CHAPTER I.

VENETIAN LIFE

By William Dean Howells

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete

it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter

sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present

trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on

the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical

persons, incidents, and places mentioned.

Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what

I actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow

speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects

upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most

to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but

at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.

W. D. H.

Cambridge, January 1, 1867.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. Venice in Venice

CHAPTER II. Arrival and first Days in Venice

CHAPTER III. The Winter in Venice

CHAPTER IV. Comincia far Caldo

CHAPTER V. Opera and Theatres

CHAPTER VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners

CHAPTER VII. Housekeeping in Venice

CHAPTER VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal

CHAPTER IX. A Day-Break Ramble

CHAPTER X. The Mouse

CHAPTER XI. Churches and Pictures

CHAPTER XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons

CHAPTER XIII. The Armenians

CHAPTER XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice

CHAPTER XV. Some Memorable Places

CHAPTER XVI. Commerce

CHAPTER XVII. Venetian Holidays

CHAPTER XVIII. Christmas Holidays

CHAPTER XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials

CHAPTER XX. Venetian Traits and Characters

CHAPTER XXI. Society

CHAPTER XXII. Our Last Year in Venice

CHAPTER I.

VENICE IN VENICE.

One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the

stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and

the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief

part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian

theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters.

We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the

villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all

tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold

the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the

scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to

us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the

properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its

charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable

clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth

and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes

and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion

which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out

to be a condition of small importance.

It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box

at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this

VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the

theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that

melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place

without learning to know it differently from those writers who have

described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help

seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which

Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the

same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise

and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless

picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the

streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the

city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once

fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough

in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a

charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if

these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us

believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend.

And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret

vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping

depths of the Canalazzo!

Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?

Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation

for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a

government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience

of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old

Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those

for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to

understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and

despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and

sorrow for its fall.

So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will

hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the

Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his

prejudices--the merciless Venice of Darù, and of the historians who

follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he

sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion

removed; and--to take leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to

fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may

go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no

annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often

get from travelers’ beds into their books.

Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors

concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves

hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one’s

associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that

pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will

hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the

taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the

Serenest Republic’s policy. When I entered it the first time I was at

the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its

corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent

tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward

that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the

melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely

of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious

excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don

Quixote,--who might even have been very picturesque,--but who were not

at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal.

The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century,

and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except

that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that

period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment

from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication

between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the

Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse

knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places

which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose

Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic

sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge

was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables

the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties.[1]

[1] The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few

words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of

sentimental errors about Venice:--

“The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a

mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of

daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth

remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that

Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of

Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under

which the traveler now pauses with breathless interest; the statue

which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great ancestors,

was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after

Faliero’s death.”--_Stories of Venice_.]

Political offenders were not confined in the “prison on each hand” of

the poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under

the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been

uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for

their exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom

some foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to

be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say

now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with

prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped.

They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants

could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden

casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the

state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.

But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was

difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay.

I began with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to

languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the

apartments of state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators

were hanged nearly as fast as taken.

Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political

prisoners of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a

man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and

escaped from the _pozzi_ by every artifice of fact and figure.

The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their

story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it

was not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel

taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at

the top of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli,

_Memorie Venete_.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have

been confined in the _pozzi_ at different times about the middle of the

fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these

cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance

of Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic

fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been

imprisoned in the _pozzi_, can move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly,

there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we

know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great

historic presence.

Touching the Giant’s Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable

dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin

Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the

end of Lord Byron’s tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of

the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed

the traitor’s death to the people from between the two red columns in

the southern gallery of the palace;--that façade was not built till

nearly a century later.

I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides

these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of

brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest

picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic

adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old

merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this

way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become

as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which

I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social

dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.

The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the

whole world’s civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the

city, doomed four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly

(the Venetians would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger,

the inconsolable discontent, with which the people regard their present

political condition.

If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the

means by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she

holds the province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the

question in Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling,

there is something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the

Venetians appear to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that

this tenure is abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler

observation will develop some interested attachment to the present

government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge

will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness,

and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still

found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no

disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising

at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian

government, I cannot regard the cessation of those functions as release

from obligations both to that government and my own, which render it

improper for me, so long as the Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize

their rule, or contribute, by comment on existing things, to embitter

the feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak

dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social and political state of

the place; and I can certainly do this, for the present situation is

so disagreeable in many ways to the stranger forced to live there,--the

inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in

application to those in any wise consorting with them, and so stupid and

puerile in many respects, that I think the annoyance which it gives

the foreigner might well damp any passion with which he was disposed to

speak of its cause.

This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of

patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the

Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But

it is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly

interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to

the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she

fell a second time after Napoleon’s ruin, by the treaties of the Holy

Alliance, defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded

with heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of

1849,--Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened

by each remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them

with a rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of

dominion would appease.

Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private

hospitality in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger

finds himself planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice

of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither

party; society is exclusive association with the Austrians or with the

Italians. The latter do not spare one of their own number if he

consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner might expect greater

allowance, it is seldom shown to him. To be seen in the company of

officers is enmity to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it

is treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city where there is

a large garrison and a great many officers who have nothing else to

do, there is inevitably some international love-making, although

the Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association with the

citizens. But the Italian who marries an Austrian severs the dearest

ties that bind her to life, and remains an exile in the heart of her

country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off every

body who associates with the dominant race. In rare cases I have known

Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian friends, but this with

the explicit understanding that there was to be no sign of recognition

if they met them in the company of these detested acquaintance.

There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing

certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you

may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism

by yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians

hate the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather

a liking for them--rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them

somewhat slow and dull-witted--and individually the Austrians are

amiable people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very

strict in its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest

affront offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no

personal ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the

means by which an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people

believing themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred,

then, is a feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by

which it is kept in a state of perpetual tension.

The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province

and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in

every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They

live for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the

publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain

unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On

every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence

felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession

of its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee’s seal; but no one

knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are

made, but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is

said that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the

government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of

the Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all

patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the

Republic in 1848, and that of the union of the Italian States under

Victor Emanuel in 1860) salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a

proper number of red, white, and green lights displayed. It inscribes

revolutionary sentiments on the walls; and all attempts on the part

of the Austrians to revive popular festivities are frustrated by the

Committee, which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of St. Mark,

and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from

these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the

Emperor’s birthday, in St. Mark’s, when the moment of elevating the

host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the

cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than

questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and

though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the

members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens may gall some of

them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the

opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly

discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of course, the

Committee’s business to keep the world informed of public feeling

in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are

inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as their

patriotism.

The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I

said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,

except a small part of the resident _titled_ nobility (a great part

of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be

comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of

the city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous

holidays which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though

religious in their general character, were still inseparably bound up in

their origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these

holidays as related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally

ended with her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all

their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It

is true that the churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the

day of Corpus Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still

built across the Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and

across the Canal of the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the

respective festivals of these churches; but the concourse is always

meagre, and the mirth is forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have

so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that

the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to

lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.

As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming

hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety

of pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and

its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed

out with masks and horns and women’s habits, who go from shop to shop

droning forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers.

The crowd through which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with

a pensive scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the delights

of carnival.

All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the

fate of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held,

and it is impossible that balls and parties should not now and then

be given. But the greater number of the nobles and the richer of

the professional classes lead for the most part a life of listless

seclusion, and attempts to lighten the general gloom and heaviness

in any way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of chance are

Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to participate in the pleasures

of Venetian society.

As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great

part to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffè, and at the other

places of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in

those places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to

the opera, and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the

theatre at all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may

wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is

exploded in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping

away such of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is

less easy for the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy,

it is a less offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good

Italianissimism. In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood

system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another;

and Florian’s, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the

city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is

thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought

a demonstration of any kind. But the other caffè in the Piazza do not

enjoy Florian’s cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more

wonder in Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless,

indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.

It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and

discontent chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and

summer, the military band plays that exquisite music for which the

Austrians are famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas,

and the attraction is the hardest of all others for the music-loving

Italian to resist. But he does resist it. There are some noble ladies

who have not entered the Piazza while the band was playing there,

since the fall of the Republic of 1849; and none of good standing for

patriotism has attended the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in

‘59. Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were exclusively

foreigners, or else the families of such government officials as were

obliged to show themselves there. Last summer, however, before the

Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome revived the

drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun visibly to falter

in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a slight and

transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the Piazza

when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side of

the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and

down under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes

a delicate distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the

Piazza and hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first

and permitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians

disappear, and the Italians return to the Piazza.

But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need

not be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her

prosperity in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not

understand how large an income the city formerly derived from making

merry. The poor have to lament not merely the loss of their holidays,

but also of the fat employments and bountiful largess which these

occasions threw into their hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the

richer families, and the reluctance of foreigners to make a residence

of the gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen

off; the larger commerce of the place has also languished and dwindled

year by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and

heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and

despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole

province of Venetia.

The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The

Austrians have a _casino_, and they give balls and parties, and now and

then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice as

a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a

people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are

obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing

enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and

Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,

though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union

with Italy at any cost.]

Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to

neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or

the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw

him on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the

enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the

most vivid republican tint in the United States.

The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight

modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more

impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l’altra, romper il chiodo_,

(sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people

of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression,

I suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.

They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever

in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national

character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more

closely at the spirit of their demonstration.

For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its

peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a

glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving

it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing

that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be

faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.