_FICTION AND TRAVEL_
By F. Hopkinson Smith.
TOM GROGAN. Illustrated. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.
A GENTLEMAN VAGABOND, AND SOME OTHERS. 16mo, $1.25.
COLONEL CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE. With 20 illustrations by the author
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GONDOLA DAYS. Illustrated, 12mo, $1.50.
WELL-WORN ROADS OF SPAIN, HOLLAND, AND ITALY, traveled by a
Painter in search of the Picturesque. With 16 full-page phototype
reproductions of water-color drawings, and text by F. HOPKINSON
SMITH, profusely illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches. A Holiday
volume. Folio, gilt top, $15.00.
THE SAME. _Popular Edition._ Including some of the illustrations of
the above. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
GONDOLA DAYS
[Illustration: BACK OF THE RIALTO (PAGE 87)]
GONDOLA DAYS
BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND
COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE
PRESS CAMBRIDGE 1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
NOTE
THE text of this volume is the same as that of “Venice of To-Day,”
recently published by the Henry T. Thomas Company, of New York, as
a subscription book, in large quarto and folio form, with over two
hundred illustrations by the Author, in color and in black and white.
PREFATORY
[Illustration]
I HAVE made no attempt in these pages to review the splendors of the
past, or to probe the many vital questions which concern the present,
of this wondrous City of the Sea. Neither have I ventured to discuss
the marvels of her architecture, the wealth of her literature and art,
nor the growing importance of her commerce and manufactures.
I have contented myself rather with the Venice that you see in the
sunlight of a summer’s day--the Venice that bewilders with her glory
when you land at her water-gate; that delights with her color when
you idle along the Riva; that intoxicates with her music as you lie
in your gondola adrift on the bosom of some breathless lagoon--the
Venice of mould-stained palace, quaint caffè and arching bridge; of
fragrant incense, cool, dim-lighted church, and noiseless priest; of
strong-armed men and graceful women--the Venice of light and life, of
sea and sky and melody.
No pen alone can tell this story. The pencil and the palette must lend
their touch when one would picture the wide sweep of her piazzas, the
abandon of her gardens, the charm of her canal and street life, the
happy indolence of her people, the faded sumptuousness of her homes.
If I have given to Venice a prominent place among the cities of the
earth it is because in this selfish, materialistic, money-getting age,
it is a joy to live, if only for a day, where a song is more prized
than a soldo; where the poorest pauper laughingly shares his scanty
crust; where to be kind to a child is a habit, to be neglectful of
old age a shame; a city the relics of whose past are the lessons of
our future; whose every canvas, stone, and bronze bear witness to a
grandeur, luxury, and taste that took a thousand years of energy to
perfect, and will take a thousand years of neglect to destroy.
To every one of my art-loving countrymen this city should be a Mecca;
to know her thoroughly is to know all the beauty and romance of five
centuries.
F. H. S.
CONTENTS
An Arrival 1
Gondola Days 8
Along the Riva 28
The Piazza of San Marco 42
In an Old Garden 58
Among the Fishermen 85
A Gondola Race 101
Some Venetian Caffès 116
On the Hotel Steps 126
Open-Air Markets 136
On Rainy Days 145
Legacies of the Past 155
Life in the Streets 176
Night in Venice 197
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Back of the Rialto (see page 87) _Frontispiece_
The Gateless Posts of the Piazzetta 14
The One Whistler etched 26
Beyond San Rosario 58
The Catch of the Morning 90
A Little Hole in the Wall on the Via Garibaldi 116
Ponte Paglia ... next the Bridge of Sighs 136
The Fruit Market above the Rialto 140
Wide Palatial Staircases 160
Narrow Slits of Canals 186
San Giorgio stands on Tip-toe 198
AN ARRIVAL
YOU really begin to arrive in Venice when you leave Milan. Your train
is hardly out of the station before you have conjured up all the
visions and traditions of your childhood: great rows of white palaces
running sheer into the water; picture-book galleys reflected upside
down in red lagoons; domes and minarets, kiosks, towers, and steeples,
queer-arched temples, and the like.
As you speed on in the dusty train, your memory-fed imagination takes
new flights. You expect gold-encrusted barges, hung with Persian
carpets, rowed by slaves double-banked, and trailing rare brocades in a
sea of China-blue, to meet you at the water landing.
By the time you reach Verona your mental panorama makes another turn.
The very name suggests the gay lover of the _bal masque_, the poisoned
vial, and the calcium moonlight illuminating the wooden tomb of the
stage-set graveyard. You instinctively look around for the fair Juliet
and her nurse. There are half a dozen as pretty Veronese, attended by
their watchful duennas, going down by train to the City by the Sea; but
they do not satisfy you. You want one in a tight-fitting white satin
gown with flowing train, a diamond-studded girdle, and an ostrich-plume
fan. The nurse, too, must be stouter, and have a high-keyed voice;
be bent a little in the back, and shake her finger in a threatening
way, as in the old mezzotints you have seen of Mrs. Siddons or Peg
Woffington. This pair of Dulcineas on the seat in front, in silk
dusters, with a lunch-basket and a box of sweets, are too modern and
commonplace for you, and will not do.
