An English war correspondent who visited Venice in the Winter drew this
word picture:
"Shuttered palaces face each other across silent canals. A footstep
ringing down those narrow alleys, which are like deep, dark slits in a
close-crowded mass of many-storied houses, starts echoes that die
undisturbed away. The black gondola glides through a dead city more
beautiful in the silence and stillness of this war trance of hers than
ever in the fullness of her vivacious life. At each corner of the
narrow water lane the white-haired gondolier raises his mournful cry,
but by long habit, for he knows that no answer will ring out from beyond
the angle of the dark stone wall, and no tapering prow glide out to be
avoided by a turn of his skillful oar.
"The Grand Canal is a green and gleaming vista of desertion. The scream
of seagulls, beating its tranquil surface with their wings, is the only
sound that disturbs the quiet of its reverie. A pleasing melancholy
invests the deserted quays, and in remote corners of little lost canals
you can almost hear the whispering of innumerable spirits of the Venice
of long ago who have been drawn back to their old home by this strange
peace that lies upon the city.
"Venice, without tourists, without guides, without postcard sellers and
hotel touts, is a close preserve of beauty for the few who have the
fortune to be here. The atmosphere and the dignity of the days when she
was a ruling city are here as they have never been before in modern
times, nor ever will be again."