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Title: Gondola days
Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith
Illustrator: Francis Hopkinson Smith
Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71528]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897
Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GONDOLA DAYS ***
_FICTION AND TRAVEL_
By F. Hopkinson Smith.
TOM GROGAN. Illustrated. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.
A GENTLEMAN VAGABOND, AND SOME OTHERS. 16mo, $1.25.
COLONEL CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE. With 20 illustrations by the author
and E. W. Kemble. 16mo, $1.25.
A DAY AT LAGUERRE’S, AND OTHER DAYS. Printed in a new style. 16mo,
$1.25.
A WHITE UMBRELLA IN MEXICO. Illustrated by the author. 16mo, gilt
top, $1.50.
GONDOLA DAYS. Illustrated, 12mo, $1.50.
WELL-WORN ROADS OF SPAIN, HOLLAND, AND ITALY, traveled by a
Painter in search of the Picturesque. With 16 full-page phototype
reproductions of water-color drawings, and text by F. HOPKINSON
SMITH, profusely illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches. A Holiday
volume. Folio, gilt top, $15.00.
THE SAME. _Popular Edition._ Including some of the illustrations of
the above. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
GONDOLA DAYS
[Illustration: BACK OF THE RIALTO (PAGE 87)]
GONDOLA DAYS
BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND
COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE
PRESS CAMBRIDGE 1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
NOTE
THE text of this volume is the same as that of “Venice of To-Day,”
recently published by the Henry T. Thomas Company, of New York, as
a subscription book, in large quarto and folio form, with over two
hundred illustrations by the Author, in color and in black and white.
PREFATORY
[Illustration]
I HAVE made no attempt in these pages to review the splendors of the
past, or to probe the many vital questions which concern the present,
of this wondrous City of the Sea. Neither have I ventured to discuss
the marvels of her architecture, the wealth of her literature and art,
nor the growing importance of her commerce and manufactures.
I have contented myself rather with the Venice that you see in the
sunlight of a summer’s day--the Venice that bewilders with her glory
when you land at her water-gate; that delights with her color when
you idle along the Riva; that intoxicates with her music as you lie
in your gondola adrift on the bosom of some breathless lagoon--the
Venice of mould-stained palace, quaint caffè and arching bridge; of
fragrant incense, cool, dim-lighted church, and noiseless priest; of
strong-armed men and graceful women--the Venice of light and life, of
sea and sky and melody.
No pen alone can tell this story. The pencil and the palette must lend
their touch when one would picture the wide sweep of her piazzas, the
abandon of her gardens, the charm of her canal and street life, the
happy indolence of her people, the faded sumptuousness of her homes.
If I have given to Venice a prominent place among the cities of the
earth it is because in this selfish, materialistic, money-getting age,
it is a joy to live, if only for a day, where a song is more prized
than a soldo; where the poorest pauper laughingly shares his scanty
crust; where to be kind to a child is a habit, to be neglectful of
old age a shame; a city the relics of whose past are the lessons of
our future; whose every canvas, stone, and bronze bear witness to a
grandeur, luxury, and taste that took a thousand years of energy to
perfect, and will take a thousand years of neglect to destroy.
To every one of my art-loving countrymen this city should be a Mecca;
to know her thoroughly is to know all the beauty and romance of five
centuries.
F. H. S.
CONTENTS
An Arrival 1
Gondola Days 8
Along the Riva 28
The Piazza of San Marco 42
In an Old Garden 58
Among the Fishermen 85
A Gondola Race 101
Some Venetian Caffès 116
On the Hotel Steps 126
Open-Air Markets 136
On Rainy Days 145
Legacies of the Past 155
Life in the Streets 176
Night in Venice 197
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Back of the Rialto (see page 87) _Frontispiece_
The Gateless Posts of the Piazzetta 14
The One Whistler etched 26
Beyond San Rosario 58
The Catch of the Morning 90
A Little Hole in the Wall on the Via Garibaldi 116
Ponte Paglia ... next the Bridge of Sighs 136
The Fruit Market above the Rialto 140
Wide Palatial Staircases 160
Narrow Slits of Canals 186
San Giorgio stands on Tip-toe 198
AN ARRIVAL
YOU really begin to arrive in Venice when you leave Milan. Your train
is hardly out of the station before you have conjured up all the
visions and traditions of your childhood: great rows of white palaces
running sheer into the water; picture-book galleys reflected upside
down in red lagoons; domes and minarets, kiosks, towers, and steeples,
queer-arched temples, and the like.
As you speed on in the dusty train, your memory-fed imagination takes
new flights. You expect gold-encrusted barges, hung with Persian
carpets, rowed by slaves double-banked, and trailing rare brocades in a
sea of China-blue, to meet you at the water landing.
By the time you reach Verona your mental panorama makes another turn.
The very name suggests the gay lover of the _bal masque_, the poisoned
vial, and the calcium moonlight illuminating the wooden tomb of the
stage-set graveyard. You instinctively look around for the fair Juliet
and her nurse. There are half a dozen as pretty Veronese, attended by
their watchful duennas, going down by train to the City by the Sea; but
they do not satisfy you. You want one in a tight-fitting white satin
gown with flowing train, a diamond-studded girdle, and an ostrich-plume
fan. The nurse, too, must be stouter, and have a high-keyed voice;
be bent a little in the back, and shake her finger in a threatening
way, as in the old mezzotints you have seen of Mrs. Siddons or Peg
Woffington. This pair of Dulcineas on the seat in front, in silk
dusters, with a lunch-basket and a box of sweets, are too modern and
commonplace for you, and will not do.
When you roll into Padua, and neither doge nor inquisitor in ermine or
black gown boards the train, you grow restless. A deadening suspicion
enters your mind. What if, after all, there should be no Venice? Just
as there is no Robinson Crusoe nor man Friday; no stockade, nor little
garden; no Shahrazad telling her stories far into the Arabian night; no
Santa Claus with reindeer; no Rip Van Winkle haunted by queer little
gnomes in fur caps. As this suspicion deepens, the blood clogs in your
veins, and a thousand shivers go down your spine. You begin to fear
that all these traditions of your childhood, all these dreams and
fancies, are like the thousand and one other lies that have been told
to and believed by you since the days when you spelled out words in two
syllables.
Upon leaving Mestre--the last station--you smell the salt air of the
Adriatic through the open car window. Instantly your hopes revive.
Craning your head far out, you catch a glimpse of a long, low,
monotonous bridge, and away off in the purple haze, the dreary outline
of a distant city. You sink back into your seat exhausted. Yes, you
knew it all the time. The whole thing is a swindle and a sham!
“All out for Venice,” says the guard, in French.
Half a dozen porters--well-dressed, civil-spoken porters, flat-capped
and numbered--seize your traps and help you from the train. You look
up. It is like all the rest of the depots since you left Paris--high,
dingy, besmoked, beraftered, beglazed, and be----! No, you are past all
that. You are not angry. You are merely broken-hearted. Another idol of
your childhood shattered; another coin that your soul coveted, nailed
to the wall of your experience--a counterfeit!
“This door to the gondolas,” says the porter. He is very polite. If he
were less so, you might make excuse to brain him on the way out.
The depot ends in a narrow passageway. It is the same old
fraud--custom-house officers on each side; man with a punch mutilating
tickets; rows of other men with brass medals on their arms the
size of apothecaries’ scales--hackmen, you think, with their whips
outside--licensed runners for the gondoliers, you learn afterward. They
are all shouting--all intent on carrying you off bodily. The vulgar
modern horde!
Soon you begin to breathe more easily. There is another door ahead,
framing a bit of blue sky. “At least, the sun shines here,” you say to
yourself. “Thank God for that much!”
“This way, Signore.”
One step, and you stand in the light. Now look! Below, at your very
feet, a great flight of marble steps drops down to the water’s edge.
Crowding these steps is a throng of gondoliers, porters, women with
fans and gay-colored gowns, priests, fruit-sellers, water-carriers,
and peddlers. At the edge, and away over as far as the beautiful
marble church, a flock of gondolas like black swans curve in and out.
Beyond stretches the double line of church and palace, bordering the
glistening highway. Over all is the soft golden haze, the shimmer, the
translucence of the Venetian summer sunset.
With your head in a whirl,--so intense is the surprise, so foreign
to your traditions and dreams the actuality,--you throw yourself on
the yielding cushions of a waiting gondola. A turn of the gondolier’s
wrist, and you dart into a narrow canal. Now the smells greet
you--damp, cool, low-tide smells. The palaces and warehouses shut out
the sky. On you go--under low bridges of marble, fringed with people
leaning listlessly over; around sharp corners, their red and yellow
bricks worn into ridges by thousands of rounding boats; past open
plazas crowded with the teeming life of the city. The shadows deepen;
the waters glint like flakes of broken gold-leaf. High up in an opening
you catch a glimpse of a tower, rose-pink in the fading light; it is
the Campanile. Farther on, you slip beneath an arch caught between two
palaces and held in mid-air. You look up, shuddering as you trace the
outlines of the fatal Bridge of Sighs. For a moment all is dark. Then
you glide into a sea of opal, of amethyst and sapphire.
The gondola stops near a small flight of stone steps protected by huge
poles striped with blue and red. Other gondolas are debarking. A stout
porter in gold lace steadies yours as you alight.
“Monsieur’s rooms are quite ready. They are over the garden; the one
with the balcony overhanging the water.”
The hall is full of people (it is the Britannia, the best hotel in
Venice), grouped about the tables, chatting or reading, sipping coffee
or eating ices. Beyond, from an open door, comes the perfume of
flowers. You pass out, cross a garden, cool and fresh in the darkening
shadows, and enter a small room opening on a staircase. You walk up and
through the cosy apartments, push back a folding glass door, and step
out upon a balcony of marble.
How still it all is! Only the plash of the water about the bows of the
gondolas, and the little waves snapping at the water-steps. Even the
groups of people around the small iron tables below, partly hidden by
the bloom of oleanders, talk in half-heard whispers.
You look about you,--the stillness filling your soul, the soft air
embracing you,--out over the blossoms of the oleanders, across the
shimmering water, beyond the beautiful dome of the Salute, glowing like
a huge pearl in the clear evening light. No, it is not the Venice of
your childhood; not the dream of your youth. It is softer, more mellow,
more restful, more exquisite in its harmonies.
Suddenly a strain of music breaks upon your ear--a soft, low strain.
Nearer it comes, nearer. You lean forward over the marble rail to catch
its meaning. Far away across the surface of the beautiful sea floats a
tiny boat. Every swing of the oar leaves in its wake a quivering thread
of gold. Now it rounds the great red buoy, and is lost behind the sails
of a lazy lugger drifting with the tide. Then the whole broad water
rings with the melody. In another instant it is beneath you--the singer
standing, holding his hat for your pennies; the chorus seated, with
upturned, expectant faces.
Into the empty hat you pour all your store of small coins, your eyes
full of tears.
GONDOLA DAYS
THAT first morning in Venice! It is the summer, of course--never the
winter. This beautiful bride of the sea is loveliest when bright
skies bend tenderly over her, when white mists fall softly around
her, and the lagoons about her feet are sheets of burnished silver:
when the red oleanders thrust their blossoms exultingly above the
low, crumbling walls: when the black hoods of winter _felsi_ are
laid by at the _traghetti_, and gondolas flaunt their white awnings:
when the melon-boats, with lifeless sails, drift lazily by, and the
shrill cry of the fruit vender floats over the water: when the air
is steeped, permeated, soaked through and through with floods of
sunlight--quivering, brilliant, radiant; sunlight that blazes from out
a sky of pearl and opal and sapphire; sunlight that drenches every old
palace with liquid amber, kissing every moulding awake, and soothing
every shadow to sleep; sunlight that caresses and does not scorch, that
dazzles and does not blind, that illumines, irradiates, makes glorious,
every sail and tower and dome, from the instant the great god of the
east shakes the dripping waters of the Adriatic from his face until he
sinks behind the purple hills of Padua.
These mornings, then! How your heart warms and your blood tingles when
you remember that first one in Venice--your first day in a gondola!
You recall that you were leaning upon your balcony overlooking the
garden when you caught sight of your gondolier; the gondolier whom
Joseph, prince among porters, had engaged for you the night of your
arrival.
On that first morning you were just out of your bed. In fact, you
had hardly been in it all night. You had fallen asleep in a whirl of
contending emotions. Half a dozen times you had been up and out on this
balcony, suddenly aroused by the passing of some music-boat filling the
night with a melody that seemed a thousand fold more enchanting because
of your sudden awakening,--the radiant moon, and the glistening water
beneath. I say you were out again upon this same balcony overlooking
the oleanders, the magnolias, and the palms. You heard the tinkling of
spoons in the cups below, and knew that some earlier riser was taking
his coffee in the dense shrubbery; but it made no impression upon you.
Your eye was fixed on the beautiful dome of the Salute opposite; on the
bronze goddess of the Dogana waving her veil in the soft air; on the
group of lighters moored to the quay, their red and yellow sails aglow;
on the noble tower of San Giorgio, sharp-cut against the glory of the
east.
Now you catch a waving hand and the lifting of a cap on the gravel walk
below. “At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”
You remember the face, brown and sunny, the eyes laughing, the curve of
the black mustache, and how the wavy short hair curled about his neck
and struggled out from under his cap. He has on another suit, newly
starched and snow-white; a loose shirt, a wide collar trimmed with
blue, and duck trousers. Around his waist is a wide blue sash, the ends
hanging to his knees. About his throat is a loose silk scarf--so loose
that you note the broad, manly chest, the muscles of the neck half
concealed by the cross-barred boating-shirt covering the brown skin.
There is a cheeriness, a breeziness, a spring about this young fellow
that inspires you. As you look down into his face you feel that he
is part of the air, of the sunshine, of the perfume of the oleanders.
He belongs to everything about him, and everything belongs to him.
His costume, his manner, the very way he holds his hat, show you at
a glance that while for the time being he is your servant, he is, in
many things deeply coveted by you, greatly your master. If you had his
chest and his forearm, his sunny temper, his perfect digestion and
contentment, you could easily spare one half of your world’s belongings
in payment. When you have lived a month with him and have caught the
spirit of the man, you will forget all about these several relations
of servant and master. The six francs a day that you pay him will seem
only your own contribution to the support of the gondola; his share
being his services. When you have spent half the night at the Lido, he
swimming at your side, or have rowed all the way to Torcello, or have
heard early mass at San Rosario, away up the Giudecca, he kneeling
before you, his hat on the cool pavement next your own, you will begin
to lose sight even of the francs, and want to own gondola and all
yourself, that you may make _him_ guest and thus discharge somewhat the
ever-increasing obligation of hospitality under which he places you.
Soon you will begin to realize that despite your belongings--wealth to
this gondolier beyond his wildest dreams--he in reality is the richer
of the two. He has inherited all this glory of palace, sea, and sky,
from the day of his birth, and can live in it every hour in the year,
with no fast-ebbing letter-of-credit nor near-approaching sailing day
to sadden his soul or poison the cup of his pleasure. When your fatal
day comes and your trunk is packed, he will stand at the water-stairs
of the station, hat in hand, the tears in his eyes, and when one of the
demons of the master-spirit of the age--Hurry--has tightened its grip
upon you and you are whirled out and across the great iron bridge, and
you begin once more the life that now you loathe, even before you have
reached Mestre--if your gondolier is like my own gondolier, Espero--my
Espero Gorgoni, whom I love--you would find him on his knees in the
church next the station, whispering a prayer for your safe journey
across the sea, and spending one of your miserable francs for some
blessed candles to burn until you reached home.
But you have not answered your gondolier, who stands with upturned eyes
on the graveled walk below.
“At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”
You awake from your reverie. Now! as soon as you swallow your coffee.
Ten minutes later you bear your weight on Giorgio’s bent elbow and step
into his boat.
It is like nothing else of its kind your feet have ever touched--so
yielding and yet so firm; so shallow and yet so stanch; so light, so
buoyant, and so welcoming to peace and rest and comfort.
How daintily it sits the water! How like a knowing swan it bends its
head, the iron blade of the bow, and glides out upon the bosom of the
Grand Canal! You stop for a moment, noting the long, narrow body,
blue-black and silver in the morning light, as graceful in its curves
as a bird; the white awning amidships draped at sides and back, the
softly-yielding, morocco-covered seat, all cushions and silk fringes,
and the silken cords curbing quaint lions of polished brass. Beyond and
aft stands your gondolier, with easy, graceful swing bending to his
oar. You stoop down, part the curtains, and sink into the cushions.
Suddenly an air of dignified importance steals over you. Never in your
whole life have you been so magnificently carried about. Four-in-hands,
commodores’ gigs, landaus in triumphant processions with white horses
and plumes, seem tame and commonplace. Here is a whole barge, galleon,
Bucentaur, all to yourself; noiseless, alert, subservient to your
airiest whim, obedient to the lightest touch. You float between earth
and sky. You feel like a potentate out for an airing, housed like a
Rajah, served like Cleopatra, and rowed like a Doge. You command space
and dominate the elements.
[Illustration: THE GATELESS POSTS OF THE PIAZZETTA]
But Giorgio is leaning on his oar, millions of diamonds dripping from
its blade.
“Where now, Signore?”
Anywhere, so he keeps in the sunlight. To the Piazza, perhaps, and then
around San Giorgio with its red tower and noble façade, and later, when
the shadows lengthen, away down to the Public Garden, and home again in
the twilight by way of the Giudecca.
This gondola-landing of the Piazza, the most important of the
cab-stands in Venice, is the stepping-stone--a wet and ooze-covered
stone--to the heart of the city. Really the heart, for the very life
of every canal, _campo_, and street, courses through it in unending
flow all the livelong day and night, from the earliest blush of dawn
to the earliest blush of dawn again; no one ever seems to go to bed in
Venice. Along and near the edge of this landing stand the richest
examples of Venetian architecture. First, the Royal Gardens of the
king’s palace, with its balustrade of marble and broad flight of
water-steps; then the Library, with its cresting of statues, white
against the sky; then the two noble columns, the gateless posts of
the Piazzetta, bearing Saint Theodore and the Lion of Venice; and
beyond, past the edge of San Marco, the clock tower and the three great
flag-staffs; then the Palace of the Doges, that masterwork of the
fifteenth century; then the Prison, with a glimpse of the Bridge of
Sighs, caught in mid-air; then the great cimeter-sweep of the Riva, its
point lost in the fringe of trees shading the Public Garden; and then,
over all, as you look up, the noble Campanile, the wonderful bell-tower
of San Marco, unadorned, simple, majestic--up, up, into the still air,
its gilded angel, life-size, with outstretched wings flashing in the
morning sun, a mere dot of gold against the blue.
Before you touch the lower steps of the water-stairs, your eye falls
upon an old man with bared head. He holds a long staff studded with
bad coins, having a hook at one end. With this in one hand he steadies
your gondola, with the other he holds out his hat. He is an aged
gondolier, too old now to row. He knows you, the poor fellow, and he
knows your kind. How many such enthusiasts has he helped to alight!
And he knows Giorgio too, and remembers when, like him, he bent his
oar with the best. You drop a penny into his wrinkled hand, catch his
grateful thanks, and join the throng. The arcades under the Library are
full of people smoking and sipping coffee. How delicious the aroma and
the pungent smell of tobacco! In the shadow of the Doges’ Palace groups
idle and talk--a little denser in spots where some artist has his easel
up, or some pretty, dainty child is feeding the pigeons.
A moment more and you are in the Piazza of San Marco; the grand piazza
of the doges, with its thousands of square feet of white pavement
blazing in the sun, framed on three sides by marble palaces, dominated
by the noblest campanile on the globe, and enriched, glorified, made
inexpressibly precious and unique by that jewel in marble, in porphyry,
in verd antique and bronze, that despair of architects of to-day, that
delight of the artists of all time--the most sacred, the Church of San
Marco.
In and out this great quadrangle whirl the pigeons, the pigeons of
Dandolo, up into the soft clouds, the light flashing from their
throats; sifting down in showers on gilded cross and rounded dome;
clinging to intricate carvings, over and under the gold-crowned heads
of saints in stone and bronze; across the baking plaza in flurries of
gray and black; resting like a swarm of flies, only to startle, mass,
and swirl again. Pets of the state, these birds, since the siege of
Candia, when the great Admiral Dandolo’s chief bearer of dispatches,
the ancestor of one of these same white-throated doves, brought the
good news to Venice the day the admiral’s victorious banner was thrown
to the breeze, and the Grand Council, sitting in state, first learned
the tidings from the soft plumage of its wings.
At one end, fronting the church, stand the three great flag-poles,
the same you saw at the landing, socketed in bronze, exquisitely
modeled and chased, bearing the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the
Morea--kingdoms conquered by the state--all three in a row, presenting
arms to the power that overthrew them, and forever dipping their colors
to the glory of its past.
Here, too, in this noble square, under your very feet, what
solemnities, what historic fêtes, what conspiracies! Here for
centuries has been held the priestly pageant of Corpus Christi,
aflame with lanterns and flambeaux. Here eleven centuries ago blind
old Dandolo received the Crusader chiefs of France. Here the splendid
nuptials of Francesco Foscari were celebrated by a tournament,
witnessed by thirty thousand people, and lasting ten days. Here the
conspiracies of Tiepolo and Faliero were crushed--Venetian against
Venetian the only time in a thousand years. And here Italy suffered
her crowning indignity, the occupation by the French under the
newly-fledged warrior who unlimbered his cannon at the door of the
holy church, pushed the four bronze horses from their pedestals over
the sacred entrance--the horses of Constantine, wrought by Lysippus
the Greek,--despoiled the noble church of its silver lamps, robbed
the ancient column of its winged lion, and then, after a campaign
unprecedented in its brilliancy, unexampled in the humiliation and
degradation it entailed upon a people who for ten centuries had known
no power outside of Venice, planted in the centre of this same noble
square, with an irony as bitter as it was cruel, the “Tree of Liberty,”
at which was burned, on the 4th of June, 1797, the insignia of the
ancient republic.
And yet, notwithstanding all her vicissitudes, the Venice of to-day is
still the Venice of her glorious past, the Venice of Dandolo, Foscari,
and Faliero. The actors are long since dead, but the stage-setting
is the same; the same sun, the same air, the same sky over all. The
beautiful dome of the Salute still dominates the Grand Canal. The
great plaza is still perfect in all its proportions and in all that
made up its beauty and splendor. The Campanile still raises its head,
glistening in the morning light. High over all still flash and swoop
the pigeons of Venice--the pigeons of Dandolo--now black as cinders,
now flakes of gold in the yellow light. The doors of the sacred church
are still open; the people pass in and out. Under the marble arcades,
where the soldiers of the army of France stacked their arms, to-day sit
hundreds of free Venetians, with their wives and sweethearts, sipping
their ices and coffee; the great orchestra, the king’s band, filling
the air with its music.
When you ask what magician has wrought this change, let the old guide
answer as once he answered me when, crossing the Piazza and uncovering
his head, he pointed to a stone and said, in his soft Italian:--
“Here, Signore,--just here, where the great Napoleon burnt our
flag,--the noble republic of our fathers, under our good King and his
royal spouse, was born anew.”
But you cannot stay. You will return and study the Piazza to-morrow;
not now. The air intoxicates you. The sunlight is in your blood; your
cheeks burn; you look out and over the Grand Canal--molten silver in
the shimmer of the morning. Below, near the Public Garden, beyond San
Giorgio, like a cluster of butterflies, hovers a fleet of Chioggia
fishing-boats, becalmed in the channel. Off the Riva, near Danieli’s,
lies the Trieste steamer, just arrived, a swarm of gondolas and
_barcos_ about her landing-ladders; the yellow smoke of her funnel
drifting lazily. Farther away, on the golden ball of the Dogana, the
bronze Goddess of the Wind poises light as air, her face aflame, her
whirling sail bent with the passing breeze.
You resolve to stop no more; only to float, loll on your cushions,
watch the gulls circle, and the slow sweep of the oars of the luggers.
You would throw open--wide open--the great swinging gates of your soul.
You not only would enjoy, you would absorb, drink in, fill yourself to
the brim.
For hours you drift about. There is plenty of time to-morrow for the
churches and palaces and caffès. To-day you want only the salt air in
your face, the splash and gurgle of the water at the bow, and the low
song that Giorgio sings to himself as he bends to his blade.
Soon you dart into a cool canal, skirt along an old wall, water stained
and worn, and rest at a low step. Giorgio springs out, twists a cord
around an iron ring, and disappears through an archway framing a garden
abloom with flowering vines.
It is high noon. Now for your midday luncheon!
You have had all sorts of breakfasts offered you in your wanderings:
On white-winged yachts, with the decks scoured clean, the brass
glistening, the awning overhead. In the wilderness, lying on balsam
boughs, the smell of the bacon and crisping trout filling the bark
slant, the blue smoke wreathing the tall pines. In the gardens of Sunny
Spain--one you remember at Granada, hugging the great wall of the
Alhambra--you see the table now with its heap of fruit and flowers,
and can hear the guitar of the gypsy behind the pomegranate. Along
the shore of the beautiful bay of Matanzas, where the hidalgo who had
watched you paint swept down in his _volante_ and carried you off to
his oranges and omelette. At St. Cloud, along the Seine, with the
noiseless waiter in the seedy dress suit and necktie of the night
before. But the _filet_ and melon! Yes, you would go again. I say you
have had all sorts of breakfasts out of doors in your time, but never
yet in a gondola.
A few minutes later Giorgio pushes aside the vines. He carries a basket
covered with a white cloth. This he lays at your feet on the floor of
the boat. You catch sight of the top of a siphon and a flagon of wine:
do not hurry, wait till he serves it. But not here, where anybody
might come; farther down, where the oleanders hang over the wall,
their blossoms in the water, and where the air blows cool between the
overhanging palaces.