When you roll into Padua, and neither doge nor inquisitor in ermine or
black gown boards the train, you grow restless. A deadening suspicion
enters your mind. What if, after all, there should be no Venice? Just
as there is no Robinson Crusoe nor man Friday; no stockade, nor little
garden; no Shahrazad telling her stories far into the Arabian night; no
Santa Claus with reindeer; no Rip Van Winkle haunted by queer little
gnomes in fur caps. As this suspicion deepens, the blood clogs in your
veins, and a thousand shivers go down your spine. You begin to fear
that all these traditions of your childhood, all these dreams and
fancies, are like the thousand and one other lies that have been told
to and believed by you since the days when you spelled out words in two
syllables.
Upon leaving Mestre--the last station--you smell the salt air of the
Adriatic through the open car window. Instantly your hopes revive.
Craning your head far out, you catch a glimpse of a long, low,
monotonous bridge, and away off in the purple haze, the dreary outline
of a distant city. You sink back into your seat exhausted. Yes, you
knew it all the time. The whole thing is a swindle and a sham!
“All out for Venice,” says the guard, in French.
Half a dozen porters--well-dressed, civil-spoken porters, flat-capped
and numbered--seize your traps and help you from the train. You look
up. It is like all the rest of the depots since you left Paris--high,
dingy, besmoked, beraftered, beglazed, and be----! No, you are past all
that. You are not angry. You are merely broken-hearted. Another idol of
your childhood shattered; another coin that your soul coveted, nailed
to the wall of your experience--a counterfeit!
“This door to the gondolas,” says the porter. He is very polite. If he
were less so, you might make excuse to brain him on the way out.
The depot ends in a narrow passageway. It is the same old
fraud--custom-house officers on each side; man with a punch mutilating
tickets; rows of other men with brass medals on their arms the
size of apothecaries’ scales--hackmen, you think, with their whips
outside--licensed runners for the gondoliers, you learn afterward. They
are all shouting--all intent on carrying you off bodily. The vulgar
modern horde!
Soon you begin to breathe more easily. There is another door ahead,
framing a bit of blue sky. “At least, the sun shines here,” you say to
yourself. “Thank God for that much!”
“This way, Signore.”
One step, and you stand in the light. Now look! Below, at your very
feet, a great flight of marble steps drops down to the water’s edge.
Crowding these steps is a throng of gondoliers, porters, women with
fans and gay-colored gowns, priests, fruit-sellers, water-carriers,
and peddlers. At the edge, and away over as far as the beautiful
marble church, a flock of gondolas like black swans curve in and out.
Beyond stretches the double line of church and palace, bordering the
glistening highway. Over all is the soft golden haze, the shimmer, the
translucence of the Venetian summer sunset.
With your head in a whirl,--so intense is the surprise, so foreign
to your traditions and dreams the actuality,--you throw yourself on
the yielding cushions of a waiting gondola. A turn of the gondolier’s
wrist, and you dart into a narrow canal. Now the smells greet
you--damp, cool, low-tide smells. The palaces and warehouses shut out
the sky. On you go--under low bridges of marble, fringed with people
leaning listlessly over; around sharp corners, their red and yellow
bricks worn into ridges by thousands of rounding boats; past open
plazas crowded with the teeming life of the city. The shadows deepen;
the waters glint like flakes of broken gold-leaf. High up in an opening
you catch a glimpse of a tower, rose-pink in the fading light; it is
the Campanile. Farther on, you slip beneath an arch caught between two
palaces and held in mid-air. You look up, shuddering as you trace the
outlines of the fatal Bridge of Sighs. For a moment all is dark. Then
you glide into a sea of opal, of amethyst and sapphire.
The gondola stops near a small flight of stone steps protected by huge
poles striped with blue and red. Other gondolas are debarking. A stout
porter in gold lace steadies yours as you alight.
“Monsieur’s rooms are quite ready. They are over the garden; the one
with the balcony overhanging the water.”
The hall is full of people (it is the Britannia, the best hotel in
Venice), grouped about the tables, chatting or reading, sipping coffee
or eating ices. Beyond, from an open door, comes the perfume of
flowers. You pass out, cross a garden, cool and fresh in the darkening
shadows, and enter a small room opening on a staircase. You walk up and
through the cosy apartments, push back a folding glass door, and step
out upon a balcony of marble.
How still it all is! Only the plash of the water about the bows of the
gondolas, and the little waves snapping at the water-steps. Even the
groups of people around the small iron tables below, partly hidden by
the bloom of oleanders, talk in half-heard whispers.
You look about you,--the stillness filling your soul, the soft air
embracing you,--out over the blossoms of the oleanders, across the
shimmering water, beyond the beautiful dome of the Salute, glowing like
a huge pearl in the clear evening light. No, it is not the Venice of
your childhood; not the dream of your youth. It is softer, more mellow,
more restful, more exquisite in its harmonies.
Suddenly a strain of music breaks upon your ear--a soft, low strain.
Nearer it comes, nearer. You lean forward over the marble rail to catch
its meaning. Far away across the surface of the beautiful sea floats a
tiny boat. Every swing of the oar leaves in its wake a quivering thread
of gold. Now it rounds the great red buoy, and is lost behind the sails
of a lazy lugger drifting with the tide. Then the whole broad water
rings with the melody. In another instant it is beneath you--the singer
standing, holding his hat for your pennies; the chorus seated, with
upturned, expectant faces.
