Water Rots the Boat Poles
The covid-stricken world had just begun to open up when I got called for a wine gig in Italy. After surviving sirens and morgue trucks, American mask fights, shuttered rock clubs and the hell of remote school, springtime in Italy sounded so nice that I spent weeks before the trip mildly assuming I’d die in a car crash. I didn’t die, so on the last day of my trip, my reward was seeing Venice.
I rolled my red suitcase back and forth, gazing at the blue dot on my phone as if it would help me find my hotel.
“What should I do in Venice?” I’d asked winemaker Paola Ferraro of Bele Castel, over a glass of Asolo Prosecco so replete with terroir there’s a story in the shadow the liquid would cast on a wine barrel turned on its side for a table.
A colorful boat in the Cannaregio sestiere of Venice
I’m not kidding: that’s what they call a glass of wine in Veneto. L’ombra, shadow. Venetian wine sellers of yore kept their wines cool in the shade by scooching their prosecco stands around the San Marco bell tower as if it were a sundial.
“In Venice?” Paola’d answered: “Get lost. Walk. Take in all the sounds. Forget yourself.”
She said I’d love the local language there. I asked her what the words or accent sounded like. “You’ll know it when you hear it” was all she would say.
Paola Ferraro of Bele Casel, educating me about differences in local wine terms in Asolo DOCG, where her family makes prosecco that practically bursts with local character
I wanted to take Paola’s advice, but I hadn’t planned on getting lost before checking into my hotel. Venice is not a blue dot sort of place. I’d have to rely on how my father taught me to travel: forget the internet, hit whatever watering hole had evolved from the bell tower scene, and make friends–as soon as I dropped off the suitcase.
I’d passed three or four times through the same corridor when a panhandler pointed a finger over his shoulder and intoned, “Là.”
He was right. The gate was there. I rolled my stuff into the Ca’ Nigra Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the front desk, I told Narciso of the mischievous goatee that I knew “l’ombra” and desired more words like it. He let slip which sestiere he and his friends frequent after work. Cannaregio is the northernmost of the districts described by the special Italian word for “neighborhood” that lets you know that there are six of them.
I wouldn’t come close to exploring all six zones in just one day, but I’d go out with a local saying from Narciso that I could use to break the ice.
L’acqua marcise i pali. Narciso wrote it down. He told me it means “Water rots the boat poles,” and that it’s used to admonish anyone who requests a drink of water instead of something stronger.
Narciso teaching me “L’acqua marcise i pali.”
Selling wine in New York City introduced me to people from all over Italy. Their linguistic diversity is as vast and varied as the native grapes that drew me to Italian wine. I collected the vine names like baseball cards—Lambrusco di Sorbara, Malvasia di Lipari, Pallagrello Bianco. The deeper I got into the grapes, the more sayings in dialect came my way. I started noticing idioms that express the same idea with local variations in language, agricultural products, and animals.
Eggplant in italian is “melanzane.” The spelling here reflects the Venetian accent
Mere days before Venice, high on surviving my first time driving in Italy, I’d felt my definite belief that it’s way too hard to become a wine writer dissolve into the modest idea that I should start a blog or something. I could bring in the language stuff….
Then I realized it was called Modo di Bere, way of drinking, a pun on the Italian word for a saying, modo di dire. I sat up behind the steering wheel and thought,
That’s a good idea.
It was time to start having a little fun.
In other words, Water’s bad for you: drink wine. Narciso’s local example of what water destroys—poles for tying up gondolas!—was the third such phrase I’d collected during my visit to Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The first, in Italian Italian, L’acqua fa ruggine, means “Water makes rust.” The second, in a Friulian dialect, sounded like L’agghe vai buine per croz: “Water is for frogs.”
Narciso gave me a tour of the boat dock, explaining that it’s luxurious to have one and that it’s called a “cabana.” We toured the hotel, Narciso dishing 17th century gossip about ambassadors and courtesans. My red rolling suitcase matched the walls of my room. I photographed the colorful glass chandelier, marveled a little at the private veranda, and went back out in search of the covid test I’d need to re-enter the States.
The pharmacy was closed for lunch.
All right, I’d eat, too. I approached a tiny bar protruding from a window. A waitress came out the door and simply said,
“No.”
I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong, only ducked like a dog into a bigger restaurant that seemed open, if entirely empty. Its sign advertised gluten free pizza.
A young waiter led me to the garden, which was still encased in plastic, like it did not believe the spring was here to stay. I was joined in the garden by a group of apparent mechanics. They sat with their boiler suits peeled down at the waist, like half-opened bananas.
