I see the pigeons of St. Mark again:
the Square is silent, the morning hour lies on it.
In the mild coolness I send indolent songs like flights of pigeons,
then I draw them back to the ground,
to hang another rhyme on their feathers...

- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

This column is absolutely off-topic -- so out-of-place that I still wonder how it comes that a piece of BEA has been stolen for it.

It's a homage to my home town. What's it got to do with boobs? Nothing, and that's the point. This is not Los Angeles, CA. No lapdancing here, no made-in-USA super-slim-'n-stacked babes. Actually, it's full of foreigners -- when you walk down the street today, it's hard to find someone who speaks my Venetian dialect -- but almost all the American women I see here, coming out of those five-star hotels, are fat chicks. How do you call them? Chunky? Zaftig, maybe? Well, looking from this corner of good ol' Europe, it seems that Americans are the fattest people on earth. I suspect that Pandora, Wendy and all the other busty Yankees we see in the mags are all morphs.

Which mags? Seno super, the national equivalent of SCORE, except for the fact that they steal pics published two or three years ago, they use false names, and the pages are made out of crepe paper. "Here's Consuelo, from Madrid..." Whose leg are you pulling? She's Linzi McKenzie, for Chrissake!

Luckily our newsvendor, Giuseppe, brings us foreign magazines. He shares our passion for not-A-nor-B-nor-C-cupped ladies; his wife is an EE, I dare say... a "5th", using our sizes. (I never fully understood the American ones: isn't it simpler our way: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... ?) But D-Cup, Big Ones and similar tomes arrive here via air mail, and each hand they pass through takes its cut... The result: SCORE in L.A., CA : $6.99. SCORE in Calle delle Tette, Dorsoduro 2618 (the newsstand's address): $15.00, give or take a lira. No wonder my friends and I buy it jointly. No wonder it's a hard fight for who takes it home first: "Okay, okay, Marco, but I get it on Sunday...."

What did Darwin call it? The struggle for life, right? Life is hard here, guys....

Oh, by the way: do you know what Calle delle Tette means? Well, there's no good translation in my English dictionary for calle, actually. Maybe "alley," but that doesn't quite cut the mustard -- too wide. The dictionary just says "narrow Venetian street": I guess they've never been here, thus they don't understand the meaning of "narrow". Usually, a calle is a place you can only pass through (assuming you're not one of those fat chicks) by turning sideways. The Calle delle Tette is wider, luckily, and its name means: "Alley of the Tits".

A street dedicated to tits? How come? Well, there's a lack of strip-clubs here, but no lack of history. Prostitution has a glorious tradition here: when La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia was a powerful, rich and independent state, she (we always think of Venice as "she") was a kind of Amsterdam of the 16th and 17th centuries. While Puritanism was raging in Northern Europe, and your Pilgrim forefathers were burning witches, here people were having fun. Our Unsinkable Fleet ruled the 7 seas, and the Ladies of Venice were world-renowned, almost as much as our ladykillers. (Ever heard of a certain Casanova?)

Busty ladies ruled, of course, for Venetians have good taste. They designated part of the district of Dorsoduro a red-light zone. (Although we didn't have red lights, we had wall torches.) In Calle delle Tette, from sundown to sunup, the most beautiful and bustiest women had permission to display their tits to customers and the general public: a street show among the torchlights, girls dancing and bouncing around, and if you had the money, you only had to choose the one that tickled your fancy, and spend your own magic night of lust in one of the golden Venetian palaces, on the Canal Grande, over the sea and under the moon...

But things have changed. They had already started to change when some damn fool of an explorer (not an Italian, I trust) blundered into the New World one fine October day. The trade routes and thus the center of commerce moved outside of mare nostrum, the Mediterranean Sea, and we were relegated to a commercial backwater. While the rest of the world depended on horses and carts and wagons, Venice with its boats was the fastest place on earth. Nowadays there are airplanes and cars; we still use the boats, and we have become the slowest place on earth. High water comes more and more often; they say in 50 years everything will be under the sea. And if we're looking for big boobs, we'd better visit Giuseppe. (And his wife, indeed.)

But some nights, when I walk down la Calle and I see the distant lampare in the old harbour, and hear that filthy Venetian song sung by the departing fishermen, and the strong smell of the Old Town sleeping on the water makes me think about our glorious past... well, those nights it almost seems to me that I can perceive, out of the corner of my eye, a bouncing boob under the uncertain light of a torch...

This column is for Mike, who was here and knows that smell and those feelings.

Editing my English? Done! Now you only need two more miracles and you'll be a real Saint, St Stephan. I can teach you one more: parva ubera magna facere.