is both energy and idleness, and jolly friendships and laughter and
light-heartedness. Deep-laden market scows pass ponderously by, piled
high with fruits and vegetables, the rowers singing at their oars or
shouting voluble greetings. Fishermen step slowly along, balancing
baskets on their heads. Swarthy, black-eyed women, in dark skirts and
gay neckerchiefs and with mauve-colored shawls falling gracefully from
head to waist, throng the _riva_ shops and bargain over purchases with
violent gestures and eager earnestness. Priests returning from mass in
rusty black cassocks loiter among the noisy groups and are received
with profound bows and reverent touches of the cap. Husky, barefooted
girl water-carriers, known as the _bigolanti_, stride by with copper
vessels hanging from the yoke across their shoulders and offer you a
supply for a _soldo_. Up the intersecting canals endless processions
are passing over the arching bridges, and you pause, perhaps, to
observe the varied life from a place by the rail: girl bead-stringers
with wooden trays full of turquoise bits; garrulous pleasure parties
off for the Lido; laboring boatmen, breaking out into song; old men
and women shuffling along to gossip and quarrel around the carven
well-heads of the little _campi_; and now and then some withered old
aristocrat on his way to have coffee and chess at Florian’s and then a
solemn smoke over the “Gazetta di Venezia” before the Caffè Orientale
in the warm morning sun of the _riva_ of the Schiavoni.
How well the Foscari Palace, there, looks by night. The Foscari
Palace—poor old Foscari! It is a sad but glowing chapter his name
recalls. Here lived the great Doge, the least serene of all their
Serenities. Grown old in power and worn with foreign wars, his heart
broke over the treason of his worthless son, and the helpless, sobbing
old man, no longer of use, was deposed by The Ten in his tottering
age. The very next day he died—and there, in that palace. Just now,
when the red-fire glowed, a pale campanile stood out of the gloom to
the right and beyond the palace; that is where they buried him, in the
church of the Frari. With belated reverence and remorseful at having
dishonored him a few hours since, they proceeded to make history in
Venice with the splendor of his obsequies. They clothed him in cloth of
gold, set his ducal cap upon his head, buckled on his golden spurs,
and laid his great sword by his side. And thus in solemn pomp, attended
by nobles and lighted by countless tapers, the pageant passed out of
San Marco, crossed the Rialto, and came at last to the church of the
Frari. And there what is left of Doge Foscari lies to this day. It
is not a poor place to be in, either. The bones of Titian and Canova
are beside him, a Titian masterpiece glorifies the choir, and on the
opposite wall are two altar pieces of Bellini’s so lovely as to mark
the very zenith of Venetian art.
A pause in the music of the serenade brings us suddenly back to the
Venice of to-night. A vast scramble is in progress. We jostle and
scrape forward another few yards. The _barca_ sends a light hose-spray
to right, left, and in front in a desperate effort to clear a passage.
Dilatory or helpless gondoliers are lightly sprinkled, and all those of
us who a moment since had been envying their good positions now basely
give way to howls of joy. No use to struggle: all gondoliers are alike
in such a crush. A champion Castellani is no better than Paolo, if he
_is_ strong enough to bend copper _centesimi_ pieces between thumb and
finger. Presently we stop. The tumult rages, good-naturedly and jolly,
as the jockeying goes on for improved positions. And then there falls a
sudden silence. A tenor is singing the “Cielo e Mar” of “La Gioconda.”
You lie at full length on the cushions, the gondola lifting slowly with
an indolent sway, and under the spell of the dreamy, witching music
you watch the smoke of your cigar as it drifts up and over and out and
away toward the little streets in the dark.
Ah, little streets of Venice; under whatever name of _calle_ or _corto_
or _salizzada_, you are just the same—bedraggled and delightful! What
rare surprises are always reserved for each revisit—an overlooked
doorway, a balcony, some sculptured detail! If the house-fronts are
plastered and patched—still they are picturesquely discolored. If the
fantastic windows are out of plumb the gay shutters, nevertheless, are
charmingly faded and there are pretty faces behind the bars. The roofs
let in the rain—but how rookish and rickety they are. The battered
doors are low—but they have knockers that are ponderous and imposing.
Name plates are surprisingly large and keyholes deep and cavernous. The
stirrup-handled bell-wires run almost to the tiny iron balconies, away
up under the oval windows of the eaves—those little balconies that for
ages have never refused sympathetic regard for the hum of slippered
feet on the stone pavements below. And there are weathered store-fronts
with corrugated iron shutters and gilt signs on black boards; and under
your feet in the pavement are odd little slits for water to run off
in, that remind you of openings in letter-drops at home. There, too,
are the shops whose modest output arrays the Venetian poor to such
advantage, and there are the stores and markets where they bargain
for _frittole_ of white flour and oil, or _polenta_ of ground corn,
and personally pick out their sardines at ten for a penny, or indulge
in a fine _brunrino_ as large as a trout. There one sees picturesque
lanterns and gay little window-boxes full of flowers away up among
the chimneys and tin waterpipes. The rooms, perhaps, seem dark and
gloomy to us of modern houses, but you stop with a thrill of delight
at the happiness in the voice that carols a gay air from “Traviata”
somewhere in their depths, and you look up with a smile at the bright
bird that loves that dark cage. Some carping and fussy visitors may
compare these rude homes to the dungeons under the “Leads” beyond the
Bridge of Sighs, but how could they consistently be other than they
are, venerable and dirty, with splotches of paint and charcoal markings
and half-effaced pencil-drawings, of cracked plaster full of holes,
and all toned down by time and weather to a uniform mellow gray! Of
course, such critics accept, with all Italy, the proud ones with the
marble tablets that tell that Marco Polo lived there, or Petrarch,
or Titian, or Garibaldi, but the nameless and undistinguished many
are quite as worth preserving. Thus one appreciates the inspiration
of the authorities and applauds their industry in profusely tacking
up those little ovals of blue tin with the jealous warning in white
letters, “Divieto di Affisione”—that is, “Don’t spoil these walls
with placards!” So, peace, harping Philistine, to whom nothing is ever
hallowed! Though your emotions are thin and your enthusiasms a-chill,
respect these little byways; and if not for themselves, then for where
they bring you—to fascinating curiosity shops of the antiquarians
up the back courts; to charming _campi_ where you stand by graven
well-heads, wonderwist in the lengthening shadows of historic churches;
to lichen-grown bridges, themselves pictures, arched over sunny canals
overhung by gabled windows and flanked by garden walls pale blue with
wistaria; or (could you have forgotten?) to nothing less than the great
Piazza itself and glittering San Marco, the supreme jewel-casket of the
world.
But the wistful “Cielo e Mar” is ended, and we move along to opposite
the Accademia, treasure-temple of Venetian art. You uncovered just
then, my comrade of the night, and out of reverence to the Titian
Assumption, I dare say. I uncovered, too, but it was to the madonnas
and saints of Giovanni Bellini. Do you know them well? No? Not the
Santa Conversazione? Ah, then life still holds a delight in reserve for
you.
A sudden great and universal hush has fallen on canal and shore.
Another tenor, sweet and vibrant as a bell, breathes that tenderest of
all serenades, the one from “Don Pasquale.” At all times irresistible,
it seems doubly so now. The faces that you see are grave and eager and
transported. The silence and rapt attention is a tribute beyond words
to composer and singer; and where else but in Italy would a multitude
hush to a whisper when music sounds, and break into wild tumult when
it ceases? A few weeks here, and one comes to understand that music
is the very breath and life of these people. The vagabond Venetian,
penniless but happy, comes out of his doze in a corner of a sunny
_riva_ and before his mouth has settled from its yawn it is rounded
into a song. A bottle of cheap wine, a loaf of bread, and a guitar
provide joy enough for an army in the family parties of the poor that
float out on to the lagoon in rough market gondolas at sunset. Verdi
and Rossini make work light for women, walk to business with the men,
and hum comfort and courage all day. And so one needs to be discreet
and silent when a solo begins or be prepared for an instant and
tempestuous rebuke. But there seems little need for a warning to-night,
with the hand of Venice so strong upon us.
Between serenades one takes his ease on the cushions and looks about
on the people around him. Some one begins to whistle the jolly old
“Carnival of Venice,” and it is promptly taken up on all sides, bolder
spirits even venturing upon the variations. A German gives us the
Fatherland’s version, about the hat that had three corners. An enormous
Spaniard near at hand bellows a fragment of “I Pagliacci,” and is
thunderously applauded. His friends, embarrassed but elated, urge him
on to a second effort, which is received with indifference. On his
third attempt he is hissed. Such is the caprice of an open-air audience
in Italy.
