News & Notes
San Marco news, hot off the presses.
Creeping past Carnevale
One of the signs of creeping age – not that senescence and Lucy's untarnished creamy skin-tints are concepts that readily share a tandem – is the way Grandpa Time fast-forwards on you. It seems but yesterday we were airborne and Ireland-bound (the excellent Hampton...
Trying to snow.
The prosecco corks it seems to have hardly stopped popping to welcome in a New Year we are promised on all sides will be grimmer than the last, and already it's February. And arctic. The coldest end of January since the previous coldest end of January. Yesterday...
Around the Alcarria
Of course, I should have known that ending a message with 'a bientôt' was asking for trouble. Four months have passed in the blink, it seems, of an eye. The first of them was a well deserved jaunt round the Alcarria, the quid-pro-quo of holding the bastion in the...
December 6th—The Feast of San Nicolò.
It sometimes seems that saints are revered in inverse proportion to their deeds. It is not clear that Saint Nicholas ever did much of note, other than slip coins into people's shoes – and who hasn't done that? Nonetheless he's the patron Saint of Aberdeen, Russia,...
September 30th—St Jerome’s Day
(June 15th in the Eastern Church, but on this occasion Venice went with the West). In the days of the Republic, one of the five dates on which a state banquet was held, “when the newly-elected members of the Council of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them...
Lucy Minds the Summer Fort
For all my pale and delicate skin-tones and moderate aversion to the rays of Ra, I like this time of year. The lads are away – Chris in London, John-F in Poland, one supposes (he's become a bit strange and secretive with the bus-pass years approaching) – and Lucy left...
Third weekend of July—Festa del Redentore
In 1576, with Venice in the grip of one of the worst plagues in its history, the authorities attempted to bribe God to relent, promising as a quid pro quo for deliverence the construction of a magnificent temple to Christ the Redeemer. A site on the Giudecca was...
July 17th—Saint Marina’s day.
Not, I think, Saint Marina of Aguas Santas (Marina of Orense), but Margaret of Antioch, whose feast day falls in fact on July 20th in the Roman calendar. She is honoured instead by the Eastern Church, where she is known as Santa Marina, on July 17th, the Venetians, as...
All Out of Space-Junk
Thursday evening and Lucy was one of 29 at Davide and Luisa De Franceschi's excellent Trattoria 'Alle due Gondolette' on the Fondamenta delle Capuzine for the launch of Hugh Tolhurst's 'All Out of Space-Junk', no.19 in San Marco Press's ongoing whizz-bang pamphlet...
June 30th—Festa di San Marziale (vulg. S.Marcilian)
Martial was one of the seven bishops sent out by the third century Pope Fabian to preach the Gospel to the Gauls, who were sufficiently unappreciative to martyr most of them. The best known of the bunch was Saint Denis (Paris), but although the life and deeds of St....
