Venetian Life
by
W. D. Howells
Part 1 out of 5
This eBook was produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
VENETIAN LIFE
by
W. D. HOWELLS
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete it
without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter sketching
the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present trade and
industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on the national
holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical persons,
incidents, and places mentioned.
Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I
actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most to
look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but at
any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
W. D. H.
Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
CONTENTS.
I. Venice in Venice
II. Arrival and first Days in Venice
III. The Winter in Venice
IV. Comincia far Caldo
V. Opera and Theatres
VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners
VII. Housekeeping in Venice
VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal
IX. A Day-Break Ramble
X. The Mouse
XI. Churches and Pictures
XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons
XIII. The Armenians
XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice
XV. Some Memorable Places
XVI. Commerce
XVII. Venetian Holidays
XVIII. Christmas Holidays
XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials
XX. Venetian Traits and Characters
XXI. Society
XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
Index
CHAPTER I.
VENICE IN VENICE.
One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the
byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part
in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre),
and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help
seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece,
pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon
the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his
abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of
the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the
painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that
the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the
machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the
least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did not
care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and presently ceased to take
any note of them. The illusion which I had thought an essential in the
dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of small importance.
It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at
another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE,
which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to
every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in
Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without
learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it
in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my
point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually
brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the same time, it has
never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and regard, nor the
fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless picturesqueness, its
sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the streets in Venice are
canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the city, and need not take
boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once fondly thought you must. But
after all, though I find dry land enough in it, I do not find the place
less unique, less a mystery, or less a charm. By day, the canals are still
the main thoroughfares; and if these avenues are not so full of light and
color as some would have us believe, they, at least, do not smell so
offensively as others pretend. And by night, they are still as dark and
silent as when the secret vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims
into the ungossiping depths of the Canalazzo!
Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation for
vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a government
which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience of its subjects;
but to think that the careful student of the old Republican system will
condemn it for faults far different from those for which it is chiefly
blamed. At all events, I find it hard to understand why, if the Republic
was an oligarchy utterly selfish and despotic, it has left to all classes
of Venetians so much regret and sorrow for its fall.
So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the Venice
of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his prejudices--the
merciless Venice of Darù, and of the historians who follow him. But I
still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees; and will think
with me that the place loses little in the illusion removed; and--to take
leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to fatigue him with no affairs
of my own, except as allusion to them may go to illustrate Life in Venice;
and positively he shall suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which,
in Latin countries, so often get from travelers' beds into their books.
Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter,
but which no doubt form a large part of every one's associations with the
name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that pathetic swindle, the
Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned
without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the taciturn justice of
the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the Serenest Republic's
policy. When I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call about
me the sad company of those who had passed its corridors from imprisonment
to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the same. I
was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward that I had, on this occasion, been
in very low society, and that the melancholy assemblage which I then
conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, who might indeed have
given as graceful and ingenious excuses for being in misfortune as the
galley-slaves rescued by Don Quixote,--who might even have been very
picturesque,--but who were not at all the material with which a well-
regulated imagination would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not built till
the end of the sixteenth century, and no romantic episode of political
imprisonment and punishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in
Venetian history later than that period. But the Bridge of Sighs could
have nowise a savor of sentiment from any such episode, being, as it was,
merely a means of communication between the Criminal Courts sitting in the
Ducal Palace, and the Criminal Prison across the little canal.
Housebreakers, cut-purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a
poetic interest to places which have known them; and yet these are the
only sufferers on whose Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has
looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The
name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of
compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in
difficulties. [Footnote: The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said
in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of
sentimental errors about Venice:--
"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or
whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which
is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice
ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless
interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great
ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years
after Faliero's death."--_Stories of Venice_.]
Political offenders were not confined in the "prison on each hand" of the
poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under
the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their
exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some
foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be
afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now
that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with prison-
life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They are
not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could have
suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing of
the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to
inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was
difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay. I began
with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to languish in
these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the apartments of state,
and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged nearly as
fast as taken.
Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political prisoners
of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a man, they
struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped
from the _pozzi_ by every artifice of fact and figure.
The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it was
not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel taking-
off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at the top of the
palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli, _Memorie
Venete_.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have been
confined in the _pozzi_ at different times about the middle of the
fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance of
Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
imprisoned in the _pozzi_, can move the true sentimentalizer.
Certainly, there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal
Palace, but we know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it
to any great historic presence.
Touching the Giant's Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of the
Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed the
traitor's death to the people from between the two red columns in the
southern gallery of the palace;--that façade was not built till nearly a
century later.
I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides
these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of
brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest
picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic
adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old merry-
making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this way, the
conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross a
fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I have but
spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social dullness and
sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole
world's civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the city, doomed
four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the Venetians
would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger, the inconsolable
discontent, with which the people regard their present political
condition.
If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the means
by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds the
province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the question in
Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling, there is
something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the Venetians appear
to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that this tenure is
abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler observation will
develop some interested attachment to the present government, and some
interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the
hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to
take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous
and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the
question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions
by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the
cessation of those functions as release from obligations both to that
government and my own, which render it improper for me, so long as the
Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contribute, by
comment on existing things, to embitter the feeling against them
elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak dispassionately of facts of the
abnormal social and political state of the place; and I can certainly do
this, for the present situation is so disagreeable in many ways to the
stranger forced to live there,--the inappeasable hatred of the Austrians
by the Italians is so illiberal in application to those in any wise
consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in many respects, that I
think the annoyance which it gives the foreigner might well damp any
passion with which he was disposed to speak of its cause.
