the misery of Venetian life are hidden by the darkness, and one sees
only beauty. Here are subjects for the etcher, for Rembrandt and
Frans Hals,--marvellous effects of light and shade. The streets are
pitch-dark; there is nothing to mar the lovely fair blue nights of
Venice--no vicious shaft of electric light to bleach the colour from
the sky. These side streets are lit by the candle and the lamp.
Perhaps the most picturesque of all the shops at night are the
wine-shops. There one sees, beneath some low blackened doorway, a rich
golden-brown interior. In the midst of this golden gloom one dim
oil-lamp is burning--the most perfect light possible from the
painter's standpoint: by it, the dark faces and gesticulating hands of
the men gathered round a table are turned to deep orange. This is all
one sees growing from out the encircling gloom--faces, hands, and a
few flecks of ruby light, as the glasses are raised. Every shop down
these narrow streets has its shrine to the Virgin Mary, with its
statuette, its fringes, and its flowers; and at night these shrines
are illuminated according to the poverty or the wealth of the
proprietor--some have only a tiny dip, others have a candle or a group
of candles, while well-to-do folk boast a row of oil-lamps. Rich or
poor, each has its offering, its tiny beacon. The children may go
without bread, and the mother may lack warm clothing; but the Holy
Mother must not be robbed of her due. There is certainly a wonderful
simplicity of faith about these people. The cook-shops are fascinating
by night. There are innumerable stalls; in fact, nearly all the
shopping seems to be done from stalls; even the butchers have open-air
stalls. At night chestnut-roasters, toffee-vendors, pumpkin-and-hot-pear
men hold full sway. These are generally surrounded by groups of
open-mouthed children gazing with delight at the long twisted strings
of toffee in the hands of the operator. Almost a still greater
attraction to the young folk of Venice is the chestnut-roaster; he
generally takes up his position in the courtyards, as does the
coffee-roaster. Courtyards seem to be the favourite haunts of the
coffee-roasters,--partly, I suppose, because all the doors of the
houses round about open into them, and housewives can be easily
supplied. They seem to be constantly roasting coffee berries night and
day; the whole place reeks with the fragrant odour. They are
picturesque by day, these busy workers, but far more picturesque by
night, when the gleam of their ovens shows orange in the purple gloom,
and the leaping flames light up the faces of the children round
about, handsome little faces with a certain grandeur in them--boys
with bronze cheeks, dark hair, olive complexions, black eyes, and
sometimes a touch of colour in their red flannel caps and their
multicoloured patches of garments. There is something barbaric and
fine and graceful about them, half-encircled, as they are, by the
filmy blue smoke from the ovens. A Venetian Good Friday celebrated in
a poor and populous part of Venice at night is most picturesque. The
people of the quarter--the coffee-roasters, the cook-shop men, the
footmen, and the wine-sellers--arrange to sing a chant in twenty-four
verses, a grave and sombre chant following the life of our Lord in His
Passion. Each verse takes about five minutes to sing, and there is a
pause of equal length between each two verses. During every interval
the crowd, who have been quiet, begin to chatter, the men smoke, and
the boys rush and tumble. Directly the precentor begins, silence falls
upon them once more. Most of the people in that particular quarter
subscribe to the erection of a shrine with plenty of candles and
little glass lamps. It is a picturesque sight--the yellow light from
the altar lamps falling on the group of men and women gathered round
the singers and the many heads thrust out of windows and balconies,
on the fair, devout, and serious faces of the children, on the
handsome women and the bronze-faced men.
All the world in Venice lives out of doors: they breakfast and lunch
and dine, all in the open air. All of them live in lodgings or hotels,
and principally in the bedrooms, which are for the most part
comfortless and dreary,--their only merits are a frescoed ceiling,
sometimes really fine and old, and a balcony. One can procure a marvel
of a palace in Venice for the cost of a garret in London. There is no
real home-life in Venice. Rich and poor, mothers, fathers, children,
and servants,--all take their food in the open air. There are
restaurants and cafés for the well-to-do, endless eating-houses for
the poorer classes, and sausage-makers for the gondoliers. Cookshops
swarm. There you see great piles of fish and garlic, bowls of broth,
polenta, and stewed snails, roast apples, boiled beans, cabbages, and
potatoes. Every holiday, every saint's day, has its special dish.