Into the empty hat you pour all your store of small coins, your eyes
full of tears.
GONDOLA DAYS
THAT first morning in Venice! It is the summer, of course--never the
winter. This beautiful bride of the sea is loveliest when bright
skies bend tenderly over her, when white mists fall softly around
her, and the lagoons about her feet are sheets of burnished silver:
when the red oleanders thrust their blossoms exultingly above the
low, crumbling walls: when the black hoods of winter _felsi_ are
laid by at the _traghetti_, and gondolas flaunt their white awnings:
when the melon-boats, with lifeless sails, drift lazily by, and the
shrill cry of the fruit vender floats over the water: when the air
is steeped, permeated, soaked through and through with floods of
sunlight--quivering, brilliant, radiant; sunlight that blazes from out
a sky of pearl and opal and sapphire; sunlight that drenches every old
palace with liquid amber, kissing every moulding awake, and soothing
every shadow to sleep; sunlight that caresses and does not scorch, that
dazzles and does not blind, that illumines, irradiates, makes glorious,
every sail and tower and dome, from the instant the great god of the
east shakes the dripping waters of the Adriatic from his face until he
sinks behind the purple hills of Padua.
These mornings, then! How your heart warms and your blood tingles when
you remember that first one in Venice--your first day in a gondola!
You recall that you were leaning upon your balcony overlooking the
garden when you caught sight of your gondolier; the gondolier whom
Joseph, prince among porters, had engaged for you the night of your
arrival.
On that first morning you were just out of your bed. In fact, you
had hardly been in it all night. You had fallen asleep in a whirl of
contending emotions. Half a dozen times you had been up and out on this
balcony, suddenly aroused by the passing of some music-boat filling the
night with a melody that seemed a thousand fold more enchanting because
of your sudden awakening,--the radiant moon, and the glistening water
beneath. I say you were out again upon this same balcony overlooking
the oleanders, the magnolias, and the palms. You heard the tinkling of
spoons in the cups below, and knew that some earlier riser was taking
his coffee in the dense shrubbery; but it made no impression upon you.
Your eye was fixed on the beautiful dome of the Salute opposite; on the
bronze goddess of the Dogana waving her veil in the soft air; on the
group of lighters moored to the quay, their red and yellow sails aglow;
on the noble tower of San Giorgio, sharp-cut against the glory of the
east.
Now you catch a waving hand and the lifting of a cap on the gravel walk
below. “At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”
You remember the face, brown and sunny, the eyes laughing, the curve of
the black mustache, and how the wavy short hair curled about his neck
and struggled out from under his cap. He has on another suit, newly
starched and snow-white; a loose shirt, a wide collar trimmed with
blue, and duck trousers. Around his waist is a wide blue sash, the ends
hanging to his knees. About his throat is a loose silk scarf--so loose
that you note the broad, manly chest, the muscles of the neck half
concealed by the cross-barred boating-shirt covering the brown skin.
There is a cheeriness, a breeziness, a spring about this young fellow
that inspires you. As you look down into his face you feel that he
is part of the air, of the sunshine, of the perfume of the oleanders.
He belongs to everything about him, and everything belongs to him.
His costume, his manner, the very way he holds his hat, show you at
a glance that while for the time being he is your servant, he is, in
many things deeply coveted by you, greatly your master. If you had his
chest and his forearm, his sunny temper, his perfect digestion and
contentment, you could easily spare one half of your world’s belongings
in payment. When you have lived a month with him and have caught the
spirit of the man, you will forget all about these several relations
of servant and master. The six francs a day that you pay him will seem
only your own contribution to the support of the gondola; his share
being his services. When you have spent half the night at the Lido, he
swimming at your side, or have rowed all the way to Torcello, or have
heard early mass at San Rosario, away up the Giudecca, he kneeling
before you, his hat on the cool pavement next your own, you will begin
to lose sight even of the francs, and want to own gondola and all
yourself, that you may make _him_ guest and thus discharge somewhat the
ever-increasing obligation of hospitality under which he places you.
Soon you will begin to realize that despite your belongings--wealth to
this gondolier beyond his wildest dreams--he in reality is the richer
of the two. He has inherited all this glory of palace, sea, and sky,
from the day of his birth, and can live in it every hour in the year,
with no fast-ebbing letter-of-credit nor near-approaching sailing day
to sadden his soul or poison the cup of his pleasure. When your fatal
day comes and your trunk is packed, he will stand at the water-stairs
of the station, hat in hand, the tears in his eyes, and when one of the
demons of the master-spirit of the age--Hurry--has tightened its grip
upon you and you are whirled out and across the great iron bridge, and
you begin once more the life that now you loathe, even before you have
reached Mestre--if your gondolier is like my own gondolier, Espero--my
Espero Gorgoni, whom I love--you would find him on his knees in the
church next the station, whispering a prayer for your safe journey
across the sea, and spending one of your miserable francs for some
blessed candles to burn until you reached home.
But you have not answered your gondolier, who stands with upturned eyes
on the graveled walk below.
“At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”
You awake from your reverie. Now! as soon as you swallow your coffee.
Ten minutes later you bear your weight on Giorgio’s bent elbow and step
into his boat.
It is like nothing else of its kind your feet have ever touched--so
yielding and yet so firm; so shallow and yet so stanch; so light, so
buoyant, and so welcoming to peace and rest and comfort.
How daintily it sits the water! How like a knowing swan it bends its
head, the iron blade of the bow, and glides out upon the bosom of the
Grand Canal! You stop for a moment, noting the long, narrow body,
blue-black and silver in the morning light, as graceful in its curves
as a bird; the white awning amidships draped at sides and back, the
softly-yielding, morocco-covered seat, all cushions and silk fringes,
and the silken cords curbing quaint lions of polished brass. Beyond and
aft stands your gondolier, with easy, graceful swing bending to his
oar. You stoop down, part the curtains, and sink into the cushions.
Suddenly an air of dignified importance steals over you. Never in your
whole life have you been so magnificently carried about. Four-in-hands,
commodores’ gigs, landaus in triumphant processions with white horses
and plumes, seem tame and commonplace. Here is a whole barge, galleon,
Bucentaur, all to yourself; noiseless, alert, subservient to your
airiest whim, obedient to the lightest touch. You float between earth
and sky. You feel like a potentate out for an airing, housed like a
Rajah, served like Cleopatra, and rowed like a Doge. You command space
and dominate the elements.
[Illustration: THE GATELESS POSTS OF THE PIAZZETTA]
But Giorgio is leaning on his oar, millions of diamonds dripping from
its blade.
“Where now, Signore?”
Anywhere, so he keeps in the sunlight. To the Piazza, perhaps, and then
around San Giorgio with its red tower and noble façade, and later, when
the shadows lengthen, away down to the Public Garden, and home again in
the twilight by way of the Giudecca.
This gondola-landing of the Piazza, the most important of the
cab-stands in Venice, is the stepping-stone--a wet and ooze-covered
stone--to the heart of the city. Really the heart, for the very life
of every canal, _campo_, and street, courses through it in unending
flow all the livelong day and night, from the earliest blush of dawn
to the earliest blush of dawn again; no one ever seems to go to bed in
Venice. Along and near the edge of this landing stand the richest
examples of Venetian architecture. First, the Royal Gardens of the
king’s palace, with its balustrade of marble and broad flight of
water-steps; then the Library, with its cresting of statues, white
against the sky; then the two noble columns, the gateless posts of
the Piazzetta, bearing Saint Theodore and the Lion of Venice; and
beyond, past the edge of San Marco, the clock tower and the three great
flag-staffs; then the Palace of the Doges, that masterwork of the
fifteenth century; then the Prison, with a glimpse of the Bridge of
Sighs, caught in mid-air; then the great cimeter-sweep of the Riva, its
point lost in the fringe of trees shading the Public Garden; and then,
over all, as you look up, the noble Campanile, the wonderful bell-tower
of San Marco, unadorned, simple, majestic--up, up, into the still air,
its gilded angel, life-size, with outstretched wings flashing in the
morning sun, a mere dot of gold against the blue.
Before you touch the lower steps of the water-stairs, your eye falls
upon an old man with bared head. He holds a long staff studded with
bad coins, having a hook at one end. With this in one hand he steadies
your gondola, with the other he holds out his hat. He is an aged
gondolier, too old now to row. He knows you, the poor fellow, and he
knows your kind. How many such enthusiasts has he helped to alight!
And he knows Giorgio too, and remembers when, like him, he bent his
oar with the best. You drop a penny into his wrinkled hand, catch his
grateful thanks, and join the throng. The arcades under the Library are
full of people smoking and sipping coffee. How delicious the aroma and
the pungent smell of tobacco! In the shadow of the Doges’ Palace groups
idle and talk--a little denser in spots where some artist has his easel
up, or some pretty, dainty child is feeding the pigeons.
A moment more and you are in the Piazza of San Marco; the grand piazza
of the doges, with its thousands of square feet of white pavement
blazing in the sun, framed on three sides by marble palaces, dominated
by the noblest campanile on the globe, and enriched, glorified, made
inexpressibly precious and unique by that jewel in marble, in porphyry,
in verd antique and bronze, that despair of architects of to-day, that
delight of the artists of all time--the most sacred, the Church of San
Marco.
In and out this great quadrangle whirl the pigeons, the pigeons of
Dandolo, up into the soft clouds, the light flashing from their
throats; sifting down in showers on gilded cross and rounded dome;
clinging to intricate carvings, over and under the gold-crowned heads
of saints in stone and bronze; across the baking plaza in flurries of
gray and black; resting like a swarm of flies, only to startle, mass,
and swirl again. Pets of the state, these birds, since the siege of
Candia, when the great Admiral Dandolo’s chief bearer of dispatches,
the ancestor of one of these same white-throated doves, brought the
good news to Venice the day the admiral’s victorious banner was thrown
to the breeze, and the Grand Council, sitting in state, first learned
the tidings from the soft plumage of its wings.
At one end, fronting the church, stand the three great flag-poles,
the same you saw at the landing, socketed in bronze, exquisitely
modeled and chased, bearing the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the
Morea--kingdoms conquered by the state--all three in a row, presenting
arms to the power that overthrew them, and forever dipping their colors
to the glory of its past.