This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But it
is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to the
Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she fell
a second time after Napoleon's ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance,
defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded with
heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of 1849,--
Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened by each
remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them with a
rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of dominion
would appease.
Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private hospitality
in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger finds himself
planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice of sides open to
him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither party; society is
exclusive association with the Austrians or with the Italians. The latter
do not spare one of their own number if he consorts with their masters,
and though a foreigner might expect greater allowance, it is seldom shown
to him. To be seen in the company of officers is enmity to Venetian
freedom, and in the case of Italians it is treason to country and to race.
Of course, in a city where there is a large garrison and a great many
officers who have nothing else to do, there is inevitably some
international love-making, although the Austrian officers are rigidly
excluded from association with the citizens. But the Italian who marries
an Austrian severs the dearest ties that bind her to life, and remains an
exile in the heart of her country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off,
as they cast off every body who associates with the dominant race. In rare
cases I have known Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian
friends, but this with the explicit understanding that there was to be no
sign of recognition if they met them in the company of these detested
acquaintance.
There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism by
yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians hate
the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather a liking
for them--rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them somewhat slow
and dull-witted--and individually the Austrians are amiable people, and
try not to give offence. The government is also very strict in its control
of the military. I have never seen the slightest affront offered by a
soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no personal ill-will
engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the means by which an alien
and despotic government is imposed upon a people believing themselves born
for freedom and independence. This hatred, then, is a feeling purely
political, and there is political machinery by which it is kept in a state
of perpetual tension.
The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They live
for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession of
its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee's seal; but no one knows
how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are made,
but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is said
that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of the
Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all patriotic
anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the Republic in 1848,
and that of the union of the Italian States under Victor Emanuel in 1860)
salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a proper number of red, white, and
green lights displayed. It inscribes revolutionary sentiments on the
walls; and all attempts on the part of the Austrians to revive popular
festivities are frustrated by the Committee, which causes petards to be
exploded in the Place of St. Mark, and on the different promenades. Even
the churches are not exempt from these demonstrations: I was present at
the Te Deum performed on the Emperor's birthday, in St. Mark's, when the
moment of elevating the host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in
the centre of the cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable
utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of
the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic
discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their fellow-
citizens may gall some of them, yet any public demonstration of content,
such as going to the opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band
plays, is promptly discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of
course, the Committee's business to keep the world informed of public
feeling in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members
are inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as
their patriotism.
The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
except a small part of the resident _titled_ nobility (a great part
of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of the
city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous holidays
which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though religious in
their general character, were still inseparably bound up in their origin
with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these holidays as
related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally ended with
her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all their splendor,
but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It is true that the
churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the day of Corpus
Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still built across the
Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and across the Canal of
the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the respective festivals of
these churches; but the concourse is always meagre, and the mirth is
forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have so far imbued the people with
their own ideas and feelings, that the recurrence of the famous holidays
now merely awakens them to lamentations over the past and vague longings
for the future.
As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety of
pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and its
shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed out with
masks and horns and women's habits, who go from shop to shop droning forth
a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers. The crowd through
which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with a pensive scorn,
and goes about its business untempted by the delights of carnival.
All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the fate
of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held, and it is
impossible that balls and parties should not now and then be given. But
the greater number of the nobles and the richer of the professional
classes lead for the most part a life of listless seclusion, and attempts
to lighten the general gloom and heaviness in any way are not looked upon
with favor. By no sort of chance are Austrians, or Austriacanti ever
invited to participate in the pleasures of Venetian society.
As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great part
to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffè, and at the other places
of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in those
places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to the opera,
and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the theatre at
all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may wear as
empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is exploded
in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping away such
of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is less easy for
the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy, it is a less
offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
Italianissimism. In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood
system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another; and
Florian's, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the city
on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought a
demonstration of any kind. But the other caffè in the Piazza do not enjoy
Florian's cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more wonder in
Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless, indeed, it
were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and discontent
chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and summer, the
military band plays that exquisite music for which the Austrians are
famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas, and the attraction
is the hardest of all others for the music-loving Italian to resist. But
he does resist it. There are some noble ladies who have not entered the
Piazza while the band was playing there, since the fall of the Republic of
1849; and none of good standing for patriotism has attended the concerts
since the treaty of Villafranca in '59. Until very lately, the promenaders
in the Piazza were exclusively foreigners, or else the families of such
government officials as were obliged to show themselves there. Last
summer, however, before the Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation
of Rome revived the drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun
visibly to falter in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a
slight and transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the
Piazza when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side
of the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and down
under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes a delicate
distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the Piazza and
hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first and permitting the
last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians disappear, and the
Italians return to the Piazza.