Carnival time sets the fashion for beaten cream or panamonlata; at San
Martino gingerbread soldiers are popular; and for Christmas time there
is candy made with honey and almonds. A certain broth consumed by the
very humblest is made from scraps of meat which even the
sausage-makers will not use: as may be imagined, the soup is highly
flavoured. In the midst of all these stalls and eating-houses it is
extraordinary how little there is eaten in Venice,--merely a mouthful
here and there,--a kind of light running meal. A Venetian, no matter
how rich he might be, would never dream of inviting you to a set meal.
There is no heavy food, no cut from the joint. If a Venetian invites
you to an entertainment, he will give you a cup of coffee perhaps, or
a glass of wine and a biscuit,--rarely more. He will never invite you
to eat a great meal; he never takes it himself. The eating-house and
the stall appear to be more or less of an excuse for gossip and the
meeting of neighbours.
If the streets of Venice are bewitching by night, they are certainly
delightful in the early morning. It is then that one receives the most
vivid impressions. There is a certain freshness in one's perceptions
at the dawn. The poor wretches who make their beds in the streets, or
on the steps, or at the base of columns, shake themselves and shamble
off. Troops of ragged "facchini" fill the streets, and quarrel noisily
over their work. The great cisterns in the market-place are open, and
the water is brought round to your house by dealers, stout young
girls with broad backs and rosy cheeks; they carry it in two brass
buckets attached to a pole, and empty it into large earthenware pots
placed ready for its reception in the kitchen. These girls, called
"bigolanti," supply the place of water-works. At this hour you see the
shops opening like so many flowers before the sun. Butchers set forth
their meat; fruit shops, crockery shops, bakers', cheap-clothing, and
felt-hat shops, show their various wares. You see peasants at work
among vegetables, building cabbages and carrots into picturesque
piles, and decorating them with garlic and onions, while their masters
are still sleeping on sacks of potatoes. Great barges arrive from
Mestre, Chioggia, and Torcello, laden with vegetables and fruit.
Eating-houses begin their trade. You see men and women taking their
breakfast, and a savoury smell of spaghettis and eels on gridirons
fills the air. Gondoliers begin to wash their gondolas, brush their
felces, polish the iron of their prows, shake their cushions, and put
everything in order for business. Picturesque old women, carrying milk
in fat squat bottles, make the round of the hotels and restaurants at
this early hour. They are good to look at, with their dark nut-brown
faces and dangling gold earrings under their large straw hats. Their
figures are much the shape of their bottles; and they bring a pleasant
atmosphere into Venice, an atmosphere of fields and clover-scented
earth, and milk drawn from the cream-coloured cows. Fishermen, a
handsome class, with weather-beaten faces, in blue clothing, come
striding down the calle, shallow baskets of fish on their heads. They
set up their stalls and display their soles and mackerel, chopping up
their eels into sections and crying, "Beautiful, and all alive!" At
this hour everyone is making bargains, and the result is a continual
buzz; but there is nothing discordant about the street cries of
Venice. A peculiarly beautiful cry is that of the man who comes round
every morning with wood for your kitchen fire. The fuel-men cut their
wood on the shores of the Adriatic, and anchor their barges at the
Custom House, leaving them in charge of mongrel yellow dogs, who guard
so vigilantly and are so extremely aggressive that never a splinter is
taken from the barges.
[Illustration: THE WOODEN SPOON SELLER]
The street cries are full of individuality, and the tradesman brings a
little art to bear on the description of his wares. The song of the
sweep, exquisitely sad, quite befits the warning, "Beware of your
chimney!" There is nothing gay about the sweep: he is a very
melancholy person, and his expression is in sympathy with his music.
The pumpkin-vendor is coy, and his cry has a winning pathos; his is
not an easy vegetable to launch on the market, and he has developed
into a very bashful person. His cry is cooing and subtle: he almost
caresses you into buying, which is necessary, as no one in his right
senses really desires a pumpkin. The fruiterer is different. He is
handsome, fat-cheeked, and has scarlet lips, strong black hair curling
in ringlets, and gold rings in his ears. His adjuration is a round,
full, resonant roar, like a triumphant hymn; and there is altogether a
certain Oriental splendour about his demeanour. It is not necessary
for him to be subtle: there is always a sale for melons and pears,
chestnuts and pomegranates. He uses colour as a stimulant to his
customers, and dwells upon the hue of his fruit. "Melons with hearts
of fire!" he cries. Also he flatters. To a dear old gentleman passing
by he will hold up a clump of melons, some of them sliced, or a group
of richly coloured pomegranates, and say, "Now, you as a man of taste
will appreciate this marvellous colour; you are young enough to
understand the fire and beauty of these melons"; and the old
gentleman will go on his way feeling quite pleased and youthful. Some
of the cries are quaint. I once heard a man say, "Juicy pears that
bathe your beard!" and another said his peaches were "ugly but
good,"--they certainly were not beautiful to look upon. Almost the
most melodious salesmen are the countrymen who pace the streets with
larks and finches in cages, and roses and pinks in pots.
At mid-day the streets are enveloped in a warm golden light; there are
rich old browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas--all the tints of a
gorgeous wall-flower. A ray of sun in a bric-à-brac shop attracts your
attention; and you get a peep through a window with cobwebbed panes,
high up in a flesh-coloured wall, at some of the objects
within,--brass pots and pans gleam from the walls, bits of china and
porcelain, strings of glass beads, some quaint old bookcases with
saints carved in ivory, fragments of old brocade woven with gold and
gorgeous,--all kinds of strange curiosities, looking crisp and
brilliant in the sunlight. Suddenly you are blinded by a patch of
golden yellow. It is an orange-stall placed before a pink palace
flecked with the delicate tracery of luminous violet shadow. Away down
in the interior of the stall, where the sun does not shine, it
appears almost purple by contrast to the brilliant mass of golden
fruit. The background of all these shops is neutral: the objects for
sale form the only brilliant and positive colour.
The palaces and houses are mostly pink and white. There are pinks, and
greys, and blues, and so on. It is not the painted, coloured city that
one had imagined it to be: Venice is very grey. But its greyness is
that of the opal and the pearl. I have often heard people say how
strange it is that the colours always seem brighter in Venice than in
any other city--the shutters and the doors and the shops. The answer
is not far to seek. It is because the background and the general
colouring is neutral. There are no large patches of positive colour:
even St. Mark's, choke-full of colour as it is, has no positive colour
in its composition. Take a peep into a carpenter's shop. Through the
iron grating, rusty and red with age, you see the quaint old craftsman
at work, his flesh tone very much the colour of the wood he is
planing; piercing black eyes look through and over the large
bone-framed glasses that he wears; he suggests the carpenter of Japan;
and, judging from the amount of shavings you see about the floor, you
gather that he is a dignified, not what may be called a feverish,
worker. He is, however, evidently an artist: you see dainty specimens
of wood-carving hung round on the walls. Most of the carpenters of
Venice seem to be old men. There appear to be very few middle-aged
people at all. They seem to be either young boys and girls or ancient
men and women. Whether it is that Venetians age quickly, I do not
know. The old women are extraordinary. You can scarcely imagine how
anything so crooked and foul and old and frowsy, with so little hair,
so few teeth, so many protruding bones, and such parchment-like skin,
can be human. Their faces seem to be shrunken like old fruit: I have
seen women with noses shrivelled and with dents in them like
strawberries. It is extraordinary to watch these women on their
shopping excursions. How they bargain! They think nothing of starting
the day before to buy a piece of steak, and sometimes spend a whole
day haggling over it. Some of the shopmen are swindlers,--fat, greasy
men, very fresh and brisk, who have reduced cheating to a fine art.
