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Venetian Life

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7083 · 658,384 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Venetian Life

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7083]
                Most recently updated: August 8, 2021

Language: English

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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.



CHAPTER II.

ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.


I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five
o’clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of
my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for
my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler
recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and
affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them _gransieri_, or
crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
_poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is the compassionate generic for all
unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink
my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that
he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so
to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey
from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the
bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise,
as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the
harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent
into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this
enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count
you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of
such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell
you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret
forever.

For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle
of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the
dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief,
and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that
uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so,
unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the
forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper
time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them;
but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the
sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there,
and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty
and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and
unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and
safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this
was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles
of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense
and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in
Venice.

Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light
into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner
lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven
with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness,
and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague
feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was
part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to
the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and
unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not
Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts?
That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated
imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the
Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause
was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the
future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when,
slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the
foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and
rang again, while their passenger

    “Divided the swift mind,”

in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles
and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against every
thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at
once faded from his thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers
to make him pay a florin too much.

So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.

I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my
arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I
would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and
alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the
first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the
beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full
of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its
unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me
citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in
the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt
at home--indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur
only very imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
marvelous city, I found the good company of

    “The fair, the old;”

and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and
I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
relief.

My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left
me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible
from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for
my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to
surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden
brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable
churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me
prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen:
if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting
squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight
in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that
reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out
with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered
casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the
noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque
gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic
with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the
lofty windows with obsolete hats.

I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
the brilliancy of St. Mark’s and the glittering streets of shops that
branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines
of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches.
I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also
down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty
and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and
palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola
drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise
and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the
undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black
against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore
had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music
of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of
the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those
trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart
of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused
the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.

But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how
low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little
court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the
air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant
berry, and all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had
turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open
fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now
that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and
the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and
venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur
in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive
types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had
the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the
squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious
grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had
been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and
doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly
and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and
lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after
it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and
glorified him--then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond
art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
magnificence.

At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
get an excellent _caffè bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one
to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of
the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than
olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of
lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket
and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity
of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes.
Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and

    “Took the soul
    Of that waste place with joy;”

and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw
his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was
coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw
reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of
dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed
sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to
architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.

So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was
in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the
pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It
was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door
life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great
part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do,
and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of
this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common
indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits
of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable
when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill
long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary
study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt
the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world,
remote from incentive and sensation.

For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith
indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her
stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God’s purpose of a great moving,
anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as
after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity
possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and
useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of
the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad
condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with
it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own;
and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it
was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling
masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly
blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of
omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals,
and palaces. One’s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is
more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the
city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there
might have been some incentive to keep one’s thoughts and words from
lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But
now, what matter?



CHAPTER III.

THE WINTER IN VENICE


It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my
experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was,
indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which
travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile
with the habitual ideas of the season’s clemency in the South. But
winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not
acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a
little out of humor.

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure
a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer
equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the
cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the
effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It
is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the
affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh
you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its
prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do
in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I
think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for
in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the
protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.

The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in
summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very
large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of
apartments--the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the
winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for
defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most
part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole
change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during
the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are
the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the
summer--for the triple purpose of sparing them some months’ wear,
banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty
of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is
tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with
figures and designs of mosaic work.

All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or
of that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy
and even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the
only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous
prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.

It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the
utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as
possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm
afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders
of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines
in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men
crowd the close little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration,
and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and
beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself,
throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words
_loaf_ and _loafer_, as the only terms adequate to the description of
professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little
journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of
chess,--an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap’s,
and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of
another and happier land and civilization.

Sometimes you find a heated stove--that is to say, one in which there
has been a fire during the day--in a Venetian house; but the stove seems
usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,--as if the Venetian preferred to
take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove
itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and
plastering,--whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer
of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding
I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its
vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my
determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable
from the Anglo-Saxon character.

I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in
his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
severity is the _scaldino_, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino
is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are
most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware,
having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and
the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana’s defense against cold
is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room
to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been
my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting
over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while
she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with
religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino.
In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the
walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea
of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization
of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by
a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned
foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in
the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our
hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we fight for our sacred _scaldini_?

Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears,
for they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of
poverty below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the
wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections
of summer, as Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances,
during one of his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who
always sits upon the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe,
as the season advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and
unswerving adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it.
I have no reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment
during the whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of
comfort to do so.

In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of the
effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true,
few people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if
Desdemona, in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the
reflection that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is
comparative warmth in the broad squares before the churches, but the
narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in
wait for its prey in all those picturesque, seducing little courts of
which I have spoken.

