On the Shores of the Mediterranean (6 page)

We set off for the Bellomunno horse-drawn branch on the Rampe del Campo in rain that became progressively heavier while we waited for a bus to take us there.

Travelling up Via Don Bosco, having passed Charles’s enormous workhouse, was more like being in the Mile End Road on a wet December afternoon than twelve o’clock in Naples, in August. It was not therefore surprising that we missed the whistle stop for the Rampe del Campo and found ourselves at the beginning of the long haul up to the cemetery plateau, and by the time I realized the mistake and had managed to struggle forward through the bus shouting the equivalent in Italian of ‘Here, I say …’ to
the driver and had persuaded him to make an unscheduled stop, we were just coming up to the concrete fly-over.

He did stop, under the fly-over, making it abundantly clear that he thought we must be a couple of tomb robbers, wanting to get down in a place that has very little else to offer in the way of diversion, even in fine weather, except a visit to the Cimitero Vecchio.

But there, underneath the fly-over, with ten horses, and everyone else involved taking a breather before attacking the long
salita
, was one of Bellomunno’s huge, jet black, baroque hearses with a jet black coffin inside behind expanses of glittering plate glass, a top-hatted, long-black-coated coachman on the box, and a pair of uniformed mutes doubling as grooms holding the two lead horses’ heads with, behind them, four pairs of magnificent, jet black Dutch horses, like the leaders all tossing their heads and all steaming like mad. And behind the hearse a long line of black motor cars, containing the supporters.

‘What happened to the old
cocchiero
?’ Wanda asked the coachman on the box high overhead who was about twenty-five and as wet as we were. ‘He was a very kind man. The last time we came to the Rampe del Campo was in a taxi and he sent us back to Naples in one of your motor hearses to save us the fare.’

‘He died in 1973,’ he said. ‘They gave him a fine funeral. And you, too, will soon be dead if you don’t change your clothes,’ looking down on us where we stood in a pair of puddles. ‘At the top of the
salita
,’ he went on pointing up the hill, ‘in Largo Santa Maria, beyond the Cemetery of Santa Maria, there is a pizzeria called the Loggia del Paradiso [Verandah of Paradise] which overlooks it. That is the cemetery we are bound for. Go to the Loggia and tell them I sent you. They will dry your clothes by the oven and lend you some while you’re eating. The hearse which will take this coffin down into the cemetery from the gates is a motor one.
I can’t get into it with ten horses. After the funeral the driver and his men will go to the Loggia to have their lunch, and when they go back to the city, which will be about two o’clock, I will ask them to take you with them and drop you off in Piazza Garibaldi.’

From the automobiles, which were as black as the hearse itself and crammed with mourners, the women heavily veiled, came the sounds of groans and sobbing. The
cocchiero
winked and waved his whip with a graceful gesture, comprehending everything in and out of sight: the pouring rain, the appalling, thundering traffic, the fearful landscape, the keening women and the corpse high overhead behind him.

‘Com’è bella Napoli!’
he said.

Then he shouted to the men holding the heads of the leaders; they let them go and they were off, their hooves skidding a bit on the cobbles, eventually breaking into a trot with the grooms hanging on behind the hearse, out into the pouring rain up towards the Cemetery of Santa Maria del Pianto.

Warm and dry and full of lunch on the way back to Piazza Garibaldi in the Bellomunno motor hearse, we caught up on what had been happening to the old firm in the course of our twenty years’ absence.

They no longer had the white horse-drawn hearse used for children, or the small, black, two-horse one in their stables at the Rampe del Campo; but they still had two of the big ones, one of which – the twin of the one we had seen that morning – was undergoing extensive repairs and redecoration which would take many months to complete. This work of reconstruction was being carried out, part time, by a skilled body-worker from Alfa-Romeo, called Vincenzo di Luca, a man known in the horse-drawn carriage trade as ‘a builder and varnisher’. His family had carried on these trades for generations, and he was one of the last, if not the last,
to practise them in Naples – it was fortunate for Bellomunno that he was still a youngish man. His son, who was about eighteen or nineteen, although capable of doing this work and at present assisting his father, preferred to look after the horses in the stables at the Rampe del Campo and this was what he was now doing. To build a new hearse of this kind would take three and a half years, and it was probable that Bellomunno would eventually decide to do so. The cost of building such a vehicle would be prodigious. It would involve the use of various sorts of wood, all of which would have to be properly seasoned, iron, steel, brass, leather, cloth, glass etc., and the services of one or two craftsmen such as di Luca who would now have to carry out a wide variety of works which would previously have been carried out by a number of specialized craftsmen: body-makers who built the upper parts, carriage-makers who constructed and put together all the underparts, wheelwrights, joiners, fitters, trimmers, blacksmiths, painters and polishers. Such a hearse might be given up to twenty separate coats of paint and varnish. One of the great difficulties in the 1980s was to find suitable rubber to make the solid tyres.

