René’s old blog
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Our gondola is retired now
Our gondola has been retired, and it will spend its otium in the museum at the Lazzaretto Nuovo, in company with a sandolo buraneo, a gondolino and other traditional Venetian boats.
It is not easy to find a place to keep a boat of the size and age of our gondola, which is rather fragile.
During part of the Covid pandemic the boat has been moored at the Lazzaretto, and not used a lot. The tide and the traffic has caused some damage to the boat, and in the end taking the boat out of the water was the best choice.
A traditional gondola made of wooden planks (as opposed to plywood) weighs about 600kg, so it wasn’t easy, but we managed, and certainly earned our lunch.
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Across the river, into the trees
Through a friend I got a job as a body double for Liev Schreiber on the set of a movie adaption of Hemingway‘s last novel Across the River, into the Trees.
There are some scenes where the protagonist rows a Venetian boat, but Liev hadn’t managed to learn the technique sufficiently well.
With a bit of makeup, a haircut and letting the beard grow we do look alike a bit. He looks older then me. He isn’t.
So far so good. I was to go and do some rowing scenes instead of Liev, and I’m not somebody to let go of a chance to fool around in a boat in a movie, so I accepted.
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Rowing video from Across the River
I worked as a double for Liev Scheiber on a movie set in Venice, where I should do some rowing shots. This is video of me rowing during a break on the set.
The assistant director on the second crew made this little rowing video on a day the camera crew didn’t show up, so we had time to fool around.
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Fog in the lagoon
Yesterday the Venetian lagoon was under a dense fog. I had an appointment at the Lazzaretto Nuovo at 10am, so I went down to our boat at 9am, hoping the fog would lift before I really got anywhere.
It didn’t.
I went anyway, and luckily I brought my camera.
Navigating the Venetian lagoon in a small boat in dense fog means moving slowly from briccola to briccola (the wooden canals markers in the lagoon). Otherwise you might get stuck in the mud in the shallow areas and or get run over by bigger boats in the middle of the canals.
There are normally 25m between the briccole so visibility on these photos are about 50m.
In an hour I met two other boats, a motonave from Punta Sabbioni and a garbage collection vessel near Sant’Erasmo.
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A different Carnival in Venice
For many years, certainly all the years I’ve lived in Venice, the Venetian Carnival has been a very touristy and commercial affair, with huge crowds flooding the city and many paid actors in fancy but a-historical costumes vying for the attention of photographers.
This year has been a different carnival.
There are very few tourists in the city, and the remaining residents are coming back to the places they have mostly avoided for years, like St. Mark’s square during the Carnival.
This last Saturday of the carnival saw our square full of families and children, many dressed up and playing in the square.
The main attraction was a group of teenagers who had dressed up in home made giraffe costumes, posing for photos with the children.
There were a handful of tourists, but they were few.
It does say something about the extent of tourism in Venice in the last decades, that seeing children play in the square at carnival is something special and unique.
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Death
I thought it a good idea to send my bicycle by train from Copenhagen to the Brenner pass, and then do the rest of the trip to Ancona in the Marche in central Italy by bicycle.
Everything worked out, and soon I was on the main road towards Bressanone/Brixen which I reached an hour later.
That were sixty kilometres and a change in altitude of about 1000m. The road had hair pin turns, went through long tunnels and across tall bridges, but I moved at the same speed as the cars on the road.
I had never done anything like it. The sense of excitement and achievement was immense.
That was some thirty years ago. I was in my twenties. The thought that a twig on the road could have sent me hurling off a tall bridge or into a deep ravine never crossed my mind.
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Philips PicoPix Max portable projector
We’ve got our hands on a Philips PicoPix Max portable projector, and it is a very nice little gadget.
The projector is an android device with the projector instead of a display, and a touchpad on the top of the device for input. It comes with a remote control that’ll handle most of the day-to-day input needs.
Connectivity is by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and video input through HDMI (standard plug size), USB-C, android screencasting or from a micro SD card reader or USB.
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WordPress without a web server
In the almost two months we’ve spent in Coronavirus lockdown here in Venice, I’ve had the opportunity to get some of the old forgotten tasks done. During one of these I finally got around working with Wordpress from the command line, and directly from PHP without running a web server.
It is amazingly simple. My server is running Debian, and this code is all that’s needed to run Wordpress from the command line:
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WordPress update failed to complete
I have a bunch of sites running on a Debian multi-site setup. Managing it is normally simple.
However, one day I activated automatic Wordpress updates. Big mistake.
The next minor Wordpress update failed miserably, due to lack of permissions, and all the sites carried the message:
There was no way of getting rid of the message.
In the end, after much digging, I discovered that WP had set an option “auto_core_update_failed” on the sites. Removing that the message disappeared.
The issue is here on the Wordpress Developer site.
The Wordpress CLI command is your friend for these things.
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Vaporetto photography in Venice
Buses in Venice are boats, like so much else. The Venetians call them vaporetti (sing. vaporetto), and they’re almost as iconic as the gondolas, and much more used, by tourists and residents alike.
Besides being the easiest way of getting around the city, the vaporetti can also make for nice photography subjects or locations.
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Poveglia – urban decay in Venice
The island of Poveglia is located in the Venetian lagoon about ten km south of Venice. It guards one of the main entries from the sea towards Venice, and the island therefore has a long and rich history.
Today the abandoned buildings of a hospital dominate the island. The hospital originated in the 1780s as the Lazzaretto Nuovissimo, a quarantine station for ships and crews afflicted by the bubonic plague or other contagious deceases. The structure developed into a general navy hospital in the second half of the 1800s, and later on, to a general hospital for contagious and respiratory deceases.
Most of the buildings on the island date from the late 1800s, while the internal structures are mostly from before the second world war. The church steeple is the only part left of the church that once dominated the island.