It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter
is felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I
deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery
of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have
mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination
affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the
temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge
marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their
frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of
Palladio’s architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold
weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of
Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic
magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But by all means the
coldest church in the city is that of the Jesuits, which those who
have seen it will remember for its famous marble drapery. This base,
mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is effected by
inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and altars with
a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is marvelously
skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the church the
effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the marble is
carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or
wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent a carpet,
it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a harshness
indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill the
soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable
of thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian’s great paintings,
The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly
disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once)
you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on
his gridiron amid all that frigidity.

The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much
severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less
support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that
such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen
before. In fine, the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh,
and though the season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even
Florence, it is still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous
fires and warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once
during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none
at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to
considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The
lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction; and under our windows
on the Grand Canal, great sheets of ice went up and down with the
rising and the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The visible misery
throughout the fireless city was great; and it was a problem I never
could solve, whether people in-doors were greater sufferers from the
cold than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping the squares and
the canals, and whistling through the streets of stone and brine. The
boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though
a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked upon such a
tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it was said
that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures which
seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds, which
flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to
the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and
desolation, now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and
danced upon the waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had
something eldritch and unearthly in it.

A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was
that of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from
the island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the
coldest weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the
island. The wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the
lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the
convent naturally gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters
drifted him eight miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and
there lodged his boat in the marshes, where it froze fast in the
stiffening mud. The luckless occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his
boat, where he remained five days and nights, exposed to the inclemency
of cold many degrees below friendship in severity. He made continual
signs of distress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. At
last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he was taken off by some
fishermen, and carried to the convent, where he remains in perfectly
recovered health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive many
years in an atmosphere which renders dying at San Lazzaro a matter of
no small difficulty. During the whole time of his imprisonment, he
sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no one will
be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the fishermen through the
miraculous interposition of the Madonna--as any one might have seen by
the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of the Riva degli
Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking through the
clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing the
operations of the fishermen.

It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in
Venice since the famous _Anno del Ghiaccio_ (Year of the Ice), which
fell about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in
the local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full
houses at the people’s theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture,
by a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in
hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before
the shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the
guest of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the
plans arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government
turned the cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel
brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on commerce between the city
and the mainland were suspended for as long time as the lagoon should
remain frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and
was everywhere covered with sledges, bringing the produce of the country
to the capital, and carrying away its stuffs in return. The Venetians
of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart, and the
gentler and more delicate sex pressed eagerly forward to traverse
with their feet a space hitherto passable only in gondolas. [Footnote:
_Origine delle Feste Veneziane_, di Giustina Renier-Michiel] The lagoon
remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted eighteen days, a period of
cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song now declares that the
present generation has known a winter quite as marvelous as that of the
Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of walking on the water:--

    Che bell’ affar!
    Che patetico affar!
    Che immenso affar!
    Sora l’acqua camminar!

But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first
Venetian snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the
morning when I woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and
vertically through the motionless air, and all the senses were full
of languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and after a faint
glimpse of the golden-winged angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark’s,
to give indolent eye solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite,
where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the brown tiles. The
little scene--a few square yards of roof, a chimney-pot, and a
dormer-window--was all that the most covetous spirit could demand; and I
lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while the lingering mists
of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with the luxurious humor
of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my reverie one of
the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the deepest in it, I
was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance of a black
cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant exposures
seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there
are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon the snow
for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have been
better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less soothing
to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As it
was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left every
thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously the
cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the
dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did
come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest
interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I
had felt _ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations
with the world.

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at
once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters
and day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable
shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as
it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the
Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the
descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary
kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only
to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the
folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon
its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of
St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment
around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its
fantastic loveliness to be any thing but the creation of magic. The
tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs
of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as
if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the
brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of
the mosaics in the great arches of the façade, and all that gracious
harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting
flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like
peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if
exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild
and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St.
Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark
adopted, when the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The
Venetians seem to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an
early friend, and they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the
granite pillars, while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing
St. Mark. _Fra Marco e Todaro_, is a Venetian proverb expressing the
state of perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between
two bundles of hay.] The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that
lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas
stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily
than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in
the world.



CHAPTER IV.

COMINCIA FAR CALDO.


The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her
life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and
canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest
uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the
city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place
was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must
reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to
and from it, and you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St.
Mark’s--or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.

Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely _campi_,
or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give
honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only,
but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world
is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by
the Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace
called the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the
left; [Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the _Procuratori di
San Marco_.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width
upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the
Gothic perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward
with the name of Piazzetta, between the eastern façade of the Ducal
Palace and the classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and
ends at last on the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St.
Theodore; and then this mole, passing the southern façade of the Doge’s
Palace, stretches away to the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity
of the city, over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses and
shipping--stone and wooden walls--in the long, crescent-shaped quay
called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the
Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the Piazza, and rests
upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue and gold, on which the bronze
Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the great mass of the Campanile
San Marco, standing apart from the church at the corner of the New
Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the sky--the sky where
the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors bounded Paradise
in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.

