Théophile Gautier

Travels in Italy (Voyage en Italie, 1850)

Parts XI to XV - Life in Venice

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Part XI: The Grand Canal.
Part XII: Life in Venice.
Part XIII: Everyday Details.
Part XIV: A Vicar’s Debut – Gondolas – Sunset.
Part XV: The Venetians – William Tell – Girolamo.

Part XI: The Grand Canal

Now, if you are not too wearied by our visit to the Doge’s Palace, let us reboard our gondola and take a trip on the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal is to Venice what the Strand is to London, the Rue Saint-Honoré to Paris, and the Calle de Alcalá to Madrid, the main artery, that is, of city traffic. Its shape is that of a reversed letter S, whose lower curve embraces the city about Saint Mark’s, and whose upper point ends at the island of Santa-Chiara, and the lower at the Marine Customs House (the Dogana da Mar), near the Giudecca canal. This S is crossed in the middle by the Rialto bridge.

Venice’s Grand Canal is the most wonderful thing in the world. No other city presents so beautiful, strange, and magical a spectacle; one may find examples of architecture as remarkable, elsewhere, but never in such a picturesque setting. Here, each palace, like a flirtatious woman, has a mirror in which to admire its beauty. A superb reality is rendered double by a delightful reflection. The water lovingly caresses the feet of these beautiful facades, kissed on the brow by a golden light, and cradles them in a second sky. Small boats and bigger barges that attain its reaches seem moored there expressly as foils or foregrounds, for the convenience of painters and watercolourists.

Passing the Customs House, which, with the Palazzo Giustiniani, renamed the Hôtel de l’Europe (Hotel Europa), forms the entrance to the Grand Canal, cast your eyes on the carved horses’ heads, as gaunt and bony as if from the slaughterhouse, beneath the wide square cornice on which stand the Atlantides supporting the ball of Fortune: does this singular ornamentation mean, given that horses are mostly useless in Venice, that they are to be disposed of at the Customs, or is it purely a whim? This latter explanation seems to me to be the better of the two, since I prefer not to employ the sort of symbolic nicety that I have blamed others for. I have already described Santa Maria della Salute, which we can see from our hotel window, and which does not require us to halt, given the painting by Canaletto, which is, perhaps, his masterpiece. Yet here we experience an embarrassment of riches. The Grand Canal is the real Golden Book (Libro d’Oro), for here the Venetian nobility all signed their names, with a host of monumental facades.

Every section of wall tells a story; every house is a palace; every palace a masterpiece, and a source of legend: at each stroke of the oar the gondolier quotes you a name that is as well-known today as at the time of the Crusades; and this on both shores, over a length of more than half a league. I made a list of the palaces, not of them all, but of the most remarkable of them, yet I dare not transcribe it because of its length.

It fills five or six pages. Pietro Lombardo, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Alessandro Vittoria, Baldassare Longhena, Alessandro Tremignan, Giorgio Massari, Jacopo Sansovino, Sebastiano Mazzoni, Michele Sanmicheli that great architect from Verona, Gian Antonio Selva, Domenico Rossi, and Antonio Visentini provided the designs and directed the construction of these princely residences, not to mention the marvellous, unknown masters of the Middle Ages who built the most picturesque and romantic of them, those which grant Venice its character, and originality.

On both sides there is an uninterrupted succession of facades, all charming and variously beautiful. After an example of Renaissance architecture, with its columns and superimposed orders, follows a Medieval palace in an Arabic-Gothic style, of which the Doge’s Palace is the prototype, with its openwork balconies, its cloverleaf piercings, its serrated parapet, and its turrets. Further on is a façade clad in coloured marble, decorated with medallions, and consoles (scroll-shaped corbels); then a large pink wall, with a large window adorned with columns; every mode of architecture is present: Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombardic, Gothic, Roman, Greek, and even Rococo; the column and the columnette, the round and pointed arch, the fanciful capitals, wrought with birds and flowers, of Acre or Jaffa, the Greek capitals seen in Athenian ruins; mosaic and bas-relief; classic severity and the elegant fantasies of the Renaissance. It is a huge open-air gallery, where one can study, from the depths of one’s gondola, the art of seven centuries or more. What genius, talent and wealth were employed in this space that one can travel in less than an hour! What prodigious artists, but also what intelligent nobles, what seekers of magnificence! How sad that the patrons who knew how to commission such beautiful things only survive in the paintings of Titian, Tintoretto and Marco Moro!