The jolly stag party in the gondola to the right presses upon us the
hospitality of the capacious hamper, which we decline with a thousand
thanks and in gestures more intelligible than our pidgin-Italian.
At our elbow two slender American women in black provide excellent
eavesdropping entertainment. Here is talk to our liking, thrilling with
the names of men of fame who knew and loved this Venice. “Just over
there, Helen, is the palace where Browning lived and died. What an
elaborate place for a poet! Howells lived next door, you know, when he
wrote his ‘Venetian Life.’ These places are ever so much finer than the
one farther down where Goldoni wrote his comedies. Oh, don’t you know
the Goldoni house? It is this side the Rialto, just opposite the Byron
Palace with the blue-striped gondola posts.” “I think,” says the other,
“that the memories are quite as rich farther on. At the Hotel Europa,
you remember, Chateaubriand once lived, and so did George Eliot; and
from there you can see the Danieli where George Sand and Alfred de
Musset sought happiness but only found misery.” At mention of the
Europa the face of her friend is transfigured and our own hearts beat
high in sympathy with the reverence of the lowered voice: “Wagner wrote
‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Europa. He died in the palace where the
three trees stand, away down beyond the Rialto.” Oh, deathless Venice!
Oh, universal Love! They marvel at this elfin world—the English
father, mother, and son in the gondola ahead.
“It is a mode of mind.”
“Or a form of hypnosis; a psychological phase.”
The boy turns from the distant fairy candles of San Marco and regards
them with amaze and disapproval. His enthusiasms are keen and a-quiver
and the freshness of life’s morning is on his face. “Don’t analyze,”
he says. “Just breathe it and feel it.” The parents exchange amused
glances and smile indulgently. “‘Out of the mouth of babes and
sucklings,’” quotes the father under his breath; but we know, and they
know, that they have been answered.
Gorgeous silks and priceless tapestries and rare Oriental stuffs have
doubtless often hung from the balconies of the palace on the right in
the great gala days of the wonderful past when the Carnival lasted
half a year. The law had not yet ruled that all gondolas must be a
uniform solemn black, and the cradle-like boat of to-day, for all its
brass dolphins and carven scenes from the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” would
have cut a sorry figure beside the sumptuous ones of an earlier time,
with their mountings of silver and gold, profusion of rich colors,
upholstery of enormous value, and bearing owners of fabulous wealth
whose names were written in the city’s Book of Gold. Ah, those were
the triumphant days when foreign princes waited, half a hundred at a
time, to have the judgment of the Venetian Senate on the affairs of
their states; when royalty was no unusual spectacle on the Piazza of
San Marco; when the argosies of the world, “with portly sail,” came
to anchor in these waters; when Dante and Petrarch were received as
ambassadors; when the Admirable Crichton would be tossed a hundred
ducats for amusing the Senate with an extemporized Latin oration; and
when his Serenity, the Doge, on Ascension Day fared forth in dazzling
splendor to espouse the sea from the throne of his sumptuous Bucentoro.
The glory of that old and powerful Venice can never pass from the
memory of men. Whole libraries preserve it in imperishable record. It
is interesting, too, to note how it affected bygone visitors just as it
does us to-day—as when one turns the pages of John Evelyn’s “Diary”
and smiles to see how soon it was after his “portmanteau” had been
“visited” at the Dogana customs-offices that he pronounced the Merceria
to be “one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness
of it,” and learned with amaze of the skill and rapidity of Venetian
artisans who, while King Henry III of England was one day visiting the
Arsenal, built a galley, rigged, and finished it for launching, and
cast a cannon of sixteen thousand pounds and put it on board,—and
all while his Majesty was having luncheon. There was, indeed, a great
deal of the marvelous about men who could contrive glass goblets so
sensitive as to betray the presence of poison, or who could at so early
an age make such exquisite books as the Aldine classics, to the despair
of publishers for hundreds of years to follow.
