Venice could be a disorienting place, even for people who lived there and thought they knew it well. The narrow, winding streets, together with the serpentine course of the Grand Canal and the absence of any landmarks visible from a distance, made it difficult to keep one’s bearings. Ernest Hemingway described Venice as “a strange, tricky town” and walking in it as “better than working crossword puzzles.” To me it occasionally felt like walking through a funhouse, especially at times when, twenty minutes after having set out on a course that I had thought was a straight line, I discovered I was right back where I started. But the streets and squares of Cannaregio became familiar to me sooner than I expected, and so did some of its characters. I had been in residence barely a week when I met the Plant Man.
He appeared at first to be a shrub that moved. He was an oasis of rubber plants, ficus trees, heather, and ivy that floated along Strada Nuova, calling out in a voice that carried in all directions. “O-la! O-la! Have you got a house? Have you got somewhere to go?” As he drew closer, I made him out to be a short, solid man with wiry gray hair who loped along half hidden at the center of a mass of greenery protruding out of sacks hanging from his shoulders and clutched in both hands. He stopped to talk to a stout woman with short, battleship gray hair.
“This one costs eighty thousand lire,” he said, “but I’ll give it to you for twenty thousand. It’ll last for years!”
“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said.
The man set his sacks on the ground and emerged from his personal forest. He was barely five feet tall and wore a bright red jacket, a yellow shirt, a tie that was far too short, and high-top sneakers.
“It will last!” he crowed. “I’ve known you for a lifetime, sister. O-la! And you love plants, really love ’em. All the better, all the better. The man that marries you will be a lucky one!”
“She’s already married,” a man standing nearby said.
The woman handed the Plant Man ten thousand lire (five dollars) and took the plant, somewhat dubiously.
“Thank you, sister,” he said. “May God let you live to be a hundred! Give it a little chamomile tea for the vitamins, but no water from the tap unless you filter out the chlorine first! Chlorine is poison.”
A teenager coming the other way called out, “Hey, man! You got a house? You got somewhere to go?”
The Plant Man looked at me. “See? They know me. Hey, kid! You’ve known me all your life, right?”
“Yeah, you’re always singing,” the boy said.
“See?” he said. “I invented this song when I was at the Zamparini Stadium, where the Venice soccer team plays. I sing it to the losing team—‘You got a house?’ It means, ‘What are you hanging around here for? What’s the use? You got a house? You might as well go home!’ And now all the kids sing it. They’ve even made it into banners that they wave at the games. Yeah, I invented it.”
“Where do these plants come from?” I asked.
“We have our own farm half an hour outside Venice—my wife and me. We work it ourselves. It’s near Padua. I’ve been coming to Venice every day for twenty-eight years. Only to Venice, nowhere else, because Venice is the only city I truly have in my heart. Venetians are the best people, kind people, courteous. Monday I did a terrace for a doctor near the Rialto fish market. I brought him veronica. I go to all the parishes and the churches. I do them all, from Sant’Elena to San Giobbe. I’m the only one who does it. I have chickens, too.” He reached deep into one of his sacks and pulled out a chicken. It had been beheaded, gutted, plucked, but it still had feet.
“I just gave one to the pharmacist in Campo San Pantalon, and I now have to deliver this one to Luigi Candiani, the notary.”
“Will it still be fresh by the time you get it there?” I asked.
“Fresh? O-la! Yes, my good man, it will be fresh! It won’t smell! This is not commercial stuff. We raise these chickens on grains, grass, and vegetables, all from our fields. You can eat it now, or in two days, or if you put it in the freezer, three months. . . . Hey, brother,” he called to an old man walking past, “you got a house?”
“Nah, I don’t have a house,” the man said with a smile.
“You want to buy a live chicken?”
“Nah.”
“You want half a live chicken? No? Well, it was worth asking.” Then, turning back to me, “And you? You want anything?”
I pointed to a small pot of heather.
“Perfect choice!” he said. “It sprouts nice pink flowers, and when you get tired of watering it, you can just let it dry out. That way you’ll have it forever.”
He patted my shoulder. “My name is Adriano Delon. I come to Venice every day except Sunday. That’s when I go ballroom dancing with my wife. It’s on television. You can see us on channel nine! We waltz, we tango, and we samba.” Adriano raised his arms in the air and swiveled his hips. “O-la! Ballroom dancing will never go out of style. Well, I’d better go and deliver Candiani’s chicken.”
With that, Adriano Delon hoisted his sacks into position. Then, once again surrounded by his portable thicket and singing at the top of his lungs, he set off down Strada Nuova, this time with a sweeping stride that, to my inexpert eyes, resembled something between a waltz and a tango.
ONE MORNING I ROSE VERY EARLY with the intention of taking a walk when the streets would be virtually empty. I headed in the direction of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and as I came into Campo San Vio, I noticed four men in work clothes standing by the side of the English Church. Two of them were crouching at the base of the church wall, about thirty feet apart, at opposite ends of a net that lay loosely gathered on the ground between them. Each man drove a single nail through a corner of the net, anchoring one side of it to the pavement. Then each held a free corner in his hand and, still crouching, watched a third man, who was carrying a canvas sack. The man walked to the center of the
campo,
reached into his sack, and started tossing bread crumbs onto the ground. Within minutes, pigeons began to alight and peck at the crumbs—forty pigeons, fifty pigeons. The man now threw the bread crumbs slightly closer to the men with the net. And then closer still. The pigeons followed the moving feast, jostling each other as they pecked and hopped. When they were within a few feet of the net, the two men flung the free end over the pigeons and trapped them. A furious fluttering and tumbling swelled the net as the men skillfully pulled it around and under the pigeons until they were fully enclosed. Only a few escaped. The fourth workman now rushed over and threw a large black cloth over the pigeons. They were instantly becalmed. The men then picked up the net, now heavy with pigeons, and carried it to a boat waiting in the canal.