Later Giorgio draws all the curtains except the side next the
oleanders, steps aft and fetches a board, which he rests on the little
side seats in front of your lounging-cushions. On this board he spreads
the cloth, and then the seltzer and Chianti, the big glass of powdered
ice and the little hard Venetian rolls. (By the bye, do you know
that there is only one form of primitive roll, the world over?) Then
come the cheese, the Gorgonzola--active, alert Gorgonzola, all green
spots--wrapped in a leaf; a rough-jacketed melon, with some figs and
peaches. Last of all, away down in the bottom of the basket, there is a
dish of macaroni garnished with peppers. You do not want any meat. If
you did you would not get it. Some time when you are out on the canal,
or up the Giudecca, you might get a fish freshly broiled from a passing
cook-boat serving the watermen--a sort of floating kitchen for those
who are too poor for a fire of their own--but never meat.
Giorgio serves you as daintily as would a woman; unfolding the cheese,
splitting the rolls, parting the melon into crescents, flecking off
each seed with his knife: and last, the coffee from the little copper
coffee-pot, and the thin cakes of sugar, in the thick, unbreakable,
dumpy little cups.
There are no courses in this repast. You light a cigarette with your
first mouthful and smoke straight through: it is that kind of a
breakfast.
Then you spread yourself over space, flat on your back, the smoke
curling out through the half-drawn curtains. Soon your gondolier
gathers up the fragments, half a melon and the rest,--there is always
enough for two,--moves aft, and you hear the clink of the glass and
the swish of the siphon. Later you note the closely-eaten crescents
floating by, and the empty leaf. Giorgio was hungry too.
But the garden!--there is time for that. You soon discover that it
is unlike any other you know. There are no flower-beds and gravel
walks, and no brick fountains with the scantily dressed cast-iron boy
struggling with the green-painted dolphin, the water spurting from its
open mouth. There is water, of course, but it is down a deep well with
a great coping of marble, encircled by exquisite carvings and mellow
with mould; and there are low trellises of grapes, and a tangle of
climbing roses half concealing a weather-stained Cupid with a broken
arm. And there is an old-fashioned sun-dial, and sweet smelling box cut
into fantastic shapes, and a nest of an arbor so thickly matted with
leaves and interlaced branches that you think of your Dulcinea at once.
And there are marble benches and stone steps, and at the farther end an
old rusty gate through which Giorgio brought the luncheon.
It is all so new to you, and so cool and restful! For the first time
you begin to realize that you are breathing the air of a City of
Silence. No hum of busy loom, no tramp of horse or rumble of wheel, no
jar or shock; only the voices that come over the water, and the plash
of the ripples as you pass. But the day is waning; into the sunlight
once more.
Giorgio is fast asleep; his arm across his face, his great broad chest
bared to the sky.
“_Si, Signore!_”
He is up in an instant, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, catching his
oar as he springs.
You glide in and out again, under marble bridges thronged with people;
along quays lined with boats; by caffè, church, and palace, and so on
to the broad water of the Public Garden.
But you do not land; some other day for that. You want the row back up
the canal, with the glory of the setting sun in your face. Suddenly,
as you turn, the sun is shut out: it is the great warship Stromboli,
lying at anchor off the garden wall; huge, solid as a fort, fine-lined
as a yacht, with exquisite detail of rail, mast, yard-arms, and gun
mountings, the light flashing from her polished brasses.
In a moment you are under her stern, and beyond, skirting the old
shipyard with the curious arch,--the one Whistler etched,--sheering
to avoid the little steamers puffing with modern pride, their noses
high in air at the gondolas; past the long quay of the Riva, where
the torpedo-boats lie tethered in a row, like swift horses eager for
a dash; past the fruit-boats dropping their sails for a short cut
to the market next the Rialto; past the long, low, ugly bath-house
anchored off the Dogana; past the wonderful, the matchless, the
never-to-be-unloved or forgotten, the most blessed, the _Santa Maria
della Salute_.
[Illustration: THE ONE WHISTLER ETCHED]
Oh! this drift back, square in the face of the royal sun, attended
by all the pomp and glory of a departing day! What shall be said of
this reveling, rioting, dominant god of the west, clothed in purple
and fine gold; strewing his path with rose-leaves thrown broadcast on
azure fields; rolling on beds of violet; saturated, steeped, drunken
with color; every steeple, tower, and dome ablaze; the whole world on
tip-toe, kissing its hands good-night!
Giorgio loves it, too. His cap is off, lying on the narrow deck; his
cravat loosened, his white shirt, as he turns up the Giudecca, flashing
like burning gold.
Somehow you cannot sit and take your ease in the fullness of all this
beauty and grandeur. You spring to your feet. You must see behind and
on both sides, your eye roving eagerly away out to the lagoon beyond
the great flour-mill and the gardens.
Suddenly a delicate violet light falls about you; the lines of palaces
grow purple; the water is dulled to a soft gray, broken by long,
undulating waves of blue; the hulls of the fishing-boats become inky
black, their listless sails deepening in the falling shadows. Only the
little cupola high up on the dome of the Redentore still burns pink and
gold. Then it fades and is gone. The day is done!
ALONG THE RIVA
THE afternoon hours are always the best. In the morning the great
sweep of dazzling pavement is a blaze of white light, spotted with
moving dots of color. These dots carry gay-colored parasols and fans,
or shield their eyes with aprons, hugging, as they scurry along, the
half-shadows of a bridge-rail or caffè awning. Here and there, farther
down along the Riva, are larger dots--fruit-sellers crouching under
huge umbrellas, or groups of gondoliers under improvised awnings of
sailcloth and boat oars. Once in a while one of these water-cabmen
darts out from his shelter like an old spider, waylays a bright fly
as she hurries past, and carries her off bodily to his gondola.
Should she escape he crawls back again lazily and is merged once more
in the larger dot. In the noonday glare even these disappear; the
fruit-sellers seeking some shaded _calle_, the gondoliers the cool
coverings of their boats.
Now that the Sun God has chosen to hide his face behind the trees of
the King’s Garden, this blaze of white is toned to a cool gray. Only
San Giorgio’s tower across the Grand Canal is aflame, and that but half
way down its bright red length. The people, too, who have been all day
behind closed blinds and doors, are astir. The awnings of the caffès
are thrown back and the windows of the balconies opened. The waiters
bring out little tables, arranging the chairs in rows like those in
a concert hall. The boatmen who have been asleep under cool bridges,
curled up on the decks of their boats, stretch themselves awake,
rubbing their eyes. The churches swing back their huge doors--even the
red curtains of the _Chiesa della Pietà_ are caught to one side, so
that you can see the sickly yellow glow of the candles far back on the
altars and smell the incense as you pass.
Soon the current from away up near the Piazza begins to flow down
towards the Public Garden, which lies at the end of this Grand
Promenade of Venice. Priests come, and students; sailors on a half
day’s leave; stevedores from the salt warehouses; fishermen; peddlers,
with knick-knacks and sweetmeats; throngs from the hotels; and slender,
graceful Venetians, out for their afternoon stroll in twos and threes,
with high combs and gay shawls, worn as a Spanish Donna would her
mantilla--bewitching creatures in cool muslin dresses and wide sashes
of silk, with restless butterfly fans, and restless, wicked eyes too,
that flash and coax as they saunter along.
Watch those officers wheel and turn. See how they laugh when they meet.
What confidences under mustachios and fans! Half an hour from now you
will find the four at Florian’s, as happy over a little cherry juice
and water as if it were the dryest of all the Extras. Later on, away
out beyond San Giorgio, four cigarettes could light for you their happy
faces, the low plash of their gondolier’s oar keeping time to the soft
notes of a guitar.
Yes, one must know the Riva in the afternoon. I know it every hour
in the day; though I love it most in the cool of its shadows. And I
know every caffè, church, and palace along its whole length, from the
Molo to the garden. And I know the bridges, too; best of all the one
below the Arsenal, the _Veneta Marina_, and the one you cross before
reaching the little church that stands aside as if to let you pass,
and the queer-shaped Piazzetta beyond, with the flag-pole and marble
balustrade. And I know that old wine-shop where the chairs and tables
are drawn close up to the very bridge itself, its awnings half over
the last step.
My own gondolier, Espero--bless his sunny face!--knows the owner of
this shop and has known her for years; a great, superb creature, with
eyes that flash and smoulder under heaps of tangled black hair. He
first presented me to this grand duchess of the Riva years ago, when I
wanted a dish of macaroni browned on a shallow plate. Whenever I turn
in now out of the heat for a glass of crushed ice and orange juice, she
mentions the fact and points with pride to the old earthen platter. It
is nearly burnt through with my many toastings.
But the bridge is my delight; the arch underneath is so cool, and I
have darted under it so often for luncheon and half an hour’s siesta.
On these occasions the old burnt-bottomed dish is brought to my gondola
sizzling hot, with coffee and rolls, and sometimes a bit of broiled
fish as an extra touch.
This bridge has always been the open-air club-room of the entire
neighborhood,--everybody who has any lounging to do is a life member.
All day long its _habitués_ hang over it, gazing listlessly out upon
the lagoon; singly, in bunches, in swarms when the fish-boats round in
from Chioggia, or a new P. and O. steamer arrives. Its hand-rail of
marble is polished smooth by the arms and legs and blue overalls of two
centuries.
There is also a very dear friend of mine living near this bridge, whom
you might as well know before I take another step along the Riva. He
is attached to my suite. I have a large following quite of his kind,
scattered all over Venice. As I am on my way, in this chapter, to the
Public Garden, and can never get past this his favorite haunt without
his cheer and laugh to greet me; so I cannot, if I would, avoid
bringing him in now, knowing full well that he would bring himself in
and unannounced whenever it should please his Excellency so to do.
He is a happy-hearted, devil-may-care young fellow, who haunts this
particular vicinity, and who has his bed and board wherever, at the
moment, he may happen to be. The bed problem never troubles him; a bit
of sailcloth under the shadow of the hand-rail will do, or a straw
mat behind the angle of a wall, or even what shade I can spare from
my own white umbrella, with the hard marble flags for feathers. The
item of board is a trifle, yet only a trifle, more serious. It may be
a fragment of polenta, or a couple of figs, or only a drink from the
copper bucket of some passing girl. Quantity, quality, and time of
serving are immaterial to him. There will be something to eat before
night, and it always comes. One of the pleasures of the neighborhood is
to share with him a bite.
This beggar, tramp, _lasagnone_--ragged, barefooted, and sunbrowned,
would send a flutter through the hearts of a matinée full of pretty
girls, could he step to the footlights just as he is, and with his
superb baritone voice ring out one of his own native songs. Lying as
he does now under my umbrella, his broad chest burnt almost black, the
curls glistening about his forehead, his well-trimmed mustache curving
around a mouth half open, shading a row of teeth white as milk, his
Leporello hat thrown aside, a broad red sash girding his waist, the
fine muscles of his thighs filling his overalls, these same pretty
girls might perhaps only draw their skirts aside as they passed:
environment plays such curious tricks.
This friend of mine, this royal pauper, Luigi, never in the
recollection of any mortal man or woman was known to do a stroke of
work. He lives somewhere up a crooked canal, with an old mother who
adores him--as, in fact, does every other woman he knows, young or
old--and whose needle keeps together the rags that only accentuate more
clearly the superb lines of his figure. And yet one cannot call him a
burden on society. On the contrary, Luigi has especial duties which
he never neglects. Every morning at sunrise he is out on the bridge
watching the Chioggia boats as they beat up past the Garden trying to
make the red buoy in the channel behind San Giorgio, and enlarging on
their seagoing qualities to an admiring group of bystanders. At noon
he is plumped down in the midst of a bevy of wives and girls, flat on
the pavement, his back against a doorway in some courtyard. The wives
mend and patch, the girls string beads, and the children play around
on the marble flagging, Luigi monopolizing all the talk and conducting
all the gayety, the whole coterie listening. He makes love, and chaffs,
and sings, and weaves romances, until the inquisitive sun peeps into
the _patio_; then he is up and out on the bridge again, and so down the
Riva, with the grace of an Apollo and the air of a thoroughbred.
When I think of all the sour tempers in the world, all the people with
weak backs and chests and limbs, all the dyspeptics, all the bad livers
and worse hearts, all the mean people and the sordid, all those who
pose as philanthropists, professing to ooze sunshine and happiness
from their very pores; all the down-trodden and the economical ones;
all those on half pay and no work, and those on full pay and too
little--and then look at this magnificent condensation of bone, muscle,
and sinew; this Greek god of a tramp, unselfish, good-tempered,
sunny-hearted, wanting nothing, having everything, envying nobody,
happy as a lark, one continuous song all the day long; ready to catch a
line, to mind a child, to carry a pail of water for any old woman, from
the fountain in the Campo near by to the top of any house, no matter
how high--when, I say, I think of this prince of good fellows leading
his Adam-before-the-fall sort of existence, I seriously consider the
advisability of my pensioning him for the remainder of his life on one
_lira_ a day, a fabulous sum to him, merely to be sure that nothing
in the future will ever spoil his temper and so rob me of the ecstasy
of knowing and of being always able to find one supremely happy human
creature on this earth.
But, as I have said, I am on my way to the Public Garden.
Everybody else is going too. Step to the marble balustrade of this
three-cornered Piazzetta and see if the prows of the gondolas are not
all pointed that way. I am afoot, have left the Riva and am strolling
down the _Via Garibaldi_, the widest street in Venice. There are no
palaces here, only a double row of shops, their upper windows and
balconies festooned with drying clothes, their doors choked with piles
of fruit and merchandise. A little farther down is a marble bridge,
and then the arching trees of the biggest and breeziest sweep of green
in all Venice--the _Giardini Pubblici_--many acres in extent, bounded
by a great wall surmounted by a marble balustrade more than a mile in
length, and thickly planted with sycamores and flowering shrubs. Its
water front commands the best view of the glory of a Venetian sunset.
This garden, for Venice, is really a very modern kind of public garden,
after all. It was built in the beginning of the present century, about
1810, when the young Corsican directed one Giovanni Antonio Selva to
demolish a group of monasteries incumbering the ground and from their
débris to construct the foundations of this noble park, with its
sea-wall, landings, and triumphal gate.
Whenever I stretch myself out under the grateful shade of these
splendid trees, I always forgive the Corsican for robbing San Marco
of its bronze horses and for riding his own up the incline of the
Campanile, and even for leveling the monasteries.
And the Venetians of to-day are grateful too, however much their
ancestors may have reviled the conqueror for his vandalism. All over
its graveled walks you will find them lolling on the benches, grouped
about the pretty caffès, taking their coffee or eating ices; leaning
by the hour over the balustrade and watching the boats and little
steamers. The children romp and play, the candy man and the sellers of
sweet cakes ply their trade, and the vender with cool drinks stands
over his curious four-legged tray, studded with bits of brass and old
coins, and calls out his several mixtures. The officers are here, too,
twisting their mustachios and fingering their cigarettes; fine ladies
saunter along, preceded by their babies, half smothered in lace and
borne on pillows in the arms of Italian peasants with red cap-ribbons
touching the ground; and barefooted, frowzy-headed girls from the
rookeries behind the Arsenal idle about, four or five abreast, their
arms locked, mocking the sailors and filling the air with laughter.
Then there are a menagerie, or rather some wire-fenced paddocks filled
with kangaroos and rabbits, and an aviary of birds, and a big casino
where the band plays, and where for half a _lira_, some ten cents,
you can see a variety performance without the variety, and hear these
light-hearted people laugh to their heart’s content.
And last of all, away down at one end, near the wall fronting the
church of San Giuseppe, there lives in miserable solitude the
horse--the only horse in Venice. He is not always the same horse.
A few years ago, when I first knew him, he was a forlorn, unkempt,
lonely-looking quadruped of a dark brown color, and with a threadbare
tail. When I saw him last, within the year, he was a hand higher,
white, and wore a caudal appendage with a pronounced bang. Still he
is the same horse--Venice never affords but one. When not at work (he
gathered leaves in the old days; now I am ashamed to say he operates a
lawn-mower as well), he leans his poor old tired head listlessly over
the rail, refusing the cakes the children offer him. At these times he
will ruminate by the hour over his unhappy lot. When the winter comes,
and there are no more leaves to rake, no gravel to haul, nor grass to
mow, they lead him down to the gate opening on the little side canal
and push him aboard a flat scow, and so on up the Grand Canal and
across the lagoon to Mestre. As he passes along, looking helplessly
from side to side, the gondoliers revile him and the children jeer at
him, and those on the little steamboats pelt him with peach pits, cigar
ends, and bits of broken coal. Poor old Rosinante, there is no page in
the history of Venice which your ancestors helped glorify!
There are two landings along the front of the garden,--one below the
west corner, up a narrow canal, and the other midway of the long
sea-wall, where all the gondolas load and unload. You know this last
landing at once. Ziem has painted it over and over again for a score of
years or more, and this master of color is still at it. With him it is
a strip of brilliant red, a background of autumn foliage, and a creamy
flight of steps running down to a sea of deepest ultramarine. There is
generally a mass of fishing-boats, too, in brilliant colorings, moored
to the wall, and a black gondola for a centre dark.
When you row up to this landing to-day, you are surprised to find it
all sunshine and glitter. The trees are fresh and crisp, the marble is
dazzling white, and the water sparkling and limpid with gray-green
tints. But please do not criticise Ziem. You do not see it his way,
but that is not his fault. Venice is a hundred different Venices to
as many different painters. If it were not so, you would not be here
to-day, nor love it as you do. Besides, when you think it all over,
you will admit that Ziem, of all living painters, has best rendered
its sensuous, color-soaked side. And yet, when you land you wonder why
the colorist did not bring his easel closer and give you a nearer view
of this superb water-landing, with the crowds of gayly dressed people,
swarms of gondolas, officers, fine ladies, boatmen, and the hundred
other phases of Venetian life.
But I hear Espero’s voice out on the broad water. Now I catch the
sunlight on his white shirt and blue sash. He is standing erect, his
whole body swaying with that long, graceful, sweeping stroke which is
the envy of the young gondoliers and the despair of the old; Espero,
as you know, has been twice winner in the gondola races. He sees my
signal, runs his bow close in, and the next instant we are swinging
back up the Grand Canal, skirting the old boatyard and the edge of the
Piazzetta. A puff of smoke from the man-of-war ahead, and the roll of
the sunset gun booms over the water. Before the echoes have fairly
died away, a long sinuous snake of employees--there are some seven
thousand of them--crawls from out the arsenal gates, curves over the
arsenal bridge, and heads up the Riva. On we go, abreast of the crowd,
past the landing-wharf of the little steamers, past the rear porches of
the queer caffès, past the man-of-war, and a moment later are off the
wine-shop and my bridge. I part the curtains, and from my cushions can
see the Duchess standing in the doorway, her arms akimbo, with all the
awnings rolled back tight for the night. The bridge itself is smothered
in a swarm of human flies, most of them bareheaded. As we sheer closer,
one more ragged than the rest springs up and waves his hat. Then comes
the refrain of that loveliest of all the Venetian boat songs:--
“_Jammo, jammo neoppa, jammo ja._”
It is Luigi, bidding me good-night.
THE PIAZZA OF SAN MARCO
THERE is but one piazza in the world. There may be other splendid
courts and squares, magnificent breathing spaces for the people,
enriched by mosque and palace, bordered by wide-spreading trees, and
adorned by noble statues. You know, of course, every slant of sunlight
over the plaza of the Hippodrome, in Constantinople, with its slender
twin needles of stone; you know the _Puerta del Sol_ of Madrid, cooled
by the splash of sunny fountains and alive with the rush of Spanish
life; and you know, too, the royal _Place de la Concorde_, brilliant
with the never-ending whirl of pleasure-loving Paris. Yes, you know
and may love them all, and yet there is but one grand piazza the world
over; and that lies to-day in front of the Church of San Marco.
It is difficult to account for this fascination. Sometimes you think it
lurks in the exquisite taper of the Campanile. Sometimes you think the
secret of its charm is hidden in masterly carvings, delicacy of arch,
or refinement of color. Sometimes the Piazza appeals to you only as the
great open-air bricabrac shop of the universe, with its twin columns
of stone stolen from the islands of the Archipelago; its bronze horses,
church doors, and altar front wrested from Constantinople and the East;
and its clusters of pillars torn from almost every heathen temple
within reach of a Venetian galley.
When your eye becomes accustomed to the dazzling splendor of the
surroundings, and you begin to analyze each separate feature of this
Court of the Doges, you are even more enchanted and bewildered. San
Marco itself no longer impresses you as a mere temple, with open
portals and swinging doors; but as an exquisite jewel-case of agate and
ivory, resplendent in gems and precious stones. The clock tower, with
its dial of blue and gold and its figures of bronze, is not, as of old,
one of a row of buildings, but a priceless ornament that might adorn
the palace of some King of the Giants; while the _Loggia_ of Sansovino
could serve as a mantel for his banquet hall, and any one of the three
bronze sockets of the flag-staffs, masterpieces of Leopardo, hold huge
candles to light him to bed.
And behind all this beauty of form and charm of handicraft, how lurid
the background of tradition, cruelty, and crime! Poor Doge Francesco
Foscari, condemning his own innocent son Jacopo to exile and death,
in that very room overlooking the square; the traitor Marino Faliero,
beheaded on the Giant Stairs of the palace, his head bounding to the
pavement below; the perfidies of the Council of Ten; the state murders,
tortures, and banishments; the horrors of the prisons of the _Piombi_;
the silent death-stroke of the unsigned denunciations dropped into the
_Bocca del Leone_--that fatal letter-box with its narrow mouth agape in
the wall of stone, nightly filled with the secrets of the living, daily
emptied of the secrets of the dead. All are here before you. The very
stones their victims trod lie beneath your feet, their water-soaked
cells but a step away.
As you pass between the twin columns of stone,--the pillars of Saint
Theodore and of the Lion,--you shudder when you recall the fate of the
brave Piedmontese, Carmagnola, a fate unfolding a chapter of cunning,
ingratitude, and cruelty almost unparalleled in the history of Venice.
You remember that for years this great hireling captain had led the
armies of Venice and the Florentines against his former master, Philip
of Milan; and that for years Venice had idolized the victorious
warrior.
You recall the disastrous expedition against Cremona, a stronghold of
Philip, and the subsequent anxiety of the Senate lest the sword of the
great captain should be turned against Venice herself. You remember
that one morning, as the story runs, a deputation entered the tent of
the great captain and presented the confidence of the Senate and an
invitation to return at once to Venice and receive the plaudits of the
people. Attended by his lieutenant, Gonzaga, Carmagnola set out to
obey. All through the plains of Lombardy, brilliant in their gardens of
olive and vine, he was received with honor and welcome. At Mestre he
was met by an escort of eight gentlemen in gorgeous apparel, special
envoys dispatched by the Senate, who conducted him across the wide
lagoon and down the Grand Canal, to this very spot on the Molo.
On landing from his sumptuous barge, the banks ringing with the shouts
of the populace, he was led by his escort direct to the palace, and
instantly thrust into an underground dungeon. Thirty days later, after
a trial such as only the Senate of the period would tolerate, and
gagged lest his indignant outcry might rebound in mutinous echoes, his
head fell between the columns of San Marco.
There are other pages to which one could turn in this book of the past,
pages rubricated in blood and black-lettered in crime. The book is
opened here because this tragedy of Carmagnola recalls so clearly and
vividly the methods and impulses of the times, and because, too, it
occurred where all Venice could see, and where to-day you can conjure
up for yourself the minutest details of the terrible outrage. Almost
nothing of the scenery is changed. From where you stand between these
fatal shafts, the same now as in the days of Carmagnola (even then
two centuries old), there still hangs a balcony whence you could have
caught the glance of that strong, mute warrior. Along the water’s edge
of this same Molo, where now the gondoliers ply their calling, and the
_lasagnoni_ lounge and gossip, stood the soldiers of the state drawn up
in solid phalanx. Across the canal, by the margin of this same island
of San Giorgio--before the present church was built--the people waited
in masses, silently watching the group between those two stone posts
that marked for them, and for all Venice, the doorway of hell. Above
towered this same Campanile, all but its very top complete.
But you hurry away, crossing the square with a lingering look at this
fatal spot, and enter where all these and a hundred other tragedies
were initiated, the Palace of the Doges. It is useless to attempt a
description of its wonderful details. If I should elaborate, it would
not help to give you a clearer idea of this marvel of the fifteenth
century. To those who know Venice, it will convey no new impression; to
those who do not it might add only confusion and error.
Give yourself up instead to the garrulous old guide who assails you
as you enter, and who, for a few _lire_, makes a thousand years as
one day. It is he who will tell you of the beautiful gate, the _Porta
della Carta_ of Bartolommeo Bon, with its statues weather-stained and
worn; of the famous _Scala dei Giganti_, built by Rizzo in 1485; of the
two exquisitely moulded and chased bronze well-heads of the court; of
the golden stairs of Sansovino; of the ante-chamber of the Council of
Ten; of the great _Sala di Collegio_, in which the foreign ambassadors
were received by the Doge; of the superb senate chamber, the _Sala del
Senato_; of the costly marbles and marvelous carvings; of the ceilings
of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese; of the secret passages, dungeons,
and torture chambers.
But the greatest of all these marvels of the Piazza still awaits you,
the Church of San Marco. Dismiss the old guide outside the beautiful
gate and enter its doors alone; here he would fail you.
If you come only to measure the mosaics, to value the swinging lamps,
or to speculate over the uneven, half-worn pavement of the interior,
enter its doors at any time, early morning or bright noonday, or
whenever your practical, materialistic, nineteenth-century body
would escape from the blaze of the sun outside. Or you can stay away
altogether; neither you nor the world will be the loser. But if you are
the kind of man who loves all beautiful things,--it may be the sparkle
of early dew upon the grass, the silence and rest of cool green woods,
the gloom of the fading twilight,--or if your heart warms to the sombre
tones of old tapestries, armor, and glass, and you touch with loving
tenderness the vellum backs of old books, then enter when the glory
of the setting sun sifts in and falls in shattered shafts of light on
altar, roof, and wall. Go with noiseless step and uncovered head, and,
finding some deep-shadowed seat or sheltered nook, open your heart and
mind and soul to the story of its past, made doubly precious by the
splendor of its present. As you sit there in the shadow, the spell of
its exquisite color will enchant you--color mellowing into harmonies
you knew not of; harmonies of old gold and porphyry reds; the dull
silver of dingy swinging lamps, with the soft light of candles and the
dreamy haze of dying incense; harmonies of rich brown carvings and dark
bronzes rubbed bright by a thousand reverent hands.