The mechanics faced each other at a long table across the aisle to my right. My table faced the next garden over, which was boldly open to the air. There sat an older man in profile, sunning himself like a cat. He moved only to twitch his cheeks, crack his craggy fingers, sip his white wine, or let out a few measures of stentorian coughing.
The oldest mechanic either knew the guy or found the cough as striking as I did. He’d imitate the sound to his buddies after each round of catarrh: “Cough cough cough cough cough.”
“You’ll know it when you hear it,” Paola had said of the Venetian dialect. The mechanics’ conversation started to sound like “blah blah blah” mona, “blah blah blah” mona.
Aha!
I’d been in Veneto long enough to pick up the regional word for “pussy.”
If you learn Italian in a restaurant, you start with one part rude words, one part food words, and one part dishes.
“Cazzo.”
“Bistecca.”
“Coltello.”
Dick. Steak. Knife.
Either the mechanics’ conversation concerned explicit subjects, or they were using “mona” the way many Italians, in casual contexts, use “cazzo.” Days into learning restaurant Italian, I’d remarked to my colleagues that the sound of them talking to each other was like blah blah blah "cazzo," blah blah blah "cazzo."
“It’s the same for you guys and fuck,” my colleague had replied.
I’d spend the next several years picking up local slang from every Italian I met, and the cocks would far outnumber the vulvas. Either the mechanics’ frequent monas were a regional specialty, or my instructors had been holding out on me when it came to the emphatic feminine.
The local language had found me. It was time to make friends.
I had liquid courage in the form of an Aperol spritz. I’m kidding: Aperol is not so alcoholic, perfect for day drinking, but I’d struggled with my sudden desire to order one for lunch. The Italians I’d met ordered spritzes in the late afternoon only. They take this gustatory time of day stuff so seriously. Typical Americans ignore them, consuming both cappuccinos and spritzes for brunch.
As an obedient student of Italian customs, I try to “when-in-Rome,” but I wasn’t in Rome, and I wanted a spritz. When I was a bartender, I made so many damned spritzes, and I advised all the customers who complained of ennui to go on vacation alone.
It was my turn to travel. I ordered that spritz.
In a matter of hours, I’d learn Venice is a magical place where you drink nothing but spritzes, day and night, made not only from Aperol but from the local red spirit, Select. A spritz with Select is more bitter than Aperol, less sweet than Campari, and they throw in an olive as often as an orange.
Despite my ignorance, Venetian spritz magic had already done its work on me. Full of prosecco and vivid herbaceous liqueur, I strode over to gli operai and sat down at their table’s open seat.
“Hello,” I said in Italian. “I am interested in local language.
“For instance,” I told them, “I have learned L’acqua marcise i pa’i’.”
Introductions turned into jokes about ancient rivalries I could not begin to fathom, the man from a nearby city accused, I think, of eating cats. I decided I must have misheard.
Riccardo, the oldest, the cough imitator, he of the white mustache and the sweater with thick horizontal stripes, became even more animated when I mentioned the boat poles, pali. Narciso had already informed me that the local accent drops the central “l” sound, but Riccardo held up his hand in a sort of OK sign, the Italian gesture for “listen up, I am teaching you something.”
Riccardo demonstrating the Italian gesture for “listen, I am teaching you something”
He plunked this hand shape through the air, emphasizing each syllable like a note on a stave:
“L’acqua.”
“Marsise.”
“I pai.”
Turns out the second word was not quite mar-chee-say, Italian for “rot.” Riccardo insisted I repeat a sss, with perhaps a hint of sh : mar see shay.
A freshly minted blogger, I was filming Riccardo with my phone. An off-camera mechanic pointed a finger into the frame and prompted Riccardo to teach me the second half of the saying.
I’d learned so many versions of the water’s-bad-for-you saying without ever encountering a second half!
“And the wine?” the man asked, in Italian.
“The wine,” Riccardo answered, “Makes songs.”
I knew I’d captured the ur recording of my folkloric project even as I’d just begun. Stuffed with local language and sad pizza, I receded to my own tavolino. The mechanics paid up and left me alone. I stared at the old cat in the next garden over through the see-through plastic walls. He twitched his cheek.
L’acqua marsise i pai, I thought.
Il vin fa cantar, was the answer.
Italy—Venice—had given me permission not only to enjoy myself, but to sing.
I sat there in the garden with my empty spritz and wept.
Venetian boat pole, Burano Island
