Mythic Venice – May #Dungeon23 #City23

In case you missed the previous episodes in the series, Dungeon 23 is a writing challenge, once a day for a year. These are my notes for a Mythic Venice setting for Ars Magica as recorded in May.

My entry for May the first was included in the April episode because it was connected with the material discussed that month. This month we start on a travellers guide and set of folktales recorded by Alberto Toso Fei, who is a folklorist and travel writer native to Venice.

May 2 – Ghosts of the three Doges

The spectre of the traitorous doge, Marino Falier, wanders Venice searching for his missing head. The spectre of Enrico Dandolo wanders hunting for Falier. He is blind and has hot coals where his eyes should be. He carries a sword by its blade so he is in constant pain. No one knows what happens if these two meet. Dandolo is doing this as a curse because of the sack of Constantinople.

Tommaso Mocenigo’s ghost cannot speak. As he wanders he pulls a continuous piece of paper from his mouth. It says Veritas. Sometimes the ribbon becomes so long that it tangles around his legs. He is momentarily happy if people free him from the ribbon. Why he is cursed, Toso Fei does not say.

May 3: The jar of heroic skin.

In the church of San Giovanni et Paolo there is an urn full of skin. It belongs to
Marcantonio Bragadin. He was skinned by the Turks at Famagosta. It was stolen from Constantinople in 1596.

Plot hooks: Steal it earlier; mask magic; mysterious superhero.

May 4: The Bellringer’s Skeleton
This is a 17th century myth. A bell-ringer was hugely tall, so a master from an anatomical college offered to buy the bellringer’s skeleton after his death. He paid the man for a written contract giving over his body.

At midnight the Skeleton climbs the bell tower and rings 12 chimes. Then he walks down to his old house ringing his bell and begging for funds to buy his skeleton back. As I recall the thing doing the begging is his ghost. So it’s an example of two undead from the same person.

May 5th. San Michele
I’ve said before that the island of San Michele was created in the 19th century. It turns out I’m wrong. San Michele is merged with the neighbouring island of San Christoforo della Pace and so the island itself does predate the Napoleonic demand for a cemetery island.

The church of San Michele in Isola was begun in 1469. It was the home of Brother Mauro, one of the finest cartographers of the late medieval period. He died in 1459 so he was in the previous church. He had a factory for maps. He gets international commissions in real life and he took information from Venetian navigators to make his maps more accurate. Mythically he stole the information from Satan’s dreams and could project Satan’s dreams into the clouds. The dreams can still sometimes be seen just before lightning storms.

May 6: The Memory Witch by Kenneth Rand.
This is a street song that I may steal for Serenissima.

Fresh spells! New spells! True spells today!
A charm to keep the frost away,
that makes the rose-time never die.
Come buy.
A bit of sun and summer-breeze
of love and life and leafy trees,
When zephyrs sigh.

Fresh spells! New spells! True spells today.
A bit of magic from May.
A snatch of song where swallows fly.
Come by.
A spring day when the pulses leap
and all the southern breezes sweep
the sapphire sky.

Fresh spells! New spells, True spells today!
That point the road to yesterday.
That start the tear-drop in the eye.
Come buy.
A ghost of long-forgotten love.
The tryst, the silver moon above.
The last goodbye.

May 7: Another burning skeleton.
The ghost of Bartolomio Zenni carries a heavy bag down the Campo d’Abazia.
During a fire he didn’t help rescue children, because he was too busy stuffing his own possessions into a bundle, then he drowned in the canal. If anyone helps him carry his bundle to the Church of St. Fosca, he’ll be able to rest. If anyone touches his bundle, the ghost involuntarily turns into a flaming skeleton, which tends to frighten any aid away.

May 8: The Statue of Judas.
The Church of Madonna Dell’Orto was built in the 14th century and was originally dedicated
to St. Christopher. They found a statue of Mary in a veggie patch nearby, via a miracle, and there was a rededication. It has statues of the Apostles on the facade.

The sculptor was a Satanist, so he has Judas rather than Matthew. The Judas statue contains
one of the thirty pieces of silver stained with Judas’s blood. Remember he is meant to have
committed suicide by hanging himself. It has an infernal aura. On Good Friday night the statue
flies to the Akeldama. The Akeldama (Biblical trivia) is the name of the land that Judas bought
with the pieces of silver.

May 9th: Statues of the Mastelli Brothers
Four merchants were turned to stone by Mary Magdalene, they were cheats and hypocrites who used to swear “If I’m lying, may God turn my left hand to stone.”

May 10th, Witch in Tintoretto’s house.
On her way to First Communion at the Church of Madonna Dell’Orto, Tintoretto’s daughter was stopped by a woman. This witch told the girl that she could be like the Madonna if she retained ten weeks’ worth of Communion wafers. After hiding some wafers for weeks, she became afraid and told her father. He knew this was an initiation ritual for witches, so on the tenth week he asked his daughter to trick the witch into their house. Tintoretto locked the door after she entered and started beating her with his walking stick. She changed into a cat and couldn’t escape, so she changed into black smoke and vanished through his wall.