But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need not
be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her prosperity
in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not understand how
large an income the city formerly derived from making merry. The poor have
to lament not merely the loss of their holidays, but also of the fat
employments and bountiful largess which these occasions threw into their
hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the richer families, and the
reluctance of foreigners to make a residence of the gloomy and dejected
city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen off; the larger commerce of
the place has also languished and dwindled year by year; while the cost of
living has constantly increased, and heavier burdens of taxation have been
laid upon the impoverished and despondent people. And in all this, Venice
is but a type of the whole province of Venetia.
The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
Austrians have a _casino_, and they give balls and parties, and now
and then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice
as a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of
a people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union with
Italy at any cost.]
Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw him
on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the enemy
of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the most
vivid republican tint in the United States.
The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l'altra, romper il chiodo_,
(sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression, I
suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
CHAPTER II.
ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and
to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o'clock,
and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I
was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated
boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very
polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ran out and threw
that slender piece of luggage into a gondola. I followed, lighted to my
seat by a beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He was one of a
class of mendicants whom I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice,
and whom I dare say every traveler recollects,--the merciless tribe who
hold your gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a
displeasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call
them _gransieri_, or crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the
name or the purpose of this _poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is
the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons who work for a living in
Venice, as well as many who decline to do so.] at the station, but merely
saw that he had the Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and
arrangement of his fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous
effects of red, and he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend
of brigands would like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab
me and sink my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I
felt that he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly
know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and
left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings
which he had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard
nothing, for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-
spirit, so to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway
journey from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in
the bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise, as
that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he issues from
the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless strangeness.
There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how quickly, coming
south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the harsh, transalpine
air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent into the place; and O
you! whoever you are, that journey toward this enchanted city for the
first time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies before you
for your pleasure, the spectacle of such singular beauty as no picture can
ever show you nor book tell you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly
but once, and regret forever.
For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle of
the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot that I
had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment very cold
and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful
silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either
hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark waters,
holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which brought
balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief, and threw
long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that uncertain
glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by
any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty
of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think all
the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but they passed
vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of
sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there, and the moral
and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty and surprise.
The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events
gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and safely around sharp
corners of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress through
narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did
not know then that this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first
faint impression of the charm of life in Venice.
Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at their doors
larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly about
on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into one of
the smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness only
remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But always the
pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with its trembling stars
above, and the dark water with its trembling stars below; but now
innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns
and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these
strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of
the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers.
Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and
unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous
wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could
understand the Facts of the Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To
move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled
with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of
all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola
suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door.
The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their passenger
"Divided the swift mind,"
in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles and
service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against
every thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and
conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the _portier_
suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much.
So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex
spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring
glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of
her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been
penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been
touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival
need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would not
wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien to the
place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it
was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I here
found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could partly
understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice from which I
shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the great and famous
monuments of art alone that I felt at home--indeed, I could as yet
understand their excellence and grandeur only very imperfectly--but
wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I found the
good company of
"The fair, the old;"
and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I
learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
relief.
My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me
cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from
the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my
blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to surrender
by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden brinks of
canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable churches of the
city were equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. But all
places had something rare and worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of
sculpture or architecture, at least interesting squalor and picturesque
wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight in proper Objects of
Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome
winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court
had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers
and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and
noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of
poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene
linen, and patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets of shops that
branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little oil-
lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of the
Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole means of
street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and deepening
the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches. I remember
distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft night of late
winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from the Public
Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I turned from the
dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a solitary gondola
gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its moonlight silver
into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the vague shipping in the
basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the
Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep into the
water under them a crimson glory that sank also down and down in my own
heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and delight. Behind these
lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and palace; the moon stood bright
and full in the heavens; the gondola drifted away to the northward; the
islands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with the light palpitations
of the waves like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark
rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the Lido sank from sight
upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep by the side of
its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently beat its sands; the
yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred themselves together, and
out of one of those trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob
burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the
scene, and suffused the languid night with the murmur of luxurious,
ineffable sadness.
But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how low
its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little court
behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air
of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry, and
all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had turned the
sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open fire after the
picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now that the night had
fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and the red of the flame
luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and venerable than ever.
Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not
hard here for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius
loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint, and
the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a beggar,
superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of humanity. A
vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to do with burning coffee,
dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had been some dread
supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and doing men, instead
of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly and weirdly
impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the
cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he
shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him--
then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly
from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless magnificence.
At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
get an excellent _caffè bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and
one to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of the
sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive;
and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous
black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and
pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his
spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a
barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
"Took the soul
Of that waste place with joy;"
and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw his
whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee
and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw reflected
in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing in
that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that combated and
vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed sands in marble
structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to architecture new
glories full of eternal surprise.
So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was in
good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the pleasant
discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It was not yet
the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door life of the
place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great part of the
people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that nobody
seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse. When, however, I
ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of this idleness, and
learned that I too must assume my share of the common indolence, I found
it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my
endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained
fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished, but, after
all, merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken wholesome
struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift
into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote from incentive and sensation.
For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith indomitable
in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a
practical belief in God's purpose of a great moving, anxious, toiling,
aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as after a while I yielded,
to these influences, a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you
consent that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you cannot help
wondering why it need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but
corrupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some unconscious
way to regard her fate as my own; and when I began to write the sketches
which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in
her, or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and
fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine.
