I recently found some scanned books from Venice of times past. One of them is a kind of historical encyclopedia from the mid 19th century, and I must say it has its little oddities

The entry for Malamocco – a small hamlet on the Lido di Venezia with a glorious past – reads:

Malamocco, Matemauco, Metemaucum. City which flourished in the first times of the Venetian society, located near the harbour, where the Madoacus, or Brenta (from where, perhaps, the name Matemauco) entered the sea. It was the capital on the Venetians, and seat of their doges (these had already abandoned Eraclea, or Eraclia) until the year 813 circa; it also had nine bishops, the last of whom were one Stefano Badoaro (see Bishops of Malamocco). By earthquake, or by horrible storm from the sea, it was destroyed between 1100 and 1102, and now nothing remains but well kept orchards and a poor hamlet. There, fleeing  Austrian bullets (see san Giuliano del buon albergo), hunger, anarchy and the many other calamities that afflicted the illustrious and unfortunate Venice, in a few hours, by cholera, on the twentyfirst day of August of the year 1849, passed away serenely, because supremely pious, the woman of who writes. O reader, it will not hurt you to say a prayer for the peace of her soul.

Here’s the original:

“Lessico Veneto” by Fabio Mutinelli, published in Venice, 1849, p.238.

A dear friend of mine recently gave me a beautiful gift – the book Barche del Golfo di Venezia – an illustrated description of most of the traditional boats of the Venetian lagoon and the upper Adriatic Sea.

The various chapters describe not only the different types and classes of boats, both rowed and sailed, but also many of the now disappearing crafts associated with boats and sea faring in the lagoon area, and quite a bit of the practical, social and cultural context in which the boats were made and used. Many of the vessels are no longer used, and of some not even a single complete hull has survived.

The entire book is generously illustrated with beautiful water colours made by the author.

The text is in Italian with words, phrases and quotations in Venetian.

Luigi Divari, Barche del Golfo di Venezia, 2009, ISBN 9788883200878, Il Leggio Libreria Editrice, Sottomarina di Chioggia (VE), Italy.

In 1978 two Venetian men in their mid twenties rowed around the lagoon of Venice, photographing all the abandoned islands there.  The result was a book with photographic documentation of the state of abandonment of each island.

Recently, some thirty years after, the book has been republished, now with a English parallel text and some recent pictures of some of the islands.  Some islands are in a  better state, but others are much worse.

As a frequent traveller in the lagoon this book was a must have, and  I bought it a few days ago.

Many of the islands in the book are places I have been many times, and as recently as this week I have been to S.Giacomo in Palude, Lazzaretto Novo, Sant’Ariano and La Cura, taking my own photos of the state of disrepair or recovery of each.  As a historian it is very hard not to be intrigued and curious about the ruins and the past of these islands, and this book is a great help in understanding why the islands are like the are now.

Here are a few picture I’ve taken in the last week from some of the islands (left to right: S.Giacomo in Palude, La Cura and Sant’Ariano):

I still haven’t read it all. Many of the texts are reproduced from old descriptions of the lagoon islands, mostly 19th century texts, and the Italian is quite hard to read. The English text is a lot easier, but it feels almost like cheating

The book is:

Isole abbandonate della laguna veneta
The Abandoned Islands of the Venetian Lagoon
by Giorgio and Maurizio Crovato,
London (San Marco Press Ltd), 2009 (orig. 1978)
ISBN 0955813867

Ten percent of the price will go a Venice related charity, depending on where in the world the book is bought. In Italy the money goes to the association that takes care of the Lazzaretto Novo island, which has been recuperated and restored since the first edition of the book.

The Sea Stallion, a reconstruction of a thousand years old viking longship, has departed Dublin on a 1400 nautical miles journey back to Denmark. They expect to arrive on August 9th.

The ship is a replica of a 30m longship, build in Dublin around 1040 by Nordic or Nordic taught shipbuilders, and some time later sunk near Roskilde in Denmark, to block a narrow passage in the fjord for enemy ships. The wreck was, along four other viking ships, raised in the 1960s and is now on permanent exhibit at the Roskilde Viking Ship museum.

On friday the 28th the sea was livelier than we wanted to be part of, and we decided on an excursion by car to the mountains in the Ogliastra hinterland.

First we drove to Jerzu which is a bit further inland from Cardedu, where the mountains really begins. Francesco drove up some of the steepest and most curved roads I have ever been on, up to what is called the “Tacchi di Ogliastra”, meaning the high heels of Ogliastra. They are a series of mountains where the top is surrounded by vertical rock walls of maybe 100-200m. The mountains in Sardinia aren’t high by Himalayan standards, the tallest peaks are just over 1800m, but they’re still impressive in all their ruggedness.