In 1983 a horse-drawn funeral employing ten horses cost between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 lire. The last twelve-horse funeral Bellomunno had organized had been that of Achille Laura, a shipowner who had also been mayor of Naples, earlier that year. He was what is known as a
pezzo grosso
, literally a big piece, an important man with various far-reaching affiliations; everyone who was anyone and almost everyone who was no one turned out for his funeral, for fear that his absence might be noted. A funeral of this sort could well have cost 7,000,000 lire.

Such funerals are particularly popular with senior members of the Camorra, just as Camorra weddings – at which diamond-studded shirts are often worn by male guests – are notable for
conspicuous consumption. Whether horse-drawn or motorized, they are not very popular with those Neapolitan undertakers who are called on to organize them. The last time Bellomunno put in a bill to the family of a deceased Camorrista for a horse-drawn funeral – whose funeral they didn’t say – instead of receiving a cheque through the post, they got a bomb through the counting-house window.

During the autumn following our Neapolitan excursion we laid what plans we could for our clockwise journey round the Mediterranean, which, thanks to Wanda telling me to get on with it and plunging me into Naples instead of going off and sitting on top of the Rock of Gibraltar and feeling imperial, had started before it was intended to.

That winter we set off for Chioggia, a fishing port at the southern end of the Venetian Lagoon, about twenty miles south of Venice, a place that is picturesque enough in summer but in winter can look a bit pinched and poverty-stricken and has extremely draughty side-streets. It is also noted for having inhabitants who are extremely difficult for an outsider ever to get to
know. Here, worn down by the efforts of trying to hire a boat for a private trip to Venice at a price we could afford from monoglot Chioggiotti who see quite enough of polyglot visitors such as ourselves for eight months of the year without being pestered by them during the other four, we decided to leave their austere but strangely attractive city – in which by far the jolliest place is the fish market – by public transport. In summer we could have gone the whole way by steamer, but because this was the dead season there was no direct service and we would have to travel first by boat across the Porto di Chioggia, the southernmost of the entrances to the Lagoon, to the Litorale di Pellestrina, one of the three elongated, offshore dunes which together form the Venetian Lagoon and at the same time protect it from the fury of the Adriatic, and from there take a No. 11 bus along the Litorale to Porto di Malamocco, the entrance to the Lagoon which now takes all the biggest ships, where it is driven on to a ferry and taken across to the Litorale di Lido to continue its journey to Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, where one can take a No. 11
vaporetto
across the Lagoon to Venice. Nothing to it, really.

Although we had failed in our dealings with the Chioggiotti, it would have been easier, if we had been really pushed, to do a deal with them than with the Veneziani, who have a tariff for everything and with whom there is no possibility of bargaining, something a lot of other representatives of Christendom discovered back at the time of the Fourth Crusade on their way to the Holy Land.

At the last moment before the Venetian fleet, which the Crusaders had booked in 1202 to take them to the scene of the action, was due to sail with them on board, from their assembly point on the Litorale di Lido, some of their commanders found themselves unable to meet their commitments to the Veneziani who, although there were fewer Crusaders than had been originally
contracted for, still insisted on being paid, according to the tariff, the full passage money for those who had not turned up.

This deadlock was only resolved when the Doge Enrico Dandolo, who in spite of being nearly ninety and almost blind was leading the expedition in person, made a deal with their leaders whereby the Venetians would forgo part of the payment in exchange for help while en route in re-taking Zara, one of their ports on the Adriatic, which had gone over to the Hungarians.

But even this was not enough for the Venetians. Once they had reduced this Christian city with the aid of the Crusaders, a campaign that was punished by the Pope excommunicating all the Venetians and all the Crusaders taking part, the Doge then imposed a further condition: that the Crusaders should help the Venetians to storm yet another stronghold of Christendom, the Greek Byzantine city of Constantinople, in order, ostensibly, to restore the Emperor, who had been deposed, but in fact to revenge the death of thousands of Venetians who had been slaughtered there by the Greeks ten years previously, and to make Venice the most influential power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Doge himself led the combined forces against the city in April 1204, breaching the seaward walls and taking it by storm, virtually destroying it and gathering loot of a magnificence that was to make Venice the envy of the world. It also made her – personified by the Doge, who stayed on and eventually died and was buried there – mistress of three-eighths of what was now to become a Latinized city, as well as of Durazzo, on what are now the Albanian shores of the Adriatic, Lacedaemon, otherwise Sparta, the Greek islands of the Cyclades and Sporades, and Crete. The other five-eighths of the city became the property of Count Baldwin, who was crowned as Latin Emperor of the East in what had now become, as Santa Sofia, a Roman Catholic cathedral, as did half the Byzantine territory which lay outside the walls. The other half
was given to various Crusader knights, who held it as vassals. Altogether, for the Venetians, it had been a famous victory.

