All Souls Day - Venice
(Originally Published Early 1900's)
The Italians keep their Lemuria or festival for
the dead, not in May, as their Roman ancestors did, but in November. The 2nd of
November, All Souls' Day, and its octave are more generally observed than any
other of the minor holy days in the Roman calendar. No festival could so unite
all classes of people as this, on which each family pays the tribute of memory
to its lost ones, and acknowledges the power of that great Democrat, Death.
Every day throughout the octave, the churches of Venice recite a mass for the
souls of those who are gone and implore for them the intercession of All Saints,
whose festival comes immediately before the day of the dead. In the evening
another service is held, a little after sundown. There is a sermon; and then
begins the lighting of candles all through the church, before each altar and
round the catafalque in the centre. It is upon the vigil of All Souls, the "
notte dei Morti " as it is called, and at the church of the Gesuati, upon the
Zattere, that the greatest illumination takes place. The Gesuati is that late
Palladian church, built of
Istrian stone,
almost opposite the nobler facade of the Redentore, and more formally known as
Santa Maria del Rosario. The church is called the Gesuati because hard by — but
long before the foundation of this present building, which dates from the last
century only the company of the Blessed John Colombini, which was called the
Gesuati, first established itself in the year 1392. Among the other pious duties
of the brother-hood was that of supplying and carrying the torches at funerals,
and hence it comes that the Gesuati makes this display of light every 2nd of
November. The order of the Blessed John was suppressed in the year 1668; but the
Dominicans who succeeded the Gesuati in the possession of their monastery and
church continue the custom of the candles.
Outside, over the main door of the church is a
large blackboard, and, in white letters, an invitation to all good Christians to
pray for the souls of the departed. Round this table hangs a wreath of laurel
leaves, twined on a black and white ribbon. Every other door of the church has a
similar garland above it. The sun is setting in a cold and cloudless sky, serene
and almost hard. In the zenith the colour is deep blue, but towards the west a
thin film of gold is spread where the sun is sinking. The wind comes fine and
searching, as it so often does on an autumn evening. The broad and rippled
waters of the Giudecca Canal seem as hard as the sky they reflect.
Inside the church, through the open door where
the women troop, pulling their shawls up over their heads as they enter, all is
dark and gloomy, every column, pilaster, and architrave draped in black cloth
with silver fringes; and wreaths of laurel are twined round each pillar's base.
The high altar is hidden by a towering cenotaph, raised in the middle of the
nave; against its blackness the thin white stripes of the tapers that surround
it stand out clear. The people, chiefly women and boys, scuffle and whisper
subduedly as they kneel in rows. The black walled, black-roofed church seems to
enclose and compress them as if in some vast and lugubrious tomb; and their
mutterings sound like the gibbering of ghosts. The sermon begins; a voice alone,
full of inflexion, passion, forcible cadences, speaking out of the darkness.
Though the preacher is invisible, the mind unconsciously and perforce pictures
the action that must accompany this strong Italian rhetoric. The voice holds the
church; and there is silence in the congregation except for the dull thud of the
padded doors as some new-comers arrive. The sermon is not long; only a few rapid
passages, and then comes the close. The shuffling and whispering are resumed ;
and the sacristans begin to light the candles. Through the darkness the little
yellow tips of fire move noiselessly, touching the tall wax tapers before each
altar, and down the nave, and round the cenotaph in the centre. Presently the
church is faintly illuminated by these warm yellow stars, that waver to and fro
in the gloom, but do not overcome it. There is a short hush of silent prayer;
then the congregation rises and shuffles out down the steps of the church on to
the broad pavement of the Zattere.
The sun has set, the wind died away; the air is
mild and clear; the sky in the west is mellowed to a wonderful enamel of molten
blue and green and daffodil ; and no stars are shining yet. The crowd disappears
rapidly; the boys rush off with shouts; the men follow in twos or threes with
long swinging step and conscious manly movement; the women linked arm in arm, go
clattering down the narrow street on their noisy pattens.
On
All Souls' Day it is the custom to visit the graves of relations and friends in
that grim cemetery of San Michele, whose high brick wall you pass on the way to
Murano or Torcello. The church itself is a lovely specimen of Lombardi work with
delicate bas-reliefs in Istrian stone upon the little pentagonal Cappella
Emiliana adjoining it. But there is something terrible and sinister in the
cemetery itself, where the dead lie buried in the ooze of the lagoon-island. On
this day the Venetians carry wreaths to lay on the graves. The wealthier have
garlands made of real flowers, but, for the most part, these wreaths are twined
out of Venetian beads—red and blue, Madonna's colours, for the women; or black
and white for the men, who have no universal patron in the heavens.
There is one old custom connected with this
festival of the dead which still survives in Venice, and recalls a Latin, or
even an earlier superstition. The pious man in Ovid's " Fast rises at midnight
to fling black beans behind his shoulder. Nine times he flung his beans, and
then the ghost was laid. The Venetian does not fling away his beans; he eats
them. In Venice this custom of eating beans through the octave of All Souls' is
extremely ancient. The monks of every cloister in the city used to make a
gratuitous distribution of beans on All Souls' Day to any of the poor who chose
to come for them. A huge caldron was placed in the middle of the courtyard and
the food ladled out to the crowd. The gondoliers did not come with the rest, but
had their portion sent down to them at their ferries. This grace was granted to
them in consideration of the fact that all the year round they rowed the
brothers across the canals for nothing. In-deed, though the custom is almost
extinct, they still do so you may sometimes see a brown-cowled friar crossing a
ferry with no other payment than a pinch of snuff or a benediction. As the
Venetians grew more wealthy true beans became distasteful to the palates of the
luxurious, who were yet unwilling to break through the custom of eating them on
All Souls' Day. The pastry cooks saw their opportunity, and invented a small
round puff, coloured blue or red or yellow, and hollow inside; these they called
fave, or beans; and these are to be seen at this time of the year in all the
bakers' windows. If a man should happen to be courting at this season it is
customary for him to make a present of a boxful of these fave to his lady. But
the pious mind has never been quite at ease under the gastronomic deception; and
so, though you may hate beans and keep your hands from them as scrupulously as
any pupil of Pythagoras, should your cook chance to be a good Catholic you will
assuredly, about the month of November, have beans set before you for dinner in
Venice.
Sources:
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Text - https://www.oldandsold.com/articles07/venice-28.shtml
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Image - https://www.catholicgreetings.org/Create.asp?card=747
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