It was no secret that most Venetians hated pigeons. Mayor Cacciari had called them “flying rats,” but his proposals to reduce their number had been noisily opposed by animal-rights activists. Apparently a pigeon-control program was proceeding anyway, quietly, under the cover of early-morning hours.
The men climbed into the boat and had started transferring pigeons from the net into empty cages when I approached. One of them waved me away.
“No Greens! No Greens!” he said. “Are you with the Green Party?”
“No,” I said, “I’m just curious.”
“Well, you can see we handle the birds very gently,” the man said. “We’re taking them to the veterinarian. He will inspect them and release the healthy ones. The sick ones will be put to sleep.”
I asked how many pigeons they expected to catch this way, but my voice was drowned out by the motor revving up. The men clearly had no interest in talking to me, but as they pulled away, the driver shouted out the name of their boss: Dr. Scattolin. “He knows about all this stuff.”
To my surprise, when I called Dr. Mario Scattolin, he invited me to come and see him that very afternoon. Dr. Scattolin’s proper title was Director of Animal Affairs, and he worked in a fifteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal that served as a municipal building. I arrived at his office through a series of cramped, winding hallways.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t discuss our netting operation,” Dr. Scattolin said affably as he ushered me in. “I prefer to deny we do it. But since you saw it with your own eyes
. . . beh!”
He shrugged.
Dr. Scattolin had wavy salt-and-pepper hair and wore a light gray suit. He had a large office, and his desk and shelves were piled high with papers and reports. Tall windows looked out on a narrow, gloomy interior courtyard.
“Look,” he said, “Venice has a hundred and twenty thousand pigeons. That’s far too many. When pigeons are overcrowded, they get stressed, their immune systems weaken, and they become susceptible to parasites that can cause pneumonia, chlamydia, toxoplasmosis, and salmonella when they are passed to human beings.” As he spoke, Dr. Scattolin sketched the outline of a pigeon on a pad of paper. He drew little droppings coming from under the pigeon’s tail feathers and an arrow to indicate parasites under the wings.
“All the tourists want to be photographed feeding the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square,” he said. “They buy a bag of corn for four thousand lire [two dollars], they toss a few kernels on the ground, and immediately they are surrounded by a swarm of grateful pigeons.” He imitated a pigeon walking, his head bobbing forward in syncopation with the movement of his shoulders, then dipping to peck at a kernel of corn. Bob and dip, bob and dip. He had the pigeon strut down perfectly.
“If you can get a pigeon to stand in your palm, that’s good,” he said. “Even better if there are two or three more on your arm and one or two on your shoulder. Why not? I’ve seen people completely covered with pigeons.
“You can’t tell from the photographs, but pigeons smell horrible. It’s the same with penguins. People love to see movies of penguins.” Now Dr. Scattolin imitated the stiff-shouldered penguin waddle. “But if you were to stand in the midst of penguins, you’d discover they stink. That’s because penguins and pigeons have one very unpleasant behavioral oddity in common: They both build their nests with their own excrement.” He made a face.
“Pigeons colonize dark places, especially narrow passages where the sun doesn’t penetrate. That’s what happened in the little
calle
that leads into Campo San Vio, where you saw the netting going on this morning. The pigeons had made that
calle
impassable. It was disgusting. We had a great many complaints, so I sent the men there to clean it out. The two men you saw handling the net are a father-and-son team. They’ve been doing it for twenty years. They’ve developed a very rare expertise: They know just the right moment to swing the net. If one pigeon becomes frightened, he flees. That sends an instantaneous signal to the others, and in a fraction of a second, they are all gone.”
“Are you really going to release the healthy ones?” I asked.
“No, we will examine some of them, but they will all be chloroformed. The men were probably just trying to mollify you in case you were a member of the Green Party or an
animalista.
They take a lot of abuse from those people. They scream things like, ‘Nazi murderers! Gas chambers!’
“In Venice there is so much food available for the pigeons, they reproduce all year—seven or eight times, two eggs each time. That’s not a natural cycle. In London pigeons reproduce only once a year. So Venice has to work at pigeon control all year-round.
“We want to reduce the pigeon population by twenty thousand a year until we reach a total of forty thousand. We’ve tried everything. We’ve mixed food with birth-control chemicals, but the pigeon population only increased. We’re now testing chemicals containing hormones that simulate pregnancy, which we hope will eliminate the mating urge in females. Years ago we even imported peregrine falcons to prey on the pigeons, but each falcon killed only one pigeon a day and dumped feces that were much worse than a pigeon’s. The
animalisti
have offered their own proposals. They said we should catch male pigeons and castrate them. Imagine! It would cost a hundred thousand lire [fifty dollars] a pigeon.”