L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JUNE 28, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 14 L'Italo-Americano ELIZABETH SALTHOUSE E very year hundreds of trees are cut down. They're trimmed, sanded and hand- painted, then pile-dri- ven into the dense mud of the Venetian lagoon. It's a practice that has been going on for cen- turies for very good reasons, but few people give them a second glance. And even fewer know why they line the historic canals. So what are Venice's multicol- ored pali da casada poles there for and what history do they hide? Visiting Venice is undoubted- ly a sensory overload for most of us. From ornate waterside palazzi to delicate handmade lace, from jet-black gondolas to tasty cicchetti plates, from glis- tening glasswork to the gentle waves slapping against the canal side, there is so much to take in. So its not surprising that details get lost in the abundance. But focus in on elements and you start to see new features of build- ings or canal views appearing out of the miasma. Perhaps you'll see stone faces glaring from buildings. Probably you'll notice the variety of boats on the water. Or, maybe, you'll spot some wooden trunks stick- ing out from the water. And once you spot one, you'll start to see hundreds; they're all over the place, randomly gathered in front of houses or dotted around the lagoon. But not all poles are the same. If you take a vaporetto water bus or water taxi anywhere across the lagoon, from St Mark's to Murano for example, you will undoubtedly see rough- hewn bare wooden poles sticking out of the water. They're arranged in threes with metal bands holding them together, but otherwise seem randomly placed. Unless you are a mariner. Then they make perfect sense a s t h e y a c t a s a m a p o f t h e lagoon marking out the naviga- ble routes through the shallow, muddy waters. Sail your motor- boat to one side of the poles and you have free passage along ancient channels carved into the lagoon-bed. Sail to the other side and you'll quickly run aground on the mudflats and mud banks that lie submerged less than a couple of feet beneath the sur- face. These posts are bricole (sin- gular bricola) and, today, around 90,000 of them mark out safe passage, the location of buried electricity lines and other utili- ties. They even have reflectors and metal plates tacked onto them to make them visible in headlights at night or via radar in fog. Ingenious eh? Bricole, for the most part, inhabit the wide, open water of the lagoon. But closer into town there are different poles that cluster around palace fronts; they're called paline or pali da casada. Paline (singular palina), liter- ally meaning "poles," are driven two to three meters into the c a n a l b e d t o a c t a s m o o r i n g points for boats and watercraft. T h e y t e n d t o b e s i m p l e t r e e trunks, with the bark removed and points chopped in at both ends. Much like bricole, paline are sourced sustainably from certified European forests, pre- dominantly in Germany, France and the Balkan area. And typi- cally the wood used is oak, aca- cia or chestnut, as these survive well and harden in the anaerobic muds of the lagoon. Pali da casada, or "poles of the family," however, are much more fancy pants and individual, with much more to tell. Pali da casada are easy to spot as they're brightly colored, often painted with a spiral pattern like a barbershop pole, and usually clustered at the water door or side door to palaces, offices or h o t e l s a l o n g t h e c a n a l s o f Venice. Unlike the plain paline though, pali are not mooring p o l e s . T h e y w e r e o r i g i n a l l y designed to help gondoliers rec- ognize houses, salons and casi- nos and, at night, would have had an oil lamp on the top to illuminate the palina mooring point. Today the oil lamp is long gone, but many pali are still topped off by a cappellozzo, a stylized, carved representation of a flame. Once you start to see the pali you notice that each palazzo has a different color scheme. So some poles are red and white with a white cappellozzo, some are turquoise and white, some are blue and orange with a gold top and others still are green and blue with gilded caps. Most, but not all, are carefully hand paint- ed in a striped, twisting pattern. And the combinations seem end- less, but the color schemes have a simple explanation; they repre- sent the house or family heraldic colors and some have even sug- gested that they once represented the political leanings of a family, too. At the peak of its power and wealth, the heraldic colors of the Venetian aristocrats painted the city, not just their pali, in a kalei- doscope of color. Noble families had their own gondolas for trans- port, painted in their family hues. And their personal gondoliers w o u l d h a v e w o r n t u n i c s a n d hosiery to match. So not only would you have been able to rec- ognize the palazzi of each family from their painted poles, but also their gondolas and gondoliers, too. Everything was branded and with an estimated 10,000 gondo- las on the water in the 15th and 16th centuries, it must have been quite a sight. Sadly this dazzling array of color was brought to an abrupt stop when Doge Girolamo Pruili sanctioned the Sumptuary Laws of 1562. The new regulations forbade the bright, lavish or extravagant decoration of gondo- las, which had become a compe- tition of one-upmanship between rich families, and set strict rules on what would and would not be permitted. From that day on gon- dolas had to be painted black to a standard design with just a few flourishes of metalwork allowed and gondoliers took on a more standard uniform too. Only the p a l i d a c a s a d a w e r e l e f t u n t o u c h e d t o c o n t i n u e d o w n through the centuries, although you can occasionally still see colored gondolas at racing regat- ta s w h e n a r a in b o w o f b o a ts s p e e d s o n c e a g a i n d o w n t h e Grand Canal. Today few, if any, families still have their own gondolas, let alone gondoliers and the brand- ing of them in liveried colors has long been forbidden. The num- bers of boats have plummeted from 10,000 gondolas to a paltry 450 or so, most of which are now hired out by the half hour to tourists. But one element of the colorful Republic remains: the delightfully decorative candy- colored pali da casada poles that stand proudly still outside their palazzi. And although technolo- gy exists to replace wood with hardier, more durable synthetic materials, I, for one, hope that the old, authentic traditions will continue for centuries to come. Look out for this colorful forest of the next time you glide down the canals in Venice, they're a little piece of history hidden in plain sight. Venice's pali da casada and the history they hide Pali da casada were originally painted in the colors of the noble families to whose palace they belonged LIFE PEOPLE PLACES HERITAGE

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