THE PIAZZA AND THE CAMPANILE
The heart of Venice--Old-fashioned music--Teutonic invaders--The
honeymooners--True republicanism--A city of the poor--The black
shawls--A brief triumph--Red hair--A band-night incident--The
pigeons of the Piazza--The two Procuratie--A royal palace--The
shopkeepers--Florian's--Great names--Venetian restaurants--Little
fish--The old campanile--A noble resolve--The new campanile--The angel
vane--The rival campanili--The welcome lift--The bells--Venice from the
Campanile.
S. Mark's Square, or the Piazza, is more than the centre of Venice: to a
large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore
among its arcades.
No other city has so representative a heart. On the four musical nights
here--afternoons in the winter--the Piazza draws like a magnet. That
every stranger is here, you may be sure, and most Venetian men. Some sit
outside Florian's and the other cafés; others walk round and round the
bandstand; others pause fascinated beside the musicians. And so it has
been for centuries, and will be. New ideas and fashions come slowly into
this city, where one does quite naturally what one's father and
grandfather did; and a good instance of such contented conservatism is
to be found in the music offered to these contented crowds, for they are
still true to Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini, and with reluctance are
experiments made among the newer men.
In the daytime the population of the Piazza is more foreign than
Venetian. In fact the only Venetians to be seen are waiters,
photographers, and guides, the knots of errand boys watching the
artists, and, I might add, the pigeons. But at night Venice claims it,
although the foreigner is there too. It is amusing to sit at a table on
the outside edge of Florian's great quadrangle of chairs and watch the
nationalities, the Venetians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the
Anglo-Saxons, as they move steadily round and round. Venice is, of
course, the paradise both of Germans and Austrians. Every day in the
spring and summer one or two steamers arrive from Trieste packed with
Austrian tourists awfully arrayed. Some hundreds have to return to
Trieste at 2 o'clock; other hundreds remain till night. The beautiful
word Venezia, which we cheapen but not too cruelly to Venice and the
French soften to Venise, is alas! to Teutonic tongues Venedig.
The Venetians reach the Square first, smart, knowing, confident,
friendly, and cheerful; then the Germans and Austrians, very obviously
trippers; and then, after their hotel dinners, at about quarter past
nine, the English: the women with low necks, the men in white shirts,
talking a shade too loud, monarchs of all they survey. But the
honeymooners are the best--the solicitous young bridegrooms from
Surbiton and Chislehurst in their dinner-jackets and black ties; their
slender brides, with pretty wraps on their heads, here probably for the
last or the first time, and so determined to appear Continental and
tolerant, bless their hearts! They walk round and round, or sit over
their coffee, and would be so happy and unselfconscious and clinging
were it not for the other English here.
The fine republicanism of Venice is nowhere so apparent as on band
nights. Such aristocrats as the city holds (and judging from the
condition of the palaces to-day, there cannot be many now in residence)
either look exactly like the middle classes or abstain from the Piazza.
The prevailing type is the well-to-do citizen, very rarely with his
women folk, who moves among street urchins at play; cigar-end hunters;
soldiers watchful for officers to salute; officers sometimes returning
and often ignoring salutes; groups of slim upright Venetian girls in the
stately black shawls, moving, as they always do, like queens; little
uniformed schoolboys in "crocodiles"; a policeman or two; a party from
the country; a workman with his wife and babies (for though the
Venetians adore babies they see no incongruity in keeping them up till
ten o'clock); epauletted and cockhatted gendarmes; and at intervals,
like ghosts, officials from the arsenal, often alone, in their spotless
white linen.
Every type of Venetian is seen in the Square, save one--the gondolier.
Never have I seen a gondolier there, day or night: not because it is too
grand for him, but it is off his beat. When he has done his work he
prefers the wine shops of his own sestiere. No thought of any want of
welcome would deter him, for Venice is republic to the core. In fact one
might go farther and say that it is a city of the poor. Where the poor
lived in the great days when the palaces were occupied by the rich, one
cannot quite understand, since the palace is the staple building; but
there is no doubt as to where they live now: they live everywhere. The
number of palaces which are wholly occupied by one family must be
infinitesimal; the rest are tenements, anything but model buildings,
rookeries. Venice has no aristocratic quarter as other cities have. The
poor establish themselves either in a palace or as near it as possible.
I have referred to the girls in their black shawls or scialli. They
remain in the memory as one of Venice's most distinguished possessions.