The feeling which will steal over you will not be one of religious
humility, like that which took possession of you in the Saint Sophia of
Constantinople. It will be more like the blind idolatry of the pagan,
for of all the temples of the earth, this shrine of San Marco is the
most worthy of your devotion. Every turn of the head will bring new
marvels into relief; marvels of mosaic, glinting like beaten gold;
marvels of statue, crucifix, and lamp; marvels of altars, resplendent
in burnished silver and flickering tapers; of alabaster columns merging
into the vistas; of sculptured saint and ceiling of sheeted gold; of
shadowy aisle and high uplifted cross.
Never have you seen any such interior. Hung with the priceless fabrics
and relics of the earth, it is to you one moment a great mosque,
studded with jewels and rich with the wealth of the East; then, as
its color deepens, a vast tomb, hollowed from out a huge, dark opal,
in which lies buried some heroic soul, who in his day controlled the
destinies of nations and of men. And now again, when the mystery of its
light shimmers through windows covered with the dust of ages, there
comes to this wondrous shrine of San Marco, small as it is, something
of the breadth and beauty, the solitude and repose, of a summer night.
When the first hush and awe and sense of sublimity have passed away,
you wander, like the other pilgrims, into the baptistery; or you move
softly behind the altar, marveling over each carving of wood and
stone and bronze; or you descend to the crypt and stand by the stone
sarcophagus that once held the bones of the good saint himself.
As you walk about these shadowy aisles, and into the dim recesses, some
new devotee swings back a door, and a blaze of light streams in, and
you awake to the life of to-day.
Yes, there is a present as well as a past. There is another Venice
outside; a Venice of life and joyousness and stir. The sun going
down; the caffès under the arcades of the King’s Palace and of the
_Procuratie Vecchie_ are filling up. There is hardly an empty table at
Florian’s. The pigeons, too, are coming home to roost, and are nestling
under the eaves of the great buildings and settling on the carvings
of San Marco. The flower girls, in gay costumes, are making shops of
the marble benches next the Campanile, assorting roses and pinks, and
arranging their _boutonnières_ for the night’s sale. The awnings which
have hung all day between the columns of the arcades are drawn back,
exposing the great line of shops fringing three sides of the square.
Lights begin to flash; first in the clusters of lamps illuminating the
arcades, and then in the windows filled with exquisite bubble-blown
Venetian glass, wood carvings, inlaid cabinets, cheap jewelry,
gay-colored photographs and prints.
As the darkness falls, half a dozen men drag to the centre of the
Piazza the segments of a great circular platform. This they surround
with music-rests and a stand for the leader. Now the pavement of the
Piazza itself begins filling up. Out from the Merceria, from under
the clock tower, pours a steady stream of people merging in the
crowds about the band-stand. Another current flows in through the west
entrance, under the _Bocca di Piazza_, and still another from under
the Riva, rounding the Doges’ Palace. At the Molo, just where poor
Carmagnola stepped ashore, a group of officers--they are everywhere
in Venice--land from a government barge. These are in full regalia,
even to their white kid gloves, their swords dangling and ringing
as they walk. They, too, make their way to the square and fill the
seats around one of the tables at Florian’s, bowing magnificently to
the old Countess who sits just inside the door of the caffè itself,
resplendent, as usual, in dyed wig and rose-colored veil. She is taking
off her long, black, fingerless silk gloves, and ordering her customary
spoonful of cognac and lump of sugar. Gustavo, the head waiter, listens
as demurely as if he expected a bottle of Chablis at least, with the
customary commission for Gustavo--but then Gustavo is the soul of
politeness. Some evil-minded people say the Countess came in with the
Austrians; others, more ungallant, date her advent about the days of
the early doges.
By this time you notice that the old French professor is in his
customary place; it is outside the caffè, in the corridor, on a
leather-covered, cushioned seat against one of the high pillars. You
never come to the Piazza without meeting him. He is as much a part of
its history as the pigeons, and, like them, dines here at least once
a day. He is a perfectly straight, pale, punctilious, and exquisitely
deferential relic of a by-gone time, whose only capital is his charming
manner and his thorough knowledge of Venetian life. This combination
rarely fails where so many strangers come and go; and then, too, no
one knows so well the intricacies of an Italian kitchen as Professor
Croisac.
Sometimes on summer evenings he will move back a chair at your own
table and insist upon dressing the salad. Long before his greeting,
you catch sight of him gently edging his way through the throng, the
seedy, straight-brimmed silk hat in his hand brushed with the greatest
precision; his almost threadbare frock-coat buttoned snug around his
waist, the collar and tails flowing loose, his one glove hanging limp.
He is so erect, so gentle, so soft-voiced, so sincere, and so genuine,
and for the hour so supremely happy, that you cannot divest yourself
of the idea that he really is an old marquis, temporarily exiled from
some faraway court, and to be treated with the greatest deference.
When, with a little start of sudden surprise, he espies some dark-eyed
matron in the group about him, rises to his feet and salutes her as if
she were the Queen of Sheba, you are altogether sure of his noble rank.
Then the old fellow regains his seat, poises his gold eyeglasses--a
relic of better days--between his thumb and forefinger, holds them
two inches from his nose, and consults the _menu_ with the air of a
connoisseur.
Before your coffee is served the whole Piazza is ablaze and literally
packed with people. The tables around you stand quite out to the
farthest edge permitted. (These caffès have, so to speak, riparian
rights--so much piazza seating frontage, facing the high-water mark of
the caffè itself.) The waiters can now hardly wedge their way through
the crowd. The chairs are so densely occupied that you barely move your
elbows. Next you is an Italian mother--full-blown even to her delicate
mustache--surrounded by a bevy of daughters, all in pretty hats and
white or gay-colored dresses, chatting with a circle of still other
officers. All over the square, where earlier in the day only a few
stray pilgrims braved the heat, or a hungry pigeon wandered in search
of a grain of corn, the _personnel_ of this table is repeated--mothers
and officers and daughters, and daughters and officers and mothers
again.
Outside this mass, representing a _clientèle_ possessing at least half
a _lira_ each--one cannot, of course, occupy a chair and spend less,
and it is equally difficult to spend very much more--there moves in a
solid mass the rest of the world: bareheaded girls, who have been all
day stringing beads in some hot courtyard; old crones in rags from
below the shipyards; fishermen in from Chioggia; sailors, stevedores,
and soldiers in their linen suits, besides sight-seers and wayfarers
from the four corners of the earth.
If there were nothing else in Venice but the night life of this grand
Piazza, it would be worth a pilgrimage half across the world to
see. Empty every café in the Boulevards; add all the _habitués_ of
the Volks Gardens of Vienna, and all those you remember at Berlin,
Buda-Pesth, and Florence; pack them in one mass, and you would not
half fill the Piazza. Even if you did, you could never bring together
the same kinds of people. Venice is not only the magnet that draws the
idler and the sight-seer, but those who love her just because she is
Venice--painters, students, architects, historians, musicians, every
soul who values the past and who finds here, as nowhere else, the
highest achievement of chisel, brush, and trowel.
The painters come, of course--all kinds of painters, for all kinds of
subjects. Every morning, all over the canals and quays, you find a new
growth of white umbrellas, like mushrooms, sprung up in the night.
Since the days of Canaletto these men have painted and repainted these
same stretches of water, palace, and sky. Once under the spell of her
presence, they are never again free from the fascinations of this
Mistress of the Adriatic. Many of the older men are long since dead and
forgotten, but the work of those of to-day you know: Ziem first, nearly
all his life a worshiper of the wall of the Public Garden; and Rico and
Ruskin and Whistler. Their names are legion. They have all had a corner
at Florian’s. No matter what their nationality or specialty, they speak
the common language of the brush. Old Professor Croisac knows them all.
He has just risen again to salute Marks, a painter of sunrises, who
has never yet recovered from his first thrill of delight when early
one morning his gondolier rowed him down the lagoon and made fast to
a cluster of spiles off the Public Garden. When the sun rose behind
the sycamores and threw a flood of gold across the sleeping city,
and flashed upon the sails of the fishing-boats drifting up from the
Lido, Marks lost his heart. He is still tied up every summer to that
same cluster of spiles, painting the glory of the morning sky and the
drifting boats. He will never want to paint anything else. He will not
listen to you when you tell him of the sunsets up the Giudecca, or the
soft pearly light of the dawn silvering the Salute, or the picturesque
life of the fisher-folk of Malamocco.
“My dear boy,” he breaks out, “get up to-morrow morning at five and
come down to the Garden, and just see one sunrise--only one. We
had a lemon-yellow and pale emerald sky this morning, with dabs of
rose-leaves, that would have paralyzed you.”
Do not laugh at the painter’s enthusiasm. This white goddess of the sea
has a thousand lovers, and, like all other lovers the world over, each
one believes that he alone holds the key to her heart.
IN AN OLD GARDEN
YOU think, perhaps, there are no gardens in Venice; that it is all a
sweep of palace front and shimmering sea; that save for the oleanders
bursting into bloom near the Iron Bridge, and the great trees of
the Public Garden shading the flower-bordered walks, there are no
half-neglected tangles where rose and vine run riot; where the plash of
the fountain is heard in the stillness of the night, and tall cedars
cast their black shadows at noonday.
Really, if you but knew it, almost every palace hides a garden nestling
beneath its balconies, and every high wall hems in a wealth of green,
studded with broken statues, quaint arbors festooned with purple
grapes, and white walks bordered by ancient box; while every roof that
falls beneath a window is made a hanging garden of potted plants and
swinging vines.
[Illustration: BEYOND SAN ROSARIO]
Step from your gondola into some open archway. A door beyond leads you
to a court paved with marble flags and centred by a well with carved
marble curb, yellow stained with age. Cross this wide court, pass
a swinging iron gate, and you stand under rose-covered bowers, where
in the olden time gay gallants touched their lutes and fair ladies
listened to oft-told tales of love.
And not only behind the palaces facing the Grand Canal, but along the
Zattere beyond San Rosario, away down the Giudecca, and by the borders
of the lagoon, will you find gay oleanders flaunting red blossoms, and
ivy and myrtle hanging in black-green bunches over crumbling walls.
In one of these hidden nooks, these abandoned cloisters of shaded walk
and over-bending blossom, I once spent an autumn afternoon with my old
friend, the Professor,--“Professor of Modern Languages and Ancient
Legends,” as some of the more flippant of the _habitués_ of Florian’s
were wont to style him. The old Frenchman had justly earned this title.
He had not only made every tradition and fable of Venice his own,
often puzzling and charming the Venetians themselves with his intimate
knowledge of the many romances of their past, but he could tell most
wonderful tales of the gorgeous fêtes of the seventeenth century, the
social life of the nobility, their escapades, intrigues, and scandals.
If some fair Venetian had loved not wisely but too well, and, clinging
to brave Lorenzo’s neck, had slipped down a rope ladder into a closely
curtained, muffled-oared gondola, and so over the lagoon to Mestre,
the old Frenchman could not only point out to you the very balcony,
provided it were a palace balcony and not a fisherman’s window,--he
despised the _bourgeoisie_,--but he could give you every feature of
the escapade, from the moment the terror-stricken duenna missed her
charge to that of the benediction of the priest in the shadowed isle.
So, when upon the evening preceding this particular day, I accepted
the Professor’s invitation to breakfast, I had before me not only his
hospitality, frugal as it might be, but the possibility of drawing upon
his still more delightful fund of anecdote and reminiscence.
Neither the day nor the hour had been definitely set. The invitation, I
afterwards discovered, was but one of the many he was constantly giving
to his numerous friends and haphazard acquaintances, evincing by its
perfect genuineness his own innate kindness and his hearty appreciation
of the many similar courtesies he was daily receiving at their hands.
Indeed, to a man so delicately adjusted as the Professor and so
entirely poor, it was the only way he could balance, in his own mind,
many long-running accounts of, coffee for two at the _Calcina_, with a
fish and a fruit salad, the last a specialty of the Professor’s--the
oil, melons, and cucumbers being always provided by his host--or a dish
of _risotto_, with kidneys and the like, at the _Bauer-Grünwald_.
Nobody ever accepted these invitations seriously, that is, no one who
knew the Professor at all well. In fact, there was a general impression
existing among the many frequenters of Florian’s and the _Quadri_
that the Professor’s hour and place of breakfasting were very like
the birds’--whenever the unlucky worm was found, and wherever the
accident happened to occur. When I asked Marks for the old fellow’s
address--which rather necessary item I remembered later had also been
omitted by the Professor--he replied, “Oh, somewhere down the Riva,”
and dropped the subject as too unimportant for further mental effort.
All these various eccentricities of my prospective host, however,
were at the time unknown to me. He had cordially invited me to
breakfast--“to-morrow, or any day you are near my apartments, I would
be so charmed,” etc. I had as graciously accepted, and it would have
been unpardonable indifference, I felt sure, not to have continued the
inquiries until my hand touched his latch-string.
The clue was a slight one. I had met him once, leaning over the side of
the bridge below Danieli’s, the _Ponte del Sepolcro_, looking wistfully
out to sea, and was greeted with the remark that he had that moment
left his apartments, and only lingered on the bridge to watch the play
of silvery light on the lagoon, the September skies were so enchanting.
So on this particular morning I began inspecting the bell-pulls of all
the doorways, making inquiry at the several caffès and shops. Then I
remembered the apothecary, down one step from the sidewalk, in the _Via
Garibaldi_--a rather shabby continuation of the Riva--and nearly a mile
below the more prosperous quarter where the Professor had waved his
hand, the morning I met him on the bridge.
“The Signor Croisac--the old Frenchman?” “Upstairs, next door.”
He was as delightful as ever in his greetings; started a little when I
reminded him of his invitation, but begged me to come in and sit down,
and with great courtesy pointed out the view of the garden below, and
the sweep and glory of the lagoon. Then he excused himself, adjusted
his hat, picked up a basket, and gently closed the door.
The room, upon closer inspection, was neither dreary nor uninviting.
It had a sort of annex, or enlarged closet, with a drawn curtain
partly concealing a bed, a row of books lining one wall, a table
littered with papers, a smaller one containing a copper coffee-pot
and a scant assortment of china, some old chairs, and a disemboweled
lounge that had doubtless lost heart in middle life and committed
hari-kari. There were also a few prints and photographs, a corner of
the Parthenon, a mezzo of Napoleon in his cocked hat, and an etching
or two, besides a miniature reduction of the Dying Gladiator, which he
used as a paper-weight. All the windows of this modest apartment were
filled with plants, growing in all kinds of pots and boxes, broken
pitchers, cracked dishes--even half of a Chianti flask. These, like
their guardian, ignored their surroundings and furnishings, and flamed
away as joyously in the summer sun as if they had been nurtured in the
choicest of majolica.
He was back before I had completed my inventory, thanking me again and
again for my extreme kindness in coming, all the while unwrapping the
Gorgonzola, and flecking off with a fork the shreds of paper that still
clung to its edges. The morsel was then laid upon a broad leaf gathered
at the window, and finally upon a plate covered by a napkin so that
the flies should not taste it first. This, with a simple salad, a pot
of coffee and some rolls, a siphon of seltzer and a little raspberry
juice in a glass,--“so much fresher than wine these hot mornings,” he
said,--constituted the entire repast.
But there was no apology offered with the serving. Poor as he was, he
had that exquisite tact which avoided burdening his guest even with
his economies. He had offered me all his slender purse could afford.
Indeed, the cheese had quite overstrained it.
When he had drawn a cigarette from my case,--it was delightful to
see him do this, and always reminded me of a young girl picking
bonbons from a box, it was so daintily done,--the talk drifted into
a discussion of the glories of the old days and of the welfare of
Italy under the present government. I made a point of expressing my
deep admiration for the good King Humbert and his gracious queen. The
Professor merely waved his hand, adding:--
“Yes, a good man and a noble lady, worthy successors of the old
régime!” Then, with a certain air, “I have known, professionally, very
many of these great families. A most charming, delightful society!
The women so exquisite, with such wealth of hair and eyes, and so
_gentilles_: always of the _Beau Monde_! And their traditions and
legends, so full of romance and mystery! The palaces too! Think of
the grand staircase of the Foscari, the entrance to the Barbaro, and
the superb ceilings of the Albrezzi! Then their great gardens and
vine orchards! There is nothing like them. Do you happen to know
the old garden on the Giudecca, where lived the beautiful Contessa
Alberoni? No? And you never heard the romantic story of her life, her
disappearance, and its dramatic ending?”
I shook my head. The Professor, to my delight, was now fairly in the
saddle; the best part of the breakfast was to come.
“My dear friend! One of the most curious of all the stories of Venice!
I know intimately many of her descendants, and I know, too, the old
gardener who still cares for what is left of the garden. It has long
since passed out of the hands of the family.
“Let me light another cigarette before I tell you,” said the Professor,
crossing the room, “and just another drop of seltzer,” filling my
glass.
“Is it to be a true story?” I asked.
“_Mon cher ami!_ absolutely so. Would you care to see the garden
itself, where it all occurred, or will you take my word for it? No, not
until you sit under the arbors and lean over the very balcony where
the lovers sat. Come, is your gondola here? Under the window?” pushing
aside the flowers. “Which is your gondolier? The one in blue with the
white _tenda_ over his boat? Yes, sound asleep like all the rest of
them!”
Here the old gentleman picked up his silk hat, passed his hand once
or twice around its well-brushed surface, discarded it for a white
straw with a narrow black band, adjusted his cravat in a broken mirror
that hung near the door, gave an extra twist to his gray mustache, and
preceded me downstairs and out into the blinding light of a summer day.
Several members of the Open-Air Club were hanging over the bridge as
we passed--Luigi flat on his face and sound asleep in the shadow of
the side-wall, and Vittorio sprawled out on the polished rail above.
Those who were awake touched their hats respectfully to the old fellow
as he crossed the bridge, he returning their salutations quite as a
distinguished earl would those of his tenants. Vittorio, when he
caught my eye, sprang down and ran ahead to rouse Espero, and then back
for Luigi, who awoke with a dazed look on his face, only regaining
consciousness in time to wave his hat to me when we were clear of the
quay, the others standing in a row enjoying his discomfiture.
“This garden,” continued the Professor, settling himself on the
cushions and drawing the curtains so that he could keep the view toward
San Giorgio and still shut out the dazzling light, “is now, of course,
only a ghost of its former self. The château is half in ruins, and one
part is inhabited by fishermen, who dry their nets in the grape arbors
and stow their fish-baskets in the porticoes. Many of the fruit-trees,
however, still exist, as do many of the vines, and so my old friend
Angelo, the gardener, makes a scanty living for himself and his pretty
daughter, by supplying the fruit-stands in the autumn and raising
lettuce and melons in the spring and summer. The ground itself, like
most of the land along the east side of the islands of the Giudecca, is
valueless, and everything is falling into ruin.”
We were rounding the Dogana, Espero bending lustily to his oar as we
shot past the wood-boats anchored in the stream. The Professor talked
on, pointing out the palace where Pierre, the French adventurer, lived
during the Spanish conspiracy, and the very side door in the old
building, once a convent, from which an Englishman in the old days
stole a nun who loved him, and spirited her off to another quaint nook
in this same Giudecca, returning her to her cell every morning before
daybreak.
“Ah, those were the times to live in. Then a _soldo_ was as large as a
_lira_. Then a woman loved you for yourself, not for what you gave her.
Then your gondolier kept your secrets, and the keel of your boat left
no trace behind. Then your family crest meant something more than the
name-plate on your door, upon which to nail a tax-levy.”
The old man had evidently forgotten his history, but I did not check
him. It was his buoyant enthusiasm that always charmed me most.
As Espero passed under Ponte Lungo, the wooden bridge leading to the
_Fondamenta della Pallada_, the Professor waved his hand to the right,
and we floated out into the lagoon and stopped at an old water-gate,
its doors weather-stained and broken, over which hung a mass of tangled
vines.
“The garden of the Contessa,” said the Professor, his face aglow with
the expectancy of my pleasure.
It was like a dozen other water-gates I had seen, except that no
gratings were open and the surrounding wall was unusually high. Once
inside, however, with the gate swung-to on its rusty hinges, you felt
instantly that the world had been shut away forever. Here were long
arbors bordered by ancient box, with arching roofs of purple grapes.
Against the high walls stood fragments of statues, some headless,
some with broken arms or battered faces. Near the centre of the great
quadrangle was a sunken basin, covered with mould, and green with the
scum of stagnant water. In the once well-regulated garden beds the
roses bloomed gayly, climbing over pedestal and statue, while the
trumpet-flower and scarlet-creeper flaunted their colors high upon the
crumbling walls overlooking the lagoon. At one end of this tangled
waste rose the remains of a once noble château or summer home, built
of stone in the classic style of architecture, the pediment of the
porch supported by a row of white marble columns. Leaning against these
columns stood old fish-baskets, used for the storing of live fish,
while over the ruined arbors hung in great festoons the nets of a
neighboring fisherman, who reserved this larger space for drying and
mending his seines.
It was a ruin, and yet not a hopeless one. You could see that each year
the flowers struggled into life again; that the old black cypresses,
once trimmed into quaint designs, had still determined to live on,
even without the care of their arboreal barber; that really only the
pruning-knife and spade were needed to bring back the garden to its
former beauty. And the solitude was there too, the sense of utter
isolation, as if the outside world were across the sea, whither nor eye
nor voice could follow.
Old Angelo and his pretty daughter--a pure type of the Venetian girl
of to-day, as she stood expectantly with folded arms--met us at the
gate, and led the way to a sort of summer-house, so thickly covered
with matted vines that the sun only filtered through and fell in drops
of gold, spattering the ground below. Here, encrusted with green mould,
was a marble table of exquisite design, its circular top supported by a
tripod with lions’ feet.
Angelo evidently knew my companion and his ways, for in a few moments
the girl returned, bringing a basket of grapes, some figs, and a flask
of wine. The Professor thanked her, and then, dismissing her with one
of his gentle hand-waves and brushing the fallen leaves from the stone
bench with his handkerchief, sat down.
“And now, right here,” said the old fellow, placing his straw hat
on the seat beside him, his gray hair glistening in the soft light,
“right here, where she loved and died, I will tell you the story of the
Contessa Alberoni.
“This most divine of women once lived in a grand old palace above the
Rialto. She belonged to a noble family of Florence, whose ancestors
fought with Philip, before the Campanile was finished. All over Italy
she was known as the most beautiful woman of her day, and that, let
me tell you, at a time when to be counted as beautiful in Venice was
to be beautiful the world over. She was a woman,”--here the Professor
rested his head on the marble seat and half closed his eyes, as if he
were recalling the vision of loveliness from out his own past,--“well,
one of those ideal women, with fathomless eyes and rounded white arms
and throat; a Catherine Cornaro type, of superb carriage and presence.
Titian would have lost his heart over the torrent of gold that fell in
masses about her shapely head, and Canova might have exhausted all his
skill upon the outlines of her form.
“In the beginning of her womanhood, when yet barely sixteen, she had
married, at her father’s bidding, a decrepit Italian count nearly
thrice her age, who, in profound consideration of her sacrifice, died
in a becoming manner within a few years of their marriage, leaving her
his titles and estates. For ten years of her wedded life and after,
she lived away off in the secluded villa of Valdagna, a small town
nestling among the foothills of the Alps. Then, suddenly awakening to
the power of her wonderful beauty, she took possession of the great
palace on the Grand Canal above the Rialto. You can see it any day; and
save that some of the spindles in the exquisite rose-marble balconies
are broken and the façade blackened and weather-stained, the exterior
is quite as it appeared in her time. The interior, however, owing to
the obliteration of this noble family and the consequent decay of its
vast estates, is almost a ruin. Every piece of furniture and all the
gorgeous hangings are gone; together with the mantels, and the superb
well-curb in the court below. Tell Espero to take you there some day.
You will not only find the grand entrance blocked with wine casks, but
my lady’s boudoir plastered over with cheap green paper and rented as
cheaper lodgings to still cheaper tenants. Bah!”
Then the Professor, dropping easily and gracefully into a style of
delivery as stilted as if he were remembering the very words of some
old chronicle, told me how she had lived in this grand palace during
the years of her splendor, the pride and delight of all who came under
her magic spell, as easily Queen of Venice as Venice was Queen of the
Sea. How at thirty, then in the full radiance of her beauty, beloved
and besought by every hand that could touch her own, painters vied
with each other in matching the tints of her marvelous skin; sculptors
begged for models of her feet to grace their masterpieces; poets sang
her praises, and the first musicians of Italy wrote the songs that
her lovers poured out beneath her windows. How there had come a night
when suddenly the whole course of her life was changed,--the night of
a great ball given at one of the old palaces on the Grand Canal, the
festivities ending with a pageant that revived the sumptuous days of
the Republic, in which the Contessa herself was to take part.
When the long-expected hour arrived, she was seen to step into her
gondola, attired in a dress of the period, a marvel of velvet and cloth
of gold. Then she disappeared as completely from human sight as if the
waters of the canal had closed over her forever.
For days all investigation proved fruitless. The only definite clue
came from her gondolier, who said that soon after the gondola had
left the steps of her palace, the Contessa ordered him to return home
at once; that on reaching the landing she covered her face with her
veil and reëntered the palace. Later it was whispered that for many
weeks she had not left her apartments. Then she sent for her father
confessor, and at a secret interview announced her decision never again
to appear to the world.
At this point of the story the Professor had risen from his seat and
poured half the flagon in his glass. He was evidently as much absorbed
in the recital as if it had all happened yesterday. I could see, too,
that it appealed to those quaint, romantic views of life which, for all
their absurdities, endeared the old fellow to every one who knew him.
“For a year,” he continued, “this seclusion was maintained; no one saw
the Contessa, not even her own servants. Her meals were served behind a
screen. Of course, all Venice was agog. Every possible solution of so
strange and unexpected a seclusion was suggested and discussed.
