Buon Redentore! (UPDATED!)

Today's actually the official holiday of the Redentore in Venice, but you wouldn't have thought so if you'd seen the festivities last night!

Saturday morning was like the Venetian equivalent of Thanksgiving... Everybody out doing last minute shopping before the stores closed that afternoon, and delicious smells foreshadowing dinner were emanating from every window!

In the evening, we had our own feast with my in-laws on the Lido, and then made it back to Venice in time for the fireworks (or "foghi," as they're known in Venetian). By that time, the party was in full swing... the waterfront was one makeshift banquet table after another, and even the restaurant tables were overflowing into the alleyways.

Many Venetians, normally pretty restrained folks, were pretty well lubricated by that time... One place in Via Garibaldi even had karaoke going! A guy in the middle of a verse staggered over to us as we were passing through and wanted my husband to sing into the mike. Problem was, it was actually a bread roll! My husband's truly a sweetly dignified soul, and politely declined. (I told him that, if it'd been me, I would have tapped it and asked, "Is this thing turned on?")

Anyway, I had been inspired that morning by an article cited by Lifehacker to try to shoot pictures of the fireworks. Now, if there's one thing that just slightly less cruddy than my phone camera, it's my digital! So, the shots are not exactly impressive, especially because I don't have access to photoshop at the moment. Still, I'll share the more particular (but not necessarily better) photos here. (Hey, it's the next best thing to being there!)

For example, this shot below is way overexposed, but I like it because you can make out silhouettes of the boats and of the belltower and church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the left.

Since all of them see a 45 minute fireworks show every single year, by now Venetians are rather fireworks snobs. Color, pacing, sound and patterns are all reviewed at length as soon as the display is over. (The buzz I'm hearing so far seems to indicate that this past one was average...)

But my favorites are the figures!

We've got circles...

Spirals...

And my all-time favorite (even if the photo below is hard to see...) hearts!

And, lastly, a shot from the finale!

More? You can see a slideslow of snapshots of the whole display at Redentore 2005 - a photoset on Flickr...

Buon Redentore!!

P.S. Another interesting perspective on the Festa del Redentore is available from author/inhabitant Nan McElroy at "Living Venice... and Beyond"!

Categories: Venice

La Festa del Redentore - The Votive Bridge

For the official procession for the Venetian Festa del Redentore, from the very beginning, there was the not-so-small problem of the wide Giudecca Canal to cross, which the Venetians dealt with by annually constructing and then dismanting a temporary pontoon bridge from the Zattere (the waterfront on the southwest side of the city) to the island of the Giudecca. As you can see here, the Doge (the Venetian head of state) along with the entire government would then cross this bridge in procession to render homage to Christ Redeemer for stopping the plague, every single year until the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon in 1797.

As you can see, this year's bridge is just about ready! In order to disrupt water traffic as little as possible, they build it in three sections, and the middle section will be installed at the very last minute. The "votive bridge" will then open officially for pilgrimages to the Church of the Redentore Saturday morning.

But that's just the beginning of the festival! There's going to be more to come!!

Categories: Venice

The Plague and the Redeemer

In 1575-77, Venice was hit by a terrible epidemic of the plague, one of the largest since the Black Death back in 1348. In an almost unimaginable calamity, as much as a fourth of the population would be killed by the pestilence!

The Venetian government was at a complete loss to stop the outbreak. In a last ditch effort, the Republic passed legislation making a religious vow to Christ the Redeemer Himself (or the Redentore in Italian) asking him to take pity on Venice and stop the plague, for which the city would gratefully build a church in His honor, and forever commemorate His intervention each year with a religious holiday, processions, and other festivities on every third Sunday of July. When the plague ended, the Venetians were as good as their word, and built the Church of the Redentore on the island of the Giudecca, which you can even virtually tour here.

And the celebration still happens to this very day! It is one of the few festivities that Venetians still feel passionately about (unlike Carnival, for example, which most Venetians refuse to celebrate, and is now almost entirely for the tourists' benefit!)

This is the week that Venetians have been waiting all year for...

It's the Festa del Redentore!!

(More updates from the field as the week continues...)

Categories: Venice

More dissing Venice (and ruining the Redentore?)

Seems that the Telegraph's doing an entire series dissing Venice this week... This time, they're criticising the privatization (and therefore "Disneyfication") of the Venetian Carnival.

Fact of the matter is that Carnival in Venice is already "Disneyfied"! It had largely died out by the 1980s, when it was revived as a way to get tourists into the city during the crappy winter weather months. Most Venetians hate Carnival, and skip town during it if they can!

But privatizing also the Venetians' beloved Festival of the Redeemer?? That would be adding insult to injury for the few, already tourist beleagered Venetians left!! (You can read my past posts about Venice's treasured Festa del Redentore here...)

The Festa del Redentore: Dinner & a Show!

To tell you the truth, not all Venetians do the procession across the votive bridge to the Church of the Redentore on the island of the Giudecca every year... but that doesn't mean they don't celebrate! (In fact, it would be inconceivable for a Venetian not to celebrate this festa!!)

As you can see here, Saturday afternoon and evening, everyone who can beg, borrow or steal a boat decorates it, piles in family and friends, and heads out to the Giudecca Canal and the Basin below Saint Mark's Square. Then everybody, whether they're in a boat or not, has a massive feast of traditional Venetian dishes which lasts for hours, and waits for 11:30 pm, when the fireworks begin!

For a good 45 minutes, fireworks are fired into the Venetian night sky from the Giudecca Canal, and make quite a spectacular effect framed among the ancient bell towers of the city and reflected in the waters of the lagoon, as you can see at the link above as well as at this one!

As an experience, I highly recommend it (especially in the company of festive Venetians!)

(You can read more in English about the festivities, and see more photos like the spectacular one at left, at Venice's official city website.)

Categories: Venice

A Palladian Afternoon in Venice

Yesterday, I caught the ferry boat that takes cars to Venice's beach island, the Lido. It passes through the wide Giudecca canal that forms the underbelly of the city, where you can get some unparallelled great Venetian views!

To wit, in one fell swoop, you can get a spectacular gander of not one BUT THREE churches designed by the virtuoso Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio!

As proof, I've uploaded to Flickr these shots of mine taken of the gleamingly gorgeous sixteenth-century white marble churches of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle, and the Redentore. Enjoy!!

PhotoHunt: "Triangle"

Wow, this theme for PhotoHunt was harder than you might think, since you don't easily find triangles in nature!

On one hand, I was a little tempted to stage a portrait, but I would have had to scare up three willing participants. On the other, I might have had some interesting opportunities to look for triangles tomorrow at the celebration of the Redentore here in Venice, but I'm simply not up to suffering through the heat- and humidity-wave we're in right now just to maybe get the shot.

So, depending on whether photo manipulation is allowed, I may or may not have sort of cheated on this one! Actually, though, it honestly happened completely by accident... I was playing around last week with a photo editor on my phone, selected a vertical mirror option, and this is what I got! Rather cool, if I do say so myself!

The original photo, in which I caught a shot of a bit of a traffic pileup near the Piazza San Marco last week, isn't bad at all, but it's far less surreal, as you can see at right.


Next week's PhotoHunt theme is "hanging". Now, that should be fun!

PhotoHunt