ON FOOT. III. THE MERCERIA AND THE RIALTO
Walking in Venice--The late Colonel Douglas--Shops--The Merceria
clock--S. Zulian--S. Salvatore--Sansovino--Carlo Goldoni--the Campo
Bartolommeo and Mr. Howells--S. Giovanni Crisostomo--Piombo and
Giorgione--A Sacristan artist--Marino Faliero's house--SS. Apostoli and
Tiepolo--Venetian skittles--A broad walk--Filled in canals--The Rialto
Bridge--S. Giacomo di Rialto--The two Ghettos--The Rialto
hunchback--Vegetables and fruits--The fish market--Symmetrical irony--S.
Giovanni Elemosinario--A busy thoroughfare--Old books--The convivial
gondoliers.
The best of Venice--Venice itself, that is--can never find its way into
a book; and even if it did, no reader could extract it again. The best
of Venice must be one's own discovery and one's own possession; and one
must seek it, as Browning loved to do, in the narrow calli, in the tiny
canals, in the smaller campi, or seated idly on bridges careless of
time. Chiefly on foot does one realize the inner Venice.
I make no effort in this work to pass on any detailed account of my
researches in this way. All I would say is that every calle leads to
another; there is hardly a dull inch in the whole city; and for the
weary some kind of resting-place--a church, a wine shop, a café, or a
stone step--is always close by. If you are lost--and in Venice in the
poorer populous districts a map is merely an aggravation of dismay,
while there is no really good map of the city to be obtained--there is
but one thing to do and that is to go on. Before very long you must of
necessity come to a calle with more traffic than the others and then you
need but flow with the stream to reach some recognizable centre; or
merely say "San Marco" or "gondola" to the first boy and he will
consider it a privilege to guide you. Do not, however give up before you
must, for it is a privilege to be lost in Venice.
For those who prefer exercise to sitting in a gondola there is the
stimulating and instructive book by the late Col. Douglas, _Venice on
Foot_, which is a mine of information and interest; but I must admit
that the title is against it. Youthful travellers in particular will
have none of it. If Venice is anything at all to them, it is a city of
water, every footstep in which is an act of treachery to romance.
Even they, however, are pleased to jostle in the Merceria.
[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, SHOWING S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE]
The shops of Venice, I may say at once, are not good. They satisfy the
Venetians, no doubt, but the Venetians are not hard to please; there is
no Bond Street or Rue de la Paix. But a busy shopping centre always
being amusing, the Merceria and Frezzeria become attractive haunts of
the stranger; the Merceria particularly so. To gain this happy hunting
ground one must melt away with the crowd through the gateway under the
famous blue clock, which is worth a visit on account of its two bronze
giants: one punctual and one late, for that one on the left of the bell,
as we face the tower from the Piazza, is always a minute or two after
his brother in striking the hours. The right hand giant strikes first,
swinging all his upper part as he does so; and then the other. From
their attitude much of Venice is revealed, but only the thin can enjoy
this view, such being the narrowness of the winding stairs and doorway
by which it is gained. At Easter a procession of mechanical figures
below the clock-face delights the spectators.
It was while Coryat was in Venice that one of these giants, I know not
which, performed a deed of fatal savagery. The traveller thus describes
it: "A certaine fellow that had the charge to looke to the clocke, was
very busie about the bell, according to his usuall custome every day, to
the end to amend something in it that was amisse. But in the meane time
one of those wilde men that at the quarters of the howers doe use to
strike the bell, strooke the man in the head with his brazen hammer,
giving him such a violent blow, that therewith he fell down dead
presently in his place, and never spake more."
At the third turning to the right out of the Merceria is the church of
S. Giuliano, or S. Zulian, which the great Sansovino built. One evening,
hearing singing as I passed, I entered, but found standing-room only,
and that only with the greatest discomfort. Yet the congregation was so
happy and the scene was so animated that I stayed on and on--long enough
at any rate for the offertory box to reach me three separate times.
Every one present was either poor or on the borders of poverty; and the
fervour was almost that of a salvation army meeting. And why not, since
the religion both of the Pope and of General Booth was pre-eminently
designed for the poor? I came away with a tiny coloured picture of the
Virgin and more fleas than I ever before entertained at the same time.