“In the beginning of the following winter vague rumors reached the good
father’s ears. One morning he left his devotions, and, waylaying her
duenna outside the palace garden, pressed his rosary into her hands
and said: ‘Take this to the Contessa.’” Here the Professor became very
dramatic, holding out his hand with a quick gesture, as if it clasped
the rosary. “‘Tell her that to-night, when San Giorgio strikes twelve,
I shall be at the outer gate of the palace and must be admitted.’”
Then, pacing up and down the narrow arbor, his face flushed, his eyes
glistening, the old fellow told the rest of the story. “When,” said he,
“the hour arrived, the heavy grated door, the same through which you
can now see the wine casks, was cautiously opened. A moment later the
priest was ushered into a dimly lighted room, luxuriously furnished,
and screened at one end by a silken curtain, behind which sat the
Contessa. She listened while he told her how all Venice was outraged
at her conduct, many hearts being grieved and many tongues dropping
foul slander. He remonstrated with her about the life she was leading,
condemning its selfishness and threatening the severest discipline.
But neither threats nor the voice of slander intimidated the Contessa.
She steadfastly avowed that her life had been blameless, and despite
the earnest appeals of the priest persisted in the determination to
live the rest of her days in quiet and seclusion. The most he was able
to effect was a promise that within a month she would open the doors of
her palace for one more great ball. Her friends would then be reassured
and her enemies silenced.
“The records show that no such festival had been seen in Venice for
many years. The palace was a blaze of light. So great was the crush of
gondolas bringing their beauteous freight of richly dressed Venetians,
that the traffic of the canal was obstructed for hours. Ten o’clock
came, eleven, and still there was no Contessa to welcome her guests.
Strange stories were set afloat. It was whispered that a sudden illness
had overtaken her. Then, as the hours wore on, the terrible rumor
gained credence, that she had been murdered by her servants, and that
the report of her illness was only a cloak to conceal their crime.
“While the excitement was at its height, a man, in the costume of a
herald, appeared in the great _salon_ and announced the arrival of the
hostess. As the hour struck twelve a curtain was drawn at the farther
end of the room, revealing the Contessa seated upon a dais, superbly
attired in velvet and lace, and brilliant with jewels. When the hum
and wonder of the surprise had ceased, she arose, stood like a queen
receiving the homage of her subjects, and, welcoming her guests to
her palace, bade them dance on until the sun rose over the Lido. Then
the curtains were drawn, and so ended the last sight of the Contessa
in Venice. Her palace was never opened again. Later she disappeared
completely, and the spiders spun their webs across the threshold.
“Years afterward, a man repairing a high chimney on a roof overlooking
this very garden--the chimney can still be seen from the far corner
below the landing--saw entering the arbor a noble lady, leaning upon
the arm of a distinguished looking man of about her own age. In the
lady he recognized the Contessa.
“Little by little, the story came out. It appeared that immediately
after the ball she had moved to this château, a part of her own
estates, which had been quietly fitted up and restored. It was then
remembered that soon after the château had been finished, a certain
Marquis, well known in France, who had adored the Contessa for years,
and was really the only man she ever loved, had disappeared from
Paris. He was traced at the time to Milan and Genoa, and finally to
Venice. There all trace of him was lost. Such disappearances were not
uncommon in those days, and it was often safer even for one’s relatives
to shrug their shoulders and pass on. Further confirmation came from
the gondolier, who had landed him the night of his arrival at the
water-gate of this garden,--just where we landed an hour ago,--and
who, on hearing of his supposed murder, had kept silent upon his share
in the suspected crime. Inquiries conducted by the State corroborated
these facts.
“Look around you, _mon ami_,” exclaimed the Professor suddenly.
“Underneath this very arbor have they sat for hours, and in the
window of that crumbling balcony have they listened to the low sound
of each other’s voice in the still twilight, the world shut out,
the vine-covered wall their only horizon. Here, as the years passed
unheeded, they dreamed their lives away. _L’amour, l’amour, vous êtes
tout puissant!_”
The Professor stopped, turned as if in pain, and rested his head
on his arm. For some moments neither of us spoke. Was the romance
to which I had listened only the romance of the Contessa, or had he
unconsciously woven into its meshes some of the silken threads of his
own past? When he raised his head I said: “But, Professor, you have not
told me the secret she kept from the priest. Why did she shut herself
up? What was it that altered the whole course of her life?”
“Did I not tell you? Then listen. She had overheard her gondolier say,
as she stepped into her gondola on the fatal night of the great fête
at the Foscari, ‘The Contessa is growing old; she is no longer as
beautiful as she was.’”
I looked at the old fellow to see if he were really in earnest, and,
throwing back my head, laughed heartily. For the first time in all my
intercourse with him I saw the angry color mount to his cheeks.
He turned quickly, looked at me in astonishment, as if unable to
believe his ears, and said sharply, knitting his brows, “Why do you
laugh?”
“It seems so absurd,” I replied. “What did she expect; to be always a
goddess?”
“Ah, there you go!” he burst out again, with flashing eyes. “That is
just like a cold-blooded materialist. I hate your modern Shylock, who
can see a pound of flesh cut from a human heart with no care for the
hot blood that follows. Have you no sympathy deep down in your soul
for a woman when she realizes for the first time that her hold on the
world is slipping? Can you not understand the agony of the awakening
from a long dream of security and supremacy, when she finds that others
are taking her place? The daily watching for the loss of color, the
fullness of the waist, the penciling of care-lines about the eyes?
We men have bodily force and mental vigor, and sometimes lifelong
integrity, to commend us, and as we grow older and the first two fail,
the last serves us best of all; but what has a woman like the Contessa
left? I am not talking of an ordinary woman, nor of all the good
daughters, good wives, and good mothers in the world. You expect in
such women the graces of virtue, duty, and resignation. I am talking of
a superb creature whom the good God created just to show the world what
the angels looked like. I insist that before you laugh you must put
yourself in the place of this noble Contessa whom all Venice adored,
whose reign for fifteen years had been supreme, whose beauty was to
her something tangible, a weapon, a force, an atmosphere. She had all
the other charms that adorned the women of her day, good-humor, a rich
mind, charity, and wit, but so had a hundred other Venetians of her
class. I insist that before censuring her, you enter the _salon_ and
watch with her the faces of her guests, noting her eagerness to detect
the first glance of delight or disappointment, and her joy or chagrin
as she reads the verdict in their eyes. Can you not realize that in a
beauty such as hers there is an essence, a spirit, a something divine
and ethereal? A something like the bloom on these grapes, adding the
exquisite to their lusciousness; like the pure color of the diamond,
intensifying its flash? A something that, in addition to all her other
qualities, makes a woman transcendent and should make her immortal?
We men long for this divine quality, adore it, go mad over it; and
yet when it has faded, with an inconstancy and neglect which to me is
one of the enigmas of human nature, we shrug our shoulders, laugh,
and pass on. Believe me, _mon ami_, when that gondolier confirmed the
looking-glass of the Contessa, his words fell upon her ears like earth
upon her coffin.”
If the Professor’s emotion at the close of the story was a surprise to
me, this frenzied outburst, illogical and quixotic as it seemed, was
equally unexpected. I could hardly realize that this torrent of fiery
passion and pent-up energy had burst from the frail, plain little body
before me. Again and again, as I looked at him, the thought ran through
my mind, Whom had he loved like that? What had come between himself and
his own Contessa? Why was this man an exile--this cheery, precise, ever
courteous dignified old thoroughbred, with his dry, crackling exterior,
and his volcano of a heart beneath? Or was it Venice, with her wealth
of traditions,--traditions he had made his own,--that had turned his
head?
Long after the Professor left the garden, I sat looking about me,
noting the broken walls overhung with matted vines, and the little
lizards darting in and out. Then I strolled on and entered the doorway
of the old château, and looked long and steadily at the ruined balcony,
half buried in a tangle of roses, the shadows of their waving blossoms
splashing the weather-stained marble; and thence to the apartment
above, where these same blossoms thrust themselves far into its gloom,
as if they too would search for the vision of loveliness that had
vanished. Then I wandered into an alcove sheltering the remains of an
altar and font--the very chapel, no doubt, where the good priest had
married her; on through the unkept walks bordered on each side by rows
of ancient box, with here and there a gap where the sharp tooth of some
winter more cruel than the rest had bitten deep, and so out again into
the open garden, where I sat down under a great tree that sheltered
the head of a Madonna built into the wall--the work of Canova, the
Professor had told me.
Despite my own convictions, I seem to feel the presence of these
spirits of the past that the Professor, in his simple, earnest way, had
conjured up before me, and to see on every hand evidences of their long
life of happiness. The ruined balcony, with its matted rose vines, had
now a deeper meaning. How often had the beautiful Venetian leaned over
this same iron grating and watched her lover in the garden below! On
how many nights, made glorious by the radiance of an Italian moon, had
they listened to the soft music of passing gondolas beyond the garden
walls?
The whole romance, in spite of its improbability and my thoughtless
laughter, had affected me deeply. Why, I could not tell. Perhaps it
was the Professor’s enthusiasm; perhaps his reverence for the beauty of
woman, as well as for the Contessa herself. Perhaps he had really been
recalling a chapter out of his own past, before exile and poverty had
made him a wanderer and a dreamer. Perhaps!--Yes, perhaps it was the
thought of the long, quiet life of the Contessa with her lover in this
garden.
AMONG THE FISHERMEN
I KNOW best the fishing quarter of Ponte Lungo and the district near
by, from the wooden bridge to the lagoon, with the side canal running
along the _Fondamenta della Pallada_. This to me is not only the most
picturesque quarter of Venice, but quite the most picturesque spot I
know in Europe, except, perhaps, Scutari on the Golden Horn.
This quality of the picturesque saturates Venice. You find it in
her stately structures; in her spacious Piazza, with its noble
Campanile, clock tower, and façade of San Marco; in her tapering
towers, deep-wrought bronze, and creamy marble; in her cluster of
butterfly sails on far-off, wide horizons; in her opalescent dawns,
flaming sunsets, and star-lit summer nights. You find it in the
gatherings about her countless bridges spanning dark water-ways;
in the ever-changing color of crowded markets; in lazy gardens
lolling over broken walls; in twisted canals, quaint doorways, and
soggy, ooze-covered landing-steps. You find it, too, in many a dingy
palace--many a lop-sided old palace--with door-jambs and windows
askew, with lintels craning their heads over the edge, ready to plunge
headlong into the canal below.
The little devils of rot and decay, deep down in the water, are at the
bottom of all this settling and toppling of jamb and lintel. They are
really the guardians of the picturesque.
Search any façade in Venice, from flowline to cornice, and you
cannot find two lines plumb or parallel. This is because these imps
of destruction have helped the teredo to munch and gnaw and bore,
undermining foundation pile, grillage, and bed-stone. If you listen
some day over the side of your gondola, you will hear one of these
old piles creak and groan as he sags and settles, and then up comes a
bubble, as if all the fiends below had broken into a laugh at their
triumph.
This change goes on everywhere. No sooner does some inhabitant of the
earth build a monstrosity of right-angle triangles, than the little
imps set to work. They know that Mother Nature detests a straight line,
and so they summon all the fairy forces of sun, wind, and frost, to
break and bend and twist, while they scuttle and bore and dig, until
some fine morning after a siege of many years, you stumble upon their
victim. The doge who built it would shake his head in despair, but you
forgive the tireless little devils--they have made it so delightfully
picturesque.
To be exact, there are really fewer straight lines in Venice than in
any place in Europe. This is because all the islands are spiked full
of rotting piles, holding up every structure within their limits. The
constant settling of these wooden supports has dropped the Campanile
nearly a foot out of plumb on the eastern façade, threatened the
destruction of the southwest corner of the Doges’ Palace, rolled the
exquisite mosaic pavement of San Marco into waves of stone, and almost
toppled into the canal many a church tower and garden wall.
Then again there are localities about Venice where it seems that every
other quality except that of the picturesque has long since been
annihilated. You feel it especially in the narrow side canal of the
Public Garden, in the region back of the Rialto, through the Fruit
Market, and in the narrow streets beyond--so narrow that you can touch
both sides in passing, the very houses leaning over like gossiping
old crones, their foreheads almost touching. You feel it too in the
gardens along the Giudecca, with their long arbors and tangled masses
of climbing roses; in the interiors of many courtyards along the Grand
Canal, with _pozzo_ and surrounding pillars supporting the rooms above;
in the ship and gondola repair-yards of the lagoons and San Trovaso,
and more than all in the fishing quarters, the one beyond Ponte Lungo
and those near the Arsenal, out towards _San Pietro di Castello_.
This district of Ponte Lungo--the one I love most--lies across the
Giudecca, on the “Island of the Giudecca,” as it is called, and is
really an outskirt, or rather a suburb of the Great City. There are no
grand palaces here. Sometimes, tucked away in a garden, you will find
an old château, such as the Contessa occupied, and between the bridge
and the _fondamenta_ there is a row of great buildings, bristling
with giant chimneys, that might once have been warehouses loaded with
the wealth of the East, but which are now stuffed full of old sails,
snarled seines, great fish-baskets, oars, fishermen, fisher-wives,
fisher-children, rags, old clothes, bits of carpet, and gay, blossoming
plants in nondescript pots. I may be wrong about these old houses being
_stuffed full_ of these several different kinds of material, from
their damp basement floors to the fourth story garrets under baking red
tiles; but they certainly look so, for all these things, including the
fisher-folk themselves, are either hanging out or thrust out of window,
balcony, or doorway, thus proving conclusively the absurdity of there
being even standing room inside.
Fronting the doors of these buildings are little rickety platforms of
soggy planks, and running out from them foot-walks of a single board,
propped up out of the wet on poles, leading to fishing-smacks with
sails of orange and red, the decks lumbered with a miscellaneous lot
of fishing-gear and unassorted sea-truck--buckets, seines, booms,
dip-nets, and the like.
Aboard these boats the fishermen are busily engaged in scrubbing the
sides and rails, and emptying the catch of the morning into their great
wicker baskets, which either float in the water or are held up on poles
by long strings of stout twine.
All about are more boats, big and little; row-boats; storage-boats
piled high with empty crab baskets, or surrounded with a circle of
other baskets moored to cords and supported by a frame of hop-poles,
filled with fish or crabs; _barcos_ from across the lagoon, laden with
green melons; or lighters on their way to the Dogana from the steamers
anchored behind the Giudecca.
Beyond and under the little bridge that leads up the Pallada, the
houses are smaller and only flank one side of the narrow canal. On the
other side, once an old garden, there is now a long, rambling wall,
with here and there an opening through which, to your surprise, you
catch the drooping figure of a poor, forlorn mule, condemned for some
crime of his ancestors to go round and round in a treadmill, grinding
refuse brick. Along the quay or _fondamenta_ of this narrow canal,
always shady after ten o’clock, lie sprawled the younger members of
these tenements--the children, bareheaded, barefooted, and most of them
barebacked; while their mothers and sisters choke up the doorways,
stringing beads, making lace, sitting in bunches listening to a story
by some old crone, or breaking out into song, the whole neighborhood
joining in the chorus.
[Illustration: THE CATCH OF THE MORNING]
Up at the farther end of the Pallada and under another wooden bridge,
where two slips of canals meet, there is a corner that has added
more sketches to my portfolio than any single spot in Venice. An old
fisherman lives here, perhaps a dozen old fishermen; they come and
go all the time. There is a gate with a broken door, and a neglected
garden trampled down by many feet, a half-ruined wall with fig-trees
and oleanders peeping over from the garden next door, a row of ragged,
straggling trees lining the water’s edge, and more big fish and crab
baskets scattered all about,--baskets big as feather-beds,--and
festoons of nets hung to the branches of the trees or thrown over
the patched-up fences,--every conceivable and inconceivable kind of
fishing plunder that could litter up the premises of a _pescatore_ of
the lagoon. In and out of all this débris swarm the children, playing
baby-house in the big baskets, asleep under the overturned boat with
the new patch on her bottom, or leaning over the wall catching little
crabs that go nibbling along a few inches below the water-line.
In this picturesque spot, within biscuit-throw of this very corner, I
have some very intimate and charming friends--little Amelia, the child
model, and young Antonio, who is determined to be a gondolier when
he grows up, and who, perhaps, could earn a better living by posing
for some sculptor as a Greek god. Then, too, there is his mother, the
Signora Marcelli, who sometimes reminds me of my other old friend,
the “Grand Duchess of the Riva,” who keeps the caffè near the _Ponte
Veneta Marina_.
The Signora Marcelli, however, lacks most of the endearing qualities of
the Duchess; one in particular--a soft, musical voice. If the Signora
is in temporary want of the services of one of her brood of children,
it never occurs to her, no matter where she may be, to send another
member of the household in search of the missing child; she simply
throws back her head, fills her lungs, and begins a _crescendo_ which
terminates in a _fortissimo_, so shrill and far-reaching that it could
call her offspring back from the dead. Should her husband, the Signor
Marcelli, come in some wet morning late from the lagoon,--say at nine
o’clock, instead of an hour after daylight,--the Signora begins on
her _crescendo_ when she first catches sight of his boat slowly poled
along the canal. Thereupon the Signora fills the surrounding air with
certain details of her family life, including her present attitude of
mind toward the Signore, and with such volume and vim that you think
she fully intends breaking every bone under his tarpaulins when he
lands,--and she is quite able physically to do it,--until you further
notice that it makes about as much impression upon the Signore as the
rain upon his oilskins. It makes still less on his neighbors, who have
listened to similar outbursts for years, and have come to regard them
quite as they would the announcement by one of the Signora’s hens that
she had just laid an egg--an event of too much importance to be passed
over in silence.
When the Signor Marcelli arrives off the little wooden landing-ladder
facing his house, and, putting things shipshape about the boat, enters
his doorway, thrashing the water from his tarpaulin hat as he walks,
the Signora, from sheer loss of breath, subsides long enough to
overhaul a unique collection of dry clothing hanging to the rafters,
from which she selects a coat patched like Joseph’s of old, with
trousers to match. These she carries to the Signore, who puts them on
in dead silence, reappearing in a few moments barefooted but dry, a red
worsted cap on his head, and a short pipe in his mouth. Then he drags
up a chair, and, still silent as a graven image,--he has not yet spoken
a word,--continues smoking, looking furtively up at the sky, or leaning
over listlessly and watching the chickens that gather about his feet.
Now and again he picks up a rooster or strokes a hen as he would a
kitten. Nothing more.
Only then does the Signora subside, bringing out a fragment of
_polenta_ and a pot of coffee, which the fisherman divides with his
chickens, the greedy ones jumping on his knees. I feel assured that it
is neither discretion nor domestic tact, nor even uncommon sense, that
forbids a word of protest to drop from the Signore’s lips. It is rather
a certain philosophy, born of many dull days spent on the lagoon, and
many lively hours passed with the Signora Marcelli, resulting in some
such apothegm as, “Gulls scream and women scold, but fishing and life
go on just the same.”
There is, too, the other old fisherman, whose name I forget, who lives
in the little shed of a house next to the long wall, and who is forever
scrubbing his crab baskets, or lifting them up and down, and otherwise
disporting himself in an idiotic and most aggravating way. He happens
to own an old water-logged boat that has the most delicious assortment
of barnacles and seaweed clinging to its sides. It is generally piled
high with great baskets, patched and mended, with red splotches all
over them, and bits of broken string dangling to their sides or banging
from their open throats. There are also a lot of rheumatic, palsied old
poles that reach over this ruin of a craft, to which are tied still
more baskets of still more delicious qualities of burnt umber and
Hooker’s-green moss. Behind this boat is a sun-scorched wall of broken
brick, caressed all day by a tender old mother of a vine, who winds her
arms about it and splashes its hot cheeks with sprays of cool shadows.
When, some years ago, I discovered this combination of boat, basket,
and shadow-flecked wall, and in an unguarded moment begged the
fisherman to cease work for the morning at my expense, and smoke a
pipe of peace in his doorway, until I could transfer its harmonies to
my canvas, I spoke hurriedly and without due consideration; for since
that time, whenever this contemporary of the original _Bucentoro_ gets
into one of my compositions,--these old fish-boats last forever and are
too picturesque for even the little devils to worry over,--this same
fisherman immediately dries his sponge, secures his baskets, and goes
ashore, and as regularly demands backsheesh of _soldi_ and fine-cut.
Next summer I shall buy the boat and hire him to watch; it will be much
cheaper.
Then there are the two girls who live with their grandmother, in one
end of an old tumble-down, next to the little wooden bridge that
the boats lie under. She keeps a small cook-shop, where she boils
and then toasts, in thin strips, slices of green-skinned pumpkin,
which the girls sell to the fishermen on the boats, or hawk about the
_fondamenta_. As the whole pumpkin can be bought for a _lira_, you can
imagine what a wee bit of a copper coin it must be that pays for a
fragment of its golden interior, even when the skilled labor of the old
woman is added to the cost of the raw material.
Last of all are the boys; of no particular size, age, nationality, or
condition,--just boys; little rascally, hatless, shoeless, shirtless,
trouser--everything-less, except noise and activity. They yell like
Comanches; they crawl between the legs of your easel and look up
between your knees into your face; they steal your brushes and paints;
they cry “_Soldi, soldi, Signore_,” until life becomes a burden; they
spend their days in one prolonged whoop of hilarity, their nights in
concocting fresh deviltry, which they put into practice the moment you
appear in the morning. When you throw one of them into the canal, in
the vain hope that his head will stick in the mud and so he be drowned
dead, half a dozen jump in after him in a delirium of enjoyment. When
you turn one upside down and shake your own color-tubes out of his
rags, he calls upon all the saints to witness that the other fellow,
the boy Beppo or Carlo, or some other “o” or “i,” put them there, and
that up to this very moment he was unconscious of their existence;
when you belabor the largest portion of his surface with your folding
stool or T-square, he is either in a state of collapse from excessive
laughter or screaming with assumed agony, which lasts until he squirms
himself into freedom; then he goes wild, turning hand-springs and
describing no end of geometrical figures in the air, using his stubby
little nose for a centre and his grimy thumbs and outspread fingers for
compasses.
All these side scenes, however, constitute only part of the family life
of the Venetian fishermen. If you are up early in the morning you will
see their boats moving through the narrow canals to the fish market
on the Grand Canal above the Rialto, loaded to the water’s edge with
hundreds of bushels of crawling green crabs stowed away in the great
baskets; or piles of opalescent fish heaped upon the deck, covered with
bits of sailcloth, or glistening in the morning sun. Earlier, out on
the lagoon, in the gray dawn, you will see clusters of boats with the
seines widespread, the smaller dories scattered here and there, hauling
or lowering the spider-skein nets.
But there is still another and a larger fishing trade, a trade not
exactly Venetian, although Venice is its best market. To this belong
the fishermen of Chioggia and the islands farther down the coast. These
men own and man the heavier seagoing craft with the red and orange
sails that make the water life of Venice unique.
Every Saturday a flock of these boats will light off the wall of the
Public Garden, their beaks touching the marble rail. These are Ziem’s
boats--his for half a century; nobody has painted them in the afternoon
light so charmingly or so truthfully. Sunday morning, after mass, they
are off again, spreading their gay wings toward Chioggia. On other days
one or two of these gay-plumed birds will hook a line over the cluster
of spiles near the wall of the Riva, below the arsenal bridge, their
sails swaying in the soft air, while their captains are buying supplies
to take to the fleet twenty miles or more out at sea.
Again, sometimes in the early dawn or in the late twilight, you will
see, away out in still another fishing quarter, a single figure walking
slowly in the water, one arm towing his boat, the other carrying a bag.
Every now and then the figure bends over, feels about with his toes,
and then drops something into the bag. This is the mussel-gatherer of
the lagoon. In the hot summer nights these humble toilers of the sea,
with only straw mats for covering, often sleep in their boats, tethered
to poles driven into the yielding mud. They can wade waist-deep over
many square miles of water-space about Venice, although to one in a
gondola, skimming over the same glassy surfaces, there seems water
enough to float a ship.
These several grades of fishermen have changed but little, either in
habits, costume, or the handling of their craft, since the early days
of the republic. The boats, too, are almost the same in construction
and equipment, as can be seen in any of the pictures of Canaletto and
the painters of his time. The bows of the larger sea-craft are still
broad and heavily built, the rudders big and cumbersome, with the
long sweep reaching over the after-deck; the sails are loosely hung
with easily adjusted booms, to make room for the great seines which
are swung to the cross-trees of the foremast. The only boat of really
modern design, and this is rarely used as a fishing-boat, is the
_sandolo_, a shallow skiff drawing but a few inches of water, and with
both bow and stern sharp and very low, modeled originally for greater
speed in racing.
Whatever changes have taken place in the political and social economy
of Venice, they have affected but little these lovers of the lagoons.
What mattered it to whom they paid taxes,--whether to doge, Corsican,
Austrian, or king,--there were as good fish in the sea as had ever been
caught, and as long as their religion lasted, so long would people eat
fish and Friday come round every week in the year.
A GONDOLA RACE
TO-DAY I am interested in watching a gondolier make his toilet in a
gondola lying at my feet, for the little table holding my coffee stands
on a half-round balcony that juts quite over the water-wall, almost
touching the white _tenda_ of the boat. From this point of vantage I
look down upon his craft, tethered to a huge spile bearing the crown
and monogram of the owner of the hotel. One is nobody if not noble, in
Venice.
The gondolier does not see me. If he did it would not disturb him; his
boat is his home through these soft summer days and nights, and the
overhanging sky gives privacy enough. A slender, graceful Venetian
girl, her hair parted on one side, a shawl about her shoulders, has
just brought him a bundle containing a change of clothing. She sits
beside him as he dresses, and I move my chair so that I can catch the
expressions of pride and delight that flit across her face while she
watches the handsome, broadly-built young fellow. As he stands erect
in the gondola, the sunlight flashing from his wet arms, I note the
fine lines of his chest, the bronzed neck and throat, and the knotted
muscles along the wrist and forearm. When the white shirt with broad
yellow collar and sash are adjusted and the toilet is complete, even
to the straw hat worn rakishly over one ear, the girl gathers up the
discarded suit, glances furtively at me, slips her hand into his for a
moment, and then springs ashore, waving her handkerchief as he swings
out past the Dogana, the yellow ribbons of his hat flying in the wind.
Joseph, prince among porters, catches my eye and smiles meaningly.
