her gondola and zendaletta, which is black like a gondola, but wholly
calculated like that for the purposes of refined gallantry. So is the
nightly rendezvous, the café and casino; for whilst Palladio’s palaces
serve to adorn the Grand Canal and strike those who enter Venice
with surprise at its magnificence, those snug retreats are intended
for the relaxation of those who inhabit the more splendid apartments
and are feigned with exertions of dignity and necessity of no small
expense.... I have asked several friends about the truth of what one
has been always hearing in England--that the Venetian gondoliers
sing Tasso’s and Ariosto’s verses in the streets at night, sometimes
quarrelling with each other concerning the merits of their favourite
poets; but what I have been told since I came here of their attachment
to their respective masters, and secrecy when trusted by them in love
affairs, seems far more probable, as they are proud to excess when
they serve a nobleman of high birth, and will tell you with an air of
importance that the house of Memmo, Monsenigo, or Gratterola has been
served by their ancestors for these eighty or perhaps a hundred years,
transmitting pride thus from generation to generation, even when that
pride is but reflected only like the mock rainbow of a summer sky.
But hark! while I am writing this peevish reflection in my room, I
hear some voices under my window answering each other upon the Grand
Canal. It is--it is the gondolieri sure enough; they are at this moment
singing to an odd sort of tune, but in no unmusical manner, the flight
of Erminia from Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem.’
MRS. PIOZZI (1785).
A GONDOLIER OF CHIOGGIA
‘Drink, my friends! _vive la joyeuse Italie, et Venise la belle_!...
I am, as you know, the son of a Chioggia fisherman. Nearly all the
natives of this shore have the thorax well developed, and possess
strong voices, which would be beautiful also, if not early injured
by struggles, when at sea, with the noise of the wind and waves....
The Chioggiotes are a handsome race. They say that a great French
painter, Leopolo Roberto, is now occupied in illustrating their
beauty in a picture, which he will allow no one to see. Though, as
you perceive, my complexion is sufficiently robust, my father, in
comparing me with my brothers, considered me so frail and delicate,
that he would not teach me either to throw the line, or to manage skiff
or fishing-boat. He showed me only how to handle an oar with both
hands, to row a small boat, and sent me to gain a living at Venice,
in the capacity of assistant gondolier of the place. It was a great
relief and humiliation for me to enter thus into servitude, to quit my
paternal home, the borders of the sea, and the honourable and perilous
profession of my ancestors. But I had a fine voice, and knew many
fragments of Ariosto and Tasso. I might make a lively gondolier, and
gain, with time and patience, fifty francs a month in the service of
amateurs and strangers.... Taste for poetry and music develops itself
among us sons of the people. We had, and we still have (though the
custom threatens to be lost) our bards and our poets, whom we call
_cupidons_; rhapsodical travellers, who bring us from the central
provinces incorrect notions of the mother-tongue, modified--I should
better say enriched, with all the genius of the northern and southern
dialects. Men of the people like us, gifted at the same time with
memory and imagination, they never care for mixing their fantastic
improvisations with the creations of poets. Always taking, and leaving
some new phrase in their passage, they embellish the language and the
text of their authors with an inconceivable confusion of idioms. They
might well be called the preservers of the instability of language
in the literature of the frontier provinces. Our ignorance accepts,
without appeal, the decisions of this walking academy; and you have had
occasion, at times, to admire the energy and the grotesque Italian of
our poets, in the mouths of the singers of the lagoons. It is noon on
Sunday after Grand Mass, upon the public place of Chioggia, or of an
evening in the cabarets on the banks, that these rhapsodists delight
a numerous and impassioned audience by their recitations mingled with
song and declamation. The _cupido_ usually stands upon a table, and
plays from time to time a symphony or finale after his fashion, upon
some kind of instrument; sometimes the Calabrian pipe, sometimes the
violin, flute, or guitar. The Chioggiotes, cold and phlegmatic in
appearance, listen and smoke at first, with an imperturbable and almost
disdainful air; but at the noble battle of Ariosto’s heroes, at the
death of Paladins, the rescue of ladies, and the defeat of giants, the
audience are aroused, become animated, utter cries, excite themselves
so effectually, that pipes and glasses fly into pieces, the seats and
the tables are overturned, and often the _cupido_, about to fall the
victim to the enthusiasm he has called forth, is forced to take flight,
while the _dilettanti_ spread themselves through the country in pursuit
of an imaginary ravisher with cries of ‘_d’amazza! d’amazza!_ kill the
monster! kill the coward! bravo, Astolphe! courage, brave comrade!’ It
is thus these men of Chioggia, intoxicated with the fumes of tobacco,
wine, and poetry, take to their boats, declaiming to the winds and
waves broken fragments of these delirious epic poems.
GEORGE SAND.