My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I
never, during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without
feeling as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church,
which the mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines
make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like
a queen enthroned amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is
deeply appealed to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark’s; but if its
interior is heaven’s, its exterior, like a good man’s daily life, is
earth’s; and it is this winning loveliness of earth that first attracts
you to it, and when you emerge from its portals, you enter upon
spaces of such sunny length and breadth, set round with such exquisite
architecture, that it makes you glad to be living in this world. Before
you expands the great Piazza, peopled with its various life; on your
left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, swims the blue lagoon, and
overhead climb the arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic
grace.

Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and
made part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city’s supreme
grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant
walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by
night, is the Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie,
is belted with a glittering line of shops and caffè, the most tasteful
and brilliant in the world, and the arcades that pass round three of its
sides are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when there is music
by the Austrian bands; for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then
walk under the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would
be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of
dust and noisy hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in
Venice more than in any other Italian city, though the tendency to this
sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm
days of early May, and continuing till the _villeggiatura_ (the period
spent at the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice
goes by a single impulse of _dolce far niente_, and sits gossiping at
the doors of the innumerable caffè on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the
Piazza San Marco, and in the different squares in every part of the
city. But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St.
Mark’s Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from
the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb
Imperial Palace--the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie--the
Byzantine magic and splendor of the church--will it all be there when
you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part
of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other
spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the
Piazza vanish with the azure?--People, I say, come to drink coffee, and
eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then, what with the promenades
in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of feet, and the
hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of cities where there are
horses and wheels--the effect is that of a large evening party, and in
this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.

I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.

By all odds, the loungers at Florian’s were the most interesting,
because they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met
in the dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division
even there, and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted
themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and
the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look
at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon
relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak,
they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed
again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands
carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground,
or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The
younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed
a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white
cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in
strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these
young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden
to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and
then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I
found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed,
handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and
conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order
of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had
never any thing else but lounging at Florian’s to do; but I really know
none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble,
useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian
father, when asked of what profession his son was, “_È in Piazza!_”
 That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian’s
windows at the ladies who went by.

At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene
of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and
the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very
comely, intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces.
They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel
scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their
long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish
soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when
left to themselves, till one sees them in civil clothes.

Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by
young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian’s.
Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
is an index to every man’s politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian,
and frequented by Italian _codini_, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
elders at Florian’s. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is
the Caffè of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented
there by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed
exactly like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young
of some Oriental animal--say a boy-elephant or infant camel.

I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffè, and in the
shops, where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of
an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the
reader also groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys
about the base of St. Mark’s, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs
before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy
girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the
flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to
show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and
unrightfully in the guide-books.

Meantime, while I sit at Florian’s, sharing and studying the universal
worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
south--so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
summer before the snows are dried upon the fields--descends upon the
city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty
stone wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding
leaf, and it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for
this reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere,
and that here, where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited
to men’s hearts, the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is
certain at least that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all
times voiceful, seems to burst into song with the advent of these
golden days and silver nights. Bands of young men go singing through the
moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal reëchoes the music of the parties
of young girls as they drift along in the scarcely moving boats,
and sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fishermen and
gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and sing; and wandering
minstrels come forth before the caffè, and it is hard to get beyond the
tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is as if the city
had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as Venice in
winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring
it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in the
streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares, and
a constant movement of boats upon the canals.

We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no
_homes_. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian,
and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant
weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said
before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people
sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caffè,
and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The
promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its
rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring,
even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva
sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider
avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St.
Mark’s in the arms of its high-breasted nurses,--mighty country-women,
who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses
of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high,
free-stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some
elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had
passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.

    “_È la stagion che ognuno s’innamora;_”

and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for
hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and
looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the
Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their
heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers,
filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their
work. Every street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip;
and if the picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys,
of which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure
there is a face looking out of every window for all that, and the
social, expansive presence of the season is felt there.

The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in
crumbling palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the
welcome air. They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of
families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down
with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while
their raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the
covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children’s locks. Within
doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases
talking for an instant.

Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near
the Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the
busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge.
It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest,
and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms
early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a
cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and
the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.

Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary’s
shop, a mercer’s and draper’s shop, a blacksmith’s and shoemaker’s shop,
a caffè more or less brilliant, a green-grocer’s and fruiterer’s, a
family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant’s shop where
you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of
course there is a coppersmith’s and a watchmaker’s, and pretty certainly
a wood-carver’s and gilder’s, while without a barber’s shop no campo
could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and
political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle
and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with
the bargains of the Rialto market.

Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an
almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper
of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.
Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays
of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back
and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who
advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of
toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples
of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets
of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the
crowd;--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and
friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.

Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out
the meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their
sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time--a sharp,
pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high
above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird
in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the _alma
perdida_. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it
proceeded from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some
dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes,
bloodshot with the strain of her incessant shrieks.

