The Taste of Conquest by Michael Krondl Read Free Book Online Page A

local gimcracks replaced dealing in exotic merchandise. The museum’s back rooms are full of roulette wheels and card games, acrobats tumbling out of pictures, and fantastic human pyramids, eight men high. In 1523, even as the old pepper-laden fleet had shrunk to the odd, pathetic boatload of spice, the new doge, Andrea Gritti, started to invite poets, artists, and musicians to a city better known for its merchants and insurance underwriters. Stone bridges and civic monuments were scenically arranged to reflect the city’s splendor in the milky waters of the canals. This is the Venice you see today; it’s what draws the visitors and pays the bills. Under Gritti, Carnevale, long the disorderly flip side to the city’s carefully constructed social order, came under central control. Where now tourists compete for the privilege of being smothered by the Piazza San Marco’s famous pigeons, the doges used to sit on their reviewing stands watching official parades that were part church procession and part Fourth of July parade (bands and all). The razzle-dazzle kept the tourists coming even while overseas Venice was washed up.
    So if the Correr is all sham and show, where can you find out about the city’s history? The best place to start may not be a museum at all; it may be a fish market. To get there, follow the signs to the Rialto Bridge, then go down the Ruga Orefici and Ruga Speziali (the goldsmith and spice seller streets) until you see a large neo-Gothic pavilion. This is the Pescaria, the city’s ancient fish market. It’s a place where you can get an almost visceral sense of Venice’s origins and its first real source of wealth. You can see it in the masses of sparkling seafood, in the wriggling live shrimp no bigger than a roach and the giant six-inch shrimp that belie the name, in the translucent canoce and bags of razor clams the color of mother-of-pearl, in the giant tuna whose eyes glisten in the morning light, and in the scorfano whose pink getup seems hardly appropriate to a fish with such a fearsome grimace. Here, you understand how the Queen of the Adriatic was spawned in the wriggling lagoon just like the fishy bounty beneath the canopy of the Pescaria.
    Recent archaeological digs under the murky waters of the canals have revealed that the dependable riches of the local tides drew people here as early as the third century. The proudly separate Venetians like to think that their city was founded by Italians from the mainland escaping marauding barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries. (Luca still refers to the mainlanders, those from the terra firma, as barbarians.) But more likely, those early marsh dwellers were just looking for a spot to set up camp near the fertile fishing grounds. They eventually settled on one of the few islands that remained dry during high tide. They called it Rivo Alto, meaning “high bank,” later shortened to Rialto.
    At first, the city of Venice was no more than a stretch of wetland, scattered with a handful of boggy islands. Streams meandered through the marsh, one of which would eventually become the Grand Canal. It was a highly improbable place to build a town. Those early Venetians had to drain the boggy landscape, shore up banks, transport soil from miles away, and drive wooden stakes into the sludge. The city was built first of mud and wattle; then bricks; and finally, to give the impression of solidity, sheets of marble facing were shipped in to cover the plain brick. Nevertheless, the city kept sinking, even as it does today. Archaeologists calculate that by the eleventh century, when the mosaic floors of the great churches at Torcello and San Marco were laid, the ground level had already been raised by more than six feet at the two sites. For the city to remain above water, neither the people nor the government could ever let up on their efforts to keep the houses from flooding and the canals from silting up. This kind of cooperative spirit would come in handy