Later, when he brings my mail, he explains that the pretty Venetian,
Teresa, is the sweetheart of Pietro the yellow-and-white gondolier who
serves the English lady at the _Palazzo da Mula_. Pietro, he tells me,
rows in the regatta to-day, and these preparations are in honor of that
most important event. He assures me that it will be quite the most
interesting of all the regattas of the year, and that I must go early
and secure a place near the stake-boat if I want to see anything of the
finish. It is part of Joseph’s duty and pleasure to keep you posted on
everything that happens in Venice. It would distress him greatly if he
thought you could obtain this information from any other source.
While we talk the Professor enters the garden from the side door
of the corridor, and takes the vacant seat beside me. He, too, has
come to tell me of the regatta. He is bubbling over with excitement,
and insists that I shall meet him at the water-steps of the little
Piazzetta near the _Caffè Veneta Marina_, at three o’clock, not
a moment later. To-day, he says, I shall see, not the annual
regatta,--that great spectacle with the Grand Canal crowded with
tourists and sight-seers solidly banked from the water’s edge to the
very balconies,--but an old-time contest between the two factions of
the gondoliers, the Nicoletti and Castellani; a contest really of and
for the Venetians themselves.
The course is to begin at the Lido, running thence to the great
flour-mill up the Giudecca, and down again to the stake-boat off the
Public Garden. Giuseppe is to row, and Pasquale, both famous oarsmen,
and Carlo, the brother of Gaspari, who won the great regatta; better
than all, young Pietro, of the Traghetto of Santa Salute.
“Not Pietro of this _traghetto_, right here below us?” I asked.
“Yes; he rows with his brother Marco. Look out for him when he comes
swinging down the canal. If you have any money to wager, put it on him.
Gustavo, my waiter at Florian’s, says he is bound to win. His colors
are yellow and white.”
This last one I knew, for had he not made his toilet, half an hour
before, within sight of my table? No wonder Teresa looked proud and
happy!
While the Professor is bowing himself backward out of the garden, hat
in hand, his white hair and curled mustache glistening in the sun, an
oleander blossom in his button-hole, Espero enters, also bareheaded,
and begs that the Signore will use Giorgio’s gondola until he can have
his own boat, now at the repair-yard next to San Trovaso, scraped and
pitched; the grass on her bottom was the width of his hand. By one
o’clock she would be launched again. San Trovaso, as the Signore knew,
was quite near the _Caffè Calcina_; would he be permitted to call for
him at the caffè after luncheon? As the regatta began at three o’clock
there would not be time to return again to the Signore’s lodging and
still secure a good place at the stake-boat off the Garden.
No; the illustrious Signore would do nothing of the kind. He would
take Giorgio and his gondola for the morning, and then, when the boat
was finished, Espero could pick up the Professor at the _Caffè Veneta
Marina_ in the afternoon and bring him aboard Giorgio’s boat on his way
down the canal.
Giorgio is my stand-by when Espero is away. I often send him to my
friends, those whom I love, that they may enjoy the luxury of spending
a day with a man who has a score and more of sunshiny summers packed
away in his heart, and not a cloud in any one of them. Tagliapietra
Giorgio, of the Traghetto of Santa Salute, is his full name and
address. Have Joseph call him for you some day, and your Venice will
be all the more delightful because of his buoyant strength, his
cheeriness, and his courtesy.
So Giorgio and I idle about the lagoon and the Giudecca, watching the
flags being hoisted, the big _barcos_ being laden, and various other
preparations for the great event of the afternoon.
After luncheon Giorgio stops at his house to change his _tenda_ for
the new one with the blue lining, and slips into the white suit just
laundered for him. He lives a few canals away from the Calcina, with
his mother, his widowed sister and her children, in a small house with
a garden all figs and oleanders. His bedroom is next to his mother’s,
on the second floor, overlooking the blossoms. There is a shrine
above the bureau, decorated with paper flowers, and on the walls a
scattering of photographs of brother gondoliers, and some trophies
of oars and flags. Hanging behind the door are his oilskins for wet
weather, and the Tam O’Shanter cap that some former padrone has left
him, as a souvenir of the good times they once had together, and which
Giorgio wears as a weather signal for a rainy afternoon, although the
morning sky may be cloudless. All gondoliers are good weather prophets.
The entire family help Giorgio with the _tenda_--the old mother
carrying the side-curtains, warm from her flat-iron, and chubby Beppo,
bareheaded and barefooted, bringing up the rear with the little blue
streamer that on gala days floats from the gondola’s lamp-socket
forward, which on other days is always filled with flowers.
Then we are off, picking our way down the narrow canal, waiting here
and there for the big _barcos_ to pass, laden with wine or fruit, until
we shoot out into the broad waters of the Giudecca.
You see at a glance that Venice is astir. All along the Zattere, on
every wood-boat, _barco_, and barge, on every bridge, balcony, and
house-top, abreast the wide _fondamenta_ fronting the great warehouses,
and away down the edge below the Redentore, the people are swarming
like flies. Out on the Giudecca, anchored to the channel spiles, is
a double line of boats of every conceivable description, from a toy
_sandolo_ to a steamer’s barge. These lie stretched out on the water
like two great sea-serpents, their heads facing the garden, their tails
curving toward the Redentore.
Between these two sea-monsters, with their flashing scales of a
thousand umbrellas, is an open roadway of glistening silver.
Giorgio swings across to the salt warehouses above the Dogana and on
down and over to the Riva. Then there is a shout ahead, a red and white
_tenda_ veers a point, comes close, backs water, and the Professor
springs in.
“Here, Professor, here beside me on the cushions,” I call out. “Draw
back the curtains, Giorgio. And, Espero, hurry ahead and secure a place
near the stake-boat. We will be there in ten minutes.”
The Professor was a sight to cheer the heart of an amateur yachtsman
out for a holiday. He had changed his suit of the morning for a small
straw hat trimmed with red, an enormous field-glass with a strap over
his shoulder, and a short velvet coat that had once done service as
a smoking-jacket. His mustachios were waxed into needle points. The
occasion had for him all the novelty of the first spring meeting at
Longchamps, or a race off Cowes, and he threw himself into its spirit
with the gusto of a boy.
“What colors are you flying, _mon Capitaine_? Blue? Never!” noticing
Giorgio’s streamer. “Pasquale’s color is blue, and he will be half a
mile astern when Pietro is round the stake-boat. _Vive le jaune! Vive
Pietro!_” and out came a yellow rag--Pietro’s color--bearing a strong
resemblance to the fragment of some old silk curtain. It settled at a
glance all doubt as to the Professor’s sympathies in the coming contest.
The day was made for a regatta; a cool, crisp, bracing October day;
a day of white clouds and turquoise skies, of flurries of soft winds
that came romping down the lagoon, turned for a moment in play, and
then went scampering out to sea; a day of dazzling sun, of brilliant
distances, of clear-cut outlines, black shadows, and flashing lights.
As we neared the Public Garden the crowd grew denser; the cries of the
gondoliers were incessant; even Giorgio’s skillful oar was taxed to the
utmost to avoid the polluting touch of an underbred _sandolo_, or the
still greater calamity of a collision--really an unpardonable sin with
a gondolier. Every now and then a chorus of yells, charging every crime
in the decalogue, would be hurled at some landsman whose oar “crabbed,”
or at some nondescript craft filled with “barbers and cooks,” to quote
Giorgio, who in forcing a passage had become hopelessly entangled.
The only clear water-space was the ribbon of silver beginning away up
near the Redentore, between the tails of the two sea-monsters, and
ending at the stake-boat. Elsewhere, on both sides, from the Riva to
San Giorgio, and as far as the wall of the Garden, was a dense floating
mass of human beings, cheering, singing, and laughing, waving colors,
and calling out the names of their favorites in rapid _crescendo_.
The spectacle on land was equally unique. The balustrade of the broad
walk of the Public Garden was a huge flower-bed of blossoming hats
and fans, spotted with myriads of parasols in full bloom. Bunches of
over-ripe boys hung in the trees, or dropped one by one into the arms
of gendarmes below. The palaces along the Riva were a broad ribbon of
color with a binding of black coats and hats. The wall of San Giorgio
fronting the barracks was fringed with the yellow legs and edged with
the white fatigue caps of two regiments. Even over the roofs and tower
of the church itself specks of sight-seers were spattered here and
there, as if the joyous wind in some mad frolic had caught them up in
very glee, and as suddenly showered them on cornice, sill, and dome.
Beyond all this, away out on the lagoon, toward the islands, the
red-sailed fishing-boats hurried in for the finish, their canvas aflame
against the deepening blue. Over all the sunlight danced and blazed and
shimmered, gilding and bronzing the roof-jewels of San Marco, flashing
from oar blade, brass, and _ferro_, silvering the pigeons whirling
deliriously in the intoxicating air, making glad and gay and happy
every soul who breathed the breath of this joyous Venetian day.
None of all this was lost upon the Professor. He stood in the bow
drinking in the scene, sweeping his glass round like a weather-vane,
straining his eyes up the Giudecca to catch the first glimpse of the
coming boats, picking out faces under flaunting parasols, and waving
aloft his yellow rag when some gondola swept by flying Pietro’s colors,
or some boat-load of friends saluted in passing.
Suddenly there came down on the shifting wind, from far up the
Giudecca, a sound like the distant baying of a pack of hounds, and as
suddenly died away. Then the roar of a thousand throats, caught up by
a thousand more about us, broke on the air, as a boatman, perched on a
masthead, waved his hat.
“Here they come! _Viva_ Pietro! _Viva_
Pasquale!--Castellani!--Nicoletti!--Pietro!”
The dense mass rose and fell in undulations, like a great carpet
being shaken, its colors tossing in the sunlight. Between the thicket
of _ferros_, away down the silver ribbon, my eye caught two little
specks of yellow capping two white figures. Behind these, almost in
line, were two similar dots of blue; farther away other dots, hardly
distinguishable, on the horizon line.
The gale became a tempest--the roar was deafening; women waved their
shawls in the air; men, swinging their hats, shouted themselves hoarse.
The yellow specks developed into handkerchiefs bound to the heads of
Pietro and his brother Marco; the blues were those of Pasquale and his
mate.
Then, as we strain our eyes, the two tails of the sea-monster twist and
clash together, closing in upon the string of rowers as they disappear
in the dip behind San Giorgio, only to reappear in full sight, Pietro
half a length ahead, straining every sinew, his superb arms swinging
like a flail, his lithe body swaying in splendid, springing curves, the
water rushing from his oar blade, his brother bending aft in perfect
rhythm.
“Pietro! _Pietro!_” came the cry, shrill and clear, drowning all other
sounds, and a great field of yellow burst into flower all over the
lagoon, from San Giorgio to the Garden. The people went wild. If before
there had been only a tempest, now there was a cyclone. The waves of
blue and yellow surged alternately above the heads of the throng as
Pasquale or Pietro gained or lost a foot. The Professor grew red and
pale by turns, his voice broken to a whisper with continued cheering,
the yellow rag streaming above his head, all the blood of his ancestors
blazing in his face.
The contesting boats surged closer. You could now see the rise and
fall of Pietro’s superb chest, the steel-like grip of his hands, and
could outline the curves of his thighs and back. The ends of the yellow
handkerchief, bound close about his head, were flying in the wind. His
stroke was long and sweeping, his full weight on the oar; Pasquale’s
stroke was short and quick, like the thrust of a spur.
Now they are abreast. Pietro’s eyes are blazing--Pasquale’s teeth are
set. Both crews are doing their utmost. The yells are demoniac. Even
the women are beside themselves with excitement.
Suddenly, when within five hundred yards of the goal, Pasquale turns
his head to his mate; there is an answering cry, and then, as if
some unseen power had lent its strength, Pasquale’s boat shoots half
a length ahead, slackens, falls back, gains again, now an inch, now
a foot, now clear of Pietro’s bow, and on, on, lashing the water,
surging forward, springing with every gain, cheered by a thousand
throats, past the red tower of San Giorgio, past the channel of spiles
off the Garden, past the red buoy near the great warship,--one quick,
sustained, blistering stroke,--until the judge’s flag drops from his
hand, and the great race is won.
“A true knight, a gentleman every inch of him,” called out the
Professor, forgetting that he had staked all his _soldi_ on Pietro.
“Fairly won, Pasquale.”
In the whirl of the victory, I had forgotten Pietro, my gondolier of
the morning. The poor fellow was sitting in the bow of his boat, his
head in his hands, wiping his forehead and throat, the tears streaming
down his cheeks. His brother sat beside him. In the gladness and
disappointment of the hour, no one of the crowd around him seemed to
think of the hero of five minutes before. Not so Giorgio, who was
beside himself with grief over Pietro’s defeat, and who had not taken
his eyes from his face. In an instant more he sprang forward, calling
out, “No! no! _Brava Pietro!_” Espero joining in as if with a common
impulse, and both forcing their gondolas close to Pietro’s.
A moment more and Giorgio was over the rail of Pietro’s boat, patting
his back, stroking his head, comforting him as you would think only a
woman could--but then you do not know Giorgio. Pietro lifted up his
face and looked into Giorgio’s eyes with an expression so woe-begone,
and full of such intense suffering, that Giorgio instinctively flung
his arm around the great, splendid fellow’s neck. Then came a few
broken words, a tender caressing stroke of Giorgio’s hand, a drawing of
Pietro’s head down on his breast as if it had been a girl’s, and then,
still comforting him--telling him over and over again how superbly he
had rowed, how the next time he would win, how he had made a grand
second--
Giorgio bent his head--_and kissed him_.
When Pietro, a moment later, pulled himself together and stood erect
in his boat, with eyes still wet, the look on his face was as firm and
determined as ever.
Nobody laughed. It did not shock the crowd; nobody thought Giorgio
unmanly or foolish, or Pietro silly or effeminate. The infernal
Anglo-Saxon custom of always wearing a mask of reserve, if your heart
breaks, has never reached these people.
As for the Professor, who looked on quietly, I think--yes, I am quite
sure--that a little jewel of a tear squeezed itself up through his
punctilious, precise, ever exact and courteous body, and glistened long
enough on his eyelids to wet their lashes. Then the bright sun and
the joyous wind caught it away. Dear old relic of a by-gone time! How
gentle a heart beats under your well-brushed, threadbare coat!
SOME VENETIAN CAFFÈS
EVERY one in Venice has his own particular caffè, according to
his own particular needs, sympathies, or tastes. All the artists,
architects, and musicians meet at Florian’s; all the Venetians go to
the _Quadri_; the Germans and late Austrians, to the _Bauer-Grünwald_;
the stay-over-nights, to the Oriental on the Riva; the stevedores, to
the _Veneta Marina_ below the Arsenal; and my dear friend Luigi and his
fellow-tramps, to a little hole in the wall on the _Via Garibaldi_.
[Illustration: A LITTLE HOLE IN THE WALL ON THE VIA GARIBALDI]
These caffès are scattered everywhere, from the Public Garden to the
Mestre bridge; all kinds of caffès for all kinds of people--rich, not
so rich, poor, poorer, and the very poorest. Many of them serve only a
cup of coffee, two little flat lumps of sugar, a hard, brown roll, and
a glass of water--always a glass of water. Some add a few syrups and
cordials, with a siphon of seltzer. Others indulge in the cheaper wines
of the country, Brindisi, Chianti, and the like, and are then known as
wine-shops. Very few serve any spirits, except a spoonful of cognac
with the coffee. Water is the universal beverage, and in summer this
is cooled by ice and enriched by simple syrups of peach, orange, and
raspberry. Spirits are rarely taken and intemperance is practically
unknown. In an experience of many years, I have not seen ten drunken
men,--never one drunken woman,--and then only in September, when the
strong wine from Brindisi is brought in bulk and sold over the boat’s
rail, literally by the bucket, to whoever will buy.
In the _ristoranti_--caffès, in our sense--is served an array of
eatables that would puzzle the most expert of gourmands. There will be
macaroni, of course, in all forms, and _risotto_ in a dozen different
ways, and soups with weird, uncanny little devil-fish floating about in
them, and salads of every conceivable green thing that can be chopped
up in a bowl and drowned in olive oil; besides an assortment of cheeses
with individualities of perfume that beggar any similar collection
outside of Holland.
Some of these caffès are so much a part of Venice and Venetian life,
that you are led to believe that they were founded by the early Doges
and are coëval with the Campanile or the Library. Somebody, of course,
must know when they first began setting out tables on the piazza in
front of Florian’s, or at the _Quadri_ opposite, or yet again at the
_Caffè al Cavallo_, near _San Giovanni e Paulo_, and at scores of
others; but I confess I do not. If you ask the head waiter, who really
ought to know (for he must have been born in one of the upper rooms--he
certainly never leaves the lower ones), he shrugs his shoulders in a
hopeless way and sheds the inquiry with a despairing gesture, quite as
if you had asked who laid out San Marco, or who drove the piles under
Saint Theodore.
There is, I am convinced, no real, permanent, steady proprietor in any
of these caffès--none that one ever sees. There must be, of course,
somebody who assumes ownership, and who for a time really believes
that he has a proprietary interest in the chairs and tables about him.
After a while, however, he gets old and dies, and is buried over in
Campo Santo, and even his name is forgotten. When this happens, and it
is eminently proper that it should, another tenant takes possession,
quite as the pigeons do of an empty carving over the door of the king’s
palace.
But the caffè keeps on: the same old marble-top tables; the same old
glass-covered pictures, with the impossible Turkish houris listening to
the improbable gentleman in baggy trousers; the same serving-counter,
with the row of cordials in glass bottles with silver stoppers. The
same waiters, too, hurry about--they live on for centuries--wearing
the same coats and neckties, and carrying the same napkins. I myself
have never seen a dead waiter, and, now I happen to think of it, I have
never heard of one.
The head waiter is, of course, supreme. He it is who adds up on his
fingers the sum of your extravagances, who takes your money and dives
down into his own pocket for the change. He and his assistants are
constantly running in and out, vanishing down subterranean stairs, or
disappearing through swinging doors, with the agility of Harlequin; you
never know where or why, until they pop out again, whirling trays held
high over their heads, or bearing in both hands huge waiters loaded
with dishes.
The _habitués_ of these caffès are as interesting as the caffès
themselves. The Professor comes, of course; you always know where
to find _him_. And the youthful Contessa! She of the uncertain age,
with hair bleached to a light law-calf, and a rose-colored veil! And
here comes, too, every distinguished or notorious person of high or
low degree at the moment in Venice; you have only to take a chair at
Florian’s and be patient--they are sure to appear before the music is
over. There is the sister of the Archduke, with the straight-backed,
pipe-stem-legged officer acting as gentleman-in-waiting; and he
does _wait_, standing bolt upright like a sergeant on dress parade,
sometimes an hour, for her to sit down. There is the Spanish Grandee,
with a palace for the season (an upper floor with an entrance on a side
canal), whose gondoliers wear flaming scarlet, with a crest embossed on
brass dinner-plates for arm ornaments; one of these liveried attendants
always dogs the Grandee to the caffè, so as to be ready to pull his
chair out when his Excellency sits down. Then there are the Royal
Academician, in gray tweed knickerbockers, traveling _incognito_ with
two friends; the fragments of an American linen-duster brigade, with
red guide-books and faces, in charge of a special agent; besides scores
of others of every nationality and rank. They are all at Florian’s some
time during the day.
You will see there, too, if you are familiar with the inside workings
of a favorite caffè, an underground life of intrigue or mystery,
in which Gustavo or Florio has a hand--often upon a _billet-doux_
concealed within the folds of a napkin; not to mention the harmless
distribution, once in a while, of smuggled cigarettes fresh from Cairo.
Poor Gustavo! The government brought him to book not long ago. For
many years he had supplied his patrons, and with delicious Egyptians,
too! One night Gustavo disappeared, escorted by two gendarmes from the
Department of Justice. Next morning the judge said: “Whereas, according
to the accounts kept by the Department of Customs, the duties and
expenses due the king on the cigarettes unlawfully sold by the prisoner
for years past aggregate two thousand three hundred and ten _lire_;
and whereas, the savings of the prisoner for ten years past, and at
the moment deposited to his individual credit in the _Banco Napoli_,
amount to exactly two thousand three hundred and ten _lire_; therefore,
it is ordered, that a sight draft for the exact amount be drawn in
favor of the king.” This would entitle Gustavo to the pure air of the
piazza; otherwise?--well, otherwise not. Within a week Gustavo was
again whirling his tray--a little grayer, perhaps, and a little wiser;
certainly poorer. Thus does a tyrannical government oppress its people!
These caffès of the piazza, with their iced carafes, white napkins, and
little silver coffee-pots, are the caffès of the rich.
The caffè of the poor is sometimes afloat. No matter how early you are
out in the morning, this floating caffè--the cook-boat--has its fire
lighted, and the savory smell of its cuisine drifts over the lagoon,
long before your gondola rounds the Dogana. When you come alongside
you find a charcoal brazier heating a pan of savory fish and a large
pot of coffee, and near by a basketful of rolls, fresh and warm, from
a still earlier baker. There are peaches, too, and a hamper of figs.
The cook-boat is tended by two men; one cooks and serves, and the
other rows, standing in the stern, looking anxiously for customers,
and calling out in stentorian tones that all the delicacies of the
season are now being fried, broiled, and toasted, and that for the
infinitesimal sum of ten _soldi_ you can breakfast like a doge.
If you are just out of the lagoon, your blood tingling with the touch
of the sea, your face aglow with your early morning bath, answer the
cry of one of these floating kitchens, and eat a breakfast with the
rising sun lighting your forehead and the cool breath of the lagoon
across your cheek. It may be the salt air and the early plunge that
make the coffee so savory, the fish and rolls so delicious, and the
fruit so refreshing; or it may be because the fish were wriggling in
the bottom of the boat half an hour earlier, the coffee only at the
first boiling, and the fruit, bought from a passing boat, still damp
with the night’s dew!
The caffè of the poorest is wherever there is a crowd. It generally
stands on three iron legs under one of the trees down the _Via
Garibaldi_, or over by the landing of the Dogana, or beneath the shade
of some awning, or up a back court. The old fellow who bends over the
hot earthen dish, supported on these legs, slowly stirring a mess of
kidneys or an indescribable stew, is cook, head waiter, and proprietor
all in one. Every now and then he fishes out some delicate tidbit--a
miniature octopus, perhaps (called _fulpe_), a little sea-horror, all
legs and claws, which he sprawls out on a bit of brown paper and lays
on the palm of your left hand, assuming, clearly, that you have all the
knives and forks that you need, on your right.
Once in a while a good Bohemian discovers some out-of-the-way place
up a canal or through a twisted _calle_ that delights him with its
cuisine, its cellar, or its cosiness, and forever after he preëmpts it
as _his_ caffè. I know half a dozen such discoveries--one somewhere
near _San Giorgio degli Schiavoni_, where the men play bowls in a long,
narrow alley, under wide-spreading trees, cramped up between high
buildings; and another, off the Merceria, where the officers smoke and
lounge; and still another, quite my own--the _Caffè Calcina_. This last
is on the _Rio San Vio_, and looks out on the Giudecca, just below San
Rosario. You would never suspect it of being a caffè at all, until you
had dodged under the little roof of the porch to escape the heat, and
opening the side door found yourself in a small, plainly furnished
room with little marble-top tables, each decorated with a Siamese-twin
salt-cellar holding a pinch of salt and of pepper. Even then it is a
very common sort of caffè, and not at all the place you would care to
breakfast in twice; that is, not until you had followed the demure
waiter through a narrow passage and out into a square _patio_ splashed
with yellow-green light and cooled by overlacing vines. Then you
realize that this same square patch of ground is one of the few restful
spots of the wide earth.
It is all open to the sky except for a great arbor of grape leaves
covering the whole area, beneath which, on the cool, moist ground,
stand half a dozen little tables covered with snow-white cloths. At one
side is a shelter, from behind which come certain mysterious noises of
fries and broils. All about are big, green-painted boxes of japonicas,
while at one end the oleanders thrust their top branches through the
overhanging leaves of the arbor, waving their blossoms defiantly in the
blazing sun. Beneath this grateful shelter you sit and loaf and invite
your soul, and your best friend, too, if he happens to be that sort of
a man.
After having congratulated yourself on your discovery and having
become a daily _habitué_ of the delightful _patio_, you find that you
have really discovered the Grand Canal or the Rialto bridge. To your
great surprise, the _Caffè Calcina_ has been the favorite resort of
good Bohemians for nearly a century. You learn that Turner painted his
sunset sketches from its upper windows, and that dozens of more modern
English painters have lived in the rooms above; that Whistler and Rico
and scores of others have broken bread and had toothsome omelets under
its vines; and, more precious than all, that Ruskin and Browning have
shared many a bottle of honest Chianti with these same oleanders above
their heads, and this, too, in the years when the Sage of Brantwood was
teaching the world to love his Venice, and the great poet was singing
songs that will last as long as the language.
ON THE HOTEL STEPS
IF you drink your early coffee as I do, in the garden under the
oleanders, overlooking the water-landing of the hotel, and linger long
enough over your fruit, you will conclude before many days that a large
part of the life of Venice can be seen from the hotel steps. You may
behold the great row of gondolas at the _traghetto_ near by, ranged
side by side, awaiting their turn, and here and there, tied to the
spiles outside the line, the more fortunate boats whose owners serve
some sight-seer by the week, or some native padrone by the month, and
are thus free of the daily routine of the _traghetto_, and free, too,
from our old friend Joseph’s summoning voice.
You will be delighted at the good-humor and good-fellowship which
animate this group of gondoliers; their ringing songs and hearty
laughter; their constant care of the boats, their daily sponging
and polishing; and now and then, I regret to say, your ears will be
assailed by a quarrel, so fierce, so loud, and so full of vindictive
energy, that you will start from your seat in instant expectation
of the gleam of a stiletto, until by long experience you learn how
harmless are both the bark and bite of a gondolier, and how necessary
as a safety-valve, to accused and accuser as well, is the unlimited
air-space of the Grand Canal.