Here, too, in this noble square, under your very feet, what
solemnities, what historic fêtes, what conspiracies! Here for
centuries has been held the priestly pageant of Corpus Christi,
aflame with lanterns and flambeaux. Here eleven centuries ago blind
old Dandolo received the Crusader chiefs of France. Here the splendid
nuptials of Francesco Foscari were celebrated by a tournament,
witnessed by thirty thousand people, and lasting ten days. Here the
conspiracies of Tiepolo and Faliero were crushed--Venetian against
Venetian the only time in a thousand years. And here Italy suffered
her crowning indignity, the occupation by the French under the
newly-fledged warrior who unlimbered his cannon at the door of the
holy church, pushed the four bronze horses from their pedestals over
the sacred entrance--the horses of Constantine, wrought by Lysippus
the Greek,--despoiled the noble church of its silver lamps, robbed
the ancient column of its winged lion, and then, after a campaign
unprecedented in its brilliancy, unexampled in the humiliation and
degradation it entailed upon a people who for ten centuries had known
no power outside of Venice, planted in the centre of this same noble
square, with an irony as bitter as it was cruel, the “Tree of Liberty,”
at which was burned, on the 4th of June, 1797, the insignia of the
ancient republic.
And yet, notwithstanding all her vicissitudes, the Venice of to-day is
still the Venice of her glorious past, the Venice of Dandolo, Foscari,
and Faliero. The actors are long since dead, but the stage-setting
is the same; the same sun, the same air, the same sky over all. The
beautiful dome of the Salute still dominates the Grand Canal. The
great plaza is still perfect in all its proportions and in all that
made up its beauty and splendor. The Campanile still raises its head,
glistening in the morning light. High over all still flash and swoop
the pigeons of Venice--the pigeons of Dandolo--now black as cinders,
now flakes of gold in the yellow light. The doors of the sacred church
are still open; the people pass in and out. Under the marble arcades,
where the soldiers of the army of France stacked their arms, to-day sit
hundreds of free Venetians, with their wives and sweethearts, sipping
their ices and coffee; the great orchestra, the king’s band, filling
the air with its music.
When you ask what magician has wrought this change, let the old guide
answer as once he answered me when, crossing the Piazza and uncovering
his head, he pointed to a stone and said, in his soft Italian:--
“Here, Signore,--just here, where the great Napoleon burnt our
flag,--the noble republic of our fathers, under our good King and his
royal spouse, was born anew.”
But you cannot stay. You will return and study the Piazza to-morrow;
not now. The air intoxicates you. The sunlight is in your blood; your
cheeks burn; you look out and over the Grand Canal--molten silver in
the shimmer of the morning. Below, near the Public Garden, beyond San
Giorgio, like a cluster of butterflies, hovers a fleet of Chioggia
fishing-boats, becalmed in the channel. Off the Riva, near Danieli’s,
lies the Trieste steamer, just arrived, a swarm of gondolas and
_barcos_ about her landing-ladders; the yellow smoke of her funnel
drifting lazily. Farther away, on the golden ball of the Dogana, the
bronze Goddess of the Wind poises light as air, her face aflame, her
whirling sail bent with the passing breeze.
You resolve to stop no more; only to float, loll on your cushions,
watch the gulls circle, and the slow sweep of the oars of the luggers.
You would throw open--wide open--the great swinging gates of your soul.
You not only would enjoy, you would absorb, drink in, fill yourself to
the brim.
For hours you drift about. There is plenty of time to-morrow for the
churches and palaces and caffès. To-day you want only the salt air in
your face, the splash and gurgle of the water at the bow, and the low
song that Giorgio sings to himself as he bends to his blade.
Soon you dart into a cool canal, skirt along an old wall, water stained
and worn, and rest at a low step. Giorgio springs out, twists a cord
around an iron ring, and disappears through an archway framing a garden
abloom with flowering vines.
It is high noon. Now for your midday luncheon!
You have had all sorts of breakfasts offered you in your wanderings:
On white-winged yachts, with the decks scoured clean, the brass
glistening, the awning overhead. In the wilderness, lying on balsam
boughs, the smell of the bacon and crisping trout filling the bark
slant, the blue smoke wreathing the tall pines. In the gardens of Sunny
Spain--one you remember at Granada, hugging the great wall of the
Alhambra--you see the table now with its heap of fruit and flowers,
and can hear the guitar of the gypsy behind the pomegranate. Along
the shore of the beautiful bay of Matanzas, where the hidalgo who had
watched you paint swept down in his _volante_ and carried you off to
his oranges and omelette. At St. Cloud, along the Seine, with the
noiseless waiter in the seedy dress suit and necktie of the night
before. But the _filet_ and melon! Yes, you would go again. I say you
have had all sorts of breakfasts out of doors in your time, but never
yet in a gondola.
A few minutes later Giorgio pushes aside the vines. He carries a basket
covered with a white cloth. This he lays at your feet on the floor of
the boat. You catch sight of the top of a siphon and a flagon of wine:
do not hurry, wait till he serves it. But not here, where anybody
might come; farther down, where the oleanders hang over the wall,
their blossoms in the water, and where the air blows cool between the
overhanging palaces.