[Illustration: WORK GIRLS]
It is only after living in Venice for some months that one begins to
understand the bargaining in the streets. You will see two men
talking--one the shopman, the other the purchaser--and if you
know anything of the language, and watch carefully, you will find it
the most marvellous bit of acting imaginable. They bargain; the
customer turns in scorn, and goes; he is called back; the goods are
displayed once more, and their merits expatiated upon. The customer
laughs incredulously and moves away. The seller then tries other
tactics to fog his client. Eventually he makes a low offer, which is
accepted; but even then the shopman gets the best of it, for he has a
whole battery of the arts of measurement in reserve. There is really
no end to the various possibilities of "doing" a man out of a
halfpenny.
Beggars are a great trial in the streets. The lame, the halt, and the
blind breathe woe and pestilence under your window, and long
monotonous whines of sorrow. Fat friars in spectacles and bare feet
come round once a month begging bread and fuel for the convents. Old
troubadours serenade you with zithers, strumming feebly with fingers
that seem to be all bone, and in thin quavering voices pipe out old
ditties of youth and love.
There are lottery offices everywhere. Around them there is always a
great excitement. The missing number, printed on a card framed in
flowers and ribands, is placed in the windows daily. Some say that the
system of lottery should be done away with; but it might be cruel to
deprive the poor wretches of hope. The lottery brings joy to many
despairing people.
Venetian women are good-looking. One sees them continually about the
streets. Nothing can surpass the grace of the shawl-clad figures seen
down the perspective of the long streets, or about some old stone well
in a campiello. They are for the most part smart and clean. You see
them coming home from the factories, nearly always dressed in black,
simple and well-behaved. Their hair is of a crisp black, and well
tended; their manner is sedate and demure. There is no boisterousness
about the Venetian girls, no turning round in the streets, no
coarseness. Many of them are very beautiful. You see a woman crossing
an open space with the sunlight gleaming on the amber beads about her
throat and making the rich colour glow brighter beneath her olive
skin. A shawl is thrown round her shoulders, and her jet-black hair is
fastened by a silver pin. She wears a deep crimson bodice. The choice
of colour of these women is unerring in taste. Their shawls are
seldom gaudy, generally of blue or pale mauve; vivid colours are
reserved for the bodices.
Then, there are the bead-stringers. You see them everywhere: handsome
girls with a richness of southern colour flushing beneath warm-toned
skins, eyes large and dark, with heavy black lashes, the hair twisted
in knots low on their necks, and swept back in large waves from square
foreheads, a string of coloured beads round their necks, and flowered
linen blouses with open collars. You see them with their wooden trays
full of beads. The bead-stringers are nearly always gay. They laugh
and chat as they run the beads on the strings. They often form a very
pretty picture, as they bend over their work and thread turquoise
beads from wooden trays.
In the courtyards, some women are hanging white clothes on a line
before a yellow wall; others are leaning out of their windows,
gossiping with neighbours. Never was there a more gossiping set of
women: every window, every balcony, seems to be thronged with heads
thrust out to chatter.
Venice is divided up into campi or squares. Each campo has a church, a
butcher, a baker, a candlestick-maker, and everything else that is
necessary to life, including a café and a market.
Venetian children, as a rule, are very badly reared, and many of them
die at an early age. It is a belief and a consolation that the little
ones go straight to heaven, there to plead their parents' cause and to
arrange for their reception.
May is the best month in which to see the streets. The intoxication of
spring is in the air, and in the bright sunlight the colours burn and
glow. Although you cannot see them, you are constantly reminded that
there are gardens in Venice. Suddenly over the red brickwork of a high
wall you will see clumps of tamarisk, hanging mauve wisteria, or the
scarlet buds of a pomegranate, while the scent of syringa and banksia
roses fills the air, the birds sing in the enclosure, and the perfume
of honeysuckle trails over the wall of a garden of a foreign prince.