At the end of the Merceria is S. Salvatore, a big quiet church in the
Renaissance style, containing the ashes of S. Theodore, the tombs of
various Doges, and a good Bellini: a warm, rich, and very human scene of
a wayside inn at Emmaus and Christ appearing there. An "Annunciation" by
Titian is in the church proper, painted when he was getting very old,
and framed by Sansovino; a "Transfiguration" by Titian is in the pretty
sacristy, which, like many of the Venetian churches, is presided over by
a dwarf. A procession of Venetian sacristans would, by the way, be a
strange and grotesque spectacle.
The best of the S. Salvatore monuments is that by Sansovino of Doge
Francesco Venier (1554-1556), with beautiful figures in the niches from
the same hand--that of Charity, on the left, being singularly sweet.
When Sansovino made these he was nearly eighty. Sansovino also designed
the fine doorway beneath the organ. The most imposing monuments are
those of Caterina Cornaro (or Corner) the deposed queen of Cyprus, in
the south transept; of three Cardinals of the Corner family; and of the
Doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, each with his patron saint above him.
The oddity of its architecture, together with its situation at a point
where a little silence is peculiarly grateful, makes this church a
favourite of mine, but there are many buildings in Venice which are more
beautiful.
Opposite, diagonally, is one of the depressing sights of Venice, a
church turned into a cinema.
Leaving S. Salvatore by the main door and turning to the left, we soon
come (past a hat shop which offers "Rooswelts" at 2.45 each), to the
Goldoni Theatre. Leaving San Salvatore by the same door and turning to
the right, we come to Goldoni himself, in bronze, in the midst of the
Campo S. Bartolommeo: the little brisk observant satirist upon whom
Browning wrote the admirably critical sonnet which I quote earlier in
this book.
The comedies of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) still hold the Italian stage,
but so far as translations can tell me they are very far from justifying
any comparison between himself and Molière. Goldoni's _Autobiography_
is not a very entertaining work, but it is told with the engaging
minuteness which seems to have been a Venetian trait.
The church of S. Bartolommeo contains altar pieces by Giorgione's pupil,
Sebastian del Piombo, but there is no light by which to see them.
It was in this campo that Mr. Howells had rooms before he married and
blossomed out on the Grand Canal, and his description of the life here
is still so good and so true, although fifty years have passed, that I
make bold to quote it, not only to enrich my own pages, but in the hope
that the tastes of the urbane American book which I give now and then
may send readers to it. The campo has changed little except that the
conquering Austrians have gone and Goldoni's statue is now here. Mr.
Howells thus describes it: "Before the winter passed, I had changed my
habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San
Bartolommeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from S.
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 blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè more or less
brilliant, a greengrocer'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
Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the
Rialto market.
"Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour 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 Bartolommeo.
"In San Bartolommeo, 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 is the appartimento
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 the
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 coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings 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; 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 neighbours
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
café; to the tide of passers-by from the Merceria; the smooth shaven
Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the
dark-eyed white-faced Venetians, 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."
Having reached Goldoni's statue there are two courses open to us if we
are in a mood for walking. One is to cross the Rialto bridge and join
the stream which always fills the narrow busy calli that run parallel
with the Grand Canal to the Frari. The other is to leave this campo at
the far end, at Goldoni's back, and join the stream which is always
flowing backwards and forwards along the new Via Vittorio Emmanuele.
[Illustration: S. CHRISTOPHER, S. JEROME AND S. AUGUSTINE
FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI
_In the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo_]
Let me describe both routes, beginning with the second. A few yards
after leaving the campo we come on the right to the little church of S.
Giovanni Crisostomo where there are two unusually delightful pictures: a
Sebastiano del Piombo and a Bellini, with a keen little sacristan who
enjoys displaying their beauties and places you in the best light. The
Bellini is his last signed work, and was painted when the old man was in
his eighty-fifth year. The restorer has been at it, but not to its
detriment. S. Christopher, S. Jerome, and S. Augustine are sweetly
together in a delectable country; S. Christopher (as the photograph on
the opposite page shows) bearing perhaps the most charming Christ Child
of all, with his thumb in his mouth. The Piombo--another company of
saints--over the high altar, is a fine mellow thing with a very
Giorgionesque figure of the Baptist dominating it, and a lovely
Giorgionesque landscape spreading away. The picture (which I reproduce
opposite page 116) is known to be the last which Sebastiano painted
before he went to Rome and gave up Giorgione's influence for Michael
Angelo's. It has been suggested that Giorgione merely supplied the
design; but I think one might safely go further and affirm that the
painting of the right side was his too and the left Piombo's. How far
Piombo departed from Giorgione's spell and came under the other may be
seen in our National Gallery by any visitor standing before No. 1--his
"Raising of Lazarus". Very little of the divine chromatic melody of
Castel Franco there!