Later Giorgio draws all the curtains except the side next the
oleanders, steps aft and fetches a board, which he rests on the little
side seats in front of your lounging-cushions. On this board he spreads
the cloth, and then the seltzer and Chianti, the big glass of powdered
ice and the little hard Venetian rolls. (By the bye, do you know
that there is only one form of primitive roll, the world over?) Then
come the cheese, the Gorgonzola--active, alert Gorgonzola, all green
spots--wrapped in a leaf; a rough-jacketed melon, with some figs and
peaches. Last of all, away down in the bottom of the basket, there is a
dish of macaroni garnished with peppers. You do not want any meat. If
you did you would not get it. Some time when you are out on the canal,
or up the Giudecca, you might get a fish freshly broiled from a passing
cook-boat serving the watermen--a sort of floating kitchen for those
who are too poor for a fire of their own--but never meat.
Giorgio serves you as daintily as would a woman; unfolding the cheese,
splitting the rolls, parting the melon into crescents, flecking off
each seed with his knife: and last, the coffee from the little copper
coffee-pot, and the thin cakes of sugar, in the thick, unbreakable,
dumpy little cups.
There are no courses in this repast. You light a cigarette with your
first mouthful and smoke straight through: it is that kind of a
breakfast.
Then you spread yourself over space, flat on your back, the smoke
curling out through the half-drawn curtains. Soon your gondolier
gathers up the fragments, half a melon and the rest,--there is always
enough for two,--moves aft, and you hear the clink of the glass and
the swish of the siphon. Later you note the closely-eaten crescents
floating by, and the empty leaf. Giorgio was hungry too.
But the garden!--there is time for that. You soon discover that it
is unlike any other you know. There are no flower-beds and gravel
walks, and no brick fountains with the scantily dressed cast-iron boy
struggling with the green-painted dolphin, the water spurting from its
open mouth. There is water, of course, but it is down a deep well with
a great coping of marble, encircled by exquisite carvings and mellow
with mould; and there are low trellises of grapes, and a tangle of
climbing roses half concealing a weather-stained Cupid with a broken
arm. And there is an old-fashioned sun-dial, and sweet smelling box cut
into fantastic shapes, and a nest of an arbor so thickly matted with
leaves and interlaced branches that you think of your Dulcinea at once.
And there are marble benches and stone steps, and at the farther end an
old rusty gate through which Giorgio brought the luncheon.
It is all so new to you, and so cool and restful! For the first time
you begin to realize that you are breathing the air of a City of
Silence. No hum of busy loom, no tramp of horse or rumble of wheel, no
jar or shock; only the voices that come over the water, and the plash
of the ripples as you pass. But the day is waning; into the sunlight
once more.
Giorgio is fast asleep; his arm across his face, his great broad chest
bared to the sky.
“_Si, Signore!_”
He is up in an instant, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, catching his
oar as he springs.
You glide in and out again, under marble bridges thronged with people;
along quays lined with boats; by caffè, church, and palace, and so on
to the broad water of the Public Garden.
But you do not land; some other day for that. You want the row back up
the canal, with the glory of the setting sun in your face. Suddenly,
as you turn, the sun is shut out: it is the great warship Stromboli,
lying at anchor off the garden wall; huge, solid as a fort, fine-lined
as a yacht, with exquisite detail of rail, mast, yard-arms, and gun
mountings, the light flashing from her polished brasses.
In a moment you are under her stern, and beyond, skirting the old
shipyard with the curious arch,--the one Whistler etched,--sheering
to avoid the little steamers puffing with modern pride, their noses
high in air at the gondolas; past the long quay of the Riva, where
the torpedo-boats lie tethered in a row, like swift horses eager for
a dash; past the fruit-boats dropping their sails for a short cut
to the market next the Rialto; past the long, low, ugly bath-house
anchored off the Dogana; past the wonderful, the matchless, the
never-to-be-unloved or forgotten, the most blessed, the _Santa Maria
della Salute_.
[Illustration: THE ONE WHISTLER ETCHED]
Oh! this drift back, square in the face of the royal sun, attended
by all the pomp and glory of a departing day! What shall be said of
this reveling, rioting, dominant god of the west, clothed in purple
and fine gold; strewing his path with rose-leaves thrown broadcast on
azure fields; rolling on beds of violet; saturated, steeped, drunken
with color; every steeple, tower, and dome ablaze; the whole world on
tip-toe, kissing its hands good-night!
Giorgio loves it, too. His cap is off, lying on the narrow deck; his
cravat loosened, his white shirt, as he turns up the Giudecca, flashing
like burning gold.
Somehow you cannot sit and take your ease in the fullness of all this
beauty and grandeur. You spring to your feet. You must see behind and
on both sides, your eye roving eagerly away out to the lagoon beyond
the great flour-mill and the gardens.
Suddenly a delicate violet light falls about you; the lines of palaces
grow purple; the water is dulled to a soft gray, broken by long,
undulating waves of blue; the hulls of the fishing-boats become inky
black, their listless sails deepening in the falling shadows. Only the
little cupola high up on the dome of the Redentore still burns pink and
gold. Then it fades and is gone. The day is done!
ALONG THE RIVA
THE afternoon hours are always the best. In the morning the great
sweep of dazzling pavement is a blaze of white light, spotted with
moving dots of color. These dots carry gay-colored parasols and fans,
or shield their eyes with aprons, hugging, as they scurry along, the
half-shadows of a bridge-rail or caffè awning. Here and there, farther
down along the Riva, are larger dots--fruit-sellers crouching under
huge umbrellas, or groups of gondoliers under improvised awnings of
sailcloth and boat oars. Once in a while one of these water-cabmen
darts out from his shelter like an old spider, waylays a bright fly
as she hurries past, and carries her off bodily to his gondola.
Should she escape he crawls back again lazily and is merged once more
in the larger dot. In the noonday glare even these disappear; the
fruit-sellers seeking some shaded _calle_, the gondoliers the cool
coverings of their boats.
Now that the Sun God has chosen to hide his face behind the trees of
the King’s Garden, this blaze of white is toned to a cool gray. Only
San Giorgio’s tower across the Grand Canal is aflame, and that but half
way down its bright red length. The people, too, who have been all day
behind closed blinds and doors, are astir. The awnings of the caffès
are thrown back and the windows of the balconies opened. The waiters
bring out little tables, arranging the chairs in rows like those in
a concert hall. The boatmen who have been asleep under cool bridges,
curled up on the decks of their boats, stretch themselves awake,
rubbing their eyes. The churches swing back their huge doors--even the
red curtains of the _Chiesa della Pietà_ are caught to one side, so
that you can see the sickly yellow glow of the candles far back on the
altars and smell the incense as you pass.
Soon the current from away up near the Piazza begins to flow down
towards the Public Garden, which lies at the end of this Grand
Promenade of Venice. Priests come, and students; sailors on a half
day’s leave; stevedores from the salt warehouses; fishermen; peddlers,
with knick-knacks and sweetmeats; throngs from the hotels; and slender,
graceful Venetians, out for their afternoon stroll in twos and threes,
with high combs and gay shawls, worn as a Spanish Donna would her
mantilla--bewitching creatures in cool muslin dresses and wide sashes
of silk, with restless butterfly fans, and restless, wicked eyes too,
that flash and coax as they saunter along.
Watch those officers wheel and turn. See how they laugh when they meet.
What confidences under mustachios and fans! Half an hour from now you
will find the four at Florian’s, as happy over a little cherry juice
and water as if it were the dryest of all the Extras. Later on, away
out beyond San Giorgio, four cigarettes could light for you their happy
faces, the low plash of their gondolier’s oar keeping time to the soft
notes of a guitar.
Yes, one must know the Riva in the afternoon. I know it every hour
in the day; though I love it most in the cool of its shadows. And I
know every caffè, church, and palace along its whole length, from the
Molo to the garden. And I know the bridges, too; best of all the one
below the Arsenal, the _Veneta Marina_, and the one you cross before
reaching the little church that stands aside as if to let you pass,
and the queer-shaped Piazzetta beyond, with the flag-pole and marble
balustrade. And I know that old wine-shop where the chairs and tables
are drawn close up to the very bridge itself, its awnings half over
the last step.
My own gondolier, Espero--bless his sunny face!--knows the owner of
this shop and has known her for years; a great, superb creature, with
eyes that flash and smoulder under heaps of tangled black hair. He
first presented me to this grand duchess of the Riva years ago, when I
wanted a dish of macaroni browned on a shallow plate. Whenever I turn
in now out of the heat for a glass of crushed ice and orange juice, she
mentions the fact and points with pride to the old earthen platter. It
is nearly burnt through with my many toastings.
But the bridge is my delight; the arch underneath is so cool, and I
have darted under it so often for luncheon and half an hour’s siesta.
On these occasions the old burnt-bottomed dish is brought to my gondola
sizzling hot, with coffee and rolls, and sometimes a bit of broiled
fish as an extra touch.
This bridge has always been the open-air club-room of the entire
neighborhood,--everybody who has any lounging to do is a life member.
All day long its _habitués_ hang over it, gazing listlessly out upon
the lagoon; singly, in bunches, in swarms when the fish-boats round in
from Chioggia, or a new P. and O. steamer arrives. Its hand-rail of
marble is polished smooth by the arms and legs and blue overalls of two
centuries.
There is also a very dear friend of mine living near this bridge, whom
you might as well know before I take another step along the Riva. He
is attached to my suite. I have a large following quite of his kind,
scattered all over Venice. As I am on my way, in this chapter, to the
Public Garden, and can never get past this his favorite haunt without
his cheer and laugh to greet me; so I cannot, if I would, avoid
bringing him in now, knowing full well that he would bring himself in
and unannounced whenever it should please his Excellency so to do.
He is a happy-hearted, devil-may-care young fellow, who haunts this
particular vicinity, and who has his bed and board wherever, at the
moment, he may happen to be. The bed problem never troubles him; a bit
of sailcloth under the shadow of the hand-rail will do, or a straw
mat behind the angle of a wall, or even what shade I can spare from
my own white umbrella, with the hard marble flags for feathers. The
item of board is a trifle, yet only a trifle, more serious. It may be
a fragment of polenta, or a couple of figs, or only a drink from the
copper bucket of some passing girl. Quantity, quality, and time of
serving are immaterial to him. There will be something to eat before
night, and it always comes. One of the pleasures of the neighborhood is
to share with him a bite.
This beggar, tramp, _lasagnone_--ragged, barefooted, and sunbrowned,
would send a flutter through the hearts of a matinée full of pretty
girls, could he step to the footlights just as he is, and with his
superb baritone voice ring out one of his own native songs. Lying as
he does now under my umbrella, his broad chest burnt almost black, the
curls glistening about his forehead, his well-trimmed mustache curving
around a mouth half open, shading a row of teeth white as milk, his
Leporello hat thrown aside, a broad red sash girding his waist, the
fine muscles of his thighs filling his overalls, these same pretty
girls might perhaps only draw their skirts aside as they passed:
environment plays such curious tricks.
This friend of mine, this royal pauper, Luigi, never in the
recollection of any mortal man or woman was known to do a stroke of
work. He lives somewhere up a crooked canal, with an old mother who
adores him--as, in fact, does every other woman he knows, young or
old--and whose needle keeps together the rags that only accentuate more
clearly the superb lines of his figure. And yet one cannot call him a
burden on society. On the contrary, Luigi has especial duties which
he never neglects. Every morning at sunrise he is out on the bridge
watching the Chioggia boats as they beat up past the Garden trying to
make the red buoy in the channel behind San Giorgio, and enlarging on
their seagoing qualities to an admiring group of bystanders. At noon
he is plumped down in the midst of a bevy of wives and girls, flat on
the pavement, his back against a doorway in some courtyard. The wives
mend and patch, the girls string beads, and the children play around
on the marble flagging, Luigi monopolizing all the talk and conducting
all the gayety, the whole coterie listening. He makes love, and chaffs,
and sings, and weaves romances, until the inquisitive sun peeps into
the _patio_; then he is up and out on the bridge again, and so down the
Riva, with the grace of an Apollo and the air of a thoroughbred.
When I think of all the sour tempers in the world, all the people with
weak backs and chests and limbs, all the dyspeptics, all the bad livers
and worse hearts, all the mean people and the sordid, all those who
pose as philanthropists, professing to ooze sunshine and happiness
from their very pores; all the down-trodden and the economical ones;
all those on half pay and no work, and those on full pay and too
little--and then look at this magnificent condensation of bone, muscle,
and sinew; this Greek god of a tramp, unselfish, good-tempered,
sunny-hearted, wanting nothing, having everything, envying nobody,
happy as a lark, one continuous song all the day long; ready to catch a
line, to mind a child, to carry a pail of water for any old woman, from
the fountain in the Campo near by to the top of any house, no matter
how high--when, I say, I think of this prince of good fellows leading
his Adam-before-the-fall sort of existence, I seriously consider the
advisability of my pensioning him for the remainder of his life on one
_lira_ a day, a fabulous sum to him, merely to be sure that nothing
in the future will ever spoil his temper and so rob me of the ecstasy
of knowing and of being always able to find one supremely happy human
creature on this earth.
But, as I have said, I am on my way to the Public Garden.
Everybody else is going too. Step to the marble balustrade of this
three-cornered Piazzetta and see if the prows of the gondolas are not
all pointed that way. I am afoot, have left the Riva and am strolling
down the _Via Garibaldi_, the widest street in Venice. There are no
palaces here, only a double row of shops, their upper windows and
balconies festooned with drying clothes, their doors choked with piles
of fruit and merchandise. A little farther down is a marble bridge,
and then the arching trees of the biggest and breeziest sweep of green
in all Venice--the _Giardini Pubblici_--many acres in extent, bounded
by a great wall surmounted by a marble balustrade more than a mile in
length, and thickly planted with sycamores and flowering shrubs. Its
water front commands the best view of the glory of a Venetian sunset.
This garden, for Venice, is really a very modern kind of public garden,
after all. It was built in the beginning of the present century, about
1810, when the young Corsican directed one Giovanni Antonio Selva to
demolish a group of monasteries incumbering the ground and from their
débris to construct the foundations of this noble park, with its
sea-wall, landings, and triumphal gate.
Whenever I stretch myself out under the grateful shade of these
splendid trees, I always forgive the Corsican for robbing San Marco
of its bronze horses and for riding his own up the incline of the
Campanile, and even for leveling the monasteries.
And the Venetians of to-day are grateful too, however much their
ancestors may have reviled the conqueror for his vandalism. All over
its graveled walks you will find them lolling on the benches, grouped
about the pretty caffès, taking their coffee or eating ices; leaning
by the hour over the balustrade and watching the boats and little
steamers. The children romp and play, the candy man and the sellers of
sweet cakes ply their trade, and the vender with cool drinks stands
over his curious four-legged tray, studded with bits of brass and old
coins, and calls out his several mixtures. The officers are here, too,
twisting their mustachios and fingering their cigarettes; fine ladies
saunter along, preceded by their babies, half smothered in lace and
borne on pillows in the arms of Italian peasants with red cap-ribbons
touching the ground; and barefooted, frowzy-headed girls from the
rookeries behind the Arsenal idle about, four or five abreast, their
arms locked, mocking the sailors and filling the air with laughter.
Then there are a menagerie, or rather some wire-fenced paddocks filled
with kangaroos and rabbits, and an aviary of birds, and a big casino
where the band plays, and where for half a _lira_, some ten cents,
you can see a variety performance without the variety, and hear these
light-hearted people laugh to their heart’s content.