Just now, in the fitful glare of red-lights, hundreds of eager Venetian
faces, transported as always by the spirit of Carnival, were seen
in excited groupings in every nook and corner of the neighboring
_fondamente_. One thinks how different is the present scene from
those these people are accustomed to look upon on other nights. You
would find them then in the little family squares whose corners are
shrines of the Virgin set with flowers and illumined with candles.
Husband and wife will, perhaps, have spent the early evening in
gallery seats at the Teatro Goldoni, and Giovanni, weary with a long
day at the _traghetto_, would have finished thumbing the headlines
of the day’s “L’ Adriatico” and would now have his friends about
him, and Maria would let the _bambino_ stay up a little longer, and
all would feast with prodigious merriment and satisfaction on the
ever-popular _soupe au pidocchi_,—which is mussel-broth flavored with
spices,—to be followed by Chioggia eels and white wine of Policella.
Neighboring women would, of course, drop in for their dearly loved
gossip, hatless, with silver pins fastening their blue-black hair,
coral beads around their necks, and draping shawls thrown over their
bright waists. And presently some withered old coffee-roaster would
drag himself in with his fragrant ovens glowing, the bright flames
leaping, and toffee-venders would plead for sales. With the ease of
sleight-of-hand a guitar suddenly makes its appearance out of nowhere
and everybody enthusiastically joins in some haunting, languorous,
dreamy _villotte_ dear to the hearts of Venetians. Just around the
corner lounging groups would be scattered before café doors and voices
would be humming in low, eager talk. The usual wrangling and bargaining
would be in progress at the cooking-stalls piled high with fish and
garlic, _polenta_, cabbages, and apples. In near-by _trattorie_ with
sanded floors artistic bohemia, with ambition numbed by the latest
African sirocco, battens on bowls of macaroni in a turmoil of smoke and
confusion. In the dark interior of a neighboring wineshop one would
find the wonderful golden-browns that Rembrandt loved, as a single
oil lamp glows on the weathered faces of a circle of old cronies.
And somewhere, just at hand, a gondolier’s weird and fascinating cry
of “Ah, Stalì!” would be heard; and all about them Venice would be
crooning her ancient lullaby in the ceaseless, low lapping of water on
stone steps.
All together and forward once more, to opposite the church of the
Salute. We have lost our recent neighbors and have an entirely new
set. The changes in the grouping are like the shuffling units of a
kaleidoscope. A brilliant company is gathered on the balconies of
Desdemona’s Palace, but Othello is not among them—another piece of
calculated devilty, no doubt, on the part of the crafty Iago! Still,
Portia is there from flowery Belmont and with her are Jessica and
Lorenzo. The music is now from melodious old “Dinorah,” charmingly
rendered and just as soothing as the first time one ever heard it.
The Salute stands out impressively in her great domes and elaborate
spirals. It is beautiful, of course, by night, but then if it were day
we might run inside and revel in Titians and Tintorettos. The fantastic
columns fade and flash as the red and green fires smoulder or flame,
and the gilded Fortuna on the dome of the adjoining Dogana catches some
of the glitter and generously sends it on to the Seminario in the rear.
Some one calls my name from among the oleanders of the Britannia
terrace, just opposite. What a delight to be known by name in this
charmed city! I look up at the adjoining hotel and there are the
windows of my room, and I know that within in the dark my clothing and
articles of travel lie about. With secret wonder I whisper to myself
that I, after all the years of waiting and hoping, _I_ am actually a
part of Venice!
One might think there could not possibly be any more gondolas in all
the city outside of to-night’s tremendous gathering; but even now you
could find them floating lazily about the lagoons, or away out toward
the Lido where the moist winds are ruffling the water and the distant
Bride of the Sea seems only some sort of bright exhalation. Theirs is
a languorous and listless drifting and their dim lamps waver slowly
like glowworms. Little need there for the musical wails of “Ah, Premì!”
“Ah, Stalì!” Little of such complaint as Byron made that gondoliers are
songless, for one could not ask for more plaintive and soothing melody
than the low, passionate crooning of the barefooted boy at the oar.
And, perhaps, in the musky dark of silent canals more gondolas than one
are even now stealing lightly and with love’s devious purposes under
the fretted balconies of the star-eyed daughters of Venice, while Beppo
muffles his oar to the warning of Tom Moore:—
“Row gently here, my gondolier;
So softly wake the tide,
That not an ear on earth may hear
Save hers to whom we glide!”