Before arriving at the Ponte di Rialto, on the left, as one ascends the canal, one finds the Palazzo Dario, in the Venetian Gothic style; the Venier Palace, which presents its corner ornamented with precious marbles, and medallions, in the Lombardic style; the Gallerie dell’Accademia, a classical facade attached to the ancient Scuola Grande de la Carita and surmounted by a statue of Venice riding a lion; the Contarini Palace, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi; the Palazzo Rezzonico, with its three superimposed registers; the Giustinian triple palace, in Medieval style, in which Natale Schiavoni lives, a descendant of the famous painter Andrea Schiavoni, with a gallery of paintings, and a beautiful young daughter, a living and breathing incarnation of a canvas painted by her grandfather; the Foscari Palace, recognised by its low door, with its two registers of columns supporting pointed arches and trefoils, where once sovereigns lodged when visiting Venice, and which is now abandoned; the Palazzo Balbi, with its balcony on which princes leaned when watching the regattas which took place with so much pomp and splendour on the Grand Canal, in the heyday of the republic; the Pisani Palace, in the early-Germanic style of the fifteenth century; and the Tiepolo Palace, smart and relatively modern, with its two elegant pyramidions. On the right, quite close to our Hotel Europa (Palazzo Giustinian), between two large buildings, is a delightful pallazzino which consists of a window and a balcony; but what a window, what a balcony! A lacework in stone, with spiral columns, interlacing bands and pierced designs you would think possible only with a die-cutter, like those on the sheets of paper which enclose sugared almonds at baptisms, or border lamp-globes; I very much regretted not having the twenty-five thousand francs, with me, required to purchase it, because no less was demanded.

Further on, in ascending the canal, the following palaces are found: the Corner della Ca’ Grande, which dates from 1532, one of the best designs by Jacopo Sansovino; the Grassi, currently the Imperial Hotel, whose marble staircase is garnished with beautiful orange trees in tubs; the Corner Spinelli; the Grimani, to a robust and powerful design by Michele Sanmicheli, its surrounding marble base carved with a Greek key pattern to beautiful effect, and which today serves as a Post Office; and the Farsetti, with its columnar peristyle, and long row of columnettes above, crossing the entire facade, occupied by the municipality. I might say, as Don Ruy-Gomez da Silva does to Charles V, in Hugo’s play Hernani, when he shows the portraits of his ancestors: ‘J’en passe, et des meilleurs: I pass over them, and others finer still.’ I will, however, ask pardon for mentioning the Palazzo Loredan, and the ancient residence of Doge Enrico Dandolo, the conqueror of Constantinople. Between these palaces, are houses of equal worth, whose chimneys shaped like turbans, turrets, and flower-vases, break, fittingly, the main line of their architecture.

Sometimes a landing-stage or a piazzetta, for example the Campo San Vidal which faces the Accademia, cuts across this long series of monuments. This campo, lined with houses rendered in a bright and cheerful red, makes the happiest contrast with the garlands of vine hanging from a wine-bar’s trellis; the red-hued break in a line of facades turned more or less brown by time, rests and charms the eye; one always finds some painter established there, palette on thumb, and paintbox on knees. The gondoliers and pretty girls, whom the presence of these drole characters always attracts, pose there naturally, and the artists’ admirers become models.

The Rialto, which is the most beautiful bridge in Venice, has a most grandiose and monumental air; it crosses the canal by a single arch in an elegant and bold curve; it was created in 1591, under Doge Pasquale Cigogna, by Antonio da Ponte, and replaced the old drawbridge in wood that we mentioned, seen in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s map. Two rows of shops, separated in the middle by an arched portico, and revealing a glimpse of sky, burden the arms of the bridge, which can be crossed by one of three lanes, the central roadway, and the two outer walkways adorned with marble balustrades. Around this Rialto bridge, one of the most picturesque points of the Grand Canal, are massed the oldest houses in Venice, with their platformed roofs, planted with stakes to attach awnings, their tall chimneys, projecting balconies, their steps with uneven slabs, their large patches of red plaster, whose fallen fragments render the brick walls bare, and their foundations greened by contact with the water. There is always, a riot of boats and gondolas, near the Rialto, amidst stagnant islands of moored vessels, with tawny drying sails sometimes adorned with a large cross.