S. Giovanni Crisostomo has also two fine reliefs, one by Tullio Lombardi
with a sweet little Virgin (who, however, is no mother) in it, and the
twelve Apostles gathered about. The sacristan, by the way, is also an
amateur artist, and once when I was there he had placed his easel just
by the side door and was engaged in laboriously copying in pencil
Veronese's "Christ in the House of Levi" (the original being a mile
away, at the Accademia) from an old copper plate, whistling the while.
Having no india-rubber he corrected his errors either with a penknife or
a dirty thumb. Art was then more his mistress than Pecunia, for on this
occasion he never left his work, although more than one Baedeker was
flying the red signal of largesse.
Continuing on our way we come soon to a point where the Calle Dolfin
meets a canal at right angles, with a large notice tablet like a
gravestone to keep us from falling into the water. It bears an ancient,
and I imagine, obsolete, injunction with regard to the sale of bread by
unauthorized persons. Turning to the left we are beneath the arcade of
the house of the ill-fated Marino Faliero, the Doge who was put to death
for treason, as I have related elsewhere. It is now shops and tenements.
Opposite is the church of SS. Apostoli, which is proud of possessing an
altar-piece by Tiepolo which some think his finest work, and of which
the late John Addington Symonds wrote in terms of excessive rapture. It
represents the last communion of S. Lucy, whose eyes were put out. Her
eyes are here, in fact, on a plate. No one can deny the masterly drawing
and grouping of the picture, but, like all Tiepolo's work, it leaves me
cold.
I do not suggest the diversion at this moment; but from SS. Apostoli
one easily gains the Fondamenta Nuovo, on the way passing through a
rather opener Venice where canals are completely forgotten. Hereabouts
are two or three popular drinking places with gardens, and on one Sunday
afternoon I sat for some time in the largest of them--the Trattoria alla
Libra--watching several games of bowls--the giuocho di bocca--in full
swing. The Venetian workman--and indeed the Italian workman
generally--is never so happy as when playing this game, or perhaps he is
happiest when--ball in hand--he discusses with his allies various lines
of strategy. The Giudecca is another stronghold of the game, every
little bar there having a stamped-down bowling alley at the back of it.
The longest direct broad walk in Venice--longer than the Riva--begins at
SS. Apostoli and extends to the railway station. The name of the street
is the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, and in order to obtain it many canals had
to be filled-in. To the loss of canals the visitor is never reconciled.
Wherever one sees the words Rio Terra before the name of a calle, one
knows that it is a filled-in canal. For perhaps the best example of the
picturesque loss which this filling-in entails one should seek the Rio
Terra delle Colonne, which runs out of the Calle dei Fabri close to the
Piazza of S. Mark. When this curved row of pillars was at the side of
water it must have been impressive indeed.
And now we must return to the Goldoni statue to resume that other
itinerary over the Rialto bridge, which is as much the centre of Venice
by day as S. Mark's Square is by night. In another chapter I speak of
the bridge as seen from the Grand Canal, which it so nobly leaps. More
attractive is the Grand Canal as seen from it; and the visitor to Venice
should spend much time leaning upon the parapet of one side and the
other at the highest point. He will have it for the most part to
himself, for the Venetians prefer the middle way between the shops.
These shops are, however, very dull--principally cheap clothiers and
inferior jewellers--and the two outer tracks are better. From here may
best be seen the façade of the central Post Office, once the Fondaco dei
Tedeschi splendid with the frescoes of Giorgione and Titian. The
frescoes have gone and it is now re-faced with stucco. From here, too,
the beautiful palace of the Camerlenghi at the edge of the Erberia is
most easily studied. The Rialto bridge itself exerts no spell. It does
not compare in interest or charm with the Ponte Vecchio of Florence.
The busiest and noisiest part of Venice begins at the further foot of
the bridge, for here are the markets, crowded by housewives with their
bags or baskets, and a thousand busy wayfarers.
The little church of the market-place--the oldest in Venice--is S.
Giacomo di Rialto, but I have never been able to find it open. Commerce
now washes up to its walls and practically engulfs it. A garden is on
its roof, and its clock has stopped permanently at four.