A handsome young private gondolier in white linen with a coloured scarf,
bending to the oar and thrusting his boat forward with muscular strokes,
is a delight to watch; but he is without mystery. These girls have grace
and mystery too. They are so foreign, so slender and straight, so sad.
Their faces are capable of animation, but their prevailing expression is
melancholy. Why is this? Is it because they know how secondary a place
woman holds in this city of well-nourished, self-satisfied men? Is it
that they know that a girl's life is so brief: one day as supple and
active as they are now and the next a crone? For it is one of the
tragedies that the Venetian atmosphere so rapidly ages women.
But in their prime the Venetian girls in the black shawls are
distinguished indeed, and there was not a little sagacity in the remark
to me by an observer who said that, were they wise, all women would
adopt a uniform. One has often thought this, in London, when a nurse in
blue or grey passes refreshingly along a pavement made bizarre by
expensive and foolish fashions; one realizes it even more in Venice.
Most of these girls have dark or black hair. The famous red hair of
Venetian women is rarely seen out of pictures.
Round and round goes the chattering contented crowd, while every table
at each of the four cafés, Florian's and the Aurora, the Quadri and the
Ortes Rosa, swells the noise. Now and then the music, or the ordinary
murmur of the Square in the long intervals, is broken by the noisy
rattle of a descending shop shutter, or the hour is struck by the
Merceria clock's bronze giants; now and then a pigeon crosses the sky
and shows luminous where the light strikes its breast; now and then a
feather flutters from a window ledge, great bats flit up and down, and
the mosquitoes shrill in one's ear. It is an entertainment never failing
in interest to the observer, and not the least amusing question that one
asks oneself is, Where does every one sleep?
I shall always remember one band night here, for it was then that I saw
a girl and her father whose images will never leave me, I know not why.
Every now and then, but seldom indeed, a strange face or form will thus
suddenly photograph itself on the memory, when it is only with the
utmost concentrated effort, or not at all, that we can call up mental
pictures of those near and dear to us. I know nothing of these two; I
saw them only once again, and then in just the same fugitive way; but if
an artist were now to show me a portrait of either, I could point out
where his hand was at fault. The band was playing the usual music--_Il
Trovatore_ or _Aïda_ or _Lohengrin_--and the crowd was circulating when
an elderly man with a long-pointed grey beard and moustache and the
peculiar cast of countenance belonging to them (Don Quixotic) walked
past. He wore a straw hat slightly tilted and was smoking a cigar. His
arm was passed through that of a tall slender girl of about his own
height, and, say, twenty-five, in red. She was leaning towards him and
he slightly inclined towards her. They walked faster than Venice, and
talked animatedly in English as they passed me, and the world had no one
in it but themselves; and so they disappeared, with long strides and a
curious ease of combined movement almost like skillful partners in a
dance. Two nights later I saw them again. This time she was in black,
and again they sailed through the crowd, a little leaning towards each
other, he again holding her arm, and again both discussing in English
something with such interest that they were conscious of nothing around
them. Sitting outside a café on the Piazza every evening for a month,
one naturally sees many travellers come and go; but none other in that
phantasmagoria left any mark on my mind. Why did these?
So much for S. Mark's Square by night. With thousands of persons, to
think of S. Mark's Square by day is chiefly to think of pigeons. Many a
visitor to Venice who cannot remember the details of a single painting
there can show you a photograph of herself with pigeons on her shoulders
and arms. Photographers and dealers in maize are here all day to effect
these pretty conjunctions; but the Kodak has seriously impaired their
profits. The birds are smaller than our London monsters and not quite so
brilliantly burnished. How many there are I have no idea; but since they
are sacred, their numbers must be ever increasing. Why they are sacred
is something of a mystery. One story states that the great Enrico
Dandolo had carrier-pigeons with him in the East which conveyed the
grand tidings of victories to Venice; another says that the same heroic
old man was put in possession of valuable strategic information by means
of a carrier-pigeon, and on returning to Venice proclaimed it a bird to
be reverenced. There was once a custom of loosing a number of pigeons
among the crowd in the Piazza on Palm Sunday. The birds being weighted
floundered downwards and were caught and killed for the pot; but such as
escaped were held to have earned their liberty for ever.
[Illustration: THE PRESENTATION
FROM THE PAINTING BY TITIAN
_In the Accademia_]
At night no doubt the pigeons roost among S. Mark's statuary and on
convenient ledges in the neighbourhood; by day, when not on the pavement
of the Piazza, the bulk of the flock are dotted about among the reliefs
of the Atrio, facing S. Mark's.