Venice - The Rialto Bridge

Shylock, the Jew so eager for his pound of flesh, had his shop on the Rialto Bridge, which thus has the great honor of having furnished a setting for Shakespeare’s play.

Below, and beyond the Rialto, on the banks either side, are grouped the buildings of the ancient Fondaco dei Tedeschi, whose colourful walls, of uncertain hue, suggest the frescoes of Titian and Tintoretto, and seem like fading dreams; the fish-market; the herb-market; and the old and new manufactories of Scarpagnino (Antonio Abbondi) and Sansovino, almost falling to ruin, where the various magistracies are installed.

These reddish manufactories, dilapidated, glazed with admirable tones of disuse and abandonment, must be the despair of the city, and a joy to artists. Beneath their arcades, however, an active, noisy population seethes, rushing up and down, to and fro, buying and selling, chattering and laughing: here, red tranches of fresh tuna are sold, and baskets of mussels, oysters, crabs, and shrimps are borne away.

Under the arch of the Rialto bridge, where sonorous echoes ever resound, gondoliers sleep, sheltered from the sun, waiting for work.

Ascending the Canal still, one encounters, on the left, the Palazzo Corner della Regina, named for Queen Caterina Cornaro, known to Parisians through Fromental Halévy’s opera, The Queen of Cyprus (La Reine de Chypre), in which Rosine Stoltz sang so beautifully (in 1841). I no longer remember if the sets by Charles Séchan, Jules Diéterle and Édouard Desfléchin reflected the appearance of the palazzo; they may well have done so, and without loss, since the design, by Domenico Rossi, is of great elegance. The sumptuous palace of Queen Cornaro is now a public pawnshop, where the humble rags of misery, and the jewels of improvidence brought to bay, are heaped beneath its rich panelling, so as to save their owners from ruin; for these days it is not enough to be beautiful, one must earn a living too.

The Armenian College is presently located, some distance away, in an admirable building of ornate, solid and imposing design, by Baldassare Longhena. It is the ancient Palazzo Pesaro.

To the right rises the Palazzo della Ca’ d’Oro (Palazzo Santa Sofia), one of the most delightful buildings on the Grand Canal. It belongs to Marie Taglioni, who has had it restored with enlightened care. It is all stone tracery, lacework, all arcaded, in Greek, Gothic, barbaric style, so fanciful, light, aerial, that one might think it made expressly as the nest of some sylph. Marie Taglioni pities these poor abandoned palaces. She has several on hand, which she maintains out of sympathy for their beauty; three or four, which she has had repaired, out of charity, were pointed out to us.

Observe these blue and white mooring posts, adorned with golden fleurs-de-lis; they inform you that the old Palazzo Vendramin Calergi has become a quasi-royal dwelling. It is the home of Marie-Caroline, Duchess of Berry, and certainly she is better housed than at the Marsan pavilion; for this palace, the most beautiful in Venice, is an architectural masterpiece, and the sculptures were carved with marvellous finesse. Nothing is prettier than the sculpted children holding shields above the window arches. The interior is filled with precious marbles; we especially admired two porphyry columns of such rare beauty that their price would buy the palace. Though I have spent a while over my description, I have not yet said all. I realise that I have failed to mention the Palazzo Mocenigo (called ‘Il Nero’), where the great poet Byron stayed; our gondola nevertheless brushed against the marble staircase where (in August 1819), ‘with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast’, Margarita Cogni, ‘La Fornarina’, that daughter of the people, and mistress of her lord welcomed him on his return, with the tender words: ‘Ah! can’ della Madonna, e esto il tempo per andar’ al’ Lido?: Ah! Dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?’ The Palazzo Barbarigo also deserves a mention. I have not seen the twenty-two Titians that it contains, held under seal by the Russian consul, who has bought them for his master; but it contains many quite beautiful paintings, as well as the carved and gilded cradle intended for the noble family’s heir, a cradle of which one might make a coffin, since the Barbarigo line is extinct, as are those of most of the ancient families of Venice; of the nine hundred patrician families registered in the Golden Book, there remain today scarcely fifty.