I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light, color,
canals, and palaces. One's conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is more
virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the city,
and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might
have been some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from lapsing
into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole
hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now,
what matter?
CHAPTER III.
THE WINTER IN VENICE
It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences
of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day
roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their
first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of
the season's clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in
mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense
that it is summer only a little out of humor.
The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a
degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally
with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold,
objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort
to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a
pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among
people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no
means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed
that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are
the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the
harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different)
of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the
warmth which health demands.
The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer,
and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty,
and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments--the
smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the
grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the
insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy
the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of
carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the
comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception,
they are always removed during the summer--for the triple purpose of
sparing them some months' wear, banishing fleas and other domestic
insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement,
which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is
often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.
All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or of
that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy and
even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified plum-
pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with their
feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded gowns.
When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too heavy, but
it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian sometimes
wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only
legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to
such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost
rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in
the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in
its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class,
condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza,
shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close
little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat,
and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with
solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use
of the expressive American words _loaf_ and _loafer_, as the
only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice]
and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black
coffee, and playing long games of chess,--an evening that seemed to me as
torpid and lifeless as a Lap's, and intolerable when I remembered the
bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and
civilization.
Sometimes you find a heated stove--that is to say, one in which there has
been a fire during the day--in a Venetian house; but the stove seems
usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged only
in diffusing a very acrid smoke,--as if the Venetian preferred to take
warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself is a
curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering,--
whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and
radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm
mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to
see me, and most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as
part of the eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.
I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his
northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
severity is the _scaldino_, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino is
known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most
addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having
an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot
full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana's defense against cold is
complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to
room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my
fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over
the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she
sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion,
baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the
public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended
to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons.
There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and
Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in
furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in
her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea
of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we
fight for our sacred _scaldini_?
Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears, for
they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of poverty
below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the wretcheder
poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections of summer, as
Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances, during one of
his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon
the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as the season
advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and unswerving
adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no
reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment during the
whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so.
In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of
the effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true, few
people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona,
in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the reflection
that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is comparative warmth
in the broad squares before the churches, but the narrow streets are
bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in
all those picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have spoken.
It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter is
felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I deferred
the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery of the
Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the
severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I
thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of
Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and
their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and
broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio's architecture
was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the
traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he
trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic magnificence of the church
of the Redentore. But by all means the coldest church in the city is that
of the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will remember for its famous
marble drapery. This base, mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not
art) is effected by inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and
altars with a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is
marvelously skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the
church the effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the
marble is carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a
curtain, or wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent
a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a
harshness indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill
the soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable of
thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings, The
Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as
to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn
involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his
gridiron amid all that frigidity.
The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer
than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in
fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that such weather
as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before. In fine,
the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh, and though the
season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even Florence, it is
still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous fires and warmly-
built houses of the north. There was snow but once during my first
Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third,
which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay
unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The lagoons were frozen for miles in
every direction; and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great sheets of
ice went up and down with the rising and the falling tide for nearly a
whole month. The visible misery throughout the fireless city was great;
and it was a problem I never could solve, whether people in-doors were
greater sufferers from the cold than those who weathered the cruel winds
sweeping the squares and the canals, and whistling through the streets of
stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen
lagoons, though a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked
upon such a tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it
was said that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures
which seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds,
which flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to the
dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and desolation,
now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and danced upon the
waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had something
eldritch and unearthly in it.
A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was that
of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from the
island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the coldest
weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the island. The
wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the lagoon, blew his
boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the convent naturally
gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters drifted him eight
miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and there lodged his boat in
the marshes, where it froze fast in the stiffening mud. The luckless
occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his boat, where he remained five
days and nights, exposed to the inclemency of cold many degrees below
friendship in severity. He made continual signs of distress, but no boat
came near enough to discover him. At last, when the whole marsh was frozen
solid, he was taken off by some fishermen, and carried to the convent,
where he remains in perfectly recovered health, and where no doubt he will
be preserved alive many years in an atmosphere which renders dying a San
Lazzaro a matter of no small difficulty. During the whole time of his
imprisonment, he sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I
suppose no one will be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the
fishermen through the miraculous interposition of the Madonna--as any one
might have seen by the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of
the Riva degli Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking
through the clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing
the operations of the fishermen.
It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in Venice
since the famous _Anno del Ghiaccio_ (Year of the Ice), which fell
about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in the
local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full houses
at the people's theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture, by a
painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in hoops and
bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before the shop-
window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the guest of
the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the plans
arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government turned the cold
itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel brilliancy in its
festivities. The duties on commerce between the city and the mainland were
suspended for as long time as the lagoon should remain frozen, and the ice
became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and was everywhere covered with
sledges, bringing the produce of the country to the capital, and carrying
away its stuffs in return. The Venetians of every class amused themselves
in visiting this free mart, and the gentler and more delicate sex pressed
eagerly forward to traverse with their feet a space hitherto passable only
in gondolas. [Footnote: _Origine delle Feste Veneziane_, di Giustina
Renier-Michiel] The lagoon remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted
eighteen days, a period of cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song
now declares that the present generation has known a winter quite as
marvelous as that of the Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of
walking on the water:--
Che bell' affar!