ISLAND AND LAGOON
My windows look upon a garden, the west side of which
is bounded by the walls of a convent, while towards the
east it juts out into the lagoon, in the form of a little
peninsula. The garden is charmingly situated, but little
frequented. It is my custom every morning ... to spend a
few moments at the window ... to see the sun rise over the
Adriatic.... I recommend exactly this station, the most
eligible one, perhaps, in all Venice, to enjoy so splendid
a prospect in perfection. A purple twilight hangs over the
deep, and a golden mist on the lagoon announces the sun’s
approach. The heavens and the sea are wrapped in expectant
silence. In two seconds the orb of day appears, casting
a flood of fiery light upon the waves. It is a sight of
enchantment!
SCHILLER.
Chioggia, like Venice, is built upon a foundation of wooden
piles.... One meets sailors and fishermen at every step.
Whoever appears in a perruque, or a cloak, is regarded
as an aristocrat--a rich man; the cap and overcoat are
here the insignia of the poor. The situation is certainly
extremely lovely, but it does not bear comparison with
Venice.
SCHILLER.
PLEASANT MURANO
I passed in a gondola to pleasant Murano, distant about a little mile
from the citie, where they make their delicate Venice glasses, so
famous over al Christendome for the incomparable finenes thereof, and
in one of their working houses made a glasse my selfe. Most of their
principall matter whereof they make their glasses is a kinde of earth
which is brought thither by sea from Drepanum, a goodly haven towne
of Sicilie, where Æneas buried his aged father Anchises. This Murano
is a very delectable and populous place, having many faire buildings
both publique and private, and divers very pleasant gardens. The
first that inhabited it were those of the towne Altinum, bordering
upon the sea coast, who in the time of the Hunnes invasion of Italy,
repaired hither with their wives and children, for the securitie of
their lives, as other borderers also did at the same time to those
Islands, where Venice now standeth. Here did I eate the best oysters
that ever I did in all my life. They were indeede but little, something
lesse than our Wainflete oysters about London.... By the way, betwixt
Venice and Murano I observed a most notable thing, whereof I had often
heard long before, a faire monastery of Augustinian monkes built by a
second Flora or Lais. I meane a rich Cortezan of Venice, whose name
was Margarita Æmiliana. I have not heard of so religious a worke done
by so irreligious a founder in any place of Christendome: belike she
hoped to make expiation unto God by this holy deede for the lascivious
dalliances of her youth, but _tali spe freti sperando pereant_.
THOMAS CORYAT (1611).
MURANO
The decay of the city of Venice is, in many respects, like that of
an outwearied and aged human frame; the cause of its decrepitude is
indeed at the heart, but the outward appearances of it are first at the
extremities. In the centre of the city there are still places where
some evidence of vitality remains, and where, with kind closing of
the eyes to signs, too manifest even there, of distress and declining
fortune, the stranger may succeed in imagining, for a little while,
what must have been the aspect of Venice in her prime. But this
lingering pulsation has not force enough any more to penetrate into
the suburbs and outskirts of the city; the frost of death has there
seized upon it irrevocably, and the grasp of mortal disease is marked
daily by the increasing breadth of its belt of ruin. Nowhere is this
seen more grievously than along the great north-eastern boundary, once
occupied by the smaller palaces of the Venetians, built for pleasure or
repose; the nobler piles along the Grand Canal being reserved for the
pomp and business of daily life. To such smaller palaces some garden
ground was commonly attached, opening to the water-side; and, in front
of these villas and gardens, the lagoon was wont to be covered in the
evening by gondolas: the space of it between this part of the city and
the island group of Murano being to Venice, in her time of power, what
its parks are to London; only gondolas were used instead of carriages,
and the crowd of the population did not come out till towards sunset,
and prolonged their pleasures far into the night, company answering to
company with alternate singing.
If, knowing this custom of the Venetians, and with a vision in his
mind of summer palaces lining the shore, and myrtle gardens sloping
to the sea, the traveller now seeks this suburb of Venice, he will be
strangely and sadly surprised to find a new but perfectly desolate
quay, about a mile in length, extending from the arsenal to the Sacca
della Misericordia, in front of a line of miserable houses built in
the course of the last sixty or eighty years, yet already tottering to
their ruin; and not less to find that the principal object in the view
which these houses (built partly in front and partly on the ruins of
the ancient palaces) now command is a dead brick wall, about a quarter
of a mile across the water, interrupted only by a kind of white lodge,
the cheerfulness of which prospect is not enhanced by his finding that
this wall encloses the principal public cemetery of Venice. He may,
perhaps, marvel for a few moments at the singular taste of the old
Venetians in taking their pleasure under a churchyard wall; but on
further inquiry, he will find that the building on the island, like
those on the shore, is recent, that it stands on the ruins of the
Church of St. Cristoforo della Pace; and that, with a singular, because
unintended, moral, the modern Venetians have replaced the Peace of the
Christ-bearer by the Peace of Death, and where they once went, as the
sun set daily, to their pleasure, now go, as the sun sets to each of
them, for ever, to their graves.
