The Taste of Conquest (17 page)

It wasn’t the Portuguese but the Dutch who wiped out Venice’s role as spice merchant to Europe—not so much because they cut off the supply but because they lowered the price so much that spices bought in the Middle East were simply not competitive. Even the Ottomans mostly found it cheaper to buy spices from the Dutch and English rather than get their supplies by way of Persia and Arabia (even though some continued to arrive by the ancient caravan routes well into the eighteenth century). Consequently, by the first decades of the seventeenth century, the flow of spices through Venice had shrunk to a bare trickle. But the Rialto traders might still have been able to recover if it hadn’t been for the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which had sucked in almost all of Venice’s most profitable customers in central Europe and thereby wiped out what remained of a market north of the Alps. Even as the opening salvos of the long conflict were fired, it was clear that the merchant republic was out of the spice business for good.

In the wake of the first collapse of the spice business after 1498, the number of young nobles who, like Alessandro Magno, were still willing to follow the old Venetian pattern of a few years in trade followed by a political career began to dwindle. In part, it explains why groups such as I Antichi were such a draw. Venice, always a gerontocracy, offered no system for young men to clamber up the political ladder, and now that their traditional jobs as apprentice merchants had shriveled away, what were they supposed to do? One option was to organize public parties to show off to their peers and, along the way, make friends and influence people. It’s worth mentioning that unlike today’s I Antichi, the original confraternities were bachelors’ clubs. The demise of the commercial culture in Venice had resulted in a peculiar custom that discouraged all but one son from marrying so that the inheritance would not be spread too thin. Obviously, there is a close connection here to the widespread prostitution for which the city was renowned. I also wonder, though, about the effects of venereal disease on sapping the vigor of the population. This was the era when syphilis was first epidemic in Europe, and Venice would have made the perfect petri dish for STDs.
^*18
Whatever the explanation, the young aristocrats of Venice had plenty of time, and inclination, for wine, women, and song.

Art, literature, food, and music were the talk of Venice by the late fifteen hundreds. By the sixteen hundreds, when the city definitively lost her place in the pepper trade, visitors to Venice came as much to gamble at the card tables as to risk money on commerce. By the seventeen hundreds, Venice had become Europe’s Las Vegas, a city of brothels and casinos, a gorgeous vacation getaway where tourists would buy expensive trinkets and return home with postcard views of
La Serenissima
cranked out by the deft studios of painters such as Guardi and Canaletto. The Venetian aristocracy began to look to French chefs for inspiration, and spicy cuisine, which had characterized the Republic almost from the beginning, was relegated to just a few traditional specialties: the
peverada,
a pepper-laced sauce found mostly on the terra firma; the gnocchi still occasionally sprinkled with cheese and cinnamon in out-of-the-way villages in the Alpine foothills; the still-ubiquitous
sarde in saor,
the sardines smothered with a vinegary mix of raisins and onions, even though they are seldom finished with cinnamon as the more old-fashioned cookbooks suggest.

When Mark Twain visited in the late nineteenth century, there was little left to remind the visitor of the famed pepper fleets:

Today her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,—a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.

Even so, visitors continue to be seduced by the well-practiced charms of the dowager of the lagoon. And as a rule, the Venetians don’t complain about the tourists; they understand how important foreigners have always been to the city’s economy. No, they complain about the shopping. “This transformation is ruining our lives,” says Luca when I mention that bakers such as Franco Colussi can’t find anyone to take over their business. In Venice, there is little alternative to shopping on foot, and as the stores disappear, you have to walk farther and farther. From a transportation standpoint, the city makes absolutely no sense unless you are traveling by boat. If you look at Carpaccio’s painting of the Rialto, you notice that the crossing is a drawbridge, designed for the easy passage of cargo. It was replaced by immovable stone between 1588 and 1591. Early depictions of the city show floating bridges, one-piece flying bridges, pivoting bridges, and, of course, the usual kind of drawbridges that allowed sailing ships free passage. Every single one of these was gradually replaced by permanent footbridges, transforming a city of sailors into a town of boatless pedestrians stranded on sinking islands in the middle of a lagoon. The reality of Venice’s maritime patrimony became as insubstantial as all her other myths.

There is at least one holiday, though, when thousands of Venetians still sail out onto the sea. The city’s loveliest celebration is the
Festa di Redentore
(the Feast of the Redeemer), the party held to commemorate that most demoralizing plague of 1575. This particular plague hit the city at its precarious peak, just four years after the rout of the Turkish navy at Lepanto. It soon became evident that while the Venetian ships may have won the battle, the war against the Turk was lost and Venice would once and for all be shut out of the riches of the Orient. Soon after, the Ottomans took her colony of Cyprus, with its sugar and cotton plantations, and then the fluttering flags of Saint Mark started falling like dominoes across the remaining Aegean Islands. Meanwhile, back in Venice, many thought the plague had come as a punishment for the city’s ungodly ways, and a wave of newfound piety swept the population. As a result, the government, so long resistant to the power of Rome, was convinced to let in the Inquisition. The city’s university at Padua, the home to independent thinkers such as Galileo, now succumbed to the Jesuits, and the Queen of the Adriatic became a foot soldier in the Counter-Reformation.