In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied
by tradesmen’s families; and on the third or fourth floor is the
_appartamento signorile_. From the balconies of these stories hung the
cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots,
which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the
crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the
casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite
was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By
all odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant
serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief,
and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of
yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over
the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made
love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in
the crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn;
and at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out
upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident
direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of
studying one another’s features through opera-glasses; but I could not
persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror’s response to
the damsel’s constant “Fair or not?” being a believer in every woman’s
right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling
temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo
beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the caffè; to the tide
of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days,
and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian
girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly
clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened
soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords
at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms.

As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into
the city’s heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet,
and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared
and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to
sleepless youths who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was
obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I
might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.

Now, with the city’s lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and
in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on
the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are
by right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated
by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors
at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard
of _valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but
with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference
to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on
men’s tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise
would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a
wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her
inmost heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in
the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win
new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once
charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your
motion. Now, at last, you know _why_

    “It was an Abyssinian maid”

who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you
were born!

The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
at his post.



CHAPTER V.

OPERA AND THEATRES.


With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly
not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and
tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that
it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom
go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents
to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the
character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is
second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of
several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this
account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in
the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the
theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of
which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee
of admission to the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter
to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course,
but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who
if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government
officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of
the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the
heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a
loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.

You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the
beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter
being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the
opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly
dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they
issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The
audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for
silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling
_bravo_,--an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual
with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and
_f_.

I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out
of Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might
be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause
of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the
events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly
it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God’s gift of
beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You
hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has
an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--

    “That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.”

In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now
an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her
stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so
famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular
in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the
care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government,
which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as
the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the
Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect
and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling
hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these
institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing,--at first
for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward
for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before
the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in
the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable
diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters
of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories
of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous
throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who
found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.

With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It
is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen
excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian
comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of
Goldoni--compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where
alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly
appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at
the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered
to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may
see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and
characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not
been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening’s
amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of
comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the
ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi
[Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which
is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard
to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and
dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best
the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again
every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known
Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--which
is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but
deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre,
and sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
spitted thrown into the bargain.

The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best
to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
traditionary tricks of the stage.

The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete,
and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to
produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs
to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all
the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to
mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.

The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone
than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by the
yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni.
And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and
peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the
most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested
for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other
was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic
audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini
appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet
ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean
good-nature and wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into
trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head
until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always
executed in a spirit of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous
remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and,
indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit
of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they
perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is
wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which
the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could
not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the
greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the
scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette
Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and
comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size;
then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then
Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat
sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced,
statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their
shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women,
all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse
brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval,
and take the drama _au grand sérieux_, uttering none of the gibes which
sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the
hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give
nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment,
calls out, “Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!” and closes the
theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, _fioi
de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of
the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms.
Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest
insult which can be put into words.

In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of the
Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of
the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must
have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till
the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris
he furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I
have heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable
characters perform written plays.

Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis personae_,
and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is
always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a
merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in
all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a
glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins
the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he
has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting
his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying,
“Capisse la?” or “Sa la?” (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest
things in the world.

In nearly all of Goldoni’s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
Dottore, Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni’s witty
management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty
of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and
cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
Italy.

The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are
much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce,
as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes
for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed
to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the
Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna,
with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated
several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can
fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying
it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward
realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will
also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own
part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never
tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their
irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the
relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while
Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of
the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street,
looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the
conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed
the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the
keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of
Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply
as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when
he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a
puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:

“Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she
is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the
sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and
gesticulations toward the pit.)

To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh,
“Honor?--I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!” and attempting to
pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his
sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and
pasteboard, and topples against him.

Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous.
You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and
reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets
when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly
noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the
dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last
the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a
miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically
the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a
spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.

The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace and
far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and when
the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly
delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike _empressement_.
I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their private jealousies
and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas seul_; but I think
the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of
Carthage, is their strong point.

The people who witness their performances are of all ages and
conditions--I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some
German countesses in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are
young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and
their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place
for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama
going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of
the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and
Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of
the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant,
addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I
came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette.
“Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force
of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at
the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like
to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell
out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little
epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,--and dried
away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to
keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly
anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer--its
unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when
I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the
drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere
among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops
under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
each other “Ciò!” Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall,
thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms
of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly
twinkling in the light.



CHAPTER VI.

VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.


When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men
on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while
the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy,
for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the
restaurants are very dirty--if you wipe your plate and glass carefully
before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the
rooms are cold--if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in
the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is
not because the prices are great--they are really very reasonable; it
is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the
restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without
rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural
and insufferable.

