Points in the Air: Lacemaking on Burano

Lacemaking was one of the early ‘women’s industries’, a means by which many women achieved a measure of financial independence.  Before the French broke the Venetians’ control of the lacemaking industry Burano was one of the main centres of lacemaking in Europe.

 The  Burano vaporetto stop is a small ferry terminal opening to a wide, grassy, treed area on which children play under the watchful eyes of grandmothers, and where youths lounge around waiting for the excitement of whatever will arrive from the other islands.  

After a ferry trip in which drunken men sparred – a display more of linguistic than physical abilty – the sense of space under a blue spring sky was a relief, an escape.

Burano is famous for lacemaking.  Authentic Burano lace is no longer sold in the town's street stalls. Burano lace is now a luxury item, priced according to the time and skill that goes into its making.

Much of the lace sold in Burano shops is today made to order in countries where labour is cheap.

The visitor can still watch lace being stitched in the Scuola dei Merletti (School of Lacemaking) whose museum traces the history of lacemaking on Burano. 

Burano’s lacemaking tradition evolved from the influence of Venetian imports of gold and coloured embroideries from the East.  These inspired Venetian craftswomen who supplied the church cloths and vestments.  They developed white embroidery to trim these items.  Needlepoint lace developed from white embroidery.

The first lacemaking is, in spite of competing claims from orientalists, Francophiles and the numerous other voices clamouring for recognition of their area, not really known.  Many forms of decorative fabric trim were in existence long before true lace evolved. 

But it is interesting that the two regions of Europe where pictorial art flourished in conjunction with great trading skills, north Italy and Flanders, were where lace making first evolved as an important industry.

Lace came into being at the end of the fifteenth century and lace designs evolved from embroidery designs.

The first needle lacers were Venetian.  In the 16^th century Venetian women realized the monetary value of lace.  It was not only nuns cloistered in convents who made lace.  The women of Venice filled their palaces with relatives and servants and bales of thread from Salo on the shores of Lake Garda.  They produced lace edgings by the thousands of metres to trim cuffs, collars, hems because, in the early days, lace was used as a trim.  

These relatives and servants in turn began making lace at home and the skill spread to the islands.

Lace was a non-perishable product, that could be made in spare moments in the course of a woman’s day.  It was not dependent on timing or the season or the weather. 

Soon Murano, Chioggia, Burano and Pellestrina set up schools.  The translation of the Italian ‘scuola’ to the English ‘schools’ is confusing.  Italian ‘scuola’ were artisans’ guilds with strict rules and control over the products made under their auspices.  The scuola controlled who worked in the guilds, who trained the artisans and how, who sold the products, to whom and for how much.

In the sixteenth century the women of Burano developed a fine, delicate form of lace known as “punto in aria” (“points in the air”) which transformed the island into one of the most prosperous lacemaking centres in Europe.  Burano represented the standard for lacemaking in Europe until the end of the 18^th century 

During the 17^th century women broke away from the strict rules that had grown up around lacemaking for the church and developed new styles.

But within the mercantile spirit lies the seeds of its own destruction.  The Venetian Republic aspired to become the publishing capital of Europe and the Venetian dialect had been adopted as the official language of lace makers. 

Printers, authors and designers of manuals on lace making emerged on the fondamentas, salizadas, calles, campos and cortes of Venice.  Guides to lace making were published and became best sellers.  Outside Italy these guides were copied and translated or written by expatriate Venetians.

Those wily French and Flemish lace makers soon were providing serious competition for the women of Burano.  In order to encourage home-based industries the French imposed duty on imported lace and established their own factories for making all types of thread work.  The Venetians responded with their own import duties and bans.

From the 18^th century lace became a commercial enterprise. Venetian lace makers were paid large sums of money to go to France to work in the lace factories there.  The Venetian Republic retaliated by introducing laws against the emigration of lace workers, as they had done previously with the glassworkers of Murano. 