By the time we sailed from Chioggia, the Lagoon, the Litorali, and the Adriatic out beyond them were shrouded in freezing fog, and when we got down at the boat terminus on the Litorale di Pellestrina, which is just opposite the cemetery, and decided to miss the bus connection and take a later one in order to see the
murazzi
, the sea walls, it was with some regret that we watched its rear lights disappearing into the fog.

The houses in Pellestrina, clustered about a big white church, were a series of rectangles painted in ox-blood, vivid blues and greens and soft greys that rendered them almost invisible in the fog. Closely shuttered against it, as they were, only the drifts of smoke from the strange, tall Venetian chimneys showed that they were inhabited.

Walking amongst them we came to the
murazzi
, on the seaward side of the Litorale. They had been conceived by a cosmographer, Father Vincenzo Coronelli, in 1716, and work was finally begun on them in 1744 under the direction of Bernardino Zendrini, a mathematician. It took thirty-eight years to complete them at a cost of forty million Venetian gold ducats, and they were the last major works undertaken by the
Magistrati delle Acque
, the Magistrates of the Waters, who were responsible for building and maintaining the defences of the Lagoon and the city against the Adriatic, before the shameful extinction of this Republic of the Sea by Napoleon in 1797. They replaced previous defences which consisted of wooden palisades that had to be renewed every six years, long groynes extending seawards and musk-smelling tamarisk planted to give stability to what was mostly sand, defences that each winter had been breached and destroyed with monotonous regularity by the sirocco storms. More than 14 feet thick at the base, two and a half miles long, and nearly 20 feet high, they
are built of gleaming white blocks of marble, some of them more than 6 feet long and a yard and a half wide, all brought from Istria on the Yugoslavian side of the Adriatic in barges, the same stone used to build so many of the churches in Venice and the Lagoon. Now, ghostly in the fog, they stretched away into it on either side, the only sound the Adriatic sucking at their outer defences, an enormous breakwater of heaped-up boulders.

Although the
murazzi
are the most impressive to the eye of all the works carried out by the
Magistrati
in and around the Lagoon, equally important was what they did to the rivers. It was they who were responsible for the death of the Po di Tramontana. Until the sixteenth century the mouth of the river was directed towards the Valle dei Sette Morti, an area of the Venetian Lagoon north of Chioggia, which the river had turned into an area of
laguna morta
, dead lagoon, only inundated at high tides. They decided, with the presence of mind and self-interest which had always to their rivals been one of the Republic’s least lovable characteristics, to direct the river southwards. In five years thousands of labourers cut a channel, called the Sacca di Goro, from the Po Grande into a bay of the Adriatic east of Pomposa, where the great Benedictine abbey still stands in which Guido d’Arezzo invented the musical scale. By this boldly conceived piece of hydraulic engineering the Po di Tramontana ceased to exist, Venice was preserved and the results for the Po Valley and the Delta were disastrous. The silting process was accelerated and, although the area of the Delta increased nearly three times in the space of 220 years, the inundations increased and no one, except the Venetians, was better off.

But in spite of their success in turning away from the southern part of the Lagoon and finally destroying the Po di Tramontana, they were still subject to the recurrent nightmare that the same silting-up process might happen further north in the part of the Lagoon in which the city stood and deprive it of the isolation on
which it depended for at least part of its power and importance; it might also block the vital channels to the sea.

The Republic had before it the awful examples of other great ports in the Mediterranean, long since silted up and left far from the sea, all of which we were subsequently to visit in the course of our travels: Pergamum, Ephesus, Miletus, Patara, the high and dry port of Xanthus in Lycia, in western Asia Minor. And much nearer home they had the equally awful example of Ravenna, a former lagoon city, dependent for its continued existence on tidal movements, acquired by them but only long after it was high and dry, the only memorial to its former Byzantine greatness five splendid churches in the wilderness. And there was also Ferrara, founded on the right bank of the Po in AD 450 by refugees from Attila and his Huns, left equally high and dry.

In the seventeenth century the
Magistrati
re-routed a number of other rivers so that instead of flowing into their lagoon, they by-passed it completely and flowed into the sea. When the Venetians had finished this colossal work, the Brenta, which originally came out into the Lagoon behind Venice, entered the Adriatic south of Chioggia; the Sile, a very pretty little river which, nevertheless, was doing enormous damage to the Lagoon by pouring silt into it north of the city, was directed into a canal which carried it into what until then had been the bed of the Piave and into the sea near Jesolo; while the Piave itself was turned into the bed of the next river to the north of it, the Livenza.