But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian
civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of
Italian character,--temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare,
and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb
_mangiare_ remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But
it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not
wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which
could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the
substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the
English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the
Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people,
how the crowd amused itself with any thing--music, dancing, walking,
talking--any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing
the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few
occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I
have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the
empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at
least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy
pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the
cheerful prudence of the South.

Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on
a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated
frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner,
it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but
in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a
piece of boiled beef, a _minestra_ (a soup thickened with vegetables,
tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the
country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the
side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds
sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: “_Venga a
mangiar quattro risi con me_.” (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)

But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of
hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and
speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says
that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made
invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the
courtesies offered to strangers.

The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè,
and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof.
“What caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.”
 This is frequently your new acquaintance’s promise of friendship. And
one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at
the caffè, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not
help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some
pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of the Caffè
Pedrocchi, that I should like to go there for society, if I could always
find it there, much better than to private houses. There is far greater
ease and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight
of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend’s company
has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend’s
outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in
Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of _treating_
known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal
instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a
caffè eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily,
the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as each
prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place without calling for
something; but I have frequently seen people respond to this demand of
custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the expense of two
soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a chair, a table,
and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you like.

I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffè,--that of the
restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon
the Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost
without number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the
sausage-maker, who supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of
_sguassetto_, to the Caffè Florian. They all have names which are not
strange to European ears, but which ape sufficiently amusing to people
who come from a land where nearly every public thing is named from
some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. In Venice the principal
restaurants are called The Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The
Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do not know that any one of them is
more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of
them suffers from the fact that all are bad.

You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before
stated, of the breakfast’s unsubstantiality. The dining commences about
three o’clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o’clock, most
people dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient,
and no guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the
tables, or clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter
appears, and calls out, dramatically, “Behold me!” takes the order,
shrieks it to the cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again,
more dramatically than ever, “Behold it ready!” and arrays it with a
great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the
music of a brass band; but I did not find that so utterly bewildering,
so destructive of the individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive
to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and
clamor of the waiters in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are,
for the most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their minestra and
boiled beef in such peace as the surrounding uproar permits them, and
seldom making acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I think,
to expect much talk from any people at dinner. The ingenious English
tourists who visit the United States from time to time, find us silent
over our meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people of divers
races in Europe.

As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill
of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals,
is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffè and
the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher
privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the
most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as
it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life
of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this
homelessness and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the
gentleness of civilization.

The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of
the place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the
restaurant for economy’s sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is
cheap, and its cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford
to have. Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience
proved the cost of a dinner there to be little more than the cost of
the raw material in the market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the
custom, which is common, of sending home to purchasers meals from the
eating-houses.

As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not
so noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution
of cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking
is done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from
the unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they
grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent
with a triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice
opens upon you at almost every turn,--everywhere, in fact, but in the
Piazza and the Merceria,--and looking in, you see its vast heaps of
frying fish, and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell
to heaven with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden
mountains of _polenta_ (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made
of Indian meal, and universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp
minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and
around the fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware
for a lavish and a hospitable show, and for the representation of those
scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief.
Here I like to take my unknown friend--my scoundrel facchino or rascal
gondolier--as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with
the cook, who stands with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming
mysterious things from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which
ensues, and in which all the chords of the human heart are touched, from
those that tremble at high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad
farce. When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues forth with
his polenta in one hand, and his fried minnows or stewed snails in the
other, my fancy fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he eats
it, and quarrels volubly with other gondoliers across the Grand Canal.

A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region
of Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which
are found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more
delicate dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry,
fried in slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor
breakfast at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.

In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all
the butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of
beaten cream--_panamontata_. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of
gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes _mandorlato_, which is
a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can
any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species
of cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the
occasion of every _festa_, and of every _sagra_ (which is the holiday of
one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and
sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper
to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.

In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffè and restaurants of
every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers’, and the
sausage-makers’. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
infest every corner, and men, women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
every turn--till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening
of anomalies.



CHAPTER VII.

HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.


I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I
had found most books of travel very slow to tell,--as much as possible
of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only
from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also
from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.

The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have
thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared
to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping
would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if
I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor
lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most
prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need
not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which
there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the
window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets,
gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from
letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are,
with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling
breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of
sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim’s mind from the
idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady
sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness
without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are
dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit
Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly
enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable
rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them,
they are absurdly cheap.

As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a
number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it
only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or
from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance
from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor,
where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on
a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The
isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where
a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive
possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in
common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant
to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers,
“_Chi xe?_” (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You
reply, “_Amici!_” (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the
servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her
hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you
reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of
the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your “_Amici!_”
 with “_No ghe ne xe!_” (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a
string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial
domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom
you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely
know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about
them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe,
is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And
indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most
of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the
wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone
and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes
painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the
frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly,
the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that
there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from
the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of
plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies
alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or
look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far
to make the houses habitable.

It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you
get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the
Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken
in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of
residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial
activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these
circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment
to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a
tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with
coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls
like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all
recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying
these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after
an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives
you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little
in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la
Baronessa’s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the
couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French
novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of
the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the
open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la
Baronessa’s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their
sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden
which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the
great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much
the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain
statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made
much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
garden’s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
answers, without winking, “If taken for several years, a thousand
florins a year.” At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful
surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to
the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer,
and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. “But there
is another apartment,”--through which you drag languidly. It is empty
now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi,--and her stove-pipes
went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the
villanous old palace.

In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the
curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which
has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony
to balcony, on the façade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of
leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises
something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh,
clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to
say, a floor of the house--you may have for four hundred florins a year;
and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will
ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but
the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire
the front of your house.

_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There
are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap, as
many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin
have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed
of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed
concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect
very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let,
made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.

It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon
it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the
water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops,
that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket
handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint,
picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach
a little terrace above the water. We were not in the _appartamento
signorile_, [Footnote: The noble floor--as the second or third story
of the palace is called.]--that was above,--but we were more snugly
quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a
winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of
rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords,
till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still
retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more
than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were
humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which
we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.

The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called
Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a
long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however
pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to
relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli
with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at
a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to
think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the
superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What
went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in
another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant
of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white
head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but
feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the
front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged
to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold
among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by
room.

But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet
a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
from Modena. Except with Mr. ----, the Englishman, who was at once our
friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know
any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of
salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not
help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.

As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great
deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving
noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal
on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed
seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling.
The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive
demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city
and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had
left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years’ study of Venetian
history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time
given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point
of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows
of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman
wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I
think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the
hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a
cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of
his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St.
Mark’s Square.

The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their
names--gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as “Co.
Prata.” I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance
some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the
country to spend the winter in the city. Prata’s “Co.,” we gradually
learnt, meant “Conte,” and the little counts and countesses, his
children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the
exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the
count’s vassals came to the _riva_ [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs
which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of
streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and
corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the
fourth floor. As long as he remained “Co.” we yearned to know who and
what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.

Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
people, just married, came to live in Venice.

They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence,
tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.

The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and “This is my wife, the
new mistress,” said the young _Paron_ [Footnote: _Padrone_ in Italian.
A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian
servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride
proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with
adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.

“_Serva sua!_”

The _Parona_, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.

So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
beauty.

As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her
in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but
for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality
and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in
a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life
takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while
we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow
to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once;
but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us
to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers
on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American
ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash,
never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning,
the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the
Rialto among a hundred greengrocers’ stalls in all parts of the city;
bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker’s; there
is a butcher’s stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are
therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay
in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready
means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the
superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’
worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable,
would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent’s
worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices
approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we
sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no
reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently
amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we
proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail
rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no
more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go
under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things
we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian
fashion, and “guard our strangeness.”

But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
the houses. These _bigolanti_ all come from the mountains of Friuli;
they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
are opened about eight o’clock in the morning, and then their day’s
work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the
wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden
of two buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which
falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of
sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante
comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great
picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens;
and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a
month.

Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose
red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it
is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all
parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the
canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots
in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their
fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful
and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted
man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song,
or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand
Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the
Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon
the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the
mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with
which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the
charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman’s
cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There
may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the
chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast
pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried
“Melons with hearts of fire!” and “Juicy pears that bathe your
beard!”--there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song
of the chestnut-man who shouted “Fat chestnuts,” and added, after a
lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, “and well cooked!”--I do
not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of
one whose peaches could _not_ be called beautiful to look upon, and were
consequently advertised as “Ugly, but good!”--I say nothing to detract
from the merits of harmonious chair-menders;--to my ears the shout
of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of
summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks
in cages, and roses and pinks in pots;--but I say, after all, none
of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the
delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as
far as virtue went, was _vox et praeterea nihil_. He was a vagabond of
the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins
had gone near to make him mad--at any rate he was of a most lunatical
deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser,
serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him
the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this
woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he
scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the
more magnificent scoundrels of whom _he_ bought the wood originally,
contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On
this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel
at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay
more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the
tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We
stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned
his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat
in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood--good, sound, dryer
than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it
would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice
the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took
another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in
Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these
into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which
I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I,
and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that
the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his
tooth-pick--quite an old and worthless one--which he showed me. Yet I
was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist
at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the
end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye
from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw
in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight
through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong
when I pointed it out: “_Ga razon, lu!_” (He’s right!) he said to
his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces,
proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable
load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid
my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being
plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated
in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored
sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.

Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed
in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares
by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their
general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to
their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling
ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning
streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of
the country’s clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great
cream-colored cows.

Fishermen, also, come down the little _calli_--with shallow baskets
of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and
mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling
drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own
price. “Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they
hawk their fish.

Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come
to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely,
but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all,
chair-menders,--who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a
sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a
hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait
the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant
whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.

But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but
she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression.
She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a
strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly
shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned.
A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not
ornament--the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of
serving-women.

I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to
pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot
repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She
strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and
to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding
as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed
by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On
settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is
all in capital letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with
figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold
and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of
creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in
regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort
to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing
is a kind of pugilism--the strokes being made straight out from the
shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper
who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold
buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which
in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as
ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump;
scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this
incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely
upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar
dishes at table--particularly veteran _bifsteca_. But we fancy that the
same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other
things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to
those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to
ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as
with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of
Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges.
She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of
compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for
us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I
come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me),
I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls
me a youthful Gobbo for the work,--a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted
whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered
decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find
him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom--from his personal
resemblance to Time--I should think much better occupied with an
hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down,
than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the
sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is
dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating
impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence,
and I think he has no work to do but that which G.’s wise compassion has
given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears,
and I hear vaguely--for in Venice you never know any thing with
precision--that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again
that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive
manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years;
but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch
her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and _sciampagnin_
[Footnote: Little champagne,--the name which the Venetian populace gave
to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine.
After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known
as _petrolio_.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the
rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her
weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous
whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty
tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to
the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a
month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for
we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home,
whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out,
she ceases to respond to his ring at all.

Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums
feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music
I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity
in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used
to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different
from now--_veramente, tutt’ altro, signor!_

It is through Giovanna’s charitable disposition that we make the
acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures--_creatura_
being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
somewhat more pitiable than a _poveretta_. Our Creatures are both well
stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with
the invalid’s husband,--a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the
summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of
kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into
their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay
about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is
as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly
poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the
possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it
were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing
with their dog,--the poor old children,--and every slight display of
intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to
follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse
him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him.
He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully
carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite
of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance
at such times with “_I miei rispetti, signori!_” We often see them in
the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of
clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known
out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the
hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers’ shops there is one large
municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Pietà, where the needy
pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are
people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the
Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of
frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small
percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class,
and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had
need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when
both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill.
They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal,
when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade
opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the
contemplation of our windows.

The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later
day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew
her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of
a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna’s husband, I
nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas
apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of
his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of
Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet;
that three earthen cups of clotted chickens’ blood, placed upon his
window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he
shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of
plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished
with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be,
through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical
peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds,
and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of
victuals and a feather-bed in the same _mezzo-polio arrosto_. He turned
out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the
additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait,
and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly
advanced, I think.

As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and
took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in
a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
wander all over our house,--making a mysterious and alarming sound of
snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before
our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of
the old gondolier, who called out to him “_Petta! petta!_” (Wait!
wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other
disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he
nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.

The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came
also to know her mother,--a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it
were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen
windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice
of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in
which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did
we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw
her. The place itself is weird and terrible--low ceiled, with the stone
hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of
Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day
cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the
bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it.
When Giovanna’s mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to
do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her
good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness,
it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.

Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
Giovanna’s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna’s sickness, she slowly
but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened
at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy
calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains
of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she
never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of
having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated
her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors.
Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to
be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow
face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor
of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household,
became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna’s family, who dined there every
day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general
savor of a low cook-shop.

As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent
people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was
not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to
extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some
novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but
indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary
execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of
roast potatoes,--a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated
at last in the same style of _polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a
tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully
flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating
appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the
Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.

But G.’s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in
her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a
great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things,
when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions
of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian
abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of
opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the
attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near
us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable--“_proprio un
campo di sospiri!_” (Really a field of sighs.) “_Staga comodo!_” she
said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
between him and the wall. “Don’t move; the way to Paradise is not wider
than this.” We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in
the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not
deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with
plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our
wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom
Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with
tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache
properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late
at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona,
supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold
chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the
Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian
revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.

I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first
she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew
ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the
rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell
inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was
naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the
great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to
abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly
know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is
certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast
at twelve o’clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it,
and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our
small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o’clock.
We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more
hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed
that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with
Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the
nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of
a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great
part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss
G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last,
somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s Chinaman who invented roast
pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn
down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook
the roaster in the flames,--we hit upon an artifice by which we could
dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased
to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another
house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore
struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the
vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom
the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little
dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty
chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and
I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres,
crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with
them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six
regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her,
and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
philosophy: “We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
cannot do what we wish. _Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_” Yet he was
undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and
had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
Christmas and New Year’s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was
a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all,
and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron’s causes for
self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two
local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were
delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed
the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of
their contents.



CHAPTER VIII.

THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.


The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in
nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer,
and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark,
standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its
innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than
a Greek lyric.