The former caravanserai of the Turks (the Fondaco dei Turchi), so populous at the time when Venice traded with the Orient and the Indies, now presents two floors of Arabic arches, part-ruined and obscured by dwellings which have sprung up there like false mushrooms (clitocybe rivulosa).

At the point, approximately, where the Canareggio canal branches off, we saw traces of the siege and the Austrian bombardment; some projectiles reached the Palazzo Labia, which was set on fire, and scarred the unfinished façade of Santi Geremia et Lucia. By a strange caprice on the part of the cannonballs, which were intelligently directed, all that remained visible of one collapsed building, was a marble skull carved at the top of a wall, as if Death, in seemingly respectful fear, had recoiled from its own emblem. As you move further from the heart of the city, its life dies, and many of the windows are shuttered or boarded up; yet this sad spectacle has its beauty: it is more apparent to the mind than the eyes, constantly regaled by the more unexpected accidents of shadow and light; by a variety of buildings whose very dilapidation only renders them more picturesque; by the perpetual movement of the waters; and by that blue and pink tint which constitutes the Venetian atmosphere.

Part XII: Life in Venice

Behind the monumental Venice, a kind of enchanted opera set that immediately captivates the eye, and before whom the dazzled traveller usually comes to a halt, there exists another Venice, more familiar, more intimate and no less picturesque, although little known; it is of this that I am about to speak.

Committed to a fairly long stay in Venice, we left the Hotel Europa, the old Palazzo Giustiniani, at the entrance to the Grand Canal, to lodge, at the corner of Campo San Moisè, at Signor Tramontini’s, in rooms left vacant by a Russian prince. Lest the words ‘Russian prince’, rouse, in the imagination of the reader, ideas of magnificence displaced to accommodate a poor poet like myself, one can, in Venice, achieve luxury in a palace at very low cost. A marvel, designed by Sansovino or Scamozzi, can be rented more cheaply there than an attic, in Paris, on the Rue de la Paix, and our apartment was part of a simple house plastered in pink, like most Venetian houses. This accommodation offered the prince the advantage of viewing, from his windows looking on the square, the shop of a French baker who at least possessed, if not riches, a daughter of rare beauty. What the Russian prince purchased in the way of white bread, brown bread, baguettes, sourdough, English bread, and unleavened bread, in the interest of his passion, would have been enough to feed many a family; but nothing transpired. The young baker’s daughter was guarded with maternal vigilance and more care than the golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides by the mythological dragon, and the disappointed Muscovite was forced to depart to extinguish his ardour amidst his native snow. This beautiful girl remained a mystery to us, since we failed to see her even once during a stay of some weeks. Any tenant of our accommodation was suspected of a like aspiration.

It is in no way a desire to depict the corner where we spent such a happy month which drives me to dwell on its details. I am not one of those people whose joy or sadness matters greatly to the world, and, if I sometimes reveal my own personality in these travel notes, it is simply as a means of transition, and to avoid awkwardness in narrating; however, it is not without interest to mingle with a Venice seen in dreams a Venice viewed in reality.

During our search for an apartment, we had been accosted by a Brescian adventurer, a young man of handsome features, who described himself as a student and painter, and took advantage of our ignorance of the place, and of the Venetian dialect, to render himself necessary and intrude on our privacy; since the few coins that jingled in our pockets made us appear as magnificent to his eyes as lords, relative to his personal poverty. He led us to a series of hovels, some more dreadful than the others, next to which Consuelo’s little room in the Corte Minelli (see George Sand’s novel ‘Consuelo’) would have been a paradise. He was surprised to find us so hard to please, and conceived of ideas all the more splendid on our behalf. To placate our benevolence, and secure our considerable patronage, he made us the gift of one of those frail bouquets mounted on a stem, and surrounded by cardboard, which are sold in Venice for a few small copper coins. He seemed to base great hopes on the ingenious delicacy of this present, hopes which were disappointed and the loss of which he resigned himself to with some difficulty. Ice-creams and coffees did not seem to him sufficient compensation for his bouquet, and he complained with such bitterness of the expense to which the generosity of a heart, only too loyal, had led him, while in the company of foreign noblemen, that we felt obliged to offer him half a dozen zwanzigs (Austrian twenty-kreutzer coins) which he accepted with a grumble and with all the signs of wounded pride...at receiving so little.