The conquest of Venice in 1797, and the subsequent collapse of its commercial power, resulted in the economic ruination of Burano and by implication of Burano’s women and children, although Burano was already declining as a lacemaking centre.  In 1872 the present day lace-making school was founded in the hope that it would revive the island’s former fortunes, but buyers were not prepared to pay a living wage to the lace makers. 

Nineteenth century male writers seemed to take particular pleasure in recounting stories about Burano’s women and children, beautiful yet reduced to aggressive begging.

An article published in the New York Times on 2^nd July 1880 typifies this writing:

“[We] soon drew up in a bad smelling canal, before a dirty broad street or narrow marketplace, ... we pushed our way through the crowd of begging children to the lace school.  We were accompanied all the way by one particular dirty little girl ... who begged persistently and dolefully. ...

In spite of being unable to locate finished pieces of lace to purchase the writer found at least one compensation for the trip to the island:

The Buranese women are among the prettiest we have seen in North Italy.  When we went back to the gondola, we found the landing swarming with beggars.  We were paddled away from Burano, followed along the sides of the canal by the troop of begging children among whom the frowsty-pated little girl was still prominent and quite unabashed by her utter want of success.”

It is almost certain that canals throughout the lagoon smelt badly in those days.  They still are not that fragrant.  One only wishes the ‘frowsty-pated little girl’ had flung great handfuls of mud from the stinking canal onto the backs of the mean-spirited but doubtless well scented retreating tourists.

Observer

11 May 2010

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Email:  longline8@gmail.com

Note: 

There is an enormous amount of information about lace and Burano on the web.  There is also an almost equal amount of printed literature on the lace makers of Burano.  Below is just a sample listing.  

http://www.museocaprai.it/en/index.htm

http://www.topak.cz/text/en/history.aspx

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Art of Modern Lace Making, by The Butterick Publishing Co. 

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22325/22325-h/22325-h.htm

(Good for techniques and styles of lacemaking, but with dubious historical information)

Migration, Minorities, and Technology Transfer in Early Modern Europe* by Salvatore Ciriacono, University of Padua

 New York Times Archive for 1880
The Sciama book is an excellent sociological study 

Pompeii 1,930 years after the event

Pompeii is a dead city.  In the cobbled streets, the open plazas, the Anfiteatro, there is no echo of past lives, just the tranquillity of a cemetery long abandoned.  Frescoes shimmer behind a veil of ages.

Founded in the seventh century B.C. Pompeii underwent invasions and colonisation until 80 B.C. when it became a Roman colony.

The eruption that buried Pompeii was not the first natural disaster to hit the city.  But it was in the first century that these natural disasters reached cataclysmic proportions.

The fifth of February 62 A.D. was an important day in the pagan calendar.  Two sacrifices were to be offered in Pompeii.  One was to honour the Emperor Augustus’s anniversary, the second to appease the spirit guardians of the city.  On that winter afternoon an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale hit the city and surrounding countryside.

Roads, bridges, temples and homes were ruined.  It is believed that almost every building in Pompeii was damaged. 

Oil lamps overturned during the quake spread fires which added to the devastation.

In the days following the earthquake lawlessness ruled.  The city was plundered.  Its surviving citizens starved.

Over the following seventeen years many people moved to other cities, but some remained behind and attempted to rebuild Pompeii.  The reconstruction was far from finished, when, on 23^rd August 79 AD, the people of Pompeii celebrated Vulcanalia, the festival of the Roman god of fire.  The following day Vesuvius erupted sending a rain of ash south as far as the Gulf of Salerno. 

It is at this point that historians begin to differ.  Were Pompeii and its sister city Herculaneum destroyed in the two days following the initial eruption or was the final deadly shower of ash two months later in October?  Almost two thousand years later, the most intriguing aspect of Pompeii is that so much of the city has been revealed, rather than academic questions of exact dating.

Anyone planning a visit to Pompeii should read Pliny the Younger’s letter to Tacitis.  His vivid description of the last days of Pompeii is an engaging, timeless account of a people and place during natural disaster.

Pompeii lay under sixty feet of ash and pumice for over 1500 years until a project to redirect the flow of the River Sarno unearthed what was, 150 years later, to become the site of the excavation of Pompeii.