The many vertical rock walls are a little paradise for climbers, who come from all over to play in the Sardinian mountains.

We continued along the slope of the valley to Osini. The town seems to stick magically to the mountain side, and on the other side of the valley the town of Gairo clings on to the other slope. You can see from one town to the other, and there might only be about 2km across, but going there by car would still take an hour. It would probably be faster to ride a donkey over there.

The towns were less sticky in the good old days. A few kilometres down the road we passed Osini Vecchia, the “Old Osini”. The old (probably ancient) town of Osini were slowly sliding down the mountain side, for whatever reasons, and in the 1950s it had to be abandoned completely, and the entire population of Osini moved to the “new” and current Osini.

The story is by no means unique. Just across the valley “new” Gairo was located a couple of kilometres from “old” Gairo, in much the same way. Not everybody in Gairo moved to the new town, though. A part of the population moved further away, to the lower hills towards the coast, and thus Cardedu came about. Cardedu too is a new town, and a child of the landslides in the mountains.

From Osini Vecchia we moved up some roads even smaller, steeper and more curved than before, with the intent of finding a nuraghe.

The nuraghe are unique to Sardinia, where there are still over 6000 nuraghe in existence. In the rest of the world there are none. A nuraghe is a neolithic building or monument from the period 2500-1500 BC so they were already ancient when the Phoenicians and the Romans settled in Sardinia. Little is known about their purpose as their constructors have left no hints, but they do give an impression of being defensive fortresses.

Most nuraghes are made of a single conical tower with double walls. In the centre is a single room, sometimes with niches in the walls, and inbetween the two outer walls a stairway to the top or rooms further up. The walls are built by roughly cut stones stacked without the use of mortar.

The nuraghe is almost always placed in a strategic position on a hilltop or on a ridge in the mountains.

Larger nuraghes consist of several closely grouped towers, at times with surrounding walls or ramparts.

We ended up at the Nuraghe Serbissa after a very long drive on some very rough roads through a forest, and we only found about an hour before sunset. The Nuraghe Serbissa is the largest I have seen so far. There is a well preserved tower which can still be climbed by the original stairway, and two other towers standing to a lower height but still clearly recognisable. On the ground the outline of maybe another five or more towers could be seen.

Underneath the nuraghe is a large natural cave with three entrances, which was also a part of the entire complex.

The Nuraghe Serbissa is now situated in a completely deserted mountain forest, but who knows how the landscape was 4000 years ago, and how these people lived.

Along the road there were signs for several other nuraghes in the vincinity, but it was getting late and dark, and we still had over an hour’s drive home along the winding mountain roads.

That evening we ate out, in a local restaurant in Barisardo. Francesco had a steak so huge it couldn’t have been made in a normal frying pan, it was served on a pizza plate, and Valentina had a dish of grilled fish and seafood that was plain scary. I have no idea how they got through those quantities of food.

Tuesday evening (March 25th) we left Palermo for Trapani. The ferry was scheduled to depart at nine in the evening, but we ended up at Giacomo’s chatting until after seven, and arrived at Trapani harbour at ten to nine, only to discover that the ferry departed from a new more distant pier, which we had problems finding as the signs weren’t quite in working order. We hauled our gear from the car onto the ferry, said a hasty goodbye to Giacomo and hurried on board, only to hear a message on the loudspeakers that departure had been postponed to ten o’clock.

Initially the sea was quite rough, but it got calmer during the night, and we had a reasonably quiet passage to Cagliari where we arrived at about ten in the morning.

Francesco Muntoni of Cardedu Kayak wouldn’t be able to pick us up until in the late afternoon, so we carried our gear to the nearby bus station where it was possible to leave luggage for a while. We checked in our bags, and a greenland paddle, and set off exploring the city.

Cagliari is an ancient city. It was founded by the Phoenicians some 800 years BC, and later pass into Roman hands, followed by Byzantine, Pisan, Aragonese, Spanish, Austrian, Piedmontese and finally Italian. We walked through the busling lower quarter Marina on our way up the hillside to the old fortified city, the Castello, which in comparison seen almost lifeless.

Francesco Ravasio, one of the persons who brought sea kayaking to Sardinia over twenty years ago, met us at the station at half past three, and he took us for a short excursion to Nola before dropping us off at Diana Canoe, a local kayak producer run by Stefano Diana.

Diana Canoe makes a wide range of recreational kayaks in fiberglass, and they can make almost anything in fiberglass and kevlar. When we were there they were even working on some fiberglass roofs for ambulances.