Our lodgings had a waterside door and a landside door, giving access to a canal and the square respectively, like most houses in Venice. They consisted of a proper bedroom, and a fairly large living room, separated by an ante-room opening onto a balcony with three windows, which was garnished with flowers at our instruction, and where we passed the best part of our time gazing and dreaming, while smoking cigarettes; this layout is repeated almost everywhere, in palaces as well as in the humblest of dwellings. The balcony is the focal point, generative of that type of building. These balconies hold a middle place between the Spanish mirador and the Arabic mashrabiya.

A sofa, horsehair-filled chairs, a bed wrapped in mosquito netting, a table, and a dressing-table, made up the furnishings. Parquet flooring was replaced by a kind of stucco mottled in different colours, resembling, you understand, a huge slice of galantine. Nothing of that analogy was lacking, not even the truffles, simulated by black stones. This charcuterie paves all the apartments of Venice. It is cool on the feet and easy to keep clean. The walls, following Italian custom, were whitewashed in a flat tempera colour and decorated with boldly-coloured lithographs, after François-Claudius Compte-Calix, which was flattering to a certain extent as regards French art, but regrettable from the point of view of local colour; fortunately, a Panagia, painted by the neo-Byzantines of Mount Athos, in a rigid and hieratically-barbaric style worthy of the ninth century, relieved, fittingly, the modern vulgarity of those shoddy images.

The presence of this Madonna with a golden monogram was due to our hostess, an amiable Greek lady, married in Venice, who lived in the apartment above ours. A sonnet, printed on satin and neatly framed, related, with strong allusions taken from mythology, how the Ionian waves had ceded this Venus to the Adriatic waves, and how a virtuous Helen had followed an honest Paris across the sea.

Helen was indeed the name of the young woman, but the resemblance did not extend as far as the bridegroom, whose name was Guiseppe Tramontini. Signora Elena had completed her recovery from childbirth and still retained the sweet paleness of hands and face which is seemingly the reward of young mothers. Married very early, she had already had several advocates. Let this sentence in no way make one suspect the chastity of this charming woman. Although people live to a good age in Venice, children thrive poorly there, and many die very young. These little innocents, going straight to heaven, plead their parents’ case in God’s court. Hence the name advocates. Does that hope, though, console one quite as easily for their loss?

The rest of the household consisted of a young nanny from the Friulian Alps, a peasant girl with thin cheeks, a hooked profile, and large, wild, surprised eyes, who bounded upstairs from step to step, the baby on her arm, like a timid goat jumping from rock to rock, and an old servant called by the poetic name of Lucia, which was in scant agreement with her spiky bottlebrush hair, brown and rancid skin, squinting eyes, thick-lipped mouth, loud voice, and the appearance of a Leonardo grotesque, or a Maritorne (see Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’).

As I said, our accommodation had a view of the square and the canal. Why should a description of this dual aspect not possess the interest of a watercolour by Jules-Romain Joyant, or William Wyld, who have made thus a host of familiar little sketches of narrow streets, corners, canals, towpaths under bridges, picturesquely cluttered passageways? Is the pen more awkward than the brush? Let me try.

At the end of the square or, as they say, of the campo, rises the church of San Moisé, with its flamboyant rococo facade, tortured, almost savage, in its violent exaggeration. This is not the bland, flabby, old-fashioned wrinkled rococo which we are accustomed to in France, but a robust bad taste, full of strength, exuberance, invention and caprice; the scroll-shaped volutes twist about like flourishes in stone, the consoles make brusque sallies, the architraves are interrupted by rows of deep indentations, sculpted allegories lean together on the slopes of the tympani with impossible postures in the style of Michelangelo. In their niches, statues with sinuous contours, and bulging draperies, adopt the pose of military leaders or dancing masters. The bust of the founder, moustachioed and formidable, at the summit of the pyramidion which supports it, has the air of a true portrait of Il Capitano Spavento (the commedia dell’arte character). Yet the bushy chicory-leaves like cabbages in stone, the elaborate rocailles, the pierced cartouches, the Corinthian pilasters, the tormented figures, the extravagant excesses of ornamentation, produce a richly-grandiose effect despite good taste being violated in every detail, though by a vigorous imagination. Giacomo da Vignola would criticise the designer of this fanciful portal. I fully absolve him. Its strange architecture was the work of Alessandro Tremignon.