Yet the power of Nature cannot be shortened by the folly, nor her
beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of man. The broad tides still
ebb and flow brightly about the island of the dead, and the linked
conclave of the Alps know no decline from their old pre-eminence, nor
stoop from their golden thrones in the circle of the horizon. So lovely
is the scene still, in spite of all its injuries, that we shall find
ourselves drawn there again and again at evening out of the narrow
canals and streets of the city, to watch the wreaths of the sea-mist
weaving themselves like mourning veils around the mountains far away,
and listen to the green waves as they fret and sigh along the cemetery
shore.
But it is morning now: we have a hard day’s work to do at Murano, and
our boat shoots swiftly from beneath the last bridge of Venice, and
brings us out into the open sea and sky.
The pure cumuli of cloud lie crowded and leaning against one another,
rank beyond rank, far over the shining water, each cut away at its
foundation by a level line, trenchant and clear, till they sink to the
horizon like a flight of marble steps, except where the mountains meet
them, and are lost in them, barred across by the grey terraces of those
cloud foundations and reduced into one crestless bank of blue, spotted
here and there with strange flakes of wan, aerial greenish light,
strewed upon them like snow. And underneath is the long dark line of
the mainland fringed with low trees; and then the wide-waving surface
of the burnished lagoon trembling slowly, and shaking out into forked
bands of lengthening fight the images of the towers of cloud above. To
the north, there is first the great cemetery wall, then the long stray
buildings of Murano, and the island villages beyond, glittering in
intense crystalline vermilion, like so much jewellery scattered on a
mirror, their towers poised apparently in the air a little above the
horizon, and their reflections, as sharp and vivid and substantial as
themselves, thrown on the vacancy between them and the sea. And thus
the villages seem standing on the air; and, to the east, there is a
cluster of ships that seem sailing on the land; for the sandy line of
the Lido stretches itself between us and them, and we can see the tall
white sails moving beyond it, but not the sea, only there is a sense
of the great sea being indeed there, and a solemn strength of gleaming
light in the sky above.
The most discordant feature in the whole scene is the cloud which
hovers above the glass furnaces of Murano; but this we may not regret,
as it is one of the last signs left of human exertion among the
ruinous villages which surround us. The silent gliding of the gondola
brings it nearer to us every moment; we pass the cemetery, and a deep
sea-channel which separates it from Murano, and finally enter a narrow
water-street, with a paved footpath on each side, raised three or four
feet above the canal, and forming a kind of quay between the water and
the doors of the houses. These latter are, for the most part, low,
but built with massy doors and windows of marble or Istrian stone,
square set, and barred with iron; buildings evidently once of no mean
order, though now inhabited only by the poor. Here and there an ogee
window of the fourteenth century, or a doorway deeply enriched with
cable mouldings, shows itself in the midst of more ordinary features;
and several houses, consisting of one story only carried on square
pillars, forming a short arcade along the quay, have windows sustained
on shafts, of red Verona marble, of singular grace and delicacy. All
now in vain: little care is there for their delicacy or grace among
the rough fishermen sauntering on the quay with their jackets hanging
loose from their shoulders, jacket and cap and hair all of the same
dark-greenish sea-grey. But there is some life in the scene more than
is usual in Venice; the women are sitting at their doors knitting
busily, and various workmen of the glass-houses sifting glass-dust upon
the pavement, and strange cries coming from one side of the canal to
the other, and ringing far along the crowded water, from vendors of
figs and grapes, and gourds, and shellfish; cries partly descriptive of
the eatables in question, but interspersed with others of a character
unintelligible in proportion to their violence, and fortunately so,
if we may judge by a sentence which is stencilled in black, within a
garland, on the whitewashed walls of nearly every other house in the
street, but which, how often soever written, no one seems to regard:
‘Bestemme non più. Lodate Gesù.’
We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from
Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated
boats full of all manner of nets, that look as if they could never
be disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides;
and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its
archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small
red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up into
the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings
are covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his
sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little
to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of
the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach
of it, some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass
a considerable church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square
opposite to it with a few acacia-trees, and then find our boat suddenly
seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled into the tide-way of one
of the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the town of Murano
into two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed only by
one wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current,
looking at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly
knowing if there be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the
sunshine glows on their ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles
on the rushing of the green water by the grass-grown quay. It needs
a strong stroke of the oar to bring us into the mouth of another
quiet canal on the farther side of the tide-way, and we are still
somewhat giddy when we run the head of the gondola into the sand on the
left-hand side of this more sluggish stream, and land under the seat
end of the Church of San Donato, the ‘Matrice’ or ‘Mother’ Church of
Murano.