Today, the sociopolitical details of the holiday’s origin are mostly forgotten, as half the population of Venice clambers into boats and paddles into the lagoon to picnic and wait for the midnight fireworks that mark the date. For the occasion, the members of I Antichi dress in radiant white and perch like seagulls on their banner-bedecked boat, the
Manissa.
As they drift in the lagoon, they spread the decks with fine damask and dine on a meal of
bigoli in salsa,
the sweet-and-sour
sarde in saor,
roast duck, and baked peaches filled with almonds, butter, and amaretti. Luca stuffs his duck with cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and rosemary, among other seasonings. “Fantastico!” he exclaims as he details the menu from last year’s event. “The Venetians always say how beautiful this year’s holiday was.” He laughs. “But the next sentence—and they just have to say it—is always the same. They murmur, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, yes. But last year, it was more beautiful.’”

Luca tells me this last story as we finish our long meal, which began with the
canoce
and
bigoli
at the old Zancopè house on Campo San Maurizio. For dessert, we spread creamy mascarpone and
mostarda veneta
on
baìcoli,
the crisp little biscotti from Franco Colussi’s pastry shop. The sweet and spicy
mostarda
is reminiscent of a Martino recipe (“Grind…together mustard, raisins, dates, soaked bread and a little cinnamon”), except that here the mustard is combined with pears and quinces instead of dry fruit and bread. The condiment comes from the last
spezieria,
or spice shop, in the city, the Drogheria Mascari, just over the Rialto Bridge from the once great spice emporium at the Campo San Bartolomeo. These stores once specialized in the spices and other “drugs” of the Orient, but gradually, as spices became less prized, they branched out into other foodstuffs. Still, this is where the grandmothers go shopping for their spices and
mostarda.
Jurubeba confides in me that she is planning to open another spice shop, “the old-fashioned Venetian kind,” on the Campo San Maurizio with an American friend, a longtime resident of the ancient city. To supply her shop, though, she needs to turn to a wholesaler on the terra firma, who, no doubt, is getting his spices from a trader in Rotterdam. The members of I Antichi work hard for their whiff of authenticity.

As our dinner in Jurubeba’s dining room moved from one course to the next, the group of diners slowly grew. We were joined by Mizue, Luca’s Japanese tutor and onetime lover, and then by Jurubeba’s half-Brazilian, half-Venetian son. I was reminded of a description by a seventeenth-century French visitor who commented on the “mighty concourse of strangers” in the city. Jurubeba insists that there are people moving to Venice: Brazilians and Japanese and Americans. She maintains that the city remains a magnet as it has been since Turk and German and Jew negotiated the price of pepper on the Rialto. But when I ask Luca, the only full-blooded Venetian here, what he sees of the future, his giant’s shoulders droop. “Son vecio…,” this vigorous forty-three-year-old says in Venetian dialect, only half in jest. “I am old….”

“On the other hand,”—he takes a final swig of Prosecco as the distant bell of San Marco rings midnight—“there is this feeling of resistance. The Venetian has become more determined to go on existing,
fino alla fine
—until the bitter end.”

T
HE
C
ARAVEL

From across the pier, the
Vera Cruz
seems no bigger than a toy sailboat, her masts no more than two chopsticks poking the air; she looks like a little dinghy next to the hulking freighter chained up at the adjacent berth. Up close, the small craft is about the size of a Greyhound bus with masts and spars rendered of modest tree trunks crocheted together by a web of fasts and stays. She lies bound to an anonymous concrete jetty on the Lisbon waterfront, her black hull glum now that her sails have been furled. Yet even when her triangular sheets are raised and puffed out with the ocean breeze, there is still something awkward and even homely about this ancient sailing ship, this caravel. It seems all too incredible that sailors from such a little country, navigating unassuming vessels like the
Vera Cruz,
crisscrossed the Atlantic to scout the path for a sea route to the spice coast of Malabar, that these short and sinewy seamen were the leading edge in Europe’s conquest of the world.

When the Venetians, the Genoese, and even the independent Catalans went sailing to procure their aromatic cargo in the Middle East, they traveled over routes that had been amply documented for a couple of thousand years. The winds, the shoals, the rocky shores were the same as Odysseus had endured on his long trip home. But when the Portuguese pointed their prows south and east into the Atlantic gales, it was another matter altogether. Experts debated whether it could even be done. There was concern that great beasts would swallow ships whole; that sailors, as they entered the torrid zones to the south, would be incinerated; that the vessels, as they rounded the curve of the earth, would simply fall right off into oblivion. In fact, the real-life obstacles were probably worse. Yet in spite of all of this, thousands went willingly to die of scurvy and of thirst, to perish on alien rocks and on foreign spears. Historians have filled many exhaustively footnoted volumes with their explanations of why this chronically impoverished fleck of a nation achieved so many improbable feats. And their theories have great merit, I’m sure. Still, I figured if I wanted to make sense of it all, I would do better to ask a sailor.