Later that afternoon we descended from the No. 11 bus on the Litorale di Lido and groped our way through the fog to a dark, deserted waterfront behind the Casino, which faced the Lagoon. It is difficult to write feelingly about something you can’t see, and the fog that shrouded the Lagoon was impenetrable. In fact we could hear more than we could see of it: the melancholy crying
of gulls, the tolling of a bell mounted on a buoy moored out in one of the channels, the noise of boat engines and, occasionally, angry cries as helmsmen, set on collision courses, recorded near misses. Altogether, with the whole of the Mediterranean to choose from, it was a hell of a place to end up in on such a day. We might just as well have been on the Mersey, for all the
genius loci
I was able to sop up, and this made me think of home, a hot bath and a couple of slugs of Glenmorangie.

‘You’re in trouble, author,’ said Wanda, my companion in life’s race, near the mark as always, sensing that I felt like emigrating back to Britain, ‘if you can’t see what you’re looking at.’

As she said this, as if to show that she wasn’t always right, the fog lifted, not everywhere, not over Venice itself which remained cocooned in it, but here and there, and for a few moments that didn’t even add up to minutes we found ourselves looking down long corridors of vapour illuminated by an eerie yellow light that must have been the last of the setting sun, down which one had distant prospects of mud banks uncovered by the tide, with labyrinths of channels running through them, and one or two of the almost innumerable islands of the Lagoon which supported until quite recently – and some still support – monasteries, nunneries, forts, miniature versions of Venice, a cemetery, and the lonely enclosure to which, once every ten years when it begins to fill up, bones are taken; fishing settlements, lodges used by the wildfowlers who in winter wait in barrels sunk in the Lagoon for the dawn and dusk flights, quarantine stations, lighthouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons, barracks, magazines that, when they were full of gunpowder, had a tendency to go up in the air, taking their custodians with them, deserted factories, old people’s homes, private houses, market gardens, vineyards, and some that were just open expanses that a farmer might visit once or twice a year to cut the hay. The channels among them were marked by long
lines of
bricole
, wooden piles either driven into the bottom with their heads pressed together, as if they were lovers meeting in a lagoon, or else in clusters of three or four, also with their heads pressed together as if they were conspirators discussing some dark secret. Some of the more important channels had lights on the
bricole
. Some that were only navigable by the smallest sorts of craft, such as gondolas and boats called
sandali
, were indicated by lines of saplings.

There was another, equally momentary vista of part of one of the industrial zones that had been created by filling in vast areas of the northern part of the Lagoon and its mud flats, a huge, nightmare, end-of-the-world place without houses or permanent inhabitants, made up of oil refineries, chemical, fertilizer, plastic, steel, light alloy, coke, gas and innumerable other plants all belching dense smoke and residual gases into the sky and effluents into the Lagoon, so various and awful that collectively they made up a brew that even to a layman sounded as if it had been devised by a crew of mad scientists intent on destroying the human race, which in effect is what they are doing. Then the fog closed in again, more impenetrable than ever now that the sun was almost gone.

According to the tide table I had bought that morning in Chioggia it was now just after low water at Porto di Lido, what had been the principal entrance to the Lagoon and to Venice when it was commonplace to see 60,000-ton tankers wandering about in St Mark’s Basin. This was until they dredged the deep-water channel from Porto Malamocco to Marghera, using the material brought up from the bottom as infilling for the Third Industrial Zone. About now the flood would be beginning to run through Porto di Lido, Porto di Malamocco, and also through Porto di Chioggia, the three entrances that the Magistrates of the Waters had left open centuries ago, having sealed off the others after years
of trial and error, by doing so preserving a delicate balance which allowed Venice to function both as a city and a great seaport. Now, for six hours, the tide would flow into the Lagoon, which is not what it appears to be – a single simple expanse of water – but is made up of three distinct basins, each separated one from the other by watersheds known as the
spartiacque
, spreading through its main arteries and myriad veins, channels so small that no chart shows them, and scouring and filling the canals of the city itself. Then, at the end of the sixth hour, when it was at the full, the tide would begin to run out, loaded with the effluent of the industrial zones, which sometimes includes dangerous quantities of ammonia and its by-products of oxidation, phenol, cyanide, sulphur, chlorine, naphtha, as well as oil from passing ships and boats, all the liquid sewage of Venice, the peculiarly filthy filth of a city entirely without drains, a large part of the solid ordure produced by its inhabitants, and at least a part of that produced by Mestre and Marghera, together with vast quantities of insoluble domestic detergent. One of the more awful sights in the Lagoon used to be a mud bank at Marghera with mountains of ordure rising from it, preserved, presumably for all eternity, or until they burst, in plastic bags. There they waited for an exceptionally high water, an
acqua alta
, to distribute them over other distant parts of the Lagoon, with thousands of gulls, apparently unable to penetrate them with their beaks, hanging frustratedly over them. All because a large incineration plant, built in the Second Industrial Zone, failed to work.