Che patetico affar!
Che immenso affar!
Sora l'acqua camminar!
But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first Venetian
snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the morning when I
woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and vertically through
the motionless air, and all the senses were full of languor and repose. It
was rapture to lie still, and after a faint glimpse of the golden-winged
angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark's, to give indolent eye solely to the
contemplation of the roof opposite, where the snow lay half an inch deep
upon the brown tiles. The little scene--a few square yards of roof, a
chimney-pot, and a dormer-window--was all that the most covetous spirit
could demand; and I lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while
the lingering mists of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with
the luxurious humor of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made
my reverie one of the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the
deepest in it, I was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance
of a black cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant
exposures seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal,
and there are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon
the snow for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have
been better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less
soothing to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As
it was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left
every thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously
the cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the
dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did come
forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest interest in
the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I had felt
_ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations with
the world.
In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters and
day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable
shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it
engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But
the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending
flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort
in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.
The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow,
and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at
across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was
perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall
were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a structure that
always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be any
thing but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the
beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and
ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder--
or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous
freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the façade,
and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble
scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints,
was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble
like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest
white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as
if exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of
my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite
pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the
winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild and gentle
he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St. Theodore was
the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark adopted, when
the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The Venetians seem
to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an early friend, and
they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the granite pillars, while
the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing St. Mark. _Fra Marco e
Todaro_, is a Venetian proverb expressing the state of perplexity which
we indicate by the figure of an ass between two bundles of hay.] The
towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness;
the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like
phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque
distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.
CHAPTER IV.
COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her life
in every direction through an intricate system of streets and canals that
bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest uneasiness
had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the city at first,
there would always have been this comfort: that the place was very small
in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must reach the Piazza
sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to and from it, and
you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St. Mark's--or to the
Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely
_campi_, or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture
can give honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice
only, but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world
is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by the
Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace called
the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the left;
[Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the _Procuratori di San
Marco_.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width
upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the Gothic
perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward with the
name of Piazzetta, between the eastern façade of the Ducal Palace and the
classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and ends at last on the
mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore; and then this
mole, passing the southern façade of the Doge's Palace, stretches away to
the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity of the city, over half a score
of bridges, between lines of houses and shipping--stone and wooden walls--
in the long, crescent-shaped quay called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking
northward up the Piazzetta from the Molo, the vision traverses the eastern
breadth of the Piazza, and rests upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue
and gold, on which the bronze Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the
great mass of the Campanile San Marco, standing apart from the church at
the corner of the New Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the
sky--the sky where the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors
bounded Paradise in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I never,
during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without feeling
as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church, which the
mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines make to look
low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like a queen enthroned
amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is deeply appealed to, I
think, in the interior of St. Mark's; but if its interior is heaven's, its
exterior, like a good man's daily life, is earth's; and it is this winning
loveliness of earth that first attracts you to it, and when you emerge
from its portals, you enter upon spaces of such sunny length and breadth,
set round with such exquisite architecture, that it makes you glad to be
living in this world. Before you expands the great Piazza, peopled with
its various life; on your left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta,
swims the blue lagoon, and overhead climb the arches, one above another,
in excesses of fantastic grace.
Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and made
part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city's supreme grace;
and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant walks in the
city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the
Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie, is belted with a
glittering line of shops and caffè, the most tasteful and brilliant in the
world, and the arcades that pass round three of its sides are filled with
loungers and shoppers, even when there is music by the Austrian bands;
for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then walk under the
Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would be hopelessly
blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of dust and noisy
hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in Venice more than in
any other Italian city, though the tendency to this sort of expansion is
common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm days of early May, and
continuing till the _villeggiatura_ (the period spent at the country
seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice goes by a single impulse
of _dolce far niente_, and sits gossiping at the doors of the
innumerable caffè on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the Piazza San Marco,
and in the different squares in every part of the city. But, of course,
the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St. Mark's Place, which has a
night-time glory indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps upon
its architectural groups. The superb Imperial Palace--the sculptured,
arcaded, and pillared Procuratie--the Byzantine magic and splendor of the
church--will it all be there when you come again to-morrow night? The
unfathomable heaven above seems part of the place, for I think it is never
so tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred
with clouds, shall not the Piazza vanish with the azure?--People, I say,
come to drink coffee, and eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then,
what with the promenades in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the
sound of feet, and the hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of
cities where there are horses and wheels--the effect is that of a large
evening party, and in this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.
I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout, dead-in-
earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the Piazza,
could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
By all odds, the loungers at Florian's were the most interesting, because
they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met in the
dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division even there,
and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted themselves in a
room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and the Austriacanti
frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look at, those
tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for
them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak, they burst from
silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect
silence. The elder among them sat with their hands carefully folded on the
heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground, or else buried themselves
in the perusal of the French journals. The younger stood a good deal about
the doorways, and now and then passed a gentle, gentle jest with the
elegant waiters in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and fro
with the orders, and called them out in strident tones to the accountant
at his little table; or sometimes these young idlers make a journey to the
room devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked long and
deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then returned to the bosom of
their taciturn companions. By chance I found them playing chess, but very
rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, with beards carefully
cut, brilliant hats and boots, and conspicuously clean linen. I used to
wonder who they were, to what order of society they belonged, and whether
they, like my worthless self, had never any thing else but lounging at
Florian's to do; but I really know none of these things to this day. Some
men in Venice spend their noble, useful lives in this way, and it was the
proud reply of a Venetian father, when asked of what profession his son
was, "_È in Piazza!_" That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves,
and stared from Florian's windows at the ladies who went by.