You will also come into closer contact with Joseph, prince among
porters, and patron saint of this Traghetto of Santa Salute. There is
another Saint, of course, shaded by its trellised vines, framed in
tawdry gilt, protected from the weather by a wooden hood, and lighted
at night by a dim lamp hanging before it--but, for all that, Joseph is
supreme as protector, refuge, and friend.
Joseph, indeed, is more than this. He is the patron saint and
father confessor of every wayfarer, of whatever tongue. Should a
copper-colored gentleman mount the steps of the hotel landing, attired
in calico trousers, a short jacket of pea-green silk, and six yards
of bath toweling about his head, Joseph instantly addresses him in
broken Hindostanee, sending his rattan chairs and paper boxes to a room
overlooking the shady court, and placing a boy on the rug outside,
ready to spring when the copper-colored gentleman claps his hands. Does
another distinguished foreigner descend from the gondola, attended
by two valets with a block-tin trunk, half a score of hat-boxes,
bags, and bundles, four umbrellas, and a dozen sticks, Joseph at once
accosts him in most excellent English, and has ordered a green-painted
tub rolled into his room before he has had time to reach the door of
his apartment. If another equally distinguished traveler steps on
the marble slab, wearing a Bond Street ulster, a slouch hat, and a
ready-made summer suit, with yellow shoes, and carrying an Alpine staff
(so useful in Venice) branded with illegible letters chasing each other
spirally up and down the wooden handle, Joseph takes his measure at a
glance. He knows it is his first trip “_en Cook_,” and that he will
want the earth, and instantly decides that so far as concerns himself
he shall have it, including a small, round, convenient little portable
which he immediately places behind the door to save the marble hearth.
So with the titled Frenchman, wife, maid, and canary bird; the haughty
Austrian, his sword in a buckskin bag; the stolid German with the stout
helpmate and one satchel, or the Spaniard with two friends and no
baggage at all.
Joseph knows them all--their conditions, wants, economics, meannesses,
escapades, and subterfuges. Does he not remember how you haggled over
the price of your room, and the row you made when your shoes were mixed
up with the old gentleman’s on the floor above? Does he not open the
door in the small hours, when you slink in, the bell sounding like
a tocsin at your touch? Is he not rubbing his eyes and carrying the
candle that lights you down to the corridor door, the only exit from
the hotel after midnight, when you had hoped to escape by the garden,
and dare not look up at the balcony above?
Here also you will often meet the Professor. Indeed, he is breakfasting
with me in this same garden this very morning. It is the first time I
have seen him since the memorable day of the regatta, when Pasquale won
the prize and the old fellow lost his _soldi_.
He has laid aside his outing costume--the short jacket, beribboned
hat, and huge field-glass--and is gracing my table clothed in what he
is pleased to call his “garb of tuition,” worn to-day because of a
pupil who expects him at nine o’clock; “a horrid old German woman from
Prague,” he calls her. This garb is the same old frock-coat of many
summers, the well-ironed silk hat, and the limp glove dangling from
his hand or laid like a crumpled leaf on the cloth beside him. The
coat, held snug to the waist by a single button, always bulges out
over the chest, the two frogs serving as pockets. From these depths,
near the waist-line, the Professor now and then drags up a great silk
handkerchief, either red or black as the week’s wash may permit, for I
have never known of his owning more than two!
To-day, below the bulge of this too large handkerchief swells yet
another enlargement, to which my guest, tapping it significantly with
his finger-tips, refers in a most mysterious way as “a very great
secret,” but without unbosoming to me either its cause or its mystery.
When the cigarettes are lighted he drops his hand deep into his
one-buttoned coat, unloads the handkerchief, and takes out a little
volume bound in vellum, a book he had promised me for weeks. This
solves the mystery and effaces the bulge.
One of the delights of knowing the Professor well is to see him handle
a book that he loves. He has a peculiar way of smoothing the sides
before opening it, as one would a child’s hand, and of always turning
the leaves as though he were afraid of hurting the back, caressing
them one by one with his fingers, quite as a bird plumes its feathers.
And he is always bringing a new book to light; one of his charming
idiosyncrasies is the hunting about in odd corners for just such odd
volumes.
“Out of print now, my dear fellow. You can’t buy it for money. This is
the only copy in Venice that I could borrow for love. See the chapters
on these very fellows--these gondoliers,” pointing to the _traghetto_.
“Sometimes, when I hear their quarrels, I wonder if they ever remember
that their guild is as old as the days of the Doges, a fossil survival,
unique, perhaps, in the history of this or of any other country.”
While the Professor nibbles at the crescents and sips his coffee,
pausing now and then to read me passages taken at random from the
little volume in his hands, I watch the procession of gondolas from
the _traghetto_, like a row of cabs taking their turn, as Joseph’s
“_a una_” or “_due_” rings out over the water. One after another they
steal noiselessly up and touch the water-steps, Joseph helping each
party into its boat: the German Baroness with the two poodles and a
silk parasol; the poor fellow from the Engadine, with the rugs and an
extra overcoat, his mother’s arm about him--not many more sunshiny days
for him; the bevy of joyous young girls in summer dresses and sailor
hats, and the two college boys in white flannels, the chaperone in the
_next_ boat. “Ah, these sweet young Americans, these naïve countrywomen
of yours!” whispers the Professor; “how exquisitely bold!” Last, the
painter, with his trap and a big canvas, which he lifts in as carefully
as if it had a broken rib, and then turns quickly face in; “an old
dodge,” you say to yourself; “unfinished, of course!”
Presently a tall, finely formed gondolier in dark blue, with a red
sash, whirls the _ferro_ of his boat close to the landing-steps, and a
graceful, dignified woman, past middle life, but still showing traces
of great beauty, steps in, and sinks upon the soft cushions.
The Professor rises like a grand duke receiving a princess, brings one
arm to a salute, places the other over his heart, and makes a bow that
carries the conviction of profound respect and loyalty in its every
curve. The lady acknowledges it with a gracious bend of her head, and a
smile which shows her appreciation of its sincerity.
“An English lady of rank who spends her Octobers here,” says the
Professor, when he regains his seat. He had remained standing until
the gondola had disappeared--such old-time observances are part of his
religion.
“Did you notice her gondolier? That is Giovanni, the famous oarsman.
Let me tell you the most delicious story! Oh, the childish simplicity
of these men! You would say, would you not, that he was about forty
years of age? You saw, too, how broad and big he was? Well, _mon ami_,
not only is he the strongest oarsman in Venice, but he has proved it,
for he has won the annual regatta, the great one on the Grand Canal,
for five consecutive summers! This, you know, gives him the title of
‘Emperor.’ Now, there is a most charming Signora whom he has served
for years,--she always spends her summers here,--whom, I assure you,
Giovanni idolizes, and over whom he watches exactly as if she were both
his child and his queen. Well, one day last year,” here the Professor’s
face cracked into lines of suppressed mirth, “Giovanni asked for a
day’s leave, and went over to Mestre to bid good-by to some friends
_en route_ for Milan. The Brindisi wine--the _vina forte_--oh, that
devilish wine! you know it!--had just reached Mestre. It only comes in
September, and lasts but a few weeks. Of course Giovanni must have his
grand outing, and three days later Signor Giovanni-the-Strong presented
himself again at the door of the apartment of his Signora, sober, but
limp as a rag. The Signora, grand dame as she was, refused to see him,
sending word by her maid that she would not hear a word from him until
the next day. Now, what do you think this great strong fellow did? He
went home, threw himself on the bed, turned his face to the wall, and
for half the night cried like a baby! Think of it! like a baby! His
wife could not get him to eat a mouthful.
“The next day, of course, the Signora forgave him. There was nothing
else to be done, for, as she said to me afterwards, ‘What? Venice
without Giovanni! _Mon Dieu!_’”
The Professor throws away the end of his last cigarette and begins
gathering up his hat and the one unmated, lonely glove. No living soul
ever yet saw him put this on. Sometimes he thrusts in his two fingers,
as if fully intending to bury his entire hand, and then you see an
expression of doubt and hesitancy cross his face, denoting a change of
mind, as he crumples it carelessly, or pushes it into his coat-tail
pocket to keep company with its fictitious mate.
At this moment Espero raises his head out of his gondola immediately
beneath us. Everything is ready, he says: the sketch trap, extra
canvas, fresh siphon of seltzer, ice, _fiasco_ of Chianti, Gorgonzola,
all but the rolls, which he will get at the baker’s on our way over to
the Giudecca, where I am to work on the sketch begun yesterday.
“Ah, that horrid old German woman from Prague!” sighs the Professor.
“If I could only go with you!”
OPEN-AIR MARKETS
SOMETIMES, in early autumn, on the lagoon behind the Redentore, you may
overtake a curious craft, half barge, half gondola, rowed by a stooping
figure in cowl and frock.
Against the glow of the fading twilight this quaint figure, standing in
the stern of his flower-laden boat, swaying to the rhythm of his oar,
will recall so vividly the time when that other
“Dumb old servitor ... went upward with the flood,”
that you cannot help straining your eyes in a vain search for the
fair face of the lily maid of Astolat hidden among the blossoms. Upon
looking closer you discover that it is only the gardener of the convent
grounds, on his way to the market above the Rialto.
[Illustration: PONTE PAGLIA ... NEXT THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS]
If you continue on, crossing the Giudecca, or if you happen to be
coming from Murano or the Lido, you will pass dozens of other boats,
loaded to the water’s edge with baskets upon baskets of peaches,
melons, and figs, or great heaps of green vegetables, dashed here and
there with piles of blood-red tomatoes. All these boats are pointing
their bows towards the Ponte Paglia, the bridge on the Riva between
the Doges’ Palace and the prison, the one next the Bridge of Sighs.
Here, in the afternoons preceding market days, they unship their masts
or rearrange their cargoes, taking off the top baskets if too high to
clear the arch. Ponte Paglia is the best point of entrance from the
Grand Canal, because it is the beginning of that short cut, through a
series of smaller canals, to the fruit market above the Rialto bridge.
The market opens at daybreak.
Many of these boats come from Malamocco, on the south, a small island
this side of Chioggia, and from beyond the island known as the Madonna
of the Seaweed, named after a curious figure sheltered by a copper
umbrella. Many of them come from Torcello, that most ancient of the
Venetian settlements, and from the fruit-raising country back of it,
for all Torcello is one great orchard, with every landing-wharf piled
full of its products. Here you can taste a fig so delicately ripe that
it fairly melts in your mouth, and so sensitive that it withers and
turns black almost with the handling. Here are rose-pink peaches the
size of small melons, and golden melons the size of peaches. Here are
pomegranates that burst open from very lusciousness, and white grapes
that hang in masses, and melons and plums in heaps, and all sorts of
queer little round things that you never taste but once, and never want
to taste again.
These fruit gardens and orchards in the suburbs of Venice express the
very waste and wantonness of the climate. There is no order in setting
out the fruit, no plan in growing, no system in gathering. The trees
thrive wherever they happen to have taken root--here a peach, here a
pear, there a pomegranate. The vines climb the trunks and limbs, or
swing off to tottering poles and crumbling walls. The watermelons lie
flat on their backs in the blazing sun, flaunting their big leaves
in your face, their tangled creepers in everybody’s way and under
everybody’s feet. The peaches cling in matted clusters, and the figs
and plums weigh down the drooping branches.
If you happen to have a _lira_ about you, and own besides a bushel
basket, you can exchange the coin for that measure of peaches. Two
_lire_ will load your gondola half full of melons; three _lire_ will
pack it with grapes; four _lire_--well, you must get a larger boat.
When the boats are loaded at the orchards and poled through the
grass-lined canals, reaching the open water of the lagoon, escaping
the swarms of naked boys begging backsheesh of fruit from their
cargoes, you will notice that each craft stops at a square box, covered
by an awning and decorated with a flag, anchored out in the channel,
or moored to a cluster of spiles. This is the Dogana of the lagoon,
and every basket, crate, and box must be inspected and counted by the
official in the flat cap with the tarnished gilt band, who commands
this box of a boat, for each individual peach, plum, and pear must help
pay its share of the public debt.
This floating custom-house is one of many beads, strung at intervals
a mile apart, completely encircling Venice. It is safe to say that
nothing that crows, bleats, or clucks, nothing that feeds, clothes, or
is eaten, ever breaks through this charmed circle without leaving some
portion of its value behind. This creditor takes its pound of flesh the
moment it is due, and has never been known to wait.
Where the deep-water channels are shifting, and there is a possibility
of some more knowing and perhaps less honest market craft slipping past
in the night, a government deputy silently steals over the shallow
lagoon in a rowboat, sleeping in his blanket, his hand on his musket,
and rousing at the faintest sound of rowlock or sail. Almost hourly
one of these night-hawks overhauls other strollers of the lagoon in
the by-passages outside the city limits--some smuggler, with cargo
carefully covered, or perhaps a pair of lovers in a gondola with too
closely drawn _tenda_. There is no warning sound to the unwary; only
the gurgle of a slowly-moving oar, then the muzzle of a breech-loader
thrust in one’s eyes, behind which frowns an ugly, determined face,
peering from out the folds of a heavy boat-cloak. It is the deputy’s
way of asking for smuggled cigarettes, but it is so convincing a way as
to admit of no discussion. Ever afterward the unfortunate victim, if he
be of honest intent, cannot only detect a police-boat from a fishing
yawl, but remembers also to keep a light burning in his lamp-socket
forward, as evidence of his honesty.
When the cargoes of the market boats are inspected, the duties paid,
and the passage made under Ponte Paglia, or through the many nameless
canals if the approach is made from the Campo Santo side of the city,
the boats swarm up to the fruit market above the Rialto, rounding up
one after another, and discharging their contents like trucks at a
station, the men piling the baskets in great mounds on the broad stone
quay.
[Illustration: THE FRUIT MARKET ABOVE THE RIALTO]
After the inhabitants have pounced upon these heaps and mounds and
pyramids of baskets and crates, and have carried them away, the market
is swept and scoured as clean as a china plate, not even a peach-pit
being left to tell the tale of the morning. Then this greater market
shrinks into the smaller one, the little fruit market of the Rialto,
which is never closed, day or night.
This little market, or, rather, the broad street forming its
area,--broad for this part of Venice,--is always piled high with
the products of orchard, vineyard, and garden, shaded all day by
huge awnings, so closely stretched that only the sharpest and most
lance-like of sunbeams can cut their way into the coolness below. At
night the market is lighted by flaring torches illumining the whole
surrounding _campo_.
As for the other smaller stands and shops about the city, they are no
less permanent fixtures, and keep equally bad hours. No matter how late
you stroll down the Zattere or elbow your way along the Merceria, when
every other place is closed, you will come upon a blazing lamp lighting
up a heap of luscious fruit, in its season the comfort and sustenance
of Venice.
Then there are the other markets--the wood market of the Giudecca, the
fish market below the Rialto bridge, and the shops and stalls scattered
throughout the city.
The wood market, a double row of boats moored in mid-stream and
stretching up the broad waterway, is behind the Salute and the salt
warehouses: great, heavy, Dutch-bowed boats, with anchor chains hanging
from the open mouths of dolphins carved on the planking; long, sharp
bowsprits, painted red, and great overhanging green rudder-sweeps
swaying a rudder half as large as a barn door. Aft there is always
an awning stretched to the mainmast, under which lies the captain,
generally sound asleep.
When you board one of these floating wood-yards, and, rousing the
Signor Capitano, beg permission to spread your sketch-awning on the
forward deck out of everybody’s way, you will not only get the best
point of view from which to paint the exquisite domes and towers of the
beautiful _Santa Maria della Salute_, but, if you sit all day at work,
with the deck wet and cool beneath your feet, and listen to the barter
and sale going on around, you will become familiar with the workings
of the market itself. You will find all these boats loaded under and
above deck with sticks of wood cut about the size of an axe-handle,
tied in bundles that can be tucked under one’s arm. These are sold
over the ship’s side to the peddlers, who boat them off to their shops
ashore. All day long these hucksters come and go, some for a boat-load,
some for a hundred bundles, some for only one. When the purchase is
important, and the count reaches, say, an even hundred, there is always
a squabble over the tally. The captain, of course, counts, and so does
the mate, and so does the buyer. As soon as the controversy reaches the
point where there is nothing left but to brain the captain with one
of his own fagots, he gives in, and throws an extra bundle into the
boat, however honest may have been the count before. The instantaneous
good-humor developed all around at the concession is only possible
among a people who quarrel as easily as they sing.
Wood is really almost the only fuel in Venice. Coal is too costly, and
the means of utilizing it too complicated. What is wanted is a handful
of embers over which to boil a pot of coffee or warm a soup, a little
fire at a time, and as little as possible, for, unlike many another
commodity, fuel is a bugbear of economy to the Venetian. He rarely
worries over his rent; it is his wood-bill that keeps him awake nights.
Above the fruit market near the Rialto is the new fish market, a modern
horror of cast iron and ribbed glass. (Oh, if the polluting touch of
so-called modern progress could only be kept away from this rarest of
cities!) Here are piled and hung and spread out the endless varieties
of fish and sea foods from the lagoons and the deep waters beyond;
great halibut, with bellies of Japanese porcelain, millions of minnows,
like heaps of wet opals with shavings of pearl, crabs, _fulpe_,
mussels, and the spoils of the marshes. Outside, along the canal, are
ranged the market boats, with their noses flattened against the stone
quay, their sails clewed up, freeing the decks, the crews bending under
huge baskets.
Fish is the natural flesh-food of the Venetian, fresh every morning,
and at a price for even the poorest. If there is not money enough for
a clean slice cut through the girth of a sea-monster, for a broil,
less than a _soldo_ will buy a handful of little nondescripts like fat
spiders, for soup, or a pint of pebble-like mussels with which to savor
a stew.
ON RAINY DAYS
THE wind blows east! All night long the thunder of the surf, breaking
along the Lido, has reverberated through the deserted streets and
abandoned canals of Venice.
From your window you see the fair goddess of the Dogana, tired out with
the whirling winds, clinging in despair to the golden ball--her sail
flying westward, her eyes strained in search of the lost sun. You see,
too, the shallow lagoons, all ashy pale, crawling and shivering in the
keen air, their little waves flying shoreward as if for shelter.
Out beyond San Giorgio, the fishing-boats are tethered to the spiles,
their decks swept by fierce dashes of rain, their masts rocking
wearily. Nearer in, this side the island, two gondolas with drenched
_felsi_, manned by figures muffled in oilskins, fight every inch of
the way to the Molo; they hug in mid-stream the big P. and O. steamer
lying sullen and deserted, her landing-ladder hanging useless, the
puffs of white steam beaten flat against her red smoke-stacks. Across
the deserted canal the domes of the Salute glisten like burnished
silver in the white light of the gale, and beyond these, tatters of
gray cloud-rack scud in from the sea. Along the quays of the Dogana the
stevedores huddle in groups beneath the sheltering arches, watching the
half-loaded boats surge and jar in the ground-swell of the incoming
sea. In the garden at your very feet lie the bruised blossoms of the
oleanders, their storm-beaten branches hanging over the wall, fagged
out with the battle of the night. Even the drenched tables under the
dripping arbors are strewn with wind-swept leaves, and the overturned
chairs are splashed with sand.
All the light, all the color, all the rest and charm and loveliness of
Venice, are dead. All the tea-rose, sun-warmed marble, all the soft
purples of shifting shadows, all the pearly light of summer cloud and
the silver shimmer of the ever-changing, million-tinted sea, are gone.
Only cold, gray stone and dull, yellow water, reflecting leaden skies,
and black-stained columns and water-soaked steps! Only brown sails,
wet, colorless gondolas and disheartened, baffled pigeons! To-day the
wind blows east!
When the tide turns flood, the waters of the lagoon, driven by the high
wind, begin to rise. Up along the Molo, where the gondolas land their
passengers, the gondoliers have taken away their wooden steps. Now the
sea is level with the top stone of the pavement, and there are yet two
hours to high water. All about the caffès under the Library, the men
stand in groups, sheltered from the driving rain by the heavy canvas
awnings laid flat against the door columns. Every few minutes some one
consults his watch, peering anxiously out to sea. A waiter serving
coffee says, in an undertone, that it is twelve years since the women
went to San Marco in boats; then the water rose to the sacristy floor.
Under the arcades and between the columns of the Doges’ Palace is
packed a dense mass of people, watching the angry, lawless sea. Wagers
are freely laid that unless the wind shifts the church itself will be
flooded at high water. The gondoliers are making fast their unused
_felsi_, lashing them to the iron lamp-posts. Along the Molo the boats
themselves, lashed fore and aft to the slender poles, are rocking
restlessly to and fro.
Suddenly a loud cheer breaks from the throng nearest the water’s edge,
and a great, surging wave dashes across the flat stone and spreads
quickly in widening circles of yellow foam over the marble flagging
of the Piazzetta. Then another and another, bubbling between the iron
tables and chairs of the caffès, swashing around the bases of the
columns, and so on like a mill-race, up and around the _Loggietta_
of the Campanile, and on into the Piazza with a rush. A wild shout
goes up from the caffès and arcades. The waiters run quickly hither
and thither, heaping up the chairs and tables. The shop-men are
closing their shutters and catching up their goods. The windows of the
_Procuratie_ are filled with faces overjoyed at the sight. Troops of
boys, breechless almost to their suspender buttons, are splashing about
in glee. The sea is on the rampage. The bridegroom is in search of the
bride. This time the Adriatic has come to wed the city. Another hour
with the wind east, and only the altar steps of San Marco will suffice
for the ceremony!
Another shout comes from the Piazzetta. There is a great waving of
hands and hats. Windows are thrown open everywhere. The pigeons sweep
in circles; never in the memory of their oldest inhabitant has there
been such a sight. In the excitement of the hour a crippled beggar
slips from a bench and is half-drowned on the sidewalk.
Another and a louder roar, and a gondola rowed by a man in tarpaulins
floats past the Campanile, moves majestically up the flood, and grounds
on the lower steps of San Marco. The boys plunge in and push, the women
laugh and clap their hands.
From the steps of the arcade of the Library, men with bared thighs
are carrying the shop-girls to the entrance of the Merceria under the
clock tower. Some of the women are venturing alone, their shoes and
stockings held above their heads. Farther down, near the corner column
of the Doges’ Palace, a big woman, her feet and ankles straight out,
is breaking the back of a little man who struggles along hip-deep,
followed by the laughter of the whole Piazzetta.
In the _campo_ fronting the church of San Moisè, a little square hemmed
around by high buildings, the sea, having overflowed the sewers, is
spurting small geysers through the cracks in the pavement; thumping and
pounding a nest of gondolas moored under the bridge.
Out on the Piazzetta a group of men, barelegged and bareheaded, are
constructing a wooden bridge from the higher steps of the arcade of
the Library to the equally high steps surrounding the base of the
column of Saint Theodore, and so on to the corner column of the
Doges’ Palace. They are led by a young fellow wearing a discarded
fatigue-cap, his trousers tied around his ankles. The only dry spot
about him is the lighted end of a cigarette. This is Vittorio--up from
the _Via Garibaldi_--out on a lark. He and his fellows--Luigi and the
rest--have splashed along the Riva with all the gusto of a pack of boys
reveling in an October snow. They have been soaking wet since daylight,
and propose to remain so until it stops raining. The building of the
bridge was an inspiration of Vittorio, and in five minutes every loose
plank about the _traghetto_ is caught up and thrown together, until
a perilous staging is erected. Upon this Luigi dances and pirouettes
to prove its absolute stability. When it topples over with the second
passenger, carrying with it a fat priest in purple robe and shovel hat,
who is late for the service and must reach the Riva, Luigi roars with
laughter, stands his Reverence on his feet, and, before he can protest,
has hoisted him aback and plunged knee-deep into the flood.
The crowd yell and cheer, Vittorio holding his sides with laughter,
until the dry flagging of the palace opposite is reached, and the
reverend gentleman, all smiles and benedictions, glides like a turtle
down Luigi’s back.
But the tramps from the _Via Garibaldi_ are not satisfied. Luigi and
Vittorio and little stumpy Appo, who can carry a sack of salt as easily
as a pail of water, now fall into line, offering their broad backs
for other passengers, Vittorio taking up a collection in his hat,
the others wading about, pouncing down upon derelict oars, barrels,
bits of plank, and the débris of the wrecked bridge. When no more
_soldi_ for ferry-tolls are forthcoming, and no more Venetians, male
or female, can be found reckless or hurried enough to intrust their
precious bodies to Luigi’s shoulders, the gang falls to work on a fresh
bridge. This Vittorio has discovered hidden away in the recesses of
the Library cellars, where it has lain since the last time the Old Man
of the Sea came bounding over the Molo wall. There are saw-horses for
support, and long planks with rusty irons fastened to each end, and
braces, and cross-pieces. All these are put up, and the bridge made
entirely practicable, within half an hour. Then the people cross and
recross, while the silent gendarmes look on with good-natured and lazy
indifference. One very grateful passenger drops a few _soldi_ into
Vittorio’s water-soaked fatigue-cap. Another, less generous, pushes
him to one side, crowding some luckless fellow, who jumps overboard up
to his knees to save himself from total immersion, the girls screaming
with assumed fright, Vittorio coaxing and pleading, and Luigi laughing
louder than ever.
At this moment a steamboat from the Lido attempts to make fast to her
wharf, some hundreds of feet down the Molo. As the landing-planks are
afloat and the whole dock awash, the women and children under the
awnings of the after-deck, although within ten feet of the solid stone
wall, are as much at sea as if they were off the Lido. Vittorio and
his mates take in the situation at a glance, and are alongside in an
instant. Within five minutes a plank is lashed to a wharf-pile, a rope
bridge is constructed, and Vittorio begins passing the children along,
one by one, dropping them over Luigi’s shoulders, who stands knee-deep
on the dock. Then the women are picked up bodily, the men follow
astride the shoulders of the others, and the impatient boat moves off
to her next landing-place up the Giudecca.
By this time hundreds of people from all over the city are pouring into
the Piazza, despite the driving rain and gusts of wind. They move in a
solid mass along the higher arcades of the Library and the Palace. They
crawl upon the steps of the columns and the sockets of the flag-staffs;
they cling to the rail and pavement of the _Loggietta_--wherever a
footing can be gained above the water-line. To a Venetian nothing is
so fascinating as a spectacle of any kind, but it has been many a day
since the Old Man of the Sea played the principal rôle himself!
