CNF: The Rialto Market
by Emanuele Pettener
The Rialto Market, in Venice, is located along the Canal Grande at the foot of the famous bridge. It pulses with life, it is a sensory experience for tourists to enjoy: long counters of fruits, a continuous bustling of people and voices, the husking of vegetables, the beeping of scales, the cry of a child. The Rialto Market ebbs and flows in a rhythm that it’s developed over centuries, its own frantic calm. The merchants don’t shout, the pigeons keep watch, the customers move slowly and study things closely, they lose themselves in a mosaic of color—yellow apples from Canada, black cherries from Verona, red sundried tomatoes from the south, orange oranges from Sicily—as they breathe in the smell of basil and sage, of fennel and wet earth, of peaches and melon. A group of black boys in blue coveralls move boxes of fruit, a dove grazes on cast-off artichoke leaves on the masegni, huge ships move along the Canal Grande to load and unload their cargo as tourists move along it to take pictures. Then, on ink-stained ice, enormous cuttlefish with white and gray stripes lay alongside Atlantic octopi, anchovies and sardines with their dark backs and silver bellies, deep pink cuts of swordfish, ivory colored Peter’s fish filets and the bronze ones of African perch. In one of the steel compartments, there are the little sea snails that Venetians love to boil, season with garlic, and suck out of their shells as an appetizer. On the ground a seagull is playing with a salmon head and from a balcony, on the other side of the canal, a spectator sips a prosecco and takes notes.
[Translated from Italian by Zachary Scalzo]
Emanuele Pettener was born in Venice, Italy, and has lived in the United States since 2000. He teaches Italian language and literature at Florida Atlantic University. In Italy, he is the author of three novels and a critical essay on the American author John Fante. In the United States, his collection of short-stories A Season in Florida, translated by Thomas de Angelis, has been published by Bordighera press (New York) in 2014.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Rialto Market”? At the Rialto market many people take a lot of pictures with their phones, others shoot videos, someone paints. That’s normal and nobody cares, but when I went there to take notes (of colors, of names, of splendiferous details) Venetian merchants were suspicious, squeezing their eyes at me: “What are you writing about?”, “Just taking notes”, “Why?”, “Planning a novel, Murder at the Rialto Market”. They didn’t like it, they didn’t believe me. So I bribed them, I bought a lot of apples, a pound of cherries, two figs, one seabass. Still, they didn’t like me. It was a consolation realizing that writing is still considered a suspicious activity.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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