You Can't Make This Stuff Up
Tycho Brahe's mustache: In "The Observatory" Howie wears a bushy flourish under his nose, as if to say "look down here, not up there" (p.6). By p.43 he sports an even more flamboyant mustache. When asked about it he says "I was thinking more Tycho Brahe." Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) invented scientific astronomy. But it's his mustache that interests us. Like Howie, he is balding, and his mustache sprouts profusely from his upper lip, extending in great brushlike bristles of hair well past the limits of his face. Tycho indeed wanted you to look down there, because his nose was a fake. He lost his nose at age 20 in a sword duel in the dark, fighting over who was the better mathematician. (Oh, those hot-headed Danes!) For the rest of his life he wore a prosthetic metal nose. And an absurdly big mustache.
San Zanipolo: On the last page of "Navigation" (p.207) an enormous Venetian church is dedicated to a saint "that none of us had ever heard of: San Zanipolo. Our best guess was that he must have been Marco's uncle." Of course, this is a final mention of Marco Polo (explorer and swimming pool game); and Lewis' Italian is a little off: Ziani (not Zani) means "old geezer." But the real San Zanipolo is stranger than you think. Zanipolo isn't a saint, he's two saints. Somehow the Venetian dialect compressed Giovanni e Paolo down to Zanipolo. Furthermore, this huge church in which many of the doges are buried isn't dedicated to the apostles John (Giovanni) and Paul (Paolo). It is actually dedicated to two unknown (probably fictitious) saints with the same names.
Dark Matter, Indeed: In “Vacation” The theologian Thomas Kemp is giving a lecture to astronomers, one of whom challenges him with the topic of Dark Matter: “Thomas took some time to explain how he found immense comfort in knowing that something exists without anyone understanding it.” (p.38) I’m glad that Thomas is at peace with the unknowable, because Dark Matter is even more inscrutable than I knew when I wrote this, as summarized by Scientific American (August 20, 2024): Most of the matter in our universe is invisible. We can measure the gravitational pull of this “dark matter” on the orbits of stars and galaxies. We can see the way it bends light around itself and can detect its effect on the light left over from the primordial plasma of the hot big bang. We have measured these signals with exquisite precision. We have every reason to believe dark matter is everywhere. Yet we still don’t know what it is. ….We are starting to grapple with the sobering idea that we may never nail down the nature of dark matter at all. In the early days of dark matter hunting, this notion seemed absurd. We had lots of good theories and plenty of experimental options for testing them. But the easy roads have mostly been traveled, and dark matter has proved more mysterious than we ever imagined. It’s entirely possible that dark matter behaves in a way that current experiments aren’t well-suited to detect—or even that it ignores regular matter completely… There is a chance that dark matter will prove so elusive we may never understand its true nature. from “What If We Never Find Dark Matter?” by Tracy R. Slatyer & Tim M. P. Tait.
A Venetian Water View: "Navigation" (p.155): In the exact center of the piazza was a well. In Rome they would have built a fountain. In Florence they would have erected a statue. In salty Venice where fresh water was precious as gold, an old stone well, capped with an iron cover. A Venetian water view. While accurate, this hardly does justice to the several hundred elaborate rainwater cisterns of Venice. Surrounding that stone well there are four drains (gatoli) in the far corners of the piazza. The pavement is carefully sloped so rainwater runs into these drains, and then flows beneath the pavement through a carefully lined 16-foot deep crater filled with imported salt-free river sand. The sand filters the water and directs it to the well in the center. The barrel of the well is built of special water-permeable bricks that further purify the water. The surrounding salt water is carefully kept out and the rainwater kept in. And that iron cover isn't just for safety. Wells were locked at night to prevent water theft. The parish priest kept the key and rang the campana dei pozzi (the bell of the wells) every morning when the well was open for business. Until an aqueduct replaced them in 1884, this was why Venetians gazed with prideful admiration at their wells.
I've been on second and stolen first: In "Navigation" Lewis' directionally-impaired baseball career (p.116) references an era when this was completely legal. The culprit was Herman "Germany" Schaefer, who twice in 1911 deliberately stole first base from second. With a runner on third, Germany took off running backwards with as much hullabaloo as possible. His hope was to confuse the catcher to try to throw Schaefer out, allowing the man on third to steal home. In 1920, after Schaefer's death, a baseball rule (currently 5.09(b)(10)) was added that states that a player is out if "After he has acquired legal possession of a base, he runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game."
I Thought You Were the Police: In "Navigation" p.161 & 162 a suspicious policeman asks Lewis "The Carabinieri. Are they involved?" worrying that an official file might have been opened by the other guys. In Italy there are several different branches of the police, ostensibly to prevent any single branch seizing power...The Carabinieri are dressed in military-style uniforms and white shoulder belts (they're part of the army) , and deal with general crime, public order and drugs control. The Polizia Statale, the other general crime-fighting branch, enjoy a fierce rivalry with the Carabinieri, and are the ones to whom you should report a theft...The Polizia Statale have a small police station on the Piazza San Marco, at no. 63." from The Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto.
A tourist map of Venice: "Navigation" (p.159) gives us this map as a waterlogged bit of litter, of no use whatsoever to Lewis. What goes unsaid here is that on one level all maps of Venice are useless to everybody, because the places on all of the maps are invariably named in Italian, whereas the white signs on the walls (nizioleti, "little bedsheets") are invariably in Venetian. A few of hundreds of examples: Parrocchia (parish) on the map is Parochia on the wall; Sant' Angelo is identified by a sign for S. Anzolo; the Sottoportico dietro il Fornaio is economically marked as Sotoportego drio el Forner.