There is no weeping or wailing about wet cellars and damp basements, no
anxiety over damaged furniture and water-soaked carpets. All Venetian
basements are damp; it is their normal condition. If the water runs in,
it will run out again. They have known this Old Sea King for centuries,
and they know every whim in his head. As long as the _Murazzi_
hold--the great stone dykes breasting the Adriatic outside the
lagoons--Venice is safe. To-morrow the blessed sun will shine again,
and the warm air will dry up the last vestige of the night’s frolic.
Suddenly the wind changes. The rain ceases. Light is breaking in the
west. The weather-vane on the Campanile glows and flashes. Now a flood
of sunshine bursts forth from a halo of lemon-colored sky. The joyous
pigeons glint like flakes of gold. Then a shout comes from the Molo.
The sea is falling! The gondolier who has dared the centre of the
Piazza springs to his oar, strips off his oilskins, throws them into
his boat, and plunges overboard waist-deep, seizing his gondola by
the bow. The boys dash in on either side. Now for the Molo! The crowd
breaks into cheers. On it goes, grounding near the _Porta della Carta_,
bumping over the stone flagging; afloat again, the boatmen from the
Molo leaping in to meet it; then a rush, a cheer, and the endangered
gondola clears the coping of the wall and is safe at her moorings.
Half an hour later the little children in their white summer dresses,
the warm sunshine in their faces, are playing in the seaweed that
strews the pavements of the Piazzetta.
LEGACIES OF THE PAST
“WILL you have the kindness to present Professor Croisac’s profound
adoration to the Contessa Albrizzi, and say that he humbly begs
permission to conduct his friend, a most distinguished painter, through
the noble salons of her _palazzo_?”
It was the Professor, standing bareheaded on the landing-steps of the
entrance to the Palazzo Albrizzi, the one lonely glove breaking the
rounded outline of his well-brushed hat. He was talking to a portly
Italian who did duty as Cerberus. As for myself, I was tucked back
under the _tenda_, awaiting the result of the conference, Espero
smiling at the old fellow’s elaborate address and manners.
The porter bowed low, and explained, with much earnestness, that
the _Illustrissima_ was then sojourning at her country-seat in the
Tyrol; adding that, despite this fact, the whole palace, including the
garden and its connecting bridge, from the courtyard to the roof, was
completely at the service of the _Signor Professore_.
“And all for two _lire_,” whispered Espero, to whom the old gentleman
was a constant source of amusement, and who could never quite
understand why most of his talking was done with his back bent at right
angles to his slender legs. So we followed the porter up the stone
staircase, around its many turns, to the grand hall above, with its
rich pictures panelled on the walls, and so on through the various
rooms of white stucco and old gold brocades, to the grand salon, the
one with the famous ceiling.
The night before, over a glass of Torino vermouth at Florian’s, the
Professor had insisted that I should not live another day until he had
piloted me through all those relics of the past, illustrative of an age
in Venice as sumptuous as it was artistic.
First of all I must see the gorgeous ceilings of the Albrizzi; then
the curious vine-covered bridge leading out of the Contessa’s boudoir
to a garden across the narrow canal, as secluded as the groves of
Eden before Adam stepped into them. Then I must examine the grand
Palazzo Rezzonico, begun by Longhena in 1680, and completed sixty years
later by Massari; once the home of Pope Clement XIII., and again made
immortal as sheltering the room in which Browning had breathed his
last. There, too, was the Barbaro, with its great flight of stone
steps sweeping up and around two sides of a court to the picturesque
entrance on the second floor,--the Barbaro, with its exquisite salon,
by far the most beautiful in Europe. There was the Palazzo Pisani,
built in the fifteenth century, its galleries still hung with Venetian
mirrors; and the Palazzo Pesaro, designed by this same Longhena in
1679, the home of an illustrious line of Venetian nobles from Leonardo
Pesaro down to the Doge Giovanni, with its uncanny row of grotesque
heads of boars, bulls, and curious beasts studded along the water-table
of the first story, a hand’s touch from your gondola, so grotesque and
quaint that each one looked like a nightmare solidified into stone.
There were also the Dandolo, where lived the great Doge Enrico Dandolo,
the conqueror of Constantinople,--conqueror at ninety-seven years of
age; the Farsetti, where Canova studied, in his time an academy; the
Barbarigo, where Titian once held court; the Mocenigo, where Byron
lived; not to mention the veritable home of the veritable Desdemona,
including the identical balcony where Othello breathed his love.
All these I must see, and more. More in out-of-the-way churches like
_San Giorgio della Schiavoni_, with the Carpaccios that are still as
brilliant as when the great painter laid down his brush. More in the
Gesuati up the Zattere, with its exquisite Tiepolos. Infinitely more
in the school of San Rocco, especially behind the altars and under the
choir-loft; in the Frari next door, and in a dozen other picturesque
churches; and away out to Torcello, the mother of Venice, with its one
temple,--the earliest of Venetian cathedrals,--its theatre-like rows of
seats, and the ancient slate shutters swinging on huge hinges of stone.
But to return to the Professor, who is still gazing up into the
exquisite ceiling of the salon of the Contessa, pointing out to me the
boldness and beauty of the design, a white sheet drawn taut at the
four corners by four heroic nude figures, its drooping folds patted up
against the ceiling proper by a flutter of life-sized, winged cupids
flying in the air, in high relief, or half smothered in its folds.
“Nothing gives you so clear an idea of the lives these great nobles
lived,” said the Professor, “as your touching something they touched,
walking through their homes--the homes they lived in--and examining
inch by inch the things they lived with. Now this Palazzo Albrizzi is,
perhaps, less spacious and less costly than many others of the period;
but, for all that, look at the grand hall, with its sides a continuous
line of pictures! Its ceiling a marvel of stucco and rich-colored
canvases! Do you find anything like this outside of Venice? And now
come through the salon, all white and gold, to the bridge spanning the
canal. Here, you see, is where my lady steps across and so down into
her garden when she would be alone. You must admit that this is quite
unique.”
The Professor was right. A bridge from a boudoir to a garden wall,
sixty or more feet above the water-line, is unusual, even in Venice.
And such a bridge! All smothered in vines, threading their way in
and out the iron lattice-work of the construction, and sending their
tendrils swinging, heads down, like acrobats, to the water below. And
such a garden! Framed in by high prison walls, their tops patrolled
by sentinels of stealthy creepers and wide-eyed morning-glories! A
garden with a little glass-covered arbor in the centre plot, holding
a tiny figure of the Virgin; circular stone benches for two, _and no
more_; tree-trunks twisted into seats, with encircling branches for
shoulders and back, and all, too, a thousand miles in the wilderness
for anything you could hear or see of the life of the great city about
you. A garden for lovers and intrigues and secret plots, and muffled
figures smuggled through mysterious water-gates, and stolen whisperings
in the soft summer night. A garden so utterly shut in, and so entirely
shut out, that the daughter of a Doge could take her morning bath in
the fountain with all the privacy of a boudoir.
“Yes,” said the Professor, with a slight twinkle in his eye, “these old
Venetians knew; and perhaps some of the modern ones.”
[Illustration: WIDE PALATIAL STAIRCASES]
And so we spent the day, rambling in and out of a dozen or more of
these legacies of the past, climbing up wide palatial staircases;
some still inhabited by the descendants of the noble families; others
encumbered with new and old furniture, packing-boxes and loose straw,
now magazines for goods; gazing up at the matchless equestrian statue
of Colleoni, the most beautiful the world over; rambling through the
_San Giovanni e Paolo_; stopping here and there to sketch, perhaps
the Madonna over the gate next the Rezzonico, or some sculptured lion
surmounting the newel-post of a still more ancient staircase; prying
into back courts or up crumbling staircases, or opening dust-begrimed
windows only to step out upon unkept balconies overhanging abandoned
gardens; every carving, pillar, and rafter but so much testimony to the
wealth, power, and magnificence of these rulers of the earth.
“And now to the Caffè Calcina for luncheon, Espero.”
When we had dodged into its open door out of the heat, and were seated
at one of its little square tables under the grapevines, the Professor
fished up two books from that capacious inside pocket of his, and
with much explanatory preface of how he had searched through all the
book-stalls of the Rialto, finding them at last in the great library of
the Doge’s Palace itself, wiped their faded covers with a napkin, and
turned the leaves tenderly with his withered fingers.
“And just see what festivities went on in these great palaces! Here is
a little book written by Giustina Renier Michiel, and published early
in the century. It is especially interesting as throwing some light on
the wonderful festivities of the olden time. You remember the Palazzo
Nani, the palace we saw after leaving the Dandolo? Well, listen to
this account of a wonderful _fête_ given in the beginning of the last
century at this very palace”--the Professor had closed the book over
his finger--he knew the description by heart.
“Michiel says that owing to the intense cold the lagoon was frozen
over as far as Mestre, so the hospitable host warmed every part of
the palace with huge stoves made of solid silver, elaborately wrought
in exquisite designs; and not content with the sum of that outlay, he
completed the appointments and decorations in the same precious metal,
even to the great candelabra lighting the entrance hall. And then, as
a mere freak of hospitality,--he had a large visiting list, you may be
sure,--he added ten rooms to his varied suites, in each one of which he
placed musicians of different nationalities, just to prevent crowding,
you see.
“And now let me read you of another. Part of the palace referred to
here,” he added, “has, I believe, been destroyed these many years.
It was the home of Patrizio Grimani--the palace where we saw the
fine portrait of a Doge hanging near the window. That must have been
the room in which the banquet took place. The stage referred to must
have been erected in the room opening out from it. The author Michiel
says, in describing a princely _fête_ that took place here, that
‘after the play’--performed by his private company in his own theatre,
remember--‘the guests were ushered into an adjoining room and the doors
closed. In half an hour the doors were re-opened, discovering a superb
ballroom, with every vestige of the theatre and its appointments swept
away.’
“All years and years ago, _mon ami_,” continued the Professor, closing
the book, “and in the very room that you and I walked through! Think
of the balconies crowded with Venetian beauties in the richest of
brocades and jewels! Imagine that same old ruin of a garden, roofed
over and brilliant with a thousand lanterns! See the canals packed with
gondolas, the torch-bearers lighting the way! Bah! When I think of the
flare of modern gas-jets along the Champs Elysées, and the crush of
_fiacres_ and carriages, all held in check by a score of gendarmes in
black coats; of the stuffy rooms and screeching violins; and then drink
in the memory of these _fêtes_, with their sumptuousness and grandeur,
I can hardly restrain my disgust for the cheap shams of our times.
“And here is another ancient chronicle of quite a different kind,”
opening the other book. “You will find it more or less difficult, for
it is in old Italian, and some of its sentences, even with my knowledge
of the language,”--this with a certain wave of the hand, as if no one
had ever disputed it,--“I can only guess at. This, too, came from the
library in the Doge’s Palace, and is especially valuable as showing
how little change there is between the Venice of to-day and the Venice
of a century and a half ago, so far as localities and old landmarks
go. The customs, I am delighted to say, have somewhat improved. It was
written by one Edmondo Lundy in 1750.[1] He evidently came down to
Venice to try his wings, and from his notes I should say he spread them
to some purpose. He first fell into the clutches of a grand dame,--a
certain noble lady, a _Duchessa_,--who sent for him the day after
he arrived, and who complimented him upon his bearing and personal
attractions. Then she explained that all Venetian ladies of position
had attached to their persons a gentleman in waiting, a sort of _valet
de place_ of the heart, as it were, who made love to them in a kind of
lute-and-guitar-fashion, with ditties and song; that she had seen him
on the Riva the afternoon before, had admired his figure and face, and
being at the moment without any such attendant herself had determined
to offer him the situation. His being a foreigner only increased her
ardor, foreigners being at a high premium for such positions in those
days. Although the _Duchessa_ had already a husband of her own, was
wrinkled, partly bald, and over sixty, Lundy, the gay cavalier, fell
into the scheme. It is delightful to hear him tell of how the strange
courtship progressed, one incident in particular: It was the custom of
the fashionable set of the day to drift out in their gondolas up the
Giudecca in the twilight, right in front of where we now sit; you can
see the spot from this window. Here they would anchor in mid-stream
and listen to recitals of music and poetry by some of the more gifted
cavaliers,--lines from Dante and Tasso,--the servants and gondoliers
serving the ices, which were all brought from this very Caffè Calcina.
See, the name was spelled the same way. Does it not make you feel, as
you sit here, that you have only to shut your eyes to bring it all
back? Oh, the grand days of the Republic! These old vines above our
heads could tell a story!
“But it seems that even the _Duchessa_ palled on so versatile a
cavalier as Lundy. She really bored him to death, so he hunts out
a friend, explains the situation, and begs that he will get him
out of the scrape. The friend writes a letter to Milan, and has it
re-delivered to Lundy, summoning him instantly to the bedside of a
dying relative. This letter is shown to the _Duchessa_, who parts
with him with many tears and protestations, and Lundy leaves Venice.
In three months he returns, hoping that some other equally handsome
and attractive young foreigner has taken his place. Alas! the black
drapings of the _Duchessa’s_ gondola announce her death. And now comes
the most comical part of it all. In her will she left him a thousand
_lire_ to purchase some souvenir expressive of the love and devotion
with which he had inspired her!
“Further on Lundy tells how he watched for hours the efforts of two
priests to get a breakfast. They were strung half way up the Campanile,
suspended outside the tower, between heaven and earth, in an iron cage.
That, it seems, was the punishment inflicted on such unworthy gentlemen
of the Church. They were considered to be better equipped than their
parishioners to resist temptation, and so when they went astray they
were strung up, like birds, in a cage. The only way these Lotharios got
anything to eat was by letting down a string, to which some charitable
soul would tie a flagon of wine or a loaf of bread. This morning the
string was too short, and Lundy had no end of fun watching their
efforts to piece it out with rosaries and sandal-lacings.
“Another time he was stopped by a poet on the Piazza, right in front
of where Florian’s now stands; the same caffè, perhaps, who knows? In
those days, quite as it is now, the Piazza was a rendezvous for all
Venice. All the doctors went there in search of patients, soliciting
their patronage and holding out their diplomas. The mountebanks had
performances on a carpet stretched on the pavement, and the actors
played their parts in little booths erected between the clock tower and
the Loggietta of the Campanile,--the roars of applause could be heard
away out on the lagoons. The professional poets, too, would hand you
copies of their latest productions, and button-hole you long enough to
have you listen to a sample stanza.
“Lundy was beguiled in this way, and an hour later discovered that his
tobacco-box, containing a portrait of his mother, set in brilliants--an
old-fashioned snuff-box, perhaps--was missing. So, under the advice of
a friend, he went to the headquarters of the city guard.
“‘Where did you lose it?’ said the Chief. ‘Ah! the poet. Do not worry.
In two days please come again.’
“When he returned, the Chief said:--
“‘Please take some tobacco.’ It was from his own box!
“Then the Chief explained that in addition to being a poet, the man was
also a member of the _Borsainoli_ (literally translated, ‘the takers’),
from which our own word ‘Bourse’ is derived.
“The same old swindlers still, only our stock-brokers do not stop at
our tobacco-boxes,” added the Professor, laughing.
“Then Lundy goes on to explain that whatever these fellows succeeded in
stealing they must bring to the Chief’s office within three days. If
the article was reclaimed within fifteen days, the thief received only
a small sum, and the article was returned to its owner. If it was never
called for, then it belonged to the thief. If he was detected in the
act, or failed to return it to the office, he was punished.
“‘But why do you permit this?’ continues Lundy, speaking to the Chief.
“‘To encourage an _ingenious, intelligent, sagacious activity among
the people_,’ replied the officer, with perfect seriousness.
“See, I translate literally,” said the Professor, with his finger on
the line, throwing back his head in laughter.
But the day was not over for the Professor. We must go to the Church of
the Frari, the Professor going into raptures over the joyous Madonna
and Saints by Bellini, while I had a little rapture of my own over a
live, kneeling mother, illumined by a shaft of light which fell on
her babe clasped to her breast,--a Madonna of to-day, infinitely more
precious and lovely than any canvas which ages had toned to a dull
smokiness. But then the Professor lives in the past, while I have
a certain indefensible adoration for the present--when it comes to
Madonnas.
Later we idled along between the columns supporting the roof, and
wandered up behind the altar, the whole interior aglow with the
afternoon sun, stopping at the monument of the great Titian and the
tomb of Canova. To his credit be it said, the Professor had no raptures
over this outrage in marble. And around all the other stone sepulchres
of doge, ambassador, and noble, lingering in the open door for a last
glance back into its rich interior--certainly, after San Marco, the
most picturesque and harmonious in coloring of all the churches in
Venice--until we emerged into the sunlight and lost ourselves in the
throngs of people blocking up the Campo. Then we turned the corner and
entered San Rocco.
It was the _festa_ day of the Frari, and the superb staircase of the
_Scuola di San Rocco_, lined with the marvellous colorings of Titian
and Tintoretto, was thronged with people in gala costume, crowding
up the grand staircase to the upper _sala_, the room once used as an
assembly-room by the Brotherhood of the Order. I had seen it often
before, without the Professor, for this was one of my many pilgrimages.
Whenever you have an hour to spare, lose half your breath mounting this
staircase. You will lose the other half when this magnificent council
chamber bursts upon your view. Even the first sight of the floor will
produce that effect.
You have doubtless, in your youth, seen a lady’s brooch, fashionable
then, made of Florentine mosaic,--a cunning, intricate joining of
many-colored stones,--or perhaps a paper-weight of similar intricate
design, all curves and scrolls. Imagine this paper-weight, with its
delicacy of fitting, high polish, and harmony of color, enlarged to a
floor several hundred feet long, by a proportionate width,--I have
not the exact dimensions, and it would convey no better idea if I
had,--and you will get some faint impression of the quality and beauty
of the floor of this grand _sala_. Rising from its polished surface
and running half way up the four walls, broken only by the round
door you entered, with the usual windows and a corner chapel, is a
wainscoting of dark wood carved in _alto relievo_, in the last century,
by Marchioni and his pupils. Above this is a procession of pictures,
harmonizing in tone with the carvings and mosaics, and over all hangs a
scroll-like ceiling incrusted with gold, its seven panels made luminous
by Tintoretto’s brush.
These panels are not his masterpieces. The side walls are equally
unimportant, so far as the ravings of experts and art critics go. Even
the carvings, on close inspection, are labored, and often grotesque.
But to the painter’s eye and mind this single _sala_ of San Rocco,
contrasted with all the other stately banquet halls and council
chambers of Europe, makes of them but shelters to keep out the weather.
Filled with peasants and gala people in brilliant costumes on some
_festa_ day, when all may enter, the staircase crowded, its spacious
interior a mass of colored handkerchief, shawl, and skirt, all flooded
with the golden radiance of the sun, it is one of the rare sights
of Venice. But even empty, with only your footfall and that of the
bareheaded custodian to break the profound stillness, it is still your
own ideal princely hall,--that hall where the most gallant knight of
the most entrancing romance of your childhood could tread a measure
with the fairest ladye of the loftiest, cragged-stepped castle; that
salon where the greatest nobles of your teeming fancy could strut
about in ermine and cloth of gold; where the wonderful knights held
high revel, with goblets of crystal and flagons of ruby wine, and
all the potentates from the spice-laden isles could be welcomed with
trumpet and cymbal. Here you are sure Desdemona might have danced, and
Katharine; and here Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, received the ambassadors
of her promised kingdom. As you stand breathless, drinking in its
proportions, you feel that it is a _sala_ for pomps and ceremonies, not
for monkish rites; a _sala_ for wedding breakfasts and gay routs and
frolicsome masquerades and bright laughter, rather than for whispered
conferences in cowl and frock. Even its polished floor recalls more
readily the whirl of flying slippers than the slow, measured tread of
sandalled feet.
The Professor himself, I regret to say, was not wildly enthusiastic
over this interior. In fact he made no remark whatever, except that the
floor was too slippery to walk upon, and looked too _new_ to him. This
showed the keynote of his mind: the floor was laid within a century
of the preceding generation. Nothing less than two centuries old ever
interests the Professor!
However, despite his peculiarities, it is delightful to go about with
the old fellow, listening to his legends. Almost every palace and
bridge stirs into life some memory of the past.
“Here,” he says, “was where the great Doge Foscari lived, and from
that very balcony were hung his colors the day of his abdication,--the
colors that four hours later were draped in black at his tragic
death. On that identical doorstep landed the ex-Queen of Cyprus on
the eventful morning when she returned to Venice an exile in her own
land.” And did I know that on this very bridge--the _Ponte dei Pugni_,
the bridge of the fisticuffs--many of the fights took place between
the two factions of the gondoliers, the Nicoletti and the Castellani?
If I would leave the gondola for a moment he would show me the four
impressions of the human foot set into the marble of the two upper
steps, two on each side. Here each faction would place its two best
men, their right feet covering the stone outline; then at a given
signal the rush began. For days these fights would go on and the canal
be piled up with those thrown over the railless bridge. Soon the whole
neighborhood would take sides, fighting on every street and every
corner; and once, so great was the slaughter, the tumult could only
be quelled by the Archbishop bringing out the Host from the Church of
Santa Barnaba, not far off, thus compelling the people to kneel.
When the day was over and we were floating through the little canal
of San Trovaso, passing the great Palazzo Contarini, brilliant in the
summer sunset, the Professor stopped the gondola and bade me good-by,
with this parting comment:--
“It was either in this palace, in that room you see half way up the
wall, where the pointed Gothic windows look out into the garden, or
perhaps in one of the palaces of the Procuratie, I forget which, that
the King of Denmark, during the great _fêtes_ attendant upon his
visit in 1708, trod a measure with a certain noble dame of marvelous
beauty, one Catarina Quirini, the wife of a distinguished Venetian. As
he wheeled in the dance his buckle tore a string of priceless pearls
from her dress. Before the King could stoop to hand them to his fair
partner, her husband sprang forward and crushed them with his foot,
remarking, ‘The King never kneels.’ Charming, was it not?”
“What do you think it cost his Highness the next day, Professor?” I
asked.
“I never heard,” he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders; “but what
did it matter? what are kings for?”
“Good-night!”
LIFE IN THE STREETS
THE gondola, like all other cabs, land or water, whether hansom,
four-wheeler, sampan, or caïque, is a luxury used only by the hurried
and the rich. As no Venetian is ever hurried, and few are rich,--very
many of them living in complete ignorance of the exact whereabouts of
their next repast,--almost everybody walks.
And the walking, strange to say, in this city anchored miles out at
sea, with nearly every street paved with ripples, is particularly good.
Of course, one must know the way,--the way out of the broad Campo,
down the narrow slit of a street between tall houses; the way over the
slender bridges, along stone foot-walks, hardly a yard wide, bracketed
to some palace wall overhanging the water, or the way down a flight of
steps dipping into a doorway and so under and through a greater house
held up by stone columns, and on into the open again.
But when you do know all these twists and turns and crookednesses, you
are surprised to find that you can walk all over Venice and never wet
the sole of your shoe, nor even soil it, for that matter.
If you stand on the Iron Bridge spanning the Grand Canal,--the only
dry-shod connection between the new part of Venice which lies along
the Zattere, and the old section about San Marco and the Piazza,--you
will find it crowded all day with hundreds of pedestrians passing
to and fro. Some of them have come from away down near the Arsenal,
walked the whole length of the Riva, rounded the Campanile, crossed
the Piazza, and then twisted themselves through a tangle of these same
little byways and about church corners and down dark cellars,--_sotto
porticos_, the street labels call them,--until they have reached the
Campo of San Stefano and the Iron Bridge. And it is so, too, at the
Rialto, the only other bridge, but one, crossing the Grand Canal,
except that the stream of idlers has here a different current and
poorer clothes are seen. Many of these streets are wide enough for a
company of soldiers to walk abreast, and many are so narrow that when
two fruit venders pass with their baskets, one of them steps into a
doorway.
And the people one meets in these twists and turns,--the people who
live in the big and little streets,--who eat, sleep, and are merry,
and who, in the warm summer days and nights, seem to have no other
homes! My dear friend Luigi is one of these vagrant Bohemians, and so
is Vittorio, and little Appo, with shoulders like a stone Hercules and
quite as hard, and so, also, are Antonio and the rest. When Luigi wants
his breakfast he eats it from a scrap of paper held on the palm of his
hand, upon which is puddled and heaped a little mound of thick soup
or brown _ragout_ made of _fulpe_, or perhaps shreds of fish. He will
eat this as he walks, stopping to talk to every fellow-tramp he meets,
each one of whom dips in his thumb and forefinger with a pinch-of-snuff
movement quite in keeping with the ancient custom and equally as
courteous. Every other poverty-stricken _cavalière_ of the Riva, as
soon as he has loaded down his own palm with a similar greasy mess from
the earthen dish simmering over a charcoal fire,--the open-air caffè of
the poor,--expects that the next friend passing will do the same. When
night comes they each select some particularly soft slab of marble on
one of the seats in the shadow of the Campanile, or some bricked recess
behind San Marco, stuff their hats under their cheeks, and drop into
oblivion, only waking to life when the sun touches the gilded angel
of San Giorgio. And not only Luigi and his fellow-tramps,--delightful
fellows every one of them, and dear particular friends of mine,--but
hundreds of others of every class and condition of royal, irredeemable,
irresponsible, never-ending poverty.
And as to making merry! You should sit down somewhere and watch these
millionnaires of leisure kill the lazy, dreamy, happy-go-lucky hours
with a volley of chaff hurled at some stroller, some novice from the
country back of Mestre in for a day’s holiday; or with a combined,
good-natured taunt at a peasant from the fruit gardens of Malamocco,
gaping at the wonders of the Piazza; or in heated argument each with
the other--argument only ending in cigarettes and _vino_. Or listen to
their songs--songs started perhaps by some one roused out of a sound
sleep, who stretches himself into shape with a burst of melody that
runs like fire in tangled grass, until the whole Campo is ablaze:
_Il Trovatore_, and snatches from _Marta_ and _Puritani_, or some
fisherman’s chorus that the lagoons have listened to for centuries. You
never hear any new songs. All the operas of the outside world, German,
French, and English, might be sung and played under their noses and
into their ears for a lifetime, and they would have none of them.