Few crowds are more cheerful or better ordered than a Venetian crowd.
There is a light-heartedness about these people that is very engaging;
they have a marvellous frankness of manner, a sublime indifference to
truth. The smallest Venetian child is a born flatterer, and will tell
you, not what he thinks, but what he imagines you wish to hear. The
people are the most engaging in the world, free from care or doubt as
to right or wrong. This carelessness is characteristic of the whole
Italian race. Venetians give the impression of being always determined
to enjoy life to the full. They are continually coming together, for
the purpose of pleasure, on one pretence or another, and the flashes
of wit in the street are sometimes very amusing. The Venetians have
always been, and still are, a great festa-loving people. When the
Republic fell, the brave ceremonies came to an end; but the original
passion is still kept alive. The festa in Venice are chiefly of
religious character. For example, once a year each parish church
honours the feast of its patron saint by processions to all shrines
within that particular parish. Very picturesque are the streams of
priests and people crossing the bridges and passing along the fondanta
of some small canal,--a brilliant ribbon of vermilion and gold winding
through the grey-toned city: porters of the church (in blouses of
white, red, and blue) bearing candles, pictures, and banners; bands
playing the gayest operatic tunes; priests and the parocco carrying
the Host under a canopy of cloth of gold; long files of the devout
holding candles; and boys with crackers and guns. At night there is
dancing in the largest campo of the parish. On Good Friday the streets
resemble a feast rather than a fast. The people are in their best and
gaudiest clothes; children are rushing and romping and turning
somersaults, whirling their rattles, fitting up shrines and then
appealing to the crowd for coppers,--human mites of six or seven
constructing "Santo Sepolcro," or Holy Graves, from old bottles,
sprigs of bay stuck in, and odd candle-ends. One may witness touches
of sentiment in a Venetian crowd; but the depths are seldom stirred.
Sometimes sentiment finds expression in the rilotti--popular Venetian
songs.
[Illustration: CHIOGGIA FISH MARKET]
THE ISLANDS OF THE LAGOON
There is no piece of water more extraordinary than the lagoons of
Venice. They cover an area of 184 square miles of water, shut off from
the sea by a narrow strip of sandy islands, which are called the Lidi.
The form of the lagoons is, roughly, that of a bent bow. How did they
happen to be formed thus? That is a difficult question, and there are
various opinions. Certainly the lagoons are a great feature of the
city. They gave shelter to the founders flying from the Huns on the
mainland, and the health of the community depends on their regular ebb
and flow. A lagoon is not a lake; neither is it a swamp, nor open sea.
It is a strange piece of natural engineering. There are really,
although we cannot see them at high tide, four distinct water systems,
with separate watersheds and confluent streams. The sea comes in once
a day as from a great heart, pulsing in through the four breaks in
the Lido barrier, cleaning and purifying the lagoon, and afterwards
bearing away the refuse of the city. At low tide one can see these
channels distinctly winding in and out of the mud-banks. In the spring
they are bare, with long trails of sea-grass. In autumn they are brown
and bare, and at high tide the whole surface is flooded. On the
mainland shore of the lagoon there is a certain territory, called
Laguna Morta, where the sea and the land fight a continual battle. It
is the home of the wildfowl. Here salt sea-grasses grow, tamarisk,
samphire, and, in the autumn, sea lavender. Farther, the ground
becomes solid, and the Venetian plain begins, with its villas,
poplars, vineyards, and mulberry groves.
Nothing is more delightful than to spend a whole long day upon the
lagoon when the air is sweet and the breeze is fresh from the Lido.
