The Taste of Conquest by Michael Krondl Read Free Book Online

economy hum, many panicked. The loss of the spice trade “would be like the loss of milk and nourishment to an infant,” wrote the spice dealer Girolamo Priuli in his journal in July 1501. And in many ways, it was, though it wouldn’t be until a hundred years later that the Dutch finally choked off the teat of prosperity.
    Bemoaning the city’s fate has been a favorite pastime ever since. But there may be more to it now. The city’s population has shrunk by a third in the last twenty years. Foreigners do arrive to settle in the city, just as they have always done, but they are a trickle compared to the exodus. Jurubeba, in her mellifluous Brazilian accent, murmurs how, yes, Venice is shrinking but how the community is più profondo, “deeper.” I don’t ask if becoming deeper in a city that is sinking is necessarily the best thing. Luca shakes his head as he finishes his Prosecco: “The shrinking of the population is a shock to the system. All the food stores are closing so that they can sell masks, but not only masks. Lately, for some reason, everyone is opening lingerie stores. A great explosion of intimate apparel!” Luca bursts into laughter—he doesn’t find this entirely displeasing.
    D OGES AND F ISHERMEN
     
    Luca is right about the lingerie stores: I counted four as I made my way—a little unsteadily—to the Museo Correr the next morning. The musty civic history museum is tucked into one of the homely, neoclassical palaces that hem in the much-photographed Piazza San Marco. Like Venice itself, the Correr is all hype and illusion. Every society is a Potemkin village to some degree, built to appear as it would like to be seen, but nowhere is this more true than in the city that sprouted from the lagoon, where marble façades mask simple brick structures teetering on wooden sticks stuck in mud. When Venice’s role on the world stage shrank to insignificance in the sixteenth—but most especially, the seventeenth—century, its inhabitants rewrote her history and rebuilt the backdrop to reflect the new story line. As with the cuisine, the myth of Venice was fossilized into its current form in the nineteenth century, and much to my frustration, the spices are almost as absent from the myth as they are from the cooking.
    The Museo Correr is an institution devoted to this willful amnesia, its permanent exhibition a particularly bombastic staging of the nineteenth-century myth. Grand pictures of battles and displays of guns and armor tell a magnificent epic of a mighty imperial power ruled by great doges resplendent as any European prince. In the Correr’s version of history, the most glorious moment came in 1571, at the Battle of Lepanto, when a Venetian-led navy cleared the Mediterranean of the infidel Turk. What you won’t get from the operatic paintings of dueling triremes plunging through roiling waves is that the famous skirmish is widely seen as Venice’s last gasp of power in the inland sea, that in its aftermath, the Turks systematically annexed Venice’s overseas possessions. As you walk from room to room, staring up at portrait after portrait of majestic doges done up in kingly, gold-stitched robes, you never find out that, before Lepanto, just about every one of them had started out as a businessman dealing in grain, wine, cheese, salt, but above all, in spices. As you admire vitrines filled with shiny gold ducats, zecchini, and scudi d’oro, you may notice the plaque that explains that the coins circulated from Europe to India—though, of course, it doesn’t mention why Indian museums are chockablock with old Venetian coins.
    All the same, there is a certain logic to the Correr myth. By 1571, the Republic was on its way out as a commercial superpower, and so it only made sense for Venetians to reinvent themselves. The great trading entrepôt turned itself into the entertainment capital of Europe. Gambling at the casinos took the place of speculating on the spice market, and shopping for