It seems weeks since, in the cool of this very morning, out at the
little island of Burano, I lunched under shady locusts in the quiet
garden of “The Crowned Lion.” It was a pleasant stop on the way to
deserted old Torcello—Torcello that mothered Venice, but now sleeps,
a clutter of grass-grown ruins, in the appalling stillness of her
weedy canals and thickets of blackberry hedges. Within a cable length
of where our gondola is now resting a black, tarry fishing-bark tugs
at anchor. If it were day and her sails were set, one could not help
being delighted over the oranges and reds and blues of her patched
and weathered canvas, the curve of the elaborately painted bow, and
the spirited air of the curious figurehead. Unchanged survivors of
the fading Past are these sturdy old _bragozzi_ of Chioggia, and one
could not ask for a braver show than they present when they hoist their
painted sails to dry in one long line from the Public Gardens to the
Doge’s Palace.
It was at Chioggia that we loitered, a few days back, and fed on
picturesqueness to satiety. We have but to close our eyes—and there
are the grizzled old fellows in red _berrettas_, trousers rolled to
their wiry brown knees and great hoops of yellow gold in their ears.
When the midday sun was hottest we found them sitting in the shade of
their fishing-boats’ sails, mending their nets with wooden bodkins and
brown twine. In the old days, when the hand of Venice was all-powerful
in this part of the world, the Chioggians were the gayest and most
picturesque people of these islands. Artists still consider them the
purest types of Venetians, but they are a sad and melancholy lot now,
as if burdened with the heritage of glorious memories. It seemed to me
that the old men were the happiest living things in Chioggia; then,
perhaps, came the boys, then the girls, and last of all the women—and
the older the women the gloomier. The flirt of a sober mantilla is the
nearest they ever come nowadays to gayety.
We shall never forget, nor ever want to, that wonderful sail back from
Chioggia to Venice. Listening to the music on the Canal to-night the
memory of it seems compact of dreams, or as the florid cloister-fancy
of a Middle-Ages monk that we had read in some illuminated old volume
bound in vellum and clasped with gold. There was all the vitalizing
pageantry of sunset about us, all the immensity of sky and sea, and
many a bright little island rising out of the rippling lagoon this
side the marshy wastes. The yellow strips of Pellestrina and Malamocco
topped the waves in two long lines, like half-submerged reefs of gold.
Above was a vast dome of turquoise glinted with pinks and grays, and
with here and there a little heap of snowy clouds. Every phase of the
wonderful sky was reproduced in the water. The sun reflected a second
sun of no less ruddy fire which burned across the sea in a broad
highway of shaking light that rolled to our very feet. The piled and
fleecy clouds were steeped in gold, and bands of purple mists across
Shelley’s Euganean Hills were pierced by it through and through.
Venice, a mirage of the azure sea, rose slowly as we drew nearer, a
witchery of towers, campaniles, palaces, painted sails, and drifting
gondolas. As the dimming beauty faded with the brief Eastern twilight
and we were gazing in awe on the enchanting panorama, there suddenly
loomed a fresh and added glory, for just above the topmost pinnacle of
stately San Giorgio floated a young summer moon!
Beauty has here an abiding-place. Venice is doubtless a fairer vision
now, with its myriad lights, than when the only illumination was
from flickering tapers before the corner shrines of the Virgin. More
comfortable it surely is than when St. Roche himself was baffled by
more than seventy plagues. The jaunty boatman and his peerless gondola
still charm us, and dustless and noiseless the city continues musical
with the cheery hum of voices and the soft shuffle of feet. In the
cool twilight of the churches marvels of sculpture and immortal
canvases still inspire and enthrall. Time has added new charms to the
marbles of bell tower, church, and palace, and nature still employs
a witchery scarce equaled elsewhere in decking the Sea City with
flowers. From the water-lilies of the Brenta, the flaming begonia
trumpets of the Giudecca, the pale sea-lavender of the Dead Lagoon, the
rose-pergolas and oleander-cloisters of San Lazzaro, the primroses and
sea-holly of the Lido wooded with odorous acacias and white-flowered
catalpas, and carpeted with crimson poppies and the snowy Star of
Bethlehem, away out to the sand dunes and lush grasses of Triporti,
there continually rises an inexhaustible incense of fragrance and
beauty.