Francesco Muntoni of Cardedu Kayak came to Diana Canoe a bit later to pick us and a couple of kayaks up. Francesco uses kayaks from Diana Canoe for most his excursions in the Ogliastra area in Sardinia. The kayaks in question are in part designed by Francesco himself, especially for daytrips with less experienced paddlers along the rocky coast near Cardedu and in the area of the Golfo di Orosei.

We had a quiet drive to Cardedu in the dark, and arrived there at about ten in the evening, dead tired and ready for bed.

Whenever people put a shovel in the ground in Rome they’ll hit something ancient. It is not restricted to the centre of the city. Here in the surroundings of Grottaferrata, some 25 km outside Rome, the same thing happens too. Shortly before I arrived, a stretch of ancient Roman road was unearthed just a few hundred meters from where my friends live.

It is probably not an important find in itself, but it will still have to be examined, measured and mapped as it will be yet another little piece of the puzzle of reconstructing the ancient road network in the area.

To my untrained eye it doesn’t seem to be a stretch of a longer continuous paved road. An exploratory ditch has been made uphill with nothing in it, while the road seems to continue downhill where the paving probably continues under the modern road and the villas across that. As such, my guess is that this is a paved stretch of an old dirt road (most ancient roads were dirt roads) where it was prone to flooding. There are still several currents in the area which floods even the modern roads at times, and that problem must have been worse back then. By paving the stretches of the road most at risk of flooding the road would be usable for larger parts of the year.

For the present day owners of the land the road was found in, the find is probably a major pain the butt. Now their building project will be stalled indeterminately, waiting for the archaeologists to finish, which might take ages. After all, everything here in Italy might take ages.

Seeing that the Roman road continues straight under the current road and probably under the villas on the other side of the road, it is amazing it hasn’t been found before, but the explanation might be found in the previous paragraph :-/

Photos were taken with my mobile phone which has a lousy camera.

It was all over the news here in Italy last night. Apparently archaeologists in Rome have found the Lupercale on the Palatine hill.

This is incredible news for anybody interested in ancient history.

The Lupercale is legendary in more than one way. For the ancient Romans it was the cave under the Palatine hill where the shewolf (lupa) suckled the two abandoned twins Romulus and Remus. Romulus and Remus then grew up and founded the city of Rome on April 21st, 753 BC. In a fight over leadership Romulus then killed Remus, and the city was henceforth called Rome after Romulus who became the first King of Rome. The Lupercale was therefore considered the very birthplace of Rome and was considered a sacred site.

Since the earliest times of Rome the cave was the centre of a very popular fertility cult. Each year Romans celebrated the lupercalia with great fervour. The lupercalia included some sacrifices inside the cave where the blood of the sacrificial animals were smeared in the faces of youngsters of noble families, but much more popular with the common people were the part of the festivitas outside the cave. To the applause of the onlooking crowds, the priests, luperci, dressed only in a goatskin throng, would chase young women around the entire Palatine Hill, whipping them all the way, in an attempt to induce fertility into them.

The lupercalia were so popular that not even the imperial edicts of the fourth century AD which outlawed all non-christian religion, could get the Romans to stop partying. The lupercalia continued well into the sixth century AD, to the dismay of the early popes.

When Augustus established himself as the primo inter pares, in fact the first Roman Emperor, he built his house on the side of the Palatine Hill, very close to both the Lupercale and the place where legend will stood the little hut where Romulus and Remus lived initially. Roman nobility had for centuries preferred living on the Palatine, but the exact location of Augustus’ house was obviously an attempt to associate himself with the heritage of the city’s founders.

Later emperors built more and more sumptuous palaces on the Palatine, which has since given the English language the words “palatial” and “palace”.

The cave believed to be the Lupercale was found during the excavations of Augustus’ house on the Palatine. A sonde driven deep into the hill located a 15m deep cavity, and when a camera was lowered into the cavity, the image shown above resulted.

Nobody has been inside the cave yet, and the real entrance to the need still be located before a definitive identification of the cave with the Lupercale can be made. The location of the cave, the decorations and the fact that it is part natural, part manmade, is consistent with what is known about the Lupercale. The floor of the cave appears to be covered in several meters of debris.

Even after the entrance is found it will be many years before you and I will have a chance to see it, if that will ever happen. The Suprintendenza dei Beni Culturali in Rome suffers from constant underfunding compared to the massive volume of archaeological, artistic and cultural monuments they are obliged to protect, so it might very well end with a basic excavation, followed by a stabilisation of the cave which will then be left closed and inaccessible to the public. Let’s hope some funding will find its way to the Lupercale again.