It was in this campo that the merchants anciently met: here, in the
district of the Rialto, and not on the bridge itself, as many readers
suppose, did Antonio transact his business with one Shylock a Jew. There
are plenty of Jews left in Venice; in fact, I have been told that they
are gradually getting possession of the city, and judging by their
ability in that direction elsewhere, I can readily believe it; but I saw
none in the least like the Shylock of the English stage, although I
spent some time both in the New Ghetto and the Old by the Cannaregio.
All unwilling I once had the company of a small Jewish boy in a
gaberdine for the whole way from the New Ghetto to the steamboat station
of S. Toma, his object in life being to acquire for nothing a coin
similar to one which I had given to another boy who had been really
useful. If he avowed once that he was a starving Jewish boy and I was a
millionaire, he said it fifty times. Every now and then he paused for an
anxious second to throw a somersault. But I was obdurate, and embarking
on the steamer, left the two falsehoods to fight it out.
The two Ghettos, by the way, are not interesting; no traveller, missing
them, need feel that he has been in Venice in vain.
At the other end of the Rialto campo, opposite the church, is the famous
hunchback, the Gobbo of the Rialto, who supports a rostrum from which
the laws of the Republic were read to the people, after they had been
read, for a wider audience, from the porphyry block at the corner of S.
Mark's.
Leaving the Gobbo on our left and passing from the campo at the
right-hand corner, we come to the great arcaded markets for fruit and
vegetables, and further to the wholesale and retail fish markets, all of
which are amusing to loiter in, particularly in the early hours of the
morning. To the Erberia are all the fruit-laden barges bound, chiefly
from Malamocco, the short cut from the lagoon being through the Rio del
Palazzo beneath the Bridge of Sighs and into the Grand Canal, just
opposite us, by the Post Office. The fruit market is busy twice a day,
in the early morning and in the late afternoon; the fish market in the
morning only.
[Illustration: S. MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI]
The vegetables and fruit differ according to the seasons; the fish are
always the same. In the autumn, when the quay is piled high with golden
melons and flaming tomatoes, the sight is perhaps the most splendid.
The strangest of the fish to English eyes are the great cuttle-fish,
which are sold in long slices. It strikes one as a refinement of
symmetrical irony that the ink which exudes from these fish and stains
everything around should be used for indicating what their price is.
Here also are great joints of tunny, huge red scarpenna, sturgeon,
mullet, live whole eels (to prove to me how living they were, a
fishmonger one morning allowed one to bite him) and eels in writhing
sections, aragosta, or langouste, and all the little Adriatic and lagoon
fish--the scampi and shrimps and calimari--spread out in little wet
heaps on the leaves of the plane-tree. One sees them here lying dead;
one can see them also, alive and swimming about, in the aquarium on the
Lido, where the prettiest creatures are the little cavalli marini, or
sea horses, roosting in the tiny submarine branches.
From all the restlessness and turmoil of these markets there is escape
in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario, a few yards along the Ruga
Vecchia di San Giovanni on the left. Here one may sit and rest and
collect one's thoughts and then look at a fine rich altar-piece by
Pordenone--S. Sebastian, S. Rocco, and S. Catherine. The lion of the
church is a Titian, but it is not really visible.
As typical a walk as one can take in democratic Venice is that from this
church to the Frari, along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni, parallel
with the Grand Canal. I have been here often both by day and by night,
and it is equally characteristic at either time. Every kind of shop is
here, including two old book-shops, one of which (at the corner of the
Campiello dei Meloni) is well worth rummaging in. A gentle old lady sits
in the corner so quietly as to be invisible, and scattered about are
quite a number of English books among them, when I was last there, a
surprising proportion of American minor verse. Another interesting shop
here supplies Venetians with the small singing birds which they love so
much, a cage by a window being the rule rather than the exception; and
it was hereabouts that an old humorous greengrocer once did his voluble
best to make me buy a couple of grilli, or crickets, in a tiny barred
prison, to make their shrill mysterious music for me. But I resisted.
At night, perhaps, is this walk best, for several very popular wine
shops for gondoliers are hereabouts, one or two quite large, with rows
of barrels along the walls; and it is good to see every seat full, and
an arm round many a waist, and everybody merry. Such a clatter of
tongues as comes from these taverns is not to be beaten; and now and
then a tenor voice or a mandolin adds a grace.