable in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks. Venice had succeeded in great part by taking over the maritime appendages of the Byzantine Empire but, in the process, made the fatal mistake avoided by all successful parasites—that you do not so weaken your host that it dies. The Venetians had so enfeebled the Byzantines that when the Ottomans arrived, the ancient realm gave up its last breath. From that point on, it was just a matter of time before Venice lost her empire in the Aegean.

By 1500, the geopolitical constellations that had long favored the Republic’s fortune were beginning to predict a not-so-happy future. The fall of Constantinople made the strategy that had been so effective since 1204—to protect and secure Venice’s route to the Orient—no longer feasible. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498 seemed as if it would throttle the spice trade at its very source. Even in its own neighborhood, the city couldn’t muster the resources to police the Adriatic Sea, where thugs and pirates now lay in wait to mug unsuspecting traders as they passed by. As the mercantile empire withered, the city shifted its gaze from the eastern Mediterranean, where it had been firmly fixed since the first Venetians loaded salt onto their galleys, to western Europe and the terra firma.

In this new climate, what was a young Venetian with money to do? Trade, and especially the still-lucrative but increasingly less predictable spice trade, now seemed too risky. As a result, more and more Venetian profits were pumped into real estate as well as into new luxury industries. Better to sink your money into growing grapes or making glass or setting up a publishing business than risk your shirt, or worse, by chancing the voyage to Alexandria. Venice was abuzz with stories of its citizens abroad abducted by Barbary corsairs (mostly, though not exclusively, Arab pirates from North Africa), sold into slavery, and forced to work under the most inhuman conditions for their godless captors.

All the same, Venetian merchants did not retire en masse from the spice trade to stay home eating contraband gilded pigeons. After a brief collapse of the Mediterranean spice business in the early sixteenth century—more a result of the wars against Turkey than the incursions of the Portuguese—Venice regained a huge portion of the spice trade for most of the remaining hundred years. (Both the Turks and the Venetians realized soon enough that it was better to exchange profitable trade goods than deadly volleys.) Partially as a result of the renewed fashion for spices that had been, to some extent, fueled by modish Venetian cookbook publishers, the Europe-wide demand for spices kept growing. Even while Lisbon was bringing in some 2
¹
/2 million pounds of pepper a year directly from India, the Venetians were still able to sell more than half that amount picked up from their usual suppliers in the Near East, even if fewer merchants were willing to run the increased risks.