which the city’s fleet of fishing boats brought back every day to sizzle in peddler’s carts and drive the street dogs wild. There were the people, from literally every corner of the Earth: glittering ladies tottering about on platform shoes, their attendants following them like a flock of twittering birds; harried men, grasping at their hips for swords they weren’t allowed to wear here; foreign merchants with their robes and turbans and troops of slaves; dirty, olive skinned children running underfoot in droves and pickpocketing you if you weren’t careful. And, finally, there were the colors: a city of white sails and blue-green water and black smoke from the kilns at Murano, and huge skies in a whole palette of shades, and towering mountains of clouds that painters came from all over Europe to set down for posterity, but that we saw every day.
“Wow,” Ray said again, sounding awed.
“You were never here?” I asked.
“No, and I kinda think I missed out.”
I smiled, glad to be able to show him this.
“What is this, exactly?” he asked.
“We are on the way to one of the battagliola, one of the street battles fought with sticks,” I informed him. “There were few chivalric tournaments in Venice, there being little room for the horses, so street fights took their place. Even better, you did not have to be a knight or some wealthy man’s son to take part. There was no armor to buy, just wooden weapons and leather shields, which almost anyone could afford. Whole neighborhoods used to join in, or all the members of a single guild. It was like a sport, you see?”
Ray nodded, perhaps because he was seeing it, through my eyes.
“We found a spot with a good view,” I continued, taking him to where I’d been that day, high above the teeming street.
We suddenly reappeared on a rooftop—perhaps a little too close to the edge. He abruptly stepped back. “Hey! A little warning next time!”
“Sorry.” I grinned at him, and he shook his head.
“Everybody in this damn family is crazy,” he muttered, but he did return to the edge after a moment, to gaze downward.
“There are so many people,” he said, sounding surprised. “There’s gotta be half the city down there!”
“Not quite. But some of the bigger fights could draw thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It was free entertainment.”
“But with so many fighting at once, it looks like a battle down there!”
“Most of those are onlookers,” I said, amused, because the battle hadn’t even started yet. “They were merely jostling for a good spot.”
I peered down alongside him for a while, at people crowding the streets and balconies, at hawkers selling sweet fritters and sausages and veal liver fried in olive oil, at old ladies clutching handkerchiefs, ready to wave them furiously at their favorites, and at men holding rotten vegetables and rooftiles, with which to pelt the cowardly.
“You did have a good spot,” Ray said, watching Coletta come up alongside us, to toss scraps to the pigeons. It caused a mini battle in the skies, with the faster birds catching her offerings mid-air, swooping and diving at fantastic speeds, and making her laugh delightedly.
Then the main event began, while the birds still cawed and circled overhead. The teams were from different neighborhoods: ours, who were mostly fishermen, and one from close by the Arsenal shipyard, who were mostly shipwrights. There were only fifty or sixty combatants per group, unlike the hundreds who sometimes participated in later centuries. But their taunting cries filled the air nonetheless, stirring up the crowd, who were already rowdy enough.
“The locals are missing out,” Ray said.
“How so?”
“Everybody’s getting buffeted around down there, and the fight hasn’t even started. I bet it gets worse later.”
“Frequently,” I agreed.
“Well, if it had been me, I’da set up a stall selling wooden shields with the different faction’s symbols on ‘em. Protect yourself on the day and keep them as a souvenir for later.” He shook his head. “These people got no idea how to merchandise.”
I grinned. “They became better at it in later years. They started holding the battles on bridges, allowing spectators to watch from their gondolas, which was marginally safer.”
“Marginally?”
“People did tend to get tossed off the bridges.”
Ray laughed. “Godddamn!”
“The gondolas were so closely packed that vendors could walk from boat to boat, hawking their wares. But we always watched from the top of a local church.”
“Wasn’t that considered sacrilegious?”
“Of course.” I smiled. “That’s why no one else was up here.”