At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene of
equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the
idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in Austrian-
German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the talk was
upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the interests of
self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely, intelligent-
looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and went
restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against the
tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking
against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and
one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one
sees them in civil clothes.
Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by
young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian's.
Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
is an index to every man's politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian, and
frequented by Italian _codini_, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
elders at Florian's. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is the
Caffè of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented there
by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed exactly
like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young of some
Oriental animal--say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffè, and in the shops,
where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of an appetite
unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the reader also
groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys about the base
of St. Mark's, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs before the church;
that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through the
Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the flocks of pigeons hovering
near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware
that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully in the guide-books.
Meantime, while I sit at Florian's, sharing and studying the universal
worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
south--so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
summer before the snows are dried upon the fields--descends upon the city
and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and where
here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty stone wall,
the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding leaf, and it is
human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for this reason that
the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere, and that here, where
the effect of the season is narrowed and limited to men's hearts, the joy
it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is certain at least that the
rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all times voiceful, seems to
burst into song with the advent of these golden days and silver nights.
Bands of young men go singing through the moonlit streets, and the Grand
Canal reëchoes the music of the parties of young girls as they drift along
in the scarcely moving boats, and sing the glories of the lagoons and the
loves of fishermen and gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and
sing; and wandering minstrels come forth before the caffè, and it is hard
to get beyond the tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is
as if the city had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as
Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in
spring it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in
the streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares,
and a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no
_homes_. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the
Italian, and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in
pleasant weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as
I said before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the
people sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the
caffè, and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their
places. The promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it
has its rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in
spring, even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the
Riva sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider
avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St.
Mark's in the arms of its high-breasted nurses,--mighty country-women,
who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of
gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free-
stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder
race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away
from our puny, dull-clad times.
"È la stagion che ognuno s'innamora;"
and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for hours,
subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at
them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian
housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and
gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling
their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work. Every
street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip; and if the
picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of which the
vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure there is a face
looking out of every window for all that, and the social, expansive
presence of the season is felt there.
The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in crumbling
palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the welcome air.
They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit
about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other
slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their raven-
haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert insects
that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within doors shines the
bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for an
instant.
Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the
Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest
street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one
of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the
spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March,
when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and
made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were
opened, I found that I had too much society.
Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-
ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a
mercer's and draper's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè
more or less brilliant, a green-grocer's and fruiterer's, a family
grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy
and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there
is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood-
carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could
preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news
of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance,
San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the
Rialto market.
Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost
imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins,
is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with
baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares;
louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long
cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement
for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers
who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the
ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who
brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd;--these were
the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to
frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out the
meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their sources.
There was one which puzzled me for a long time--a sharp, pealing cry that
ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all other sounds,
impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird in the tropic forests which
the terrified Spaniards called the _alma perdida_. After many days of
listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from a wretched, sun-
burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair
hung disheveled round her eyes, bloodshot with the strain of her incessant
shrieks.
In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by
tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth floor is the
_appartamento signorile_. From the balconies of these stories hung
the cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage
parrots, which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from
the crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the
casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite
was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all
odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant
serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief,
and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of
yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the
balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love
at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the
crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn; and
at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out upon the
square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident direction of a
mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of studying one
another's features through opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself
to use this means of learning the mirror's response to the damsel's
constant "Fair or not?" being a believer in every woman's right to look
well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in
the case, and turned again to the campo beneath--to the placid dandies
about the door of the caffè; to the tide of passers from the Merceria; the
smooth-shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these;
the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion
to the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace;
the files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering
lazily about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless
Austrian uniforms.
As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into the
city's heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet, and as
San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared and thundered
under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to sleepless youths
who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to abandon
San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I might enjoy the last
luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
Now, with the city's lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and in
the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on the
Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by
right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by
the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors at
the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of
_valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with
a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all
purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men's
tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would
strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and
frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost
heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in the
new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new
color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed
away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion.
Now, at last, you know _why_
"It was an Abyssinian maid"
who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you were
born!
The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
at his post.
CHAPTER V.
OPERA AND THEATRES.
With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly not
so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful
theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that it is
closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom go to
it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents to
support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the character of
the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is second-rate. It is
nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of several thousand
florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this account, of
supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in the little
German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the theatre is
carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of which receives
the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee of admission to
the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter to be satisfied
with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before you can reach your
place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course, but you do not sit down
there without paying. So, most Italians (who if they go at all go without
ladies) and the poorer sort of government officials stand; the orchestra
seats are reserved for the officers of the garrison. The first row of
boxes, which is on a level with the heads of people in the pit, is well
enough, but rank and fashion take a loftier flight, and sit in the second
tier.