JOHN RUSKIN.
THE GLASS FURNACES OF MURANO
I was lately to see the arsenal of Venice, one of the worthiest things
of Christendom; they say there are as many galleys, and galeasses
of all sorts, belonging to St. Mark, either in cours, as anchor, in
dock, or upon the carine, as there be days in the year; here they can
build a complete galley in half a day, and put her afloat in perfect
equipage, having all the ingredients fitted beforehand, as they did
in three hours, when Henry the Third passed this way to France from
Poland, who wished, that besides Paris and his parliament towns, he
had this arsenal in exchange for three of his chiefest cities. There
are three hundred people perpetually here at work, and if one comes
young and grows old in St. Mark’s service, he hath a pension from the
State during life. Being brought to see one of the Clarissimos that
governs this arsenal, this huge sea store-house, amongst other matters
reflecting upon England, he was saying: ‘That if Cavalier Don Roberto
Mansell were now here, he thought verily the republic would make a
proffer to him to be admiral of that fleet of galleys and galleons,
which are now going against the Duke of Ossuna and the forces of
Naples, you are so well known here.’
I was, since I came hither, in Murano, a little island about the
distance of Lambeth from London, where crystal glass is made, and it
is a rare sight to see a whole street, where on the one side there
are twenty furnaces together at work. They say here that although one
should transplant a glass-furnace from Murano to Venice herself, or to
any of the little assembly of islands about her, or to any other part
of the earth besides, and use the same materials, the same workmen, the
same fuel, the self-same ingredients every day, yet they cannot make
crystal glass in that perfection, for beauty and lustre, as in Murano.
Some impute it to the quality of the circumambient air that hangs over
the place, which is purified and attenuated by the concurrence of so
many fires that are in those furnaces night and day perpetually, for
they are like the vestal fire which never goes out....
The art of glass-making here is very highly valued; for, whosoever be
of that profession are gentlemen _ipso facto_, and it is not without
reason; it being a rare kind of knowledge and chemistry to transmute
dust and sand (for they are the only main ingredients) to such a
diaphanous pellucid dainty body as you see a crystal glass is, which
hath this property above gold or silver or any other mineral, to admit
no poison; as also that it never wastes or loses a whit of its first
weight, though you use it never so long. When I saw so many sorts
of curious glasses made here I thought upon the compliment which a
gentleman put upon a lady in England, who having five or six comely
daughters, said he never saw in his life such a dainty cupboard of
crystal glasses; the compliment proceeds, it seems, from a saying they
have here, ‘That the first handsome woman that ever was made, was made
of Venice glass,’ which implies beauty, but brittleness with all (and
Venice is not unfurnished with some of that mould, for no place abounds
more with lasses and glasses).... When I pried into the materials, and
observed the furnaces and the calcinations, the transubstantiations,
the liquefactions that are incident to this art, my thoughts were
raised to a higher speculation: that if this small furnace-fire hath
the virtue to convert such a small lump of dark dust and sand into such
a precious clear body as crystal, surely that grand universal fire
which shall happen at the day of judgment, may by its violent ardour
vitrify and turn to one lump of crystal the whole body of the earth;
nor am I the first that fell upon this conceit.
JAMES HOWELL.
TORCELLO
Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which nearer
the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher
level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised
here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks
of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some
time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburnt weeds
whitened with webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool
beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On
this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic
type, which if we ascend towards evening (and there are none to hinder
us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges),
we may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide
world of ours. Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of
a lurid ashen grey; not like our northern moors with their jet-black
pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the colour of sackcloth, with the
corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and
gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering
of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy
clearness of space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the
horizon of its level gloom. To the very horizon, on the north-east;
but, to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land along
the border of it, and above this, but further back, a misty band of
mountains, touched with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of
the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the
bars of sand; to the south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon,
alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds
or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same field which
sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them
little larger than cottages (though built of stone, and one adorned
by a quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can
see but little more than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the
fourth, a considerable church with nave and aisles, but of which, in
like manner, we can see little but the long central ridge and lateral
slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing mass from
the green field beneath and grey moor beyond. There are no living
creatures near the buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round
about them. They lie like a little company of ships becalmed on a
far-away sea.
Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the
lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there
are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes
of clustered palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the southern
sky.
Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood,--TORCELLO
and VENICE.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the grey moorland looked as it does this
day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances
of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires
mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices
mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The
flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude
of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in
the paths of the sea.
The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they
left; the mower’s scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street
of the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now
sending up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills
the temple of their ancient worship. Let us go down into that little
space of meadow land.