It was not until the late 1800s that professional and controlled methods of excavation were employed at the site.  During this time Giuseppe Fiorelli devised the technique of injecting plaster into cavities left around human remains.  The grotesque figures stored or displayed at the site are examples of his technique.  It is these echoes of tormented deaths that most embody the reality of those catastrophic days in the summer of 79 A.D.

Today Pompeii is best visited in the cooler months of the year.  During the summer months its roofless buildings and cobbled streets bake under the Italian sun.  In winter it may be cold, but is usually dry and it is  pleasant to spend a day poking around the cobbled streets, inspecting the interiors of the homes of merchants remembered now only because of the disaster that destroyed 2,000 people millenia ago.

A word of advice – the available maps of the site are continually being updated and changed.  For the person who has travelled half way round the world to visit it, this is one place where the price of an official guided tour is money well spent.

What is memorable about Pompeii is not the brothel with its erotic frescoes.  After all, this is the oldest profession and more imaginative versions of the frescoes exist on in a variety of forms in all parts of the world. 

It is the complexity and sophistication of the social life of Romans at that time, reflected in the public buildings, that is most thought provoking.  There are pagan temples and the famous Anfiteatro, the oldest Roman amphitheatre in which gladiators fought before a crowd of 20,000.  But there are also law courts, the forum, the covered markets, specialty shops, public baths, a water supply, roads with pedestrian crossings and night lighting, systems for removal of human waste and garbage.  There are many places in the world today almost 2,000 years later which have never known such development.  

Observer

New Year's Eve 2009

longline8.blogspot.com

Rome to Naples and Pompeii : Journey – the middle

Two hours south of Rome the bus enters Naples via back streets, and threads through ancient tightly packed slums.  The guide relapses into silence.  There is nothing she can say.  These are not the slums of Asia or the sub-continent with exhausted beaten masses eking out a living.  Hard faced people quivering with angry energy glare at the bus, watch for the raised camera, any opportunity to raise a fist.  This is the city of blood thick on the streets, of ancient internecine wars.

Naples is almost 3,000 years old with a story convoluted through three millennia of telling and the shadow of its slums overlaying all. 

It is a small city of one million people and famous for pizza, opera and Sophia Loren.  It could equally be famous for one of the worst traffic problems in the world.  Traffic lights are ignored, drivers invent their own direction of traffic flow against all odds and triple parking seems to be the norm.  A walking tour of the city, preferably with a Neoplitan speaking guide, is an attractive option for a visitor, in fact the only practical option.

Step out of the main part of the city and the Bay of Naples opens to another reality.

Along the waterfront it is as if the slums did not exist.  The bay is a perfect curve.  Arms linked, couples stroll along the promenade, children chase seagulls, old men sit on benches smoking and staring out to sea, women gather in excited gesticulating groups.  The walkers are not as fashionable as the technicolour movies of the 1960s promised and the rock wall protecting the promenade from the sea is the least attractive feature on the front.  But after the chaos of the city it is a welcome space to stand and gaze across the bay to the horizon where Capri floats between a cerulean sky and ultramarine sea and then to turn around and look back at the hills of the city and see in them an order that is non-existent in the city proper.

But now we are almost at our destination

Outside Pompeii is a cameo factory that has attracted a record number of warnings from tourists about its hard sell policy.  However on this day the hard sell is tucked away and visitors are treated to a demonstration of cameo carving.  An ancient art brought from Greece by the Romans its history reflects much of the history of Europe.  Royalty gave cameo images of themselves to favourites and admirers.  Cameos have been copied and cast in plastic, glass, and resin by such names as Wedgwood, but the art of carving by hand survives.  And the cost of buying a hand carved cameo reflects its labour intensiveness.

The gates of Pompeii beckon.

Observer

longline8.blogspot.com

Rome to Naples and Pompeii - On the Highway of the Sun

The journey begins. 

The drizzle decreases, the light strengthens.  Soon the sun is shining, appropriately, as the bus is roaring along the Autostrada del Sole – the Highway of the Sun.