They have no timidity, but by a kind of honourable understanding they
all affect to be startled by the bells at certain hours and the midday
gun, and ascend in a grey cloud for a few seconds.
They are never so engaging as when flying double, bird and shadow,
against the Campanile.
Their collective cooing fills the air and makes the Piazza's day music.
Venetians crossing the Piazza walk straight on, through the birds, like
Moses crossing the Red Sea; the foreigners pick their way.
What with S. Mark's and the pigeons, the Campanile and coffee, few
visitors have any time to inquire as to the other buildings of the
Piazza. Nor are they of much interest. Briefly they are the Old
Procuratie, which forms the side on which the clock is, the Atrio or
Nuova Fabbrica opposite S. Mark's, and the New Procuratie on the
Campanile side. The Old Procuratie, whose main row of windows I once
counted, making either a hundred or a hundred and one, is now offices
and, above, residences. Here once abode the nine procurators of Venice
who, under the Doge, ruled the city.
The New Procuratie is now the Royal Palace, and you may see the royal
lackeys conversing with the sentinels in the doorway by Florian's. It is
the finer building: over the arches it has good sprawling
Michael-Angelesque figures, noble lions' heads, and massive
ornamentations.
I don't know for certain, but I should guess that the Royal Palace in
Venice is the only abode of a European King that has shops underneath
it. Wisely the sleeping apartments face the Grand Canal, with a garden
intervening; were they on the Piazza side sleep would be very
difficult. But all the great State rooms overlook the Piazza. The Palace
is open on fixed days and shown by a demure flunkey in an English bowler
hat, but it should be the last place to be visited by the sightseer. Its
only real treasures--the Tintorettos illustrating the life of S.
Mark--were not visible on the only occasion on which I ventured in.
Beneath these three buildings--the two Procuratie and the Fabbrica
Nuova--runs an arcade where the Venetians congregate in wet weather and
where the snares for tourists are chiefly laid by the dealers in
jewellery, coral, statuary, lace, glass, and mosaic. But the Venetian
shopkeepers are not clever: they have not the sense to leave the nibbler
alone. One has not been looking in the window for more than two seconds
before a silky-voiced youth appears at the door and begins to recommend
his wares and invite custom; and then of course one moves away in
terror.
Here, too, under the arcade, are the head-quarters of the cafés, which
do most of their business on the pavement of the Square. Of these
Florian's is the oldest and best. At certain hours, however, one must
cross the Square to either the Ortes Rosa or Quadri, or be roasted. The
original Florian was wise in his choice of site, for he has more shady
hours than his rivals opposite. In an advertisement of the café in the
musical programme it is stated that, "the oldest and most aristocratic
establishment of its kind in Venice, it can count among its clients,
since 1720, Byron, Goethe, Rousseau, Canova, Dumas, and Moor," meaning
by Moor not Othello but Byron's friend and biographer, the Anacreon of
Erin. How Florian's early patrons looked one can see in a brilliant
little picture by Guardi in the National Gallery, No. 2099. The café
boasts that its doors are never shut, day or night; and I have no doubt
that this is true, but I have never tested it in the small hours.
Oddly enough there are no restaurants in the Piazza, but many about its
borders on the north and west. The visitor to Venice, as a rule, eats in
his hotel; and I think he is wise. But wishing to be in Venice rather
more thoroughly than that, I once lived in rooms for a month and ate in
all the restaurants in turn. Having had this experience I expect to be
believed when I say that the restaurants of Venice are not good. The
food is monotonous, and the waiting, even at what is called the best,
the Bauer-Grünwald, say, or the Pilsen, is leisurely. Add to this that
the guests receive no welcome, partly because, all the places being
understaffed, no one can be spared for that friendly office, and partly
because politeness is not a Venetian foible. An immense interval then
elapses before the lista, or bill of fare, is brought, partly because
there is no waiter disengaged and partly because there seems to be a law
in Venetian restaurants that one lista shall suffice for eight tables.
Then comes the struggle--to find anything new either to eat or drink.