There are fishing-boats coming in from their long night, with spoil
for the Rialto market, crossing and recrossing one another as they
tack. The bows are painted, and the nets are hung mast-high to be
mended and dried in the sun. Their sails are folded close together,
like the wings of great vermilion moths. These sails, which are
picturesque in the Venetian landscape, are of the deepest oranges and
reds, rich red browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas, contrasting
strangely with the cool grey waters of the lagoon upon which they
float.
One can wander for miles along the Lido on the Adriatic side. The
lizards bask in the hot sand; the delicate, pale sea-holly mingles
with the yellow of the evening primrose. From the Lido you can see
right away to the south-east, and in the horizon can discern the faint
blue hills above Trieste and the top of Monte Maggiore. From there the
city looks well: one sees the Ducal Palace, faintly pink, the green
woods of the public gardens, and the vast blue Venetian sky. The true
native seems to have a strange affection for the Lido. One cannot tell
why or wherefore; but it is so--"Lido" has ever been a name to conjure
with. One cannot tell what associations and sensations of pleasure and
charm are connected with it. At the present day it is a flat piece of
somewhat marshy ground, with large gardens intersected by canals.
The woods of the Favorita, on the shore of San Elizabetta, are
delightful, with their groves of acacia and catalpas, where the ground
is carpeted with wild flowers, and the grass is greener than elsewhere
in Venice, and the nodding violets grow. Behind the acacia grove
there is a Protestant burial-ground where rest the bones of many
Englishmen who came to Venice for pleasure and stayed to die. The tomb
of our ambassador, Sir Francis Vincent, is here. A beautiful walk is
towards the ramparts of San Nicolo, where the blackbirds sing in the
old convent garden, and in summer crimson poppies, purple salvias, and
vivid green grass are luxuriant. San Nicolo di Bari is the patron
saint of sailors. They have erected a magnificent church dedicated to
his memory on the most beautiful point of the Lido. Here the crews of
the merchantmen and warships of the Republic would linger for a while
before sailing, to ask a blessing on their voyage. The saint's remains
do not really rest here. Venice failed in her endeavour to obtain them
by force from the people of Bari; but she spread the fiction among the
people. To this day the sailors of the lagoon firmly believe that San
Nicolo still watches over and protects them, and when in doubt or
danger are enabled by the campanile of his church to find the direct
course to the Lido port. At the Lido is the cemetery of the Jews. The
graves are covered with sand and vegetation, and children never
hesitate to dance on them,--in fact, to do so is a favourite pastime.
If one remonstrates, they will look at you with wide-open eyes,
and explain that these are only graves of Jews,--a Jew with the
Venetians being no better than a dog. The grave of a Christian is
treated with the greatest reverence: even the children and the
gondoliers salute it as they pass. There is something pathetic about
the Jewish graves, from the stones over which the inscriptions have
been effaced.
[Illustration: CHIOGGIA]
Chioggia is one of the greater islands. It has a large town with an
immensely broad street and a wide canal. Here is the most famous and
most picturesque fish-market of all suburban Venice. In it one comes
across the finest Venetian types, magnificent models for painters,
bronzed Giorgione figures and black-eyed swarthy women. Their dialect
is beautiful, far more so than that of Venice proper; and at night
Ariosto is read publicly in the streets by a musical sweet-voiced
Chiozzotto. Here the dramatist Goldoni lived, and the painter Rosalba
Carrera, and the composer Giuseppe Zarlino. Chioggia reminds one of
the Jewish quarter in the east end of London. The people, mostly
fishermen, are extremely poor.
This is the place for colour. There is colour everywhere--in the sails
of the boats, in the costume of the people, and even in the red
cotton curtains of the churches. Unfortunately, one's stay there was
brief--because of the insects. A fisherman in Chioggia took us for a
sail. We had bargained for an hour's journey; but we had not been out
for more than ten minutes before he landed us on the rocks and
demanded five francs. We were entirely at his mercy, and were forced
to concede; but his action struck us as being high-handed. Sometimes
the fishermen of Chioggia, if they are so inclined, will tell you
tales of Angelica and Orlando, and the pageant of the Carolingian
myth.