Roberto Trevisan
Click here for
the Venetian version
WHO I AM
I was born in Venice and still live here just like my ancestors did before me according to records dating as far back as the 1500s. Ever since I was a child, I have not only loved my city dearly, but I have also loved its ultra-millennial history. In Venice, life is very different than anywhere else in the world. This is a love I already had in my heart, but one that was also instilled in me from primary school onwards, together with an appreciation for this beautiful and unique city. I fondly remember my Elementary School teacher, Giuseppina Serraglia, who assigned us historical research on Venice's history.
HOW THE IDEA CAME ABOUT
As sometimes happens in life, it all came about by chance.
The reading of a boring novel. A friend's friendly provocation: "Try writing something better yourself if you can!"
The writing of a short story I sent her by email. Her surprise and appreciation for this short story of mine were followed by her pressing encouragement to write an entire novel.
I only began to realise the importance of this undertaking when she said the following:
“You will be able to tell the world how ordinary people have lived in Venice for centuries and centuries until just a few decades ago when everything changed. You will be able to give perhaps one last testimony about a world that is now lost and that is unlikely to be reborn again."
THE RESEARCH
So I began to search, then to find, then to catalogue, then to read dozens and dozens of ancient books and historical documents of the Republic of Venice. A little blindly, without a precise goal in mind, in search of I still didn't quite know what.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to write a modern novel about ancient Venice.
I wanted to set everything, every detail, within the historical period in which the story of the novel would take place.
After long months of toil and frustration, I finally found the historical event to which I could attach the story of my novel.
AND NOW?
Searching for ancient documents was complicated and tiring, but reading and understanding them turned out to be even more so.
These ancient documents are written in Venetian and/or ancient Italian, some in Latin, and sometimes the three languages overlap.
The greatest difficulty was not so much understanding the meaning of individual words, but making sense of sentences that were sometimes unclear or even incomprehensible to a modern person.
Up to that point, the work had been long and arduous, but once I found the historical event that inspired me, the plot of the novel emerged quickly and clearly in my mind, at least in its basic form.
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THE DETAILS
The historical event had been found, as had the basic plot points, so the question was how to develop the story in all its detail, starting with the main characters. The idea came to me thanks to the research carried out by my father, Gianfranco. After more than 10 years of painstaking work, my father was able to trace our ancestors and establish our complete family tree back to the 1500s.
In fact, it was only after the Council of Trent's decree called the Decretum de Reformatione Matrimonii of 11 November 1563, that parishes were ordered to register the births, marriages and deaths of the inhabitants of each borough in Venice. This led to the data of ordinary people being collected in special registers.
ORIGIN OF SURNAMES
I like to define the surname as a kind of attribute to people's first names, and one that served to distinguish and identify them more precisely. Surnames were given not only to identify a family but also a branch of the same family, e.g. to distinguish it from other family members living in the same small district.
For this reason, the family surname sometimes contained an additional attribute for identification purposes. For example, my oldest ancestor for whom I have documentation was called Zuane Buranello, which means someone who comes from the island of Burano, one of the first islands in the Venetian lagoon to be inhabited.
WHO WERE MY EARLIEST ANCESTORS?
They were Venetians, they were fishermen, later they were hired by noble families, then fishermen again, and ship officers. They lived in the borough of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, then in the borough of Anzolo Raffael, before moving to the borough of San Geremia in the 1700s. Some of them even owned their own houses, something which was not common at that time for ordinary people.
With the help of historical documents, I have also been able to identify the exact spot where the houses of some of them used to stand. And it is on the exact spot where the house of one of my ancestors once stood, that the male protagonist in the novel lives. Even though that house no longer exists today, there is another now there which was built during the 1900s.
THE CHARACTERS OF THE NOVEL
For many years, whenever I happened to look at the documents my father had collected during his decades of research and read the few lines where their names, dates of birth, marriage and death were listed, I could not help but wonder how these ancestors of mine had lived their lives.
What did they eat? How did they dress? Where did they live and what objects did they use in their daily lives? Where did they go to buy food and what remedies did they use for their illnesses? What social rules did they have to obey and what was the society they lived in like?
I can never have all my questions answered, but thanks to the research I have done, I have found the answers to many of them. Anyway, if I exist today, it is because they existed before me, and in one way or another, they managed to survive plagues, wars and foreign invasions. It therefore seemed to me both a duty and a fascinating endeavour to revive them imaginatively by assigning some of their names to the characters in my novel.
Cattarina, Antonio, Angela, Maria, Giulia, Lauretta... these are the names of my ancestors that I have used in my novel. In addition, I have used the surnames of two of my ancestors for both the female and male protagonists, as you can see from the documents in the Historical Records section of this website.
I decided to write my novel from the point of view of simple, humble people like my ancestors… to convey all the joys and sorrows that everyone experiences on a daily basis. People who are not mentioned or remembered in the history books, but who ultimately represent the vast majority of us. I wanted to tell the personal story of ordinary people, embedded in the environment and time in which they lived, embedded in the unpredictability of life itself and their world which was often beyond their control and understanding.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
It is only logical that in any given place, customs from the past survive. Rules, festivals, customs… these are things that are fairly easy to pass on. But digging deeper, I found many examples that confirmed to me that living in a place, in a particular society, also influences the way people think and interpret life. And this influence lasts for generations, crossing the boundary of time, but also that of the memory of the men themselves, to continue unconsciously in them like a kind of DNA.
In a few, perhaps simpler words, I could say that Venetians were born, but also became so, living in a country where, for better or worse, there were rules and values that were respected and shared by the majority of the population. I would like to make one last point: if the Republic of Venice lasted for well over 1,000 years, it was because the majority of its people, regardless of social class, loved it as one loves one's home.
A place without its people is like a lifeless body.
A country without people who love it is doomed to disappear.