May 11: The ghostly nun
Chiaretta, the daughter of Lorenzo Loredan, haunts the convent of Sant’Anna. She fell in love with a carpenter, so her father forced her to take the veil. She tried to escape, but her father found out and murdered her as she was making the attempt. There is a story that her ghost sometimes helps lovers in surrounding campos or rescues the suicidal.

May 12: Infernal Aura / St Peter’s mother
God allows St Peter’s mother out of Hell for his Saint’s Day and the week before and after.
She is a vicious old woman, so the Infernal Aura rises, and the winds are strange and strong.

May 13: Han Dong
Toso Fei says that Marco Polo married a daughter of Chinngis Khan. When Polo was imprisoned, she spent her evenings singing a Cathayan love song over the canals from the balcony of her palace. When he was moved to Genoa, Polo’s sister told the princess that he had been put to death for marrying a non-Christian. She dressed in her finery, set herself aflame, and then threw herself into the canal. Toso Fei says they found the body of an Asian woman buried with a tiara during a restoration.

May 14: Notes
There is a version of the Devil and the Mason about the Rialto Bridge.
Black candles burn every night at the Virgin of the Sea to remember the Baker’s Boy.

Page 142, there is the use of a false fleet to get the Genoans to flee. This battle is commemorated with two great Palazzo columns.

Page 145, between the 9th and 10th columns on the upper level of the Doge’s Palace is where
death sentences were proclaimed.

Page 147, Cheba: tortured by a hanging cage on the southern side of the Bell Tower.

Page 149, There was a third column with a crocodile on top. It was sunk in the ocean during transport. Some nights it rises, roaring from the sea. And on those nights, a girl always vanishes.

Page 150, Story about Elizabeth I’s goddaughter, a guy who kept meeting her on the down low, was executed for espionage. She was then privately told to flee the city. Instead, she gatecrashed the Doge’s Palace, passionately explained that this wasn’t espionage just adultery
and got a public declaration, and an apology to her lovers’ family.

May 15: Giordano Bruno
Bruno was an alchemist who worked for, and tutored, the doge from 1591 to 1592. Doge Mochenigo didn’t develop magical powers, so he handed him over to the local church authorities. Bruno fled to Rome, was arrested, tortured by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600. On the night of his death, he does water-related pranks, but only in front of women 85 years old or older.

And then there’s a break for some time.

May 26: The Fade
The fairies (Fade) often appear in the night and look like women in white. They have hooves and bestial reflections. You must hide knives and mirrors in their presence if you don’t want to
enrage them. They give wealth and beauty, but they are devious.

May 27: Further notes
Page 186: There is a description of Giacomo Cassanova’s method of immortality and lifestyle,
either magical longevity or constant reincarnation in Venice. This is noted as a post-period 18th
century piece of folklore.
Page 200: there is a story of a young man who kicked the skull from the graveyard into a canal, who was then punished on his wedding night.
Page 201: Tthere are annual parades to celebrate deliverance from plague. During plagues proper burial customs were skipped, and this creates genius locis, where burial masses are needed.
Page 207: a deep part of the Punta della Dogana is home to a horse-headed sea monster or
serpent
Page 210-12: there is a story from the Pentamerone

Now we move on from Toso Fei

We have to deal with the elephant in the room, Giovanni Straparola. When I did the Pentamerone it sidetracked me for a year, and so I wanted to leave Straparola’s “Facetious Nights” alone. I was worried that it would do the same thing. However, I’ve gone through the 75 stories and set myself some ground rules in this note, which I then promptly ignored.

The entry for May 29th is a text sheet of which stories I would include, and so I’m going to skip reading that, because it will become obvious in future entries.

May 30: Cassandrino, a variant of the Master Thief, set in Perugia.
Cassandrino has a bet with a local governor that he will steal the governor’s bed and decoys him with a corpse dressed in the thief’s clothes. While the governor buries the corpse,
which he thinks is the thief who has volunteered his death because of the bet, the thief steals his bed by breaking in through his roof. Next he steals a horse.

The governor sets the thief a task – bring me a particular holy man in a sack or I’ll hang you. The thief thinks this is a trap so he dresses as an angel, tricks the priest into the sack, and then delivers him. The governor gives the thief 400 florins and says, if he doesn’t give up his thievery, he’ll be hanged, and so he becomes a merchant.

My idea for the unusual characters from Straparola is that they could be guides to Venice, that they would take the place of portal fairies.

May 30: Father Scarpatico
Set in Imola.
The priest, Scarpatico, is a miser and has a lame foot, so his housekeeper Nina convinces him to buy a horse. He buys a mule for seven florins, and then is tricked out of it by three thieves. For revenge, he tricks them into paying him money, then murdering their wives, then murdering a shepherd, so Scarpatico can steal his flock, and then committing suicide by convincing them that they will have magical powers, if Scarpatico is allowed to put a sack and heave them into the river. He even uses a bladder filled up with blood to fake murder.

