May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the
days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than
the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, and more
golden than ever as the day descends. It seems to expand and evaporate,
to multiply all its reflections and iridescences. Then the life of its
people and the strangeness of its constitution become a perpetual
comedy, or, at least, a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole
habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido,
though the Lido has been spoiled. When I was first in Venice, in 1869,
it was a very natural place, and there was only a rough lane across the
little island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a
bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but
where, in the warm evenings, your dinner did not much matter as you sat
letting it cool upon the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea.
To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy, and has been made the victim
of villainous improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on
its rural bosom, and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta
to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walls and gas-lamps, lodging-houses,
shops, and a _teatro diurno_. The bathing-establishment is bigger than
before, and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation, perhaps,
that the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you will not
scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which
bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats,
with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon.
The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily
walk away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset
is classical and indispensable, and those who, at that glowing hour,
have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon, will not
easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger
excursions--you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia.
Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting
little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of
the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its
primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed
ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the
charm of the place, its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh
departed. It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on
the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the
wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am sorry to
say--can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of
its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though
some of the ladies are rather bold about it, every one of them shows you
a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and, in their
desire to be satisfied, pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a
larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad,
half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of
bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls
with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with
splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow
shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that
click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of
brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive
throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a
certain traditional defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice
are almost as handsome as the women; I have never seen so many
good-looking fellows. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their
nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always
high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they
decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and throats as
richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--their sea-faded
tatters which are always a "costume"--their soft Venetian jargon, and
the gallantry with which they wear their hats--an article that nowhere
sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy, you
will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on a
balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad
ledge, a cigarette in your teeth, and a little good company beside you.
The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from
their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously
in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many
gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels.
The serenading (in particular) is overdone; but on such a balcony as I
speak of you needn't suffer from it, for in the apartment behind you--an
accessible refuge--there is more good company, there are more
cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently.