church of San Giuseppe, there lives in miserable solitude the
horse--the only horse in Venice. He is not always the same horse.
A few years ago, when I first knew him, he was a forlorn, unkempt,
lonely-looking quadruped of a dark brown color, and with a threadbare
tail. When I saw him last, within the year, he was a hand higher,
white, and wore a caudal appendage with a pronounced bang. Still he
is the same horse--Venice never affords but one. When not at work (he
gathered leaves in the old days; now I am ashamed to say he operates a
lawn-mower as well), he leans his poor old tired head listlessly over
the rail, refusing the cakes the children offer him. At these times he
will ruminate by the hour over his unhappy lot. When the winter comes,
and there are no more leaves to rake, no gravel to haul, nor grass to
mow, they lead him down to the gate opening on the little side canal
and push him aboard a flat scow, and so on up the Grand Canal and
across the lagoon to Mestre. As he passes along, looking helplessly
from side to side, the gondoliers revile him and the children jeer at
him, and those on the little steamboats pelt him with peach pits, cigar
ends, and bits of broken coal. Poor old Rosinante, there is no page in
the history of Venice which your ancestors helped glorify!
There are two landings along the front of the garden,--one below the
west corner, up a narrow canal, and the other midway of the long
sea-wall, where all the gondolas load and unload. You know this last
landing at once. Ziem has painted it over and over again for a score of
years or more, and this master of color is still at it. With him it is
a strip of brilliant red, a background of autumn foliage, and a creamy
flight of steps running down to a sea of deepest ultramarine. There is
generally a mass of fishing-boats, too, in brilliant colorings, moored
to the wall, and a black gondola for a centre dark.
When you row up to this landing to-day, you are surprised to find it
all sunshine and glitter. The trees are fresh and crisp, the marble is
dazzling white, and the water sparkling and limpid with gray-green
tints. But please do not criticise Ziem. You do not see it his way,
but that is not his fault. Venice is a hundred different Venices to
as many different painters. If it were not so, you would not be here
to-day, nor love it as you do. Besides, when you think it all over,
you will admit that Ziem, of all living painters, has best rendered
its sensuous, color-soaked side. And yet, when you land you wonder why
the colorist did not bring his easel closer and give you a nearer view
of this superb water-landing, with the crowds of gayly dressed people,
swarms of gondolas, officers, fine ladies, boatmen, and the hundred
other phases of Venetian life.
But I hear Espero’s voice out on the broad water. Now I catch the
sunlight on his white shirt and blue sash. He is standing erect, his
whole body swaying with that long, graceful, sweeping stroke which is
the envy of the young gondoliers and the despair of the old; Espero,
as you know, has been twice winner in the gondola races. He sees my
signal, runs his bow close in, and the next instant we are swinging
back up the Grand Canal, skirting the old boatyard and the edge of the
Piazzetta. A puff of smoke from the man-of-war ahead, and the roll of
the sunset gun booms over the water. Before the echoes have fairly
died away, a long sinuous snake of employees--there are some seven
thousand of them--crawls from out the arsenal gates, curves over the
arsenal bridge, and heads up the Riva. On we go, abreast of the crowd,
past the landing-wharf of the little steamers, past the rear porches of
the queer caffès, past the man-of-war, and a moment later are off the
wine-shop and my bridge. I part the curtains, and from my cushions can
see the Duchess standing in the doorway, her arms akimbo, with all the
awnings rolled back tight for the night. The bridge itself is smothered
in a swarm of human flies, most of them bareheaded. As we sheer closer,
one more ragged than the rest springs up and waves his hat. Then comes
the refrain of that loveliest of all the Venetian boat songs:--
“_Jammo, jammo neoppa, jammo ja._”
It is Luigi, bidding me good-night.
THE PIAZZA OF SAN MARCO
THERE is but one piazza in the world. There may be other splendid
courts and squares, magnificent breathing spaces for the people,
enriched by mosque and palace, bordered by wide-spreading trees, and
adorned by noble statues. You know, of course, every slant of sunlight
over the plaza of the Hippodrome, in Constantinople, with its slender
twin needles of stone; you know the _Puerta del Sol_ of Madrid, cooled
by the splash of sunny fountains and alive with the rush of Spanish
life; and you know, too, the royal _Place de la Concorde_, brilliant
with the never-ending whirl of pleasure-loving Paris. Yes, you know
and may love them all, and yet there is but one grand piazza the world
over; and that lies to-day in front of the Church of San Marco.
It is difficult to account for this fascination. Sometimes you think it
lurks in the exquisite taper of the Campanile. Sometimes you think the
secret of its charm is hidden in masterly carvings, delicacy of arch,
or refinement of color. Sometimes the Piazza appeals to you only as the
great open-air bricabrac shop of the universe, with its twin columns
of stone stolen from the islands of the Archipelago; its bronze horses,
church doors, and altar front wrested from Constantinople and the East;
and its clusters of pillars torn from almost every heathen temple
within reach of a Venetian galley.
When your eye becomes accustomed to the dazzling splendor of the
surroundings, and you begin to analyze each separate feature of this
Court of the Doges, you are even more enchanted and bewildered. San
Marco itself no longer impresses you as a mere temple, with open
portals and swinging doors; but as an exquisite jewel-case of agate and
ivory, resplendent in gems and precious stones. The clock tower, with
its dial of blue and gold and its figures of bronze, is not, as of old,
one of a row of buildings, but a priceless ornament that might adorn
the palace of some King of the Giants; while the _Loggia_ of Sansovino
could serve as a mantel for his banquet hall, and any one of the three
bronze sockets of the flag-staffs, masterpieces of Leopardo, hold huge
candles to light him to bed.
And behind all this beauty of form and charm of handicraft, how lurid
the background of tradition, cruelty, and crime! Poor Doge Francesco
Foscari, condemning his own innocent son Jacopo to exile and death,
in that very room overlooking the square; the traitor Marino Faliero,
beheaded on the Giant Stairs of the palace, his head bounding to the
pavement below; the perfidies of the Council of Ten; the state murders,
tortures, and banishments; the horrors of the prisons of the _Piombi_;
the silent death-stroke of the unsigned denunciations dropped into the
_Bocca del Leone_--that fatal letter-box with its narrow mouth agape in
the wall of stone, nightly filled with the secrets of the living, daily
emptied of the secrets of the dead. All are here before you. The very
stones their victims trod lie beneath your feet, their water-soaked
cells but a step away.
As you pass between the twin columns of stone,--the pillars of Saint
Theodore and of the Lion,--you shudder when you recall the fate of the
brave Piedmontese, Carmagnola, a fate unfolding a chapter of cunning,
ingratitude, and cruelty almost unparalleled in the history of Venice.
You remember that for years this great hireling captain had led the
armies of Venice and the Florentines against his former master, Philip
of Milan; and that for years Venice had idolized the victorious
warrior.
You recall the disastrous expedition against Cremona, a stronghold of
Philip, and the subsequent anxiety of the Senate lest the sword of the
great captain should be turned against Venice herself. You remember
that one morning, as the story runs, a deputation entered the tent of
the great captain and presented the confidence of the Senate and an
invitation to return at once to Venice and receive the plaudits of the
people. Attended by his lieutenant, Gonzaga, Carmagnola set out to
obey. All through the plains of Lombardy, brilliant in their gardens of
olive and vine, he was received with honor and welcome. At Mestre he
was met by an escort of eight gentlemen in gorgeous apparel, special
envoys dispatched by the Senate, who conducted him across the wide
lagoon and down the Grand Canal, to this very spot on the Molo.
On landing from his sumptuous barge, the banks ringing with the shouts
of the populace, he was led by his escort direct to the palace, and
instantly thrust into an underground dungeon. Thirty days later, after
a trial such as only the Senate of the period would tolerate, and
gagged lest his indignant outcry might rebound in mutinous echoes, his
head fell between the columns of San Marco.
There are other pages to which one could turn in this book of the past,
pages rubricated in blood and black-lettered in crime. The book is
opened here because this tragedy of Carmagnola recalls so clearly and
vividly the methods and impulses of the times, and because, too, it
occurred where all Venice could see, and where to-day you can conjure
up for yourself the minutest details of the terrible outrage. Almost
nothing of the scenery is changed. From where you stand between these
fatal shafts, the same now as in the days of Carmagnola (even then
two centuries old), there still hangs a balcony whence you could have
caught the glance of that strong, mute warrior. Along the water’s edge
of this same Molo, where now the gondoliers ply their calling, and the
_lasagnoni_ lounge and gossip, stood the soldiers of the state drawn up
in solid phalanx. Across the canal, by the margin of this same island
of San Giorgio--before the present church was built--the people waited
in masses, silently watching the group between those two stone posts
that marked for them, and for all Venice, the doorway of hell. Above
towered this same Campanile, all but its very top complete.
But you hurry away, crossing the square with a lingering look at this
fatal spot, and enter where all these and a hundred other tragedies
were initiated, the Palace of the Doges. It is useless to attempt a
description of its wonderful details. If I should elaborate, it would
not help to give you a clearer idea of this marvel of the fifteenth
century. To those who know Venice, it will convey no new impression; to
those who do not it might add only confusion and error.
Give yourself up instead to the garrulous old guide who assails you
as you enter, and who, for a few _lire_, makes a thousand years as
one day. It is he who will tell you of the beautiful gate, the _Porta
della Carta_ of Bartolommeo Bon, with its statues weather-stained and
worn; of the famous _Scala dei Giganti_, built by Rizzo in 1485; of the
two exquisitely moulded and chased bronze well-heads of the court; of
the golden stairs of Sansovino; of the ante-chamber of the Council of
Ten; of the great _Sala di Collegio_, in which the foreign ambassadors
were received by the Doge; of the superb senate chamber, the _Sala del
Senato_; of the costly marbles and marvelous carvings; of the ceilings
of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese; of the secret passages, dungeons,
and torture chambers.
But the greatest of all these marvels of the Piazza still awaits you,
the Church of San Marco. Dismiss the old guide outside the beautiful
gate and enter its doors alone; here he would fail you.
If you come only to measure the mosaics, to value the swinging lamps,
or to speculate over the uneven, half-worn pavement of the interior,
enter its doors at any time, early morning or bright noonday, or
whenever your practical, materialistic, nineteenth-century body
would escape from the blaze of the sun outside. Or you can stay away
altogether; neither you nor the world will be the loser. But if you are
the kind of man who loves all beautiful things,--it may be the sparkle
of early dew upon the grass, the silence and rest of cool green woods,
the gloom of the fading twilight,--or if your heart warms to the sombre
tones of old tapestries, armor, and glass, and you touch with loving
tenderness the vellum backs of old books, then enter when the glory
of the setting sun sifts in and falls in shattered shafts of light on
altar, roof, and wall. Go with noiseless step and uncovered head, and,
finding some deep-shadowed seat or sheltered nook, open your heart and
mind and soul to the story of its past, made doubly precious by the
splendor of its present. As you sit there in the shadow, the spell of
its exquisite color will enchant you--color mellowing into harmonies
you knew not of; harmonies of old gold and porphyry reds; the dull
silver of dingy swinging lamps, with the soft light of candles and the
dreamy haze of dying incense; harmonies of rich brown carvings and dark
bronzes rubbed bright by a thousand reverent hands.
The feeling which will steal over you will not be one of religious
humility, like that which took possession of you in the Saint Sophia of
Constantinople. It will be more like the blind idolatry of the pagan,
for of all the temples of the earth, this shrine of San Marco is the
most worthy of your devotion. Every turn of the head will bring new
marvels into relief; marvels of mosaic, glinting like beaten gold;
marvels of statue, crucifix, and lamp; marvels of altars, resplendent
in burnished silver and flickering tapers; of alabaster columns merging
into the vistas; of sculptured saint and ceiling of sheeted gold; of
shadowy aisle and high uplifted cross.
Never have you seen any such interior. Hung with the priceless fabrics
and relics of the earth, it is to you one moment a great mosque,
studded with jewels and rich with the wealth of the East; then, as
its color deepens, a vast tomb, hollowed from out a huge, dark opal,
in which lies buried some heroic soul, who in his day controlled the
destinies of nations and of men. And now again, when the mystery of its
light shimmers through windows covered with the dust of ages, there
comes to this wondrous shrine of San Marco, small as it is, something
of the breadth and beauty, the solitude and repose, of a summer night.
When the first hush and awe and sense of sublimity have passed away,
you wander, like the other pilgrims, into the baptistery; or you move
softly behind the altar, marveling over each carving of wood and
stone and bronze; or you descend to the crypt and stand by the stone
sarcophagus that once held the bones of the good saint himself.
As you walk about these shadowy aisles, and into the dim recesses, some
new devotee swings back a door, and a blaze of light streams in, and
you awake to the life of to-day.
Yes, there is a present as well as a past. There is another Venice
outside; a Venice of life and joyousness and stir. The sun going
down; the caffès under the arcades of the King’s Palace and of the
_Procuratie Vecchie_ are filling up. There is hardly an empty table at
Florian’s. The pigeons, too, are coming home to roost, and are nestling
under the eaves of the great buildings and settling on the carvings
of San Marco. The flower girls, in gay costumes, are making shops of
the marble benches next the Campanile, assorting roses and pinks, and
arranging their _boutonnières_ for the night’s sale. The awnings which
have hung all day between the columns of the arcades are drawn back,
exposing the great line of shops fringing three sides of the square.
Lights begin to flash; first in the clusters of lamps illuminating the
arcades, and then in the windows filled with exquisite bubble-blown
Venetian glass, wood carvings, inlaid cabinets, cheap jewelry,
gay-colored photographs and prints.
As the darkness falls, half a dozen men drag to the centre of the
Piazza the segments of a great circular platform. This they surround
with music-rests and a stand for the leader. Now the pavement of the
Piazza itself begins filling up. Out from the Merceria, from under
the clock tower, pours a steady stream of people merging in the
crowds about the band-stand. Another current flows in through the west
entrance, under the _Bocca di Piazza_, and still another from under
the Riva, rounding the Doges’ Palace. At the Molo, just where poor
Carmagnola stepped ashore, a group of officers--they are everywhere
in Venice--land from a government barge. These are in full regalia,
even to their white kid gloves, their swords dangling and ringing
as they walk. They, too, make their way to the square and fill the
seats around one of the tables at Florian’s, bowing magnificently to
the old Countess who sits just inside the door of the caffè itself,
resplendent, as usual, in dyed wig and rose-colored veil. She is taking
off her long, black, fingerless silk gloves, and ordering her customary
spoonful of cognac and lump of sugar. Gustavo, the head waiter, listens
as demurely as if he expected a bottle of Chablis at least, with the
customary commission for Gustavo--but then Gustavo is the soul of
politeness. Some evil-minded people say the Countess came in with the
Austrians; others, more ungallant, date her advent about the days of
the early doges.
By this time you notice that the old French professor is in his
customary place; it is outside the caffè, in the corridor, on a
leather-covered, cushioned seat against one of the high pillars. You
never come to the Piazza without meeting him. He is as much a part of
its history as the pigeons, and, like them, dines here at least once
a day. He is a perfectly straight, pale, punctilious, and exquisitely
deferential relic of a by-gone time, whose only capital is his charming
manner and his thorough knowledge of Venetian life. This combination
rarely fails where so many strangers come and go; and then, too, no
one knows so well the intricacies of an Italian kitchen as Professor
Croisac.
Sometimes on summer evenings he will move back a chair at your own
table and insist upon dressing the salad. Long before his greeting,
you catch sight of him gently edging his way through the throng, the
seedy, straight-brimmed silk hat in his hand brushed with the greatest
precision; his almost threadbare frock-coat buttoned snug around his
waist, the collar and tails flowing loose, his one glove hanging limp.
He is so erect, so gentle, so soft-voiced, so sincere, and so genuine,
and for the hour so supremely happy, that you cannot divest yourself
of the idea that he really is an old marquis, temporarily exiled from
some faraway court, and to be treated with the greatest deference.
When, with a little start of sudden surprise, he espies some dark-eyed
matron in the group about him, rises to his feet and salutes her as if
she were the Queen of Sheba, you are altogether sure of his noble rank.
Then the old fellow regains his seat, poises his gold eyeglasses--a
relic of better days--between his thumb and forefinger, holds them
two inches from his nose, and consults the _menu_ with the air of a
connoisseur.
Before your coffee is served the whole Piazza is ablaze and literally
packed with people. The tables around you stand quite out to the
farthest edge permitted. (These caffès have, so to speak, riparian
rights--so much piazza seating frontage, facing the high-water mark of
the caffè itself.) The waiters can now hardly wedge their way through
the crowd. The chairs are so densely occupied that you barely move your
elbows. Next you is an Italian mother--full-blown even to her delicate
mustache--surrounded by a bevy of daughters, all in pretty hats and
white or gay-colored dresses, chatting with a circle of still other
officers. All over the square, where earlier in the day only a few
stray pilgrims braved the heat, or a hungry pigeon wandered in search
of a grain of corn, the _personnel_ of this table is repeated--mothers
and officers and daughters, and daughters and officers and mothers
again.
Outside this mass, representing a _clientèle_ possessing at least half
a _lira_ each--one cannot, of course, occupy a chair and spend less,
and it is equally difficult to spend very much more--there moves in a
solid mass the rest of the world: bareheaded girls, who have been all
day stringing beads in some hot courtyard; old crones in rags from
below the shipyards; fishermen in from Chioggia; sailors, stevedores,
and soldiers in their linen suits, besides sight-seers and wayfarers
from the four corners of the earth.
If there were nothing else in Venice but the night life of this grand
Piazza, it would be worth a pilgrimage half across the world to
see. Empty every café in the Boulevards; add all the _habitués_ of
the Volks Gardens of Vienna, and all those you remember at Berlin,
Buda-Pesth, and Florence; pack them in one mass, and you would not
half fill the Piazza. Even if you did, you could never bring together
the same kinds of people. Venice is not only the magnet that draws the
idler and the sight-seer, but those who love her just because she is
Venice--painters, students, architects, historians, musicians, every
soul who values the past and who finds here, as nowhere else, the
highest achievement of chisel, brush, and trowel.
The painters come, of course--all kinds of painters, for all kinds of
subjects. Every morning, all over the canals and quays, you find a new
growth of white umbrellas, like mushrooms, sprung up in the night.
Since the days of Canaletto these men have painted and repainted these
same stretches of water, palace, and sky. Once under the spell of her
presence, they are never again free from the fascinations of this
Mistress of the Adriatic. Many of the older men are long since dead and
forgotten, but the work of those of to-day you know: Ziem first, nearly
all his life a worshiper of the wall of the Public Garden; and Rico and
Ruskin and Whistler. Their names are legion. They have all had a corner
at Florian’s. No matter what their nationality or specialty, they speak
the common language of the brush. Old Professor Croisac knows them all.
He has just risen again to salute Marks, a painter of sunrises, who
has never yet recovered from his first thrill of delight when early
one morning his gondolier rowed him down the lagoon and made fast to
a cluster of spiles off the Public Garden. When the sun rose behind
the sycamores and threw a flood of gold across the sleeping city,
and flashed upon the sails of the fishing-boats drifting up from the
Lido, Marks lost his heart. He is still tied up every summer to that
same cluster of spiles, painting the glory of the morning sky and the
drifting boats. He will never want to paint anything else. He will not
listen to you when you tell him of the sunsets up the Giudecca, or the
soft pearly light of the dawn silvering the Salute, or the picturesque
life of the fisher-folk of Malamocco.
“My dear boy,” he breaks out, “get up to-morrow morning at five and
come down to the Garden, and just see one sunrise--only one. We
had a lemon-yellow and pale emerald sky this morning, with dabs of
rose-leaves, that would have paralyzed you.”
Do not laugh at the painter’s enthusiasm. This white goddess of the sea
has a thousand lovers, and, like all other lovers the world over, each
one believes that he alone holds the key to her heart.
IN AN OLD GARDEN
YOU think, perhaps, there are no gardens in Venice; that it is all a
sweep of palace front and shimmering sea; that save for the oleanders
bursting into bloom near the Iron Bridge, and the great trees of
the Public Garden shading the flower-bordered walks, there are no
half-neglected tangles where rose and vine run riot; where the plash of
the fountain is heard in the stillness of the night, and tall cedars
cast their black shadows at noonday.
Really, if you but knew it, almost every palace hides a garden nestling
beneath its balconies, and every high wall hems in a wealth of green,
studded with broken statues, quaint arbors festooned with purple
grapes, and white walks bordered by ancient box; while every roof that
falls beneath a window is made a hanging garden of potted plants and
swinging vines.
[Illustration: BEYOND SAN ROSARIO]
Step from your gondola into some open archway. A door beyond leads you
to a court paved with marble flags and centred by a well with carved
marble curb, yellow stained with age. Cross this wide court, pass
a swinging iron gate, and you stand under rose-covered bowers, where
in the olden time gay gallants touched their lutes and fair ladies
listened to oft-told tales of love.
And not only behind the palaces facing the Grand Canal, but along the
Zattere beyond San Rosario, away down the Giudecca, and by the borders
of the lagoon, will you find gay oleanders flaunting red blossoms, and
ivy and myrtle hanging in black-green bunches over crumbling walls.