You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations. The
people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the beauty is
the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter being the
fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the opera, some of
the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly dressed, and sat far
back in boxes of the third tier, and when they issued forth after the
opera were veiled beyond recognition. The audience usually takes its
enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for silence in the house, and
clapping hands for applause, without calling _bravo_,--an Italian
custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual with foreigners: with
Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and _f_.
I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out of
Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might be
chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause of
the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the events
which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly it cannot
be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God's gift of
beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You hear
the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as our own
colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an inborn
sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the cultivated
tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--
"That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole."
In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now an
imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her stages,
and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so famous,
have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular in Venice
as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the care of the
state for the drama existed from the first. The government, which always
piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre
advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the Old or New
Testament, began about the close of the century to protect and encourage
the instruction of music in the different foundling hospitals and public
refuges in the city. The young girls in these institutions were taught to
play on instruments, and to sing,--at first for the alleviation of their
own dull and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the public.
In the merry days that passed just before the fall of the Republic, the
Latin oratorios which they performed in the churches attached to the
hospitals were among the most fashionable diversions in Venice. The
singers were instructed by the best masters of the time; and at the close
of the last century, the conservatories of the Incurables, the Foundlings,
and the Mendicants were famous throughout Europe for their dramatic
concerts, and for those pupils who found the transition from sacred to
profane opera natural and easy.
With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is
hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen excellent
acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian comedy, which
is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni--compositions
deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where alone their admirable fidelity
of drawing and coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best comedy is
usually given to the educated classes at the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a
bloodier and louder drama is offered to the populace at Teatro Malibran,
where on a Sunday night you may see the plebeian life of the city in one
of its most entertaining and characteristic phases. The sparings of the
whole week which have not been laid out for chances in the lottery, are
spent for this evening's amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides
the families of comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a
multitude of the ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of
eight or ten soldi [Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the
Austrian florin, which is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.]
apiece, it is hard to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience,
in its likes and dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence.
It likes best the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers
again every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-
known Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--
which is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit,
but deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre, and
sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
spitted thrown into the bargain.
The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best to
go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
traditionary tricks of the stage.
The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete, and
every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to produce an
illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very artlessly
introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of the scene,
by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs to the top of
the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the vehemence of
their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention a certain
gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone than
that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by
the yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of
Goldoni. And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have
great and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing
the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested for
lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other was raging
in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences; but
for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini appears to be a
sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet ten inches high,
with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good-nature and
wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into trusting him, and
then beats them with a club upon the back of the head until they die. The
murders of this infamous creature, which are always executed in a spirit
of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous remarks, are
received with the keenest relish by the spectators and, indeed, the action
is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian race
seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they perform their parts
with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is wonderful. I have
witnessed death agonies on these little stages which the great American
tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could not surpass in
degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit
because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not
managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their
audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys
ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls,
supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long
coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or
Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their
cloaks thrown over their shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick
black hair; old women, all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with
hooded cloaks of coarse brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the
spectacle with approval, and take the drama _au grand sérieux_,
uttering none of the gibes which sometimes attend efforts to please in our
own country. Even when the hat, or other instrument of extortion, is
passed round, and they give nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of
fury and disappointment, calls out, "Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to
you!" and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse.
Though, indeed, _fioi de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian
parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their
children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak
upon him the deadliest insult which can be put into words.
In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of
the Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline
of the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must have
been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till the
middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris he
furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I have
heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and
invariable characters perform written plays.
Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis
personae_, and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice.
He is always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always
a merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in all
his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton
and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart.
To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part and
I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting his leg rigidly to
a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying, "Capisse la?" or "Sa
la?" (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest things in the world.
In nearly all of Goldoni's Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni's witty
management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty of
the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning
are most usually found, according to the popular notion in Italy.
The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are much
shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce, as
you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for
any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed to have
been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping
King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with
Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several
nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy
people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with
the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to
yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose
great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few
things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their
bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches
of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent
(Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the
large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when
the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed
his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in
benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of
Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of
the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many
passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior
of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the
expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a puppet of shaky and
vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
"Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is
thy brother's wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of
virtue." (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations
toward the pit.)
To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, "Honor?--
I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!" and attempting to pass the knight,
in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he yields to
the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples against him.
Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You
discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading
his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they
cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in
the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of
the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head
appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under
the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not
much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery
wholly irresistible.
The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace
and far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and
when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is
humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike
_empressement_. I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their
private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and
deprived of all positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate
their arms and legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas
seul_; but I think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular
ballets, as The Fall of Carthage, is their strong point.
The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions--
I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses
in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are young men of the
middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and
children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in
humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between
the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace
take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I
one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to
which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as "Caro Antonio," had
consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least
one love affair at the Marionette. "Caro Antonio" was humbly besought, "if
his heart still felt the force of love," to meet the writer (who softly
reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six
o'clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a
prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent
water this despairing little epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness
and bad spelling,--and dried away its briny tears on the blade of my oar.
If ever I thought to keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to
any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable
writer--its unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still,
however, when I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided
between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation
somewhere among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense
hoops under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
each other "Ciò!" Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall, thy
slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms of thy
velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly twinkling in
the light.
CHAPTER VI.
VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on
the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the
restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every
bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants
are very dirty--if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before using
them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the rooms are cold--if
you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in the centre of each
room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is not because the
prices are great--they are really very reasonable; it is not for any very
tangible fault that I object to life at the restaurants, and yet I cannot
think of its hopeless homelessness without rebellion against the whole
system it implies, as something unnatural and insufferable.
But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian civilization,
it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of Italian
character,--temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer classes,
one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare, and how with
a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb _mangiare_
remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But it is only just
to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not wholly the result of
necessity, for it prevails with other classes which could well afford the
opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of conviviality
with Venetians, as with the Germans and the English, and in degree with
ourselves; and I have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and
other social festivals of the people, how the crowd amused itself with any
thing--music, dancing, walking, talking--any thing but the great northern
pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, I make quite sure that
Venetian gayety is on few occasions connected with repletion; and I am
ashamed to confess that I have not always been able to repress a feeling
of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask
to be filled, or, at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North
has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to
appreciate the cheerful prudence of the South.
Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on a
piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated
frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner, it
of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but in
most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a piece of
boiled beef, a _minestra_ (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe,
and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the country. The
failings of the repast among all classes lean to the side of simplicity,
and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds sufficient comment in
his familiar invitation to dinner: "_Venga a mangiar quattro risi con
me_." (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of hospitality
in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the
city in the early half of the last century, he says that the number and
excellence of the eating-houses in the city made invitations to dinner at
private houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies offered to
strangers.
The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè,
and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof. "What
caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there." This is
frequently your new acquaintance's promise of friendship. And one may even
learn to like the social footing on which people meet at the caffè, as
well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one
evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some pleasant Paduans in one
of the magnificent saloons of the Caffè Pedrocchi, that I should like to
go there for society, if I could always find it there, much better than to
private houses. There is far greater ease and freedom, more elegance and
luxury, and not the slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the
gratification your friend's company has given you. One has not to be a
debtor in the sum of a friend's outlay for house, servants, refreshments,
and the like. Nowhere in Europe is the senseless and wasteful American
custom of _treating_ known; and nothing could be more especially
foreign to the frugal instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a
party of friends at a caffè eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes,
and pecuniarily, the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not,
according as each prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place
without calling for something; but I have frequently seen people respond
to this demand of custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the
expense of two soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a
chair, a table, and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you
like.
I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffè,--that of the
restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon the
Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost without
number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the sausage-maker, who
supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of _sguassetto_, to the
Caffè Florian. They all have names which are not strange to European ears,
but which ape sufficiently amusing to people who come from a land where
nearly every public thing is named from some inspiration of patriotism or
local pride. In Venice the principal restaurants are called The Steamboat,
The Savage, The Little Horse, The Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do
not know that any one of them is more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy
than another, or that any one of them suffers from the fact that all are
bad.
You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before stated,
of the breakfast's unsubstantiality. The dining commences about three
o'clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o'clock, most people
dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient, and no
guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the tables, or
clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter appears, and
calls out, dramatically, "Behold me!" takes the order, shrieks it to the
cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again, more dramatically
than ever, "Behold it ready!" and arrays it with a great flourish on the
table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the music of a brass band;
but I did not find that so utterly bewildering, so destructive of the
individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive to absent-minded
gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and clamor of the waiters
in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are, for the most part, patient
and quiet enough, eating their minestra and boiled beef in such peace as
the surrounding uproar permits them, and seldom making acquaintance with
each other. It is a mistake, I think, to expect much talk from any people
at dinner. The ingenious English tourists who visit the United States from
time to time, find us silent over our meat, and I have noticed the like
trait among people of divers races in Europe.
As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of
the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is
rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffè and the
restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher privileges
of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the most gross and
insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the world. Our boarding-
house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems to me
infinitely better than the restaurant life of young Italy. It is
creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this homelessness and domestic
outlawry, its young men still preserve the gentleness of civilization.
The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of the
place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the restaurant
for economy's sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is cheap, and its
cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. Indeed,
so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience proved the cost of a
dinner there to be little more than the cost of the raw material in the
market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the custom, which is common,
of sending home to purchasers meals from the eating-houses.
As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not so
noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution of
cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking is
done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from the
unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they grow
dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent with a
triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice opens upon
you at almost every turn,--everywhere, in fact, but in the Piazza and the
Merceria,--and looking in, you see its vast heaps of frying fish, and its
huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell to heaven with garlic and
onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden mountains of _polenta_
(a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made of Indian meal, and
universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp minnows, bowls of
rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and around the
fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware for a lavish and
a hospitable show, and for the representation of those scenes of Venetian
story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief. Here I like to take my
unknown friend--my scoundrel facchino or rascal gondolier--as he comes to
buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with the cook, who stands with a
huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming mysterious things from vasty
depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which ensues, and in which all the
chords of the human heart are touched, from those that tremble at high
tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad farce. When the diner has
bought his dinner, and issues forth with his polenta in one hand, and his
fried minnows or stewed snails in the other, my fancy fondly follows him
to his gondola-station, where he eats it, and quarrels volubly with other
gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region of
Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which are
found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more delicate
dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry, fried in
slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor breakfast
at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.
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