Then the street venders! The man who stops at some water-steps to wash
and arrange on a flat basket the handful of little silver fish, which
he sells for a copper coin no larger than one of their fins. And the
candy man with teetering scales; and the girl selling the bright red
handkerchiefs, blue suspenders, gorgeous neckties, and pearl buttons
strung on white cards.
And, too, the grave, dignified, utterly useless, and highly ornamental
_gendarmes_, always in pairs,--never stopping a moment, and always with
the same mournful strut,--like dual clog-dancers stepping in unison.
In many years’ experience of Venetian life, I have never yet seen one
of these silver-laced, cockaded, red-striped-pantalooned guardians of
the peace lay his hand upon any mortal soul. Never, even at night,
when the ragged wharf-rats from the shipyards prowl about the Piazza,
sneaking under the tables, pouncing upon the burnt ends of cigarettes
and cigars, and all in sight of these pillars of the state--never, with
all these opportunities, even when in their eagerness these ragamuffins
crawl almost between their legs.
Yes, once! Then I took a hand myself, and against the written law of
Venice too. It was at Florian’s, on the very edge of the sea of tables,
quite out to the promenade line. I was enjoying a glass of _Hofbrau_,
the stars overhead, the music of the King’s band filling the soft
summer night. Suddenly a bust of Don Quixote, about the size of my
beer-mug, was laid on the table before me, and a pair of black eyes
from under a Spanish boina peered into my own.
“_Cinque lire, Signore._”
It was Alessandro, the boy sculptor.
I had met him the day before, in front of Salviati’s. He was carrying
into the great glass-maker’s shop, for shipment over the sea, a bust
made of wet clay. A hurried sojourner, a foreigner, of course, by an
awkward turn of his heel had upset the little sculptor, bust and all,
pasting the aristocratic features of Don Quixote to the sidewalk in
a way that made that work of art resemble more the droppings from
a mortar-hod than the counterfeit presentment of Cervantes’ hero.
Instantly a crowd gathered, and a commiserating one. When I drew near
enough to see into the face of the boy, it was wreathed in a broad
smile. He was squatting flat on the stone flagging, hard at work on
the damaged bust, assuring the offending _signore_ all the while that
it was sheer nonsense to make such profuse apologies--it would be
all right in a few minutes; and while I looked on, in all less than
ten minutes, the deft fingers of the little fellow had readjusted
with marvellous dexterity the crumpled mass, straightening the neck,
rebuilding the face, and restoring the haughty dignity of the noble
_don_. Then he picked himself up, and with a bow and a laugh went on
his way rejoicing. A boy of any other nationality, by the bye, would
have filled the air with his cries until a policeman had taught him
manners, or a hat lined with pennies had healed his sorrows.
So when Alessandro looked up into my face I felt more like sharing my
table with him than driving him away--even to the ordering of another
beer and a chair. Was he not a brother artist, and though poor and with
a very slender hold on fame and fortune, had art any dividing lines?
Not so the gentlemen with the cocked hats! What! Peddling without the
King’s license, or with it, for that matter, at Florian’s, within
sound of the King’s band, the eyes of all Venice upon them! Never! So
they made a grab for Alessandro, who turned his innocent young face
up into theirs,--he was only two days from Milan and unused to their
ways,--and, finding that they were really in earnest, clung to me like
a frightened kitten.
It, of course, became instantly a matter of professional pride with
me. Allow a sculptor of renown and parts, not to say genius, to be
dragged off to prison under the pretence that he was breaking the law
by selling his wares, when really he was only exhibiting to a brother
artist an evidence of his handiwork, etc., etc.! It was a narrow
escape, and I am afraid the bystanders, as well as the frozen images of
the law, lost all respect for my truthfulness,--but it sufficed.
On my way home that night this waif of the streets told me that
since he had been ten years old--he was then only seventeen--he had
troubadoured it through Europe, even as far as Spain, his only support
being his spatula and a lump of clay. With these he could conjure
a breakfast out of the head waiter of a caffè in exchange for his
portrait in clay, or a lodging in some cheap hotel for a like payment
to the proprietor. He is still tramping the streets of Venice, his
little wooden board filled with Madonnas, Spanish matadors, and Don
Quixotes. Now he has money in the bank and the striped-pantalooned
guardians of the peace let him alone.
And the girls!
Not the better class, with mothers and duennas dogging every footstep,
but the girls who wander two and two up and down the Riva, their
arms intertwined; not forgetting the bright-eyed _signorina_ that I
once waylaid in a by-street. (Don’t start! Espero helped.) I wanted
a figure to lean over a crumbling wall in a half-finished sketch,
and sent Espero to catch one. Such a vision of beauty! Such a wealth
of purple--grape purple--black hair; such luminous black eyes, real
gazelle’s, soft and velvety; so exquisitely graceful; so charming and
naïve; so unkempt,--so ragged,--so entirely unlaundered, unscrubbed,
and slovenly!
But you must look twice at a Venetian beauty. You may miss her good
points otherwise. You think at first sight that she is only the last
half of my description, until you follow the flowing lines under the
cheap, shabby shawl and skirt, and study the face.
This one opened her big eyes wide in astonishment at Espero, listened
attentively, consented gracefully, and then sprang after him into the
gondola, which carried her off bodily to my sketching ground. Truly
one touch of the brush, with a paper _lira_ neatly folded around
the handle, is very apt to make all Venice, especially stray amateur
models, your kin.
But this is true of all the people in the streets. Every Venetian, for
that matter, is a born model. You can call from under your umbrella
to any passer-by, anybody who is not on a quick run for the doctor,
and he or she will stand stock still and fix himself or herself in any
position you may wish, and stay fixed by the hour.
And the gossip that goes on all day! In the morning hours around
the wells in the open Campo, where the women fill their copper
water-buckets, and the children play by the widening puddles; in the
narrow streets beside a shadow-flecked wall; under the vines of the
_traghetto_, lolling over the unused _felsi_; among the gondoliers at
the gondola landings, while their boats lie waiting for patrons; over
low walls of narrow slits of canals, to occupants of some window or
bridge a hundred feet away. There is always time to talk, in Venice.
Then the _dolce far niente_ air that pervades these streets! Nobody in
a hurry. Nobody breaking his neck to catch a boat off for the Lido;
there will be another in an hour, and if, by any combination of cool
awnings, warm wine, and another idler for company, this later boat
should get away without this one passenger, why worry?--to-morrow will
do.
All over Venice it is the same. The men sit in rows on the stone
benches. The girls idle in the doorways, their hands in their laps. The
members of the open-air club lounge over the bridges or lie sprawled
on the shadow-side of the steps. Up in the fishing quarter, between
naps in his doorway, some weather-beaten old salt may, perhaps, have
a sudden spasm of energy over a crab-basket that must be hoisted up,
or lowered down, or scrubbed with a broom. But there is sure to be a
lull in his energy, and before you fairly miss his toiling figure he is
asleep in his boat. When his _signora_ wakes him into life again with a
piece of toasted pumpkin,--his luncheon, like the Professor’s, is eaten
wherever he happens to be,--he may have another spasm of activity, but
the chances are that he will relapse into oblivion again.
[Illustration: NARROW SLITS OF CANALS]
Even about the Piazza, the centre of the city’s life, every free seat
that is shady is occupied. So, too, are the bases of the flag-poles in
front of the Loggietta and behind the Campanile. Only when something
out of the common moves into the open space--like the painter with
the canvas ten feet long and six feet high--do these _habitués_ leave
their seats or forsake the shelter of the arcades and stand in solemn
circle. This particular painter occupies the centre of a square bounded
by four chairs and some yards of connecting white ribbon,--the chairs
turned in so that nobody can sit on them. He has been here for many
seasons. He comes every afternoon at five and paints for an hour. The
crowds, too, come every day,--the same people, I think. Yet he is not
the only painter in the streets. You will find them all over Venice.
Some under their umbrellas, the more knowing under short gondola-sails
rigged like an awning, under which they crawl out of the blazing heat.
I am one of the more knowing.
The average citizen, as I have said, almost always walks. When there
are no bridges across the Grand Canal he must of course rely on the
gondola. Not the luxurious gondola with curtains and silk-fringed
cushions, but a gondola half worn-out and now used as a ferryboat at
the _traghetto_. These shuttles of travel run back and forth all day
and all night (there are over thirty _traghetti_ in Venice), the fare
being some infinitesimally small bit of copper. Once across, the
Venetian goes on about his way, dry-shod again. For longer distances,
say from the railroad station to the Piazza, the Public Garden, or
the Lido, he boards one of the little steamers that scurry up and
down the Grand Canal or the Giudecca and the waters of some of the
lagoons--really the only energetic things in Venice. Then another bit
of copper coin, this time the size of a cuff-button, and he is whirled
away and landed at the end of a dock lined with more seats for the
weary, and every shaded space full.
Another feature of these streets is the _bric-à-brac_ dealer. He has
many of the characteristics of his equally shrewd brethren along
Cheapside and the Bowery. One in particular,--he is always on the
sidewalk in front of his shop. The Professor insists that these men
are the curse of Venice; that they rob poor and rich alike,--the poor
of their heirlooms at one-tenth their value, the rich of their gold
by reselling this booty at twenty times its worth. I never take the
Professor seriously about these things. His own personal patronage must
be very limited, and I suspect, too, that in the earlier years of his
exile, some of his own belongings--an old clock, perhaps, or a pair of
paste buckles, or some other relic of better days--were saved from the
pawnshop only to be swallowed up by some shark down a back street.
But there is one particular Ananias, a smug, persuasive, clean-shaven
specimen of his craft, who really answers to the Professor’s epithet.
He haunts a narrow crack of a street leading from the Campo San Moisè
to the Piazza. This crevice of a lane is the main thoroughfare between
the two great sections of Venice. Not only the Venetians themselves,
but, as it is the short cut to San Marco, many of the strangers from
the larger hotels--the Britannia, the Grand, the Bauer-Grünwald, and
others--pass through it night and day.
Here this wily spider weaves his web for foreign flies, retreating with
his victim into his hole--a little shop, dark as a pocket--whenever he
has his fangs completely fastened upon the fly’s wallet. The bait is,
perhaps, a church lamp, or an altar-cloth spotted with candle-grease.
There are three metres in the cloth, with six spots of grease to the
metre. You are a stranger and do not know that the silk factory at the
corner furnished the cloth the week before for five francs a metre,
Ananias the grease, and his wife the needle that sewed it together.
Now hear him!
“No, nod modern; seexteenth century. Vrom a vary olt church in Padua.
Zat von you saw on ze Beazzi yesterday vas modern and vary often, but I
assure you, shentleman, zat zees ees antique and more seldom. Ant for
dree hundredt francs eet ees re-diklous. I bay myselluf dree hundredt
an’ feefty francs, only ze beesiness is so bad, and eet ees de first
dime zat I speak wis you, I vould not sell eet for fife hundredt.”
You begin by offering him fifty francs.
“_Two hundredt_ and feefty francs!” he answers, without a muscle in his
face changing; “no, shentleman, it vould be eemposseeble to--”
“No, fifty,” you cry out.
Now see the look of wounded pride that overspreads his face, the dazed,
almost stunned expression, followed by a slight touch of indignation.
“Shentleman, conseeder ze honor of my house. Eef I sharge you dree
hundredt francs for sometings only for feefty, it ees for myselluf I am
zorry. Eet ees not posseeble zat you know ze honorable standing of my
house.”
Then, if you are wise, you throw down your card with the name of your
hotel--and stroll up the street, gazing into the shop windows and
pricing in a careless way every other thing suspended outside any other
door, or puckered up inside any other window.
In ten minutes after you have turned the corner he has interviewed the
porter of your hotel--not Joseph of the Britannia; Joseph never lets
one of this kind mount the hotel steps unless his ticket is punched
with your permission. In five minutes Ananias has learned the very hour
of the day you have to leave Venice, and is thereafter familiar with
every bundle of stuffs offered by any other dealer that is sent to your
apartment. When you pass his shop the next day he bows with dignity,
but never leaves his doorway. If you have the moral courage to ignore
him, even up to the last morning of your departure, when your trunks
are packed and under the porter’s charge for registering, you will meet
Ananias in the corridor with the altar-cloth under his arm, and his
bill for fifty francs in his pocket. If not, and you really want his
stuffs and he finds it out, then cable for a new letter-of-credit.
At night, especially _festa_ nights, these Venetian streets are even
more unique than in the day. There is, perhaps, a festa at the _Frari_,
or at _Santa Maria del Zobenigo_. The Campo in front of the church
is ablaze with strings of lanterns hung over the heads of the people,
or fastened to long brackets reaching out from the windows. There are
clusters of candles, too, socketed in triangles of wood, and flaring
torches, fastened to a mushroom growth of booths that have sprung up
since morning, where are sold hot waffles cooked on open-air griddles,
and ladles full of soup filled with sea horrors,--spider-like things
with crawly legs. Each booth is decorated with huge brass plaques,
_repoussèd_ in designs of the Lion of St. Mark, and of the Saint
himself. The cook tells you that he helped hammer them into shape
during the long nights of the preceding winter; that there is nothing
so beautiful, and that for a few _lire_ you can add these specimens of
domestic _bric-à-brac_ to your collection at home. He is right; hung
against a bit of old tapestry, nothing is more decorative than one of
these rude reproductions of the older Venetian brass. And nothing more
_honest_. Every indentation shows the touch of the artist’s hammer.
In honor of the _festa_ everybody in the vicinity lends a hand to the
decorations. On the walls of the houses fronting the small square,
especially on the wall of the wine-shop, are often hung the family
portraits of some neighbor who has public spirit enough to add a touch
of color to the general enjoyment. My friend, Pasquale D’ Este, who is
_gastaldo_ at the _traghetto_ of Zobenigo, pointed out to me, on one of
these nights, a portrait of his own ancestor, surprising me with the
information that his predecessors had been gondoliers for two hundred
years.
While the _festa_ lasts the people surge back and forth, crowding
about the booths, buying knick-knacks at the portable shops. All are
good-natured and courteous, and each one delighted over a spectacle
so simple and so crude, the wonder is, when one thinks how often a
_festa_ occurs in Venice, that even a handful of people can be gathered
together to enjoy it.
Besides all these varying phases of street merry-making, there are
always to be found in the thoroughfares of Venice during the year, some
outward indications that mark important days in the almanac--calendar
days that neither celebrate historical events nor mark religious
festivals. You always know, for instance, when St. Mark’s day comes,
in April, as every girl you meet wears a rose tucked in her hair out
of deference to the ancient custom, not as a sign of the religious
character of the day, but to show to the passer-by that she has a
sweetheart. Before Christmas, too, if in the absence of holly berries
and greens you should have forgotten the calendar day, the peddler of
eels and of nut candy and apple sauce would remind you of it; for,
in accordance with the ancient custom, dating back to the Republic,
every family in Venice, rich or poor, the night before Christmas, has
the same supper,--eels, a nut candy called _mandorlato_, and a dish
of apple sauce with fruits and mustard. This is why the peddlers in
Venice are calling out all day at the top of their lungs, “_Mandorlato!
Mostarda!_” while the eel and mustard trade springs into an activity
unknown for a year. On other saints’ days the street peddlers sell a
red paste made of tomatoes and chestnut flour, moulded into cakes.
Last are the caffès! In winter, of course, the _habitués_ of these
Venetian lounging places are crowded into small, stuffy rooms; but in
the warmer months everybody is in the street. Not only do Florian’s and
the more important caffès of the rich spread their cloths under the
open sky, but every other caffè on the Riva,--the Oriental, the _Veneta
Marina_, and the rest--push their tables quite out to the danger-line
patrolled by the two cocked-hat guardians of the peace. In and out
between these checkerboards of good cheer, the peddlers of sweets,
candies, and fruit strung on broom-straws, ply their trade, while the
flower girls pin tuberoses or a bunch of carnations to your coat, and
the ever-present and persistent guide waylays customers for the next
day’s sightseeing. Once or twice a week there is also a band playing in
front of one of these principal caffès, either the Government band or
some private orchestra.
On these nights the people come in from all over Venice, standing in a
solid mass, men, women, and children, listening in perfect silence to
the strains of music that float over the otherwise silent street. There
is nothing in Europe quite like this bareheaded, attentive, absorbed
crowd of Venetians, enjoying every note that falls on their ears. There
is no gathering so silent, so orderly, so well-bred. The jewelled
occupants of many an opera box could take lessons in good manners from
these denizens of the tenements,--fishermen, bead stringers, lace
makers--who gather here from behind the Ship Yard and in the tangle of
streets below _San Giorgio della Schiavoni_. There is no jostling or
pushing, with each one trying to get a better place. Many of the women
carry their babies, the men caring for the larger children. All are
judges of good music, and all are willing to stand perfectly still by
the hour, so that they themselves may hear and let others hear too.
NIGHT IN VENICE
NIGHT in Venice! A night of silver moons,--one hung against the velvet
blue of the infinite, fathomless sky, the other at rest in the still
sea below.
A night of ghostly gondolas, chasing specks of stars in dim canals; of
soft melodies broken by softer laughter; of tinkling mandolins, white
shoulders, and tell-tale cigarettes. A night of gay lanterns lighting
big barges, filled with singers and beset by shadowy boats, circling
like moths or massed like water-beetles. A night when San Giorgio
stands on tip-toe, Narcissus-like, to drink in his own beauty mirrored
in the silent sea; when the angel crowning the Campanile sleeps with
folded wings, lost in the countless stars; when the line of the city
from across the wide lagoons is but a string of lights buoying golden
chains that sink into the depths; when the air is a breath of heaven,
and every sound that vibrates across the never-ending wave is the music
of another world.
No pen can give this beauty, no brush its color, no tongue its delight.
It must be seen and felt. It matters little how dull your soul may be,
how sluggish your imagination, how dead your enthusiasm, here Nature
will touch you with a wand that will stir every blunted sensibility
into life. Palaces and churches,--poems in stone,--canvases that
radiate, sombre forests, oases of olive and palm, Beethoven, Milton,
and even the great Michael himself, may have roused in you no quiver of
delight nor thrill of feeling.
But here,--here by this wondrous city of the sea,--here, where the
transcendent goddess of the night spreads her wings, radiant in the
light of an August moon, her brow studded with stars,--even were your
soul of clay, here would it vibrate to the dignity, the beauty, and the
majesty of her matchless presence.
[Illustration: SAN GIORGIO STANDS ON TIP-TOE]
As you lie, adrift in your gondola, hung in mid-air,--so like a mirror
is the sea, so vast the vault above you,--how dreamlike the charm! How
exquisite the languor! Now a burst of music from the far-off plaza,
dying into echoes about the walls of San Giorgio; now the slow tolling
of some bell from a distant tower; now the ripple of a laugh, or a
snatch of song, or the low cooing of a lover’s voice, as a ghostly
skiff with drawn curtains and muffled light glides past; and now the
low plash of the rowers as some phantom ship looms above you with
bow-lights aglow, crosses the highway of silver, and melts into shadow.
Suddenly from out the stillness there bursts across the bosom of the
sleeping wave the dull boom of the evening gun, followed by the long
blast of the bugle from the big warship near the arsenal; and then, as
you hold your breath, the clear deep tones of the great bell of the
Campanile strike the hour.
Now is the spell complete!
The Professor, in the seat beside me, turns his head, and, with a
cautioning hand to Espero to stay his oar, listens till each echo has
had its say; first San Giorgio’s wall, then the Public Garden, and last
the low murmur that pulsates back from the outlying islands of the
lagoon. On nights like these the Professor rarely talks. He lies back
on the yielding cushions, his eyes upturned to the stars, the glow of
his cigarette lighting his face. Now and then he straightens himself,
looks about him, and sinks back again on the cushions, muttering over
and over again, “Never such a night--never, never!” To-morrow night
he will tell you the same thing, and every other night while the moon
lasts. Yet he is no empty enthusiast. He is only enthralled by the
splendor of his mistress, this matchless Goddess of Air and Light and
Melody. Analyze the feeling as you may, despise its sentiment or decry
it altogether, the fact remains, that once get this drug of Venice
into your veins, and you never recover. The same thrill steals over
you with every phase of her wondrous charm,--in the early morning, in
the blinding glare of the noon, in the cool of the fading day, in the
tranquil watches of the night. It is Venice the Beloved, and there is
none other!
Espero has breathed her air always, and hundreds of nights have come
and gone for him; yet as he stands bareheaded behind you, his oar
slowly moving, you can hear him communing with himself as he whispers,
“_Bella notte, bella notte_,” just as some other devotee would tell
his beads in unconscious prayer. It is the spirit of idolatry born of
her never-ending beauty, that marks the marvellous power which Venice
wields over human hearts, compelling them, no matter how dull and
leaden, to reverence and to love.
And the Venetians never forget! While we float idly back to the city,
the quays are crowded with people, gazing across the wide lagoons,
drinking in their beauty, the silver moon over all. Now and then a
figure will come down to the water’s edge and sit upon some marble
steps, gazing seaward. There is nothing to be seen,--no passing ship,
no returning boat. It is only the night!
Away up the canal, Guglielmo, the famous singer, once a gondolier, is
filling the night with music, a throng of boats almost bridging the
canal, following him from place to place, Luigi, the primo, in the
lead,--the occupants hanging on every note that falls from his lips.
Up the Zattere, near San Rosario, where the afternoon sun blazed
but a few hours since, the people line the edge of the marble quay,
their children about them, the soft radiance of the night glorifying
the Giudecca. They are of all classes, high and low. They love their
city, and every phase of her beauty is to them only a variation of her
marvellous charm. The Grand Duchess of the Riva stands in the doorway
of her caffè, or leans from her chamber window; Vittorio and little
Appo, and every other member of the Open-Air Club, are sprawled over
the Ponte Veneta Marina, and even the fishermen up the Pallada sit in
front of their doors. Venice is decked out to-night in all the glory of
an August moon. They must be there to see!
You motion to Espero, and with a twist of his blade he whirls the
gondola back to the line of farthest lights. As you approach nearer,
the big Trieste steamer looms above you, her decks crowded with
travellers. Through her open port-holes you catch the blaze of the
electric lights, and note the tables spread and the open staterooms,
the waiters and stewards moving within. About her landing-ladders is a
swarm of gondolas bringing passengers, the porters taking up the trunks
as each boat discharges in turn.
A moment more and you shoot alongside the Molo and the water-steps of
the Piazzetta. An old man steadies your boat while you alight. You bid
Espero good-night and mingle with the throng. What a transition from
the stillness of the dark lagoon!
The open space is crowded with idlers walking in pairs or groups. The
flambeaux of gas-jets are ablaze. From behind the towering Campanile in
the great Piazza comes a burst of music from the King’s Band. Farther
down the Riva, beyond the Ponte Paglia, is heard the sound of another
band. Everywhere are color and light and music. Everywhere stroll the
happy, restful, contented people, intoxicated with the soft air, the
melody, and the beauty of the night.
If you think you know San Marco, come stand beneath its rounded portals
and look up. The deep coves, which in the daylight are lost in the
shadows of the dominant sun, are now illumined by the glare of a
hundred gas-jets from the street below. What you saw in the daylight
is lost in the shadow,--the shadowed coves now brilliant in light. To
your surprise, as you look, you find them filled with inscriptions and
studded with jewels of mosaic, which flash and glint in the glare of
the blazing flambeaux. All the pictures over the great doors now stand
out in bold coloring, with each caramel of mosaic distinct and clear.
Over every top-moulding you note little beads and dots of gray and
black. If you look closer two beads will become one, and soon another
will burst into wings. They are the countless pigeons roosting on
the carving. They are out of your reach, some fifty feet above you,
undisturbed by all this glitter and sound.
As you turn and face the great square of the Piazza, you find it
crowded to the very arcades under the surrounding palaces, with a
moving mass of people, the tables of the caffès reaching almost to the
band-stand placed in the middle. Florian’s is full, hardly a seat to
be had. Auguste and his men are bringing ices and cooling drinks. The
old Duchess of uncertain age, with the pink veil, is in her accustomed
seat, and so are the white-gloved officers with waxed mustaches, and
the pretty Venetian girls with their mothers and duennas. The Professor
drops into his seat against the stone pillar,--the seat covered with
leather,--lights another cigarette, and makes a sign to Auguste. It is
the same old order, a cup of coffee and the smallest drop of Cognac
that can be brought in a tear-bottle of a decanter the size of your
thumb.
When the music is over you stroll along the arcades and under the
_Bocca del Leone_, and through the narrow streets leading to the Campo
of San Moisè, and so over the bridge near the Bauer-Grünwald to the
crack in the wall that leads you to the rear of your own quarter. Then
you cross your garden and mount the steps to your rooms, and so out
upon your balcony.
The canal is deserted. The music-boats have long since put out their
lanterns and tied up for the night. The lighters at the Dogana opposite
lie still and motionless, their crews asleep under the mats stretched
on the decks. Away up in the blue swims the silver moon, attended by an
escort of clouds hovering close about her. Towering above you rises
the great dome of the Salute, silent, majestic, every statue, cross,
and scroll bathed in the glory of her light.
Suddenly, as you hang over your balcony, the soft night embracing you,
the odor of oleanders filling the air, you hear the quick movement of a
flute borne on the night wind from away up the Iron Bridge. Nearer it
comes, nearer, the clear, bird-like notes floating over the still canal
and the deserted city. You lean forward and catch the spring and rhythm
of the two gondoliers as they glide past, keeping time to the thrill
of the melody. You catch, too, the abandon and charm of it all. He is
standing over her, his head uncovered, the moonlight glinting on the
uplifted reed at his lips. She lies on the cushions beneath him, throat
and shoulders bare, a light scarf about her head. It is only a glimpse,
but it lingers in your memory for years,--you on the balcony and alone.
Out they go,--out into the wide lagoon,--out into the soft night, under
the glory of the radiant stars. Fainter and fainter falls the music,
dimmer and dimmer pales the speck with its wake of silver.
Then all is still!
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY
H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _Misteri di Venezia, di Edmondo Lundy._
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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