June 1: Tebaldo of Salerno
King Tebaldo is in Venice pretending to be a merchant. Unlike most guides, he desperately wishes to stay in Venice because he thinks he’s possessed. He’s not, he’s an incognisant faerie, and his story is in abeyance, while he is caught in the mesh of the Player of Games’ meta-plot.

He thinks he’s the King of Solerno, and a widower. When his wife died, he believes she made him promise to only remarry if her wedding rings fits the new bride. Only his daughter’s finger fits the ring. She flees locked in a chest with a potion that, with one dose of less than a spoonful, nourishes you for a long time.

Tebaldo dresses as a merchant, gets a great store of jewels and gems, and sets out to find her.
He also has a sleeping poison. Then he gets to Venice and his story pauses. He doesn’t consciously know that he’ll murder his grandkids and get put to death by incineration at the end of his story. But he knows if he leaves he’s going to be…possessed…again.

June 2: Biancabella and Samaritana.
A baby girl is born with a snake wrapped around her neck. She also has a shining gold chain between her skin and muscle in her neck. The snake flees at birth but comes back when her sister is a young woman, and it goes through a ritual with the girl massaging a milk bath into her skin and then dowsing her with rose water. This makes the girl, Biancabella, supernaturally beautiful, and gemstones fall from her hair when it is combed. In her story she is then maimed and blinded, but she is cured by her sister the snake who has the name Samaritana. They then go home for revenge. Her story is stuck after the healing. She’s rich gorgeous and has a sister who’s a sorceress because the snake can take human shape.

They are staying in Venice. Her new hands are not her hands reconnected or regenerated. I’d like them to be a magical prosthetics.

June 3: Fortunio
Fortunio, a boy off to make his fortune, meets three magical animals arguing over a deer carcass. He gives the flesh and bones to the wolf because their teeth, the innards to the eagle, and the squishy brain to the ant.

They reward him with the magical power of changing to their shapes by saying “Would that I were a… (wolf/eagle/ant)” he can change into the appropriate animal. He later turns up at a joust as a mystery knight, clad in bejeweled white caparisons and armour, so he’s really, really, really rich. At the end of his story he marries a princess and eats his foster parents in wolf form.

June 4: Constanza and the Satyr
The king of Thebes is old and divides his land between his three daughters, who marry neighbouring kings. Then he has a fourth baby girl later in life. When she grows up the king offers the little bit of land he has kept back for expenses as her dowry and he arranges a marriage with the son of a neighbour. She refuses to marry anyone less than a king.

She changes her name to Constanza, dresses as a man and becomes a courtier in the kingdom of Bettinia. The queen tries to seduce him, but he declines, so she’s angry, and she gets the king to send him on dangerous missions. On one he captures a satyr, who he names Chiappino.

Chirpino can sense hypocrisy and deception and finds it hilarious, for example he laughs at a child’s funeral, and when asks why he reveals that the child was not the grieving father’s, but that of the priest solemnly chanting the funeral service.

June 5: Gabrina
Gabrina is an infernal sorceress who does magic by commanding demons. She can fly across Europe, divine answers to questions, change appearance, become invisible, affect others with the powers previously mentioned, and command demons generally. Her workings use a ritual circle and a drop of the magical elixir she carries in a flask. If she’s casting a spell on someone, verbal prayers ward against her powers.

June 6: The prisoner Aglea.
Aglea, daughter of Apollo, used to live in a tower with her treasures, a pet dragon and a guardian basilisk. There was a prophecy that whoever scaled the tower would be her master. Three magical brothers worked together to take her. The first heard the prophecy in a bird’s song, the second built swift ship, and sailed it through winds and currents with superhuman skill, and the third quickly scaled the tower, using a dagger in each hand.

They split the treasure, but could never agree, who deserved to marry Aglea. She uses them as servants, it is waiting for them to die of old age. She’s immortal, and her curse is inconvenient, but she’s patient, and can just poison the three and go home, if she decides to

June 7: Diogini the Necromancer
A man is apprentice to a tailor and is terrible at it. His master is, however, a necromancer and thinking his apprentice is simpleton, performs magic where he can be observed. His apprentice, Diogini, learns mastery of shapes, and then leaves his service.

Diogini and his father do the escaping horse scam, but the old tailor traps Diogini in horse form. He then beats and starves Diogini until the tailor’s daughters take pity on him, and they take him to the creek for a drink. He changes into a fish and disappears.

Later he changes into a ruby, a handful of pomegranate seeds, and a fox. He participates
in a game of transformations with his old master, who he throttles, while the elder is in the shape of a chicken. He marries a girl who hid him while he was a ruby.

June 8: Constantino
This is the origin of the Puss in Boots story as per the Pentamorone episode, It ends rather better for the cat.

Bertuccio. This is a ghostly warder that can give gifts like horses and clothes.

That is us for May, and a large start of June. Your saga may vary.