    “All has suffered a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange,”

in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
baptism in the sea.

And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into
vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and
step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads
high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine
green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching
their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their
leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought forever into the stone.
Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where
you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable
balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if
the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very
places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of
your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet
more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the
Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down
to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian’s brood vacantly
over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when
suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up
in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of
the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed,
and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side.
Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in,
comes back and throngs the place with motley company,--dominoes,
harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even
the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little
mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits
Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia
that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of
Saint Mark,--and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square,
demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to
create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.

But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this
great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not
this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book “that
line from Byron”? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from
their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were
powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of
politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their
families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year
spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There
alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery
touched one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last
seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it
would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little
balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene
upon the water under us.

And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will
not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English,
who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
from the “Pa’ty” traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to
the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age,
ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt
to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back
seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all
have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they
all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair
tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland
and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they
always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the
Piazza, and at Florian’s, and St. Mark’s, and the Ducal Palace; and the
young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed
the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile
the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and
are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d’hôte of
their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there
with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that
this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will
all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe
there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they
are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all
countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through
which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the
English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental
peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private
English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.

They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of
the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public
Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad
trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had
dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and
died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice
grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and
farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get
it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal
opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy,
when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all
tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the
corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and
from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony.
When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and
angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the
neighborhood of that part of the “Palace of Art,” whereon

    “The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
    Burnt like a fringe of fire.”

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.

It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon
the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups
in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the
Italians, who live out-of-doors.

The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls.
We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond
interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and
contrast with a ferocious bull-dog--boule-dogue he called him, I
suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I
fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism
to life--the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from
sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about
him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their
brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we
enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in
whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who
frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like
a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain
luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those
fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in
which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again
this was merely conjecture. The general’s glance may have had no such
power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from
it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the
brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of
his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way
than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They
represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and
perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were
very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and
as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to
smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the
swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal
in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular
compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant
and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I
would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the
crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of
legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.

About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into
the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the
boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out
again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily
happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved
Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet
seemed to rest.

At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those _freschi_, which
once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are
peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible.
The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense
barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military
bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and
then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the
display,--though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official,
has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns,
and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red,
and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands
breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite
of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the
Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon
the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to
light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and
spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone
that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and
fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music
have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know
them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days,
people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At
intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned
during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers’ spectral
shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not
care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
forlorn than she is.

Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal
are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with
a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats
in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any
one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon,
whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either
gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her
great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The
rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind
enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other
persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the
dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the
cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a
small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats
from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the
commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and
gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in
childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind
of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy
river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony,
I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit
way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled
in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely
irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who,
ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
furious resentment of my longing.

Far different from the picture presented by this boat’s progress--the
peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
not mar--was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when
one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable
outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite
at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the
boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
bows of their boats, with murderous looks,

    “Con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,
    Sì che parea che l’aer ne temesse,”

and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s
heads.

But the storm burst in words.

“Figure of a pig!” shrieked the Venetian, “you have ruined my boat
forever!”

“Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!” returned the countryman, “and it
was my right to enter the canal first.”

They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third
and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins
and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_
of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended
the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The
Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere
demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the
countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the
danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult
in the wildest excesses of insult: “Ah-heigh! brutal executioner!
Ah, hideous headsman!” _Da capo._ I now know that these people never
intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well
pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter.
But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my
disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had
not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.

There was some compensation for me--coming, like all compensation, a
long while after the loss--in the spectacle of a funeral procession
on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and
his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times
he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad
in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing
else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to
Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat,
were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her
blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its
crown.



CHAPTER IX.

A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.


One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.

This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising
in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past
four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take
the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a
feeling absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and
there was a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether
delightful, and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not
think, if I had sat down immediately after to write out the experience,
I should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people
have sometimes the custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood
in the case of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a
garden wall at the end of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement,
was quite humble and sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a
cat,

    “Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,”

and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico’s little garden,
the flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,--I think the white
honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,--and the dumpy
little statues looked far more engaging than usual.

After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
coffee at the Caffè Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else
in the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on
the subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of
water, before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was
reinforced by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to
parade in the Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head,
laughing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe,
gave me a feeling of satisfaction only comparable to that which I
experienced shortly afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on
the Ponte di San Moisè. The creature was only a few inches high, and it
must have been through some mist of dreams yet hanging about me that
he impressed me as having something elephantine in his manner. When I
stooped down and patted him on the head, I felt colossal.

On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in
the early sacristan’s deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the
altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a façade in the taste of the declining
Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the
breast and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I
stood at the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with
so much interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were
next involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian,
whom I overheard asking the keeper of a caffè his way to the Campo di
Marte. He was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds
of white muslin around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he
liked the parade that morning.

I discovered that Piazza

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