Category Archives: Venice

Dublin & Venice (April 2017)

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The Grand Canal in Venice (April 2017, photo by S. Morris)

Sunset on the River Liffey in Dublin (April 2017, photo by S. Morris)

St. Mark’s Square in Venice (April 2017, photo by S. Morris)

I was lucky enough to spend a week in Venice and a week in Dublin during April with my partner Elliot. (We also spent the week in Venice with longtime friends, a couple from New Jersey.) If you follow me on Facebook, you may recognize the photos above. I hope to share a few of my travel experiences in posts here over the next few weeks.

We encountered chill and rainy weather the first day in Venice but the rest of the trip was warm and sunny in Venice; the weather was a bit chilly in Dublin but fairly dry, although there was a brief and sudden hailstorm at one point!

Venice calls out for a novel to be set there. Parts of Ireland have already appeared in Come Hell or High Water and additional regions of Ireland will be the setting of the novel I am currently working on (Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes); there could easily be additional novels set in Ireland as well.

There was a surprising similarity between Dublin and Venice that I had not expected. Each city is beautiful, although in very different ways. Both have legends and ancient tales stalking the shadows of their streets. But both also depend on the water for their history and existence. Both were built on swamps and mud flats, although the ground beneath Dublin is somewhat more solid than that under Venice. Both feature a variety of fish and seafood in their traditional cuisines (making them perhaps strange places to go after the long weeks of no meat and only fish during Lent). 😉

We just got back to New York. I’m still unpacking and doing laundry. But I look forward to sharing more about this April 2017 trip with you in the next few weeks.

Our Lady of Deliverance

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The altarpiece in Our Lady of Deliverance in Venice; note the angel on the right driving away Lady Plague with a torch.

The altarpiece in Our Lady of Deliverance in Venice; note the angel on the right driving away Lady Plague with a torch.

The bridge in 2011 to allow the procession to Our Lady of Deliverance in Venice.

The bridge in 2011 to allow the procession to Our Lady of Deliverance in Venice.

Each year on November 21, the feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, a bridge is built across the water in Venice to allow a procession of the city council and the citizens of the city to Our Lady of Deliverance in thanksgiving for the end of the plague.

Beginning in the summer of 1630, a wave of the plague assaulted Venice, killing nearly a third of the population by 1631. In the city, 46,000 people died whilst in the lagoons the number was far higher, some 94,000. As a votive offering for the city’s deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health (or of Deliverance, Italian: Salute). It was also decided that the Senate would visit the church each year on November 21 the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin, also known as the Festa della Madonna della Salut. The city’s officials still parade from San Marco to the Salute for a service in gratitude for deliverance from the plague. This involves crossing the Grand Canal on a specially constructed pontoon bridge and is still a major event in Venice.

There are several such “plague churches” in Venice, each built to celebrate the end of one outbreak of plague or another. The plague was one of the most fearsome diseases anyone could face (until the development of modern antibiotics); an outbreak of the plague in a town was probably the most terrible thing the inhabitants could face, except war. Plague was fought with prayer and fasting, fire (burning the houses and corpses of the sick), and efforts to avoid the poisonous fumes or “miasmas” that were thought to spread the disease. (Sometimes poisoned water was thought to spread the disease as well.)

Plague, as all illnesses, was seen as a disruption of the balance of the four humors of the human body. Doctors sought to heal a patient by restoring the balance of the humors, often by “bleeding” a patient to remove the excessive humors; folk healers used herbs and plants to heal patients and the modern heirs of these folk healers are the pharmacists who provide medicine at a local pharmacy. “Pharmacology” was the Greek word for witchcraft because if a person knew how to use herbs and plants to heal, the person was assumed to know how to use these same herbs and plants to kill. Many people accused of witchcraft might still be put on trial today — but as poisoners, not witches.