The lista contains in print a large number of attractive things, but few
are obtainable, for on an Italian menu print is nothing: it is only the
written words that have any relevance. The print is in Italian and
German, the reason being that Italians, Germans, and Austrians are the
only people who resort to restaurants. The English and Americans eat in
their hotels, en pension. (In Venice, I might say, all foreigners are
addressed first in German, except by the little boys in the streets
whose one desire on earth is to direct you to S. Marco and be paid for
their trouble. They call you _m'soo_.) Once a meal is ordered it comes
rapidly enough, but one has to be very hungry to enjoy it. For the most
part Venetian food is Italian food: that is to say, almost wholly veal
and paste; but in the matter of fish Venice has her specialities. There
are, for examples, those little toy octopuses which on my first visit,
twenty-five years ago, used to be seen everywhere in baskets at corners,
but now have disappeared from the streets. These are known as calamai or
calamaretti, and if one has the courage to take the shuddering first
step that counts they will be found to be very good. But they fail to
look nice. Better still are scampi, a kind of small crawfish, rather
like tenderer and sweeter langouste.
To the investigator I recommend the dish called variously frutta di mare
and fritto misto, in which one has a fried jumble of the smaller sea
creatures of the lagoon, to the scampi and calamaretti being added fresh
sardines (which the fishermen catch with the hand at low tide), shrimps,
little soles, little red mullets, and a slice or two of big cuttle fish.
A popular large fish is the bronzino, and great steaks of tunny are
always in demand too. But considering Venice's peculiar position with
regard to the sea and her boasted dominion over it fish are very dear.
Even more striking is the dearness of fruit, but this, I take it, is due
to the distance that it must come, either by rail or water. No
restaurant that I discovered--as in the fair land of France and indeed
elsewhere in Italy--places wine or grapes free on the table.
As I say, I tried all the Venetian houses, small and large--the Cappello
Nero, the Bella Venezia, the Antico Panada, the Bauer-Grünwald, the
Bonvecchiato, the Cavalletti, the Pilsen; and the only one I felt any
desire to return to was the Pilsen, which is large and noisy and
intensely Teutonic, but a shade more attentive than the others. The
Bella Venezia is the best purely Venetian house.
I cannot remember the old campanile with enough vividness to be sure,
but my impression is that its brick was a mellower tint than that of the
new: nearer the richness of S. Giorgio Maggiore's, across the water.
Time may do as much for the new campanile, but at present its colour is
not very satisfactory except when the sun is setting. Indeed, so new is
it that one cannot think of it as having any association whatever with
S. Mark's. If it belongs to anything it is to Venice as a whole, or
possibly the Royal Palace. Yet one ought not to cavil, for it stands so
bravely on the spot where its predecessor fell, and this is a very
satisfactory proof that the Venetians, for all the decay of their lovely
city and the disappearance of their marvellous power, are Venetians
still.
The old campanile, after giving various warnings, fell on July 14, 1902,
at half-past nine in the morning. On the evening of the same day the
Town Council met, under the chairmanship of Count Grimani, the mayor,
and without the least hesitation decided that a successor must be
erected: in the fine words of the count: "Dov'era, com'era" ("Where it
was and as it was"). Sympathy and contributions poured in from the
outside world to strengthen the hands of the Venetians, and on S. Mark's
Day (April 25), 1903, the first stone was laid. On S. Mark's Day, 1912,
the new campanile was declared complete in every part and blessed in the
presence of representatives of all Italy, while 2479 pigeons, brought
hither for the purpose, carried the tidings to every corner of the
country.
The most remarkable circumstance about the fall of the campanile is
that no one was hurt. The Piazza and Piazzetta are by no means empty at
half-past nine in the morning, yet these myriad tons of brick and stone
sank bodily to the ground and not a human bruise resulted. Here its
behaviour was better than that of the previous campanile of S. Giorgio
Maggiore, which, when it fell in 1774, killed one monk and injured two
others. Nor was S. Mark's harmed, although its sacristan confesses to
have been dumb for three days from the shock. The falling golden angel
from the top of the campanile was found in front of the central door as
though to protect the church. Sansovino's Loggetta, it is true, was
crushed and buried beneath the debris, but human energy is indomitable,
and the present state of that structure is a testimony to the skill and
tenacity which still inhabit Venetian hands and breasts.
What I chiefly miss in the new campanile is any aerial suggestion. It
has actual solidity in every inch of it, apart from the fact that it
also conveys the idea of solidity, as any building must which has taken
the place of one so misguided as to fall down. But its want of this
intangible quality, together with its newness, have displaced it in my
eyes as the king campanile of Venice. In my eyes the campanile of S.