Passengers shed overcoats and covertly check out their fellows.  The guide abandons her mobile phone, rises from a nest of paperwork and relates stories about the places flashing by.  She indicates the Castelli Romani at the foot of the Alban Hills.  This rich agricultural area a short distance south-east of Rome has fed the population since the dawn of history.

But it is a modern achievement that inspires her proudest moment. 

Italy was the first country in the world to build Autostrada.  Building of these began in 1921 and reached a peak during the fascist era.  However it wasn’t until the 1950s that the Milan-Rome-Naples autostrada was built.  The upgrading of the system continues today.  What ancient monuments were destroyed to build it?  What poor villages flattened?  What would have happened to the highways of Italy if Benito Mussolini had not come to power?

The bus takes a detour around the perimeter of the monastery of Monte Cassino.  The guide now tells an epic tale of glory and adventure, of men of faith and honour and monsters with swords and fire, of destruction and creation.

In 500 AD, Benedict of Nursia disgusted by the immorality of Roman society, abandoned his studies there and retreated to a cave to live as a hermit.  He attracted disciples but problems with his first community led to his founding a monastery on the fortified hill above Cassino in 529.

At that time Cassino was still largely pagan.  It had been devastated by the Goths but a temple of Apollo survived within the hilltop fortification.  Benedict, in keeping with the history and future of the site, destroyed the sculpture of Apollo and the altar on which it stood and rededicated the site to John the Baptist.

Benedict never left the monastery and near the end of his life he drew on his experience and knowledge to write what became known as the Benedictine Rule.

The Regula Benedicti is a guide for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot.  It has become the main guide in Western Christianity for monastic living in community for both men and women, in both the Orthodox and Catholic and, since the Reformation, in the Anglican and Protestant conventions.

Because of its strategic importance on the road to Rome the monastery of Monte Cassino was sacked or destroyed and rebuilt several times over the next millennia.

The last destruction was on February 15, 1944.  During the final stage of World War II the monastery sheltered hundreds of civilians.  In three hours during the battle of Monte Cassino it was reduced to a heap of debris under which many of the refugees met their death.

The monastery, memorials and graveyards that today sit on the mountain and on neighbouring Mount Cairo were built in the decade after World War II, exclusively financed by the Italian State.

The tour guide, exhausted by history subsides beside the driver

Observer

29 December 2009

longline8.blogspot.com

Rome to Naples and Pompeii

In the beginning ...

It is dark and cold, threatening rain, at the meeting place in Rome. Inside the small and shabby office a peculiar mix of confusion and indifference reigns. The waiting area is full of people being ignored while grey-faced employees lurk behind the counter shuffling paper and muttering among themselves. Minivans load and reloaded passengers in the predawn drizzle. The crowd in the waiting area increases and grows restless - a disparate group uniting now in the increasing certainty that the tour company hasn’t a clue.

The deadline for departure passes, outside the drizzle increases and the darkness thins. There is no tour bus in sight. Any attempt at making enquiries of the staff is met with please wait.

Young Arab men carrying crumpled bits of paper lead clumps of dripping people inside. Soon the tiny waiting area is crowded and those who cannot squeeze in, huddle outside in the dark under the dripping awning. Complaints in a dozen languages fill the air.

Three buses pull up outside one behind the other and simultaneously six people in blue uniforms emerge from a doorway behind the counter. With a sudden urgency the waiting people are organised into groups, ordered onto buses. Confused and damp, clutching vouchers, they obey, try to check they are on the right bus, but the only response in English is, please sit.

The driver and guide board one of the buses. The guide shouts Pompeii as the engine roars into life. Someone runs from the back of the bus yelling Pisa! Pisa! Stumbles down the stairs and disappears into the gloom. The guide casts a withering look at the remaining passengers and then engages in loud protracted discussion with the driver.

Patience, and the ability to enjoy the moment are worthwhile qualities on guided tours in Italy . Tourists have been visiting this country for millennia and the apparent confusion that seems to reign at the beginning of each tour seems to be always resolved. Even better Italy has some of the world’s best tour guide.

Observer

longline8.blogspot.com