Many years ago, when visiting Venice, I purchased a souvenir Venetian carnival mask: the 'plague-doctor' model featuring an elongated nose that resembles the face of the Looney Tunes cartoon buzzard. It's white with black curlicue embellishments and ties elaborately around the head by means of a silken ribbon. Besides colorful glass bowls and squares of fancy lace, a carnival mask is the sort of thing tourists bring home from a trip to La Serenissima. Damp socks, too, if their visit coincides with Acqua alta flooding.
At least damp socks can be dried and reworn. You can balance the colorful bowl on the end of a side-table and fill it with pistachios when friends come round. Even the lace can be spread across the back of an armchair or draped over a lampshade to dim ambient light. But what are you going to do with a plague-doctor mask? I guess you can hang it on the wall but it doesn't really fill the space, and as home decor it looks uncomfortably similar to those schmaltzy porcelain Pierrot masks that festoon the bedrooms of teenage girls. So why, you wonder, did you buy the stupid thing in the first place? It's not like you're getting invited to a masquerade ball in some waterlogged Palazzo anytime soon.
Until last week, I kept my my plague-doctor mask in a box of other homeless object d'art in a dark corner of the household coat closet. Since we're in the midst of this Coronavirus pandemic, however, I decided now was as good a time as any to remove it from storage and actually put it on. There is, after all, an actual plague stalking the land you understand. Not that I'm intending to practice unlicensed medicine or paint cautionary crosses on victim's doors, of course, but it does add a sense of theater and historic occasion to our present Quarantined circumstance.
Alas, the Venetian plague-doctor mask was designed to protect the practitioner and not his patient. Consequently it does not comply with State Government guidelines for covering your face in public places, which stress masks are supposed to shield the passer-by from any disease the wearer may carry and not vice-versa. Apparently I could be coughing Coronavirus all over the street (or the Grand Canal) if I coughed while wearing my plague-doctor mask outside. Which means I'm forced to wear this generic, flat, hospital-blue fabric thing with elastic attachments that hook behind my ears. It's not a look even Casanova could have rocked during Carnival.