Giorgio Maggiore now reigns supreme, while I am very much attached also
to those of the Frari and S. Francesco della Vigna. But let S. Mark's
campanile take heart: some day Anno Domini will claim these others too,
and then the rivalry will pass. But as it is, morning, noon, and evening
the warm red bricks and rich green copper top of S. Giorgio Maggiore's
bell-tower draw the gaze first, and hold it longest. It is the most
beautiful campanile of all, and its inevitableness is such that did we
not know the truth we should wonder if the six days of creation had not
included an afternoon for the ordainment of such edifices.
It would need a Hans Andersen to describe the feelings of the other
Venetian campaniles when S. Mark's tall column fell. S. Giorgio's I
imagine instantly took command, but no doubt there were other claimants
to the throne. I rather fancy that the Frari's had something to say, and
S. Pietro in Castello's also, on account of his age and his early
importance; but who could pay any serious attention at that time to a
tower so pathetically out of the perpendicular as he now is?
The new campanile endeavours to reproduce the old faithfully, and it was
found possible to utilize a little of the old material. The figures of
Venice on the east wall above the belfry canopy and Justice on the west
are the ancient ones pieced together and made whole; the lions on the
north and south sides are new. The golden angel on the summit is the old
one restored, with the novelty, to her, as to us, of being set on a
pivot to act as a vane. I made this discovery for myself, after being
puzzled by what might have been fancied changes of posture from day to
day, due to optical illusion. One of the shopkeepers on the Square, who
has the campanile before his eye continually, replied, however, when I
asked him if the figure was fixed or movable, "Fixed." This double duty
of the new campanile angel--to shine in golden glory over the city and
also to tell the wind--must be a little mortifying to her celestial
sister on the campanile of S. Giorgio, who is immovable. But no doubt
she has philosophy enough to consider subjection to the caprices of the
breeze a humiliation.
Another change for which one cannot be too grateful is the lift. For the
modest price of a franc one can be whirled to the belfry in a few
seconds at any time of the day and refresh one's eyes with the city and
the lagoon, the Tyrolese Alps, and the Euganean hills. Of old one
ascended painfully; but never again. Before the fall there were five
bells, of which only the greatest escaped injury. The other four were
taken to a foundry set up on the island of Sant'Elena and there fused
and recast at the personal cost of His Holiness the late Pope, who was
Patriarch of Venice. I advise no one to remain in the belfry when the
five are at work. They begin slowly and with some method; they proceed
to a deafening cacophony, tolerable only when one is far distant.
There are certain surprises in the view from the campanile. One is that
none of the water of the city is visible--not a gleam--except a few
yards of the Grand Canal and a stretch of the Canale della Giudecca; the
houses are too high for any of the by-ways to be seen. Another
revelation is that the floor pattern of the Piazza has no relation to
its sides. The roofs of Venice we observe to be neither red nor brown,
but something between the two. Looking first to the north, over the
three flagstaffs and the pigeon feeders and the Merceria clock, we see
away across the lagoon the huge sheds of the dirigibles and (to the
left) the long railway causeway joining Venice to the mainland as by a
thread. Immediately below us in the north-east are the domes of S.
Mark's, surmounted by the graceful golden balls on their branches,
springing from the leaden roof, and farther off are the rising bulk of
SS. Giovanni e Paolo, with its derivative dome and golden balls, the
leaning tower of S. Maria del Pianto, and beyond this the cemetery and
Murano. Beneath us on the east side is the Ducal Palace, and we look
right into the courtyard and on to the prison roof. Farther away are
the green trees of the Giardini Pubblici, the leaning tower of S.
Pietro di Castello, and S. Nicholas of the Lido. In the south-east are
the Lido's various hotels and the islands of S. Lazzaro (with the
campanile) and S. Servolo. In the south is the Grand Canal with a Guardi
pattern of gondolas upon it, criss-crossing like flies; then S.
Giorgio's lovely island and the Giudecca, and beyond these various
islands of the lagoon: La Grazia, S. Clemente, and, in the far distance,
Malamocco. In the south-west the Custom House pushes its nose into the
water, with the vast white mountain of the Salute behind it. In the west
is the Piazza, immediately below, with its myriad tables and chairs;
then the backs of the S. Moïse statues; and farther away the Frari and
its campanile, the huge telegraph-wire carriers of the harbour; across
the water Fusina, and beyond in the far distance the jagged Euganean
hills.
At sunset the landscape is sharpened and brought nearer. The deep blue
of the real sea, beyond the lagoon, grows deeper; the great fields of
mud (if it is low tide) gleam and glisten. And so it will ever be.