This defiant facade is connected by a flying buttress to its bell-tower, a diminutive version of the Campanile in Saint Mark’s Square. In Italy, architects have always been embarrassed by bell-towers; they neither wish, nor know how, to connect them to the main building. It seems that, preoccupied despite themselves with pagan temples, they view the Catholic bell-tower as a deformed superfetation, a barbaric excrescence; they create an isolated tower, a kind of belfry, seemingly ignoring the magnificent effect that the religious architecture of the North has derived from the former’s presence. This is said in passing. I will be obliged to return more than once to the observation.

The entrance to San Moisé is equipped with a solid leather curtain, which when raised allows a vague glimpse of the church, through transparent shadow, filled with flashes of gilding, gleams of candlelight, and warm clouds of incense, together with the sound of the organ, and of people at prayer.

The bell-tower is no sinecurist: it rings and chimes all day. In the morning, with the Angelus, then the Mass, then Vespers, then again to greet the evening; its iron tongues are scarcely silent a moment. Nothing tires those bronze lungs.

Nearby, in the shadow of the church, and separated from it by an alley, as narrow as the tightest callejon of Granada or Constantine, and which leads to the traghetto of the grand canal, shelters the presbytery; a dark facade clad in a faded red, pierced with dreary windows with complicated grilles. It would mar the clear Venetian painting, if masses of wall plants, hanging in disorder, did not brighten it a little with their tender green, and if a charming Madonna, surmounting a poor-box, was not smiling there, between two lamps.

The three or four houses facing it contain the baker’s house besieged by the Russian prince; a florist’s, whose front, decorated with small flowerpots, displays tulips in bud or in bloom, plus rare plants, supported with sticks, and flanked by scientific descriptions; and a grocer’s store forming an angle with the canal-side, lime-plastered all over, decorated with green shutters, lined with balconies, and topped by those chimneys with capitals flared in a turban shape which make Turkish cemeteries of the roofs of Venice.

On one of these balconies, a Signora often appeared, quite pretty, as far as the distance allowed one to judge, dressed almost always in black, and plying her fan with a wholly Spanish dexterity. It seemed to me that I had seen her somewhere before. Thinking about it, I realised that it was in the Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi. She recalled the type of the young woman at the window in his text. Perhaps it would not have been impossible to engage her in making love in a gondola, by means of serenades, gifts, and delicacies to consume, in the old Venetian fashion. But the traveller is a bird of passage who lacks the time for making love.

On the open side of the square, that of the landing stage, a bridge of white marble, with a single arch, spans the canal, and places the Campo in communication with the alley on the opposite bank which runs towards the Campo San Maurizio: the canal vanishes at one end into one of these perspectives which the many views of Venice have made familiar to the whole world; tall houses, pink above and green below, their heads in the sun, their feet in the water, their ribbed arches bearing modern bay-windows; chimneys rounded in flower pots; long striped banners hanging from balconies; vermilion or bistre tiles crowned with statues, standing out whitely against the azure sky; mooring posts illuminated in bright colours; water shimmering in the shadows; and boats stationary or brushing their black sides against marble steps amidst unexpected effects of light and shadow. This watercolour, as large as life, hung beyond our window, on the side occupied by the canal.

At the other end, the canal, as yet blocked by a fallen bridge, disgorged into Il Canalazzo (the Grand Canal) and revealed a portion of the entrance wall of the Dogana, with its bronze statue of Fortune turning in the wind on her gilded globe, as well as the rigging of vessels too loaded to penetrate the waters of the narrow canals.

Opposite us was an inn, the Star of Gold, which possessed nothing remarkable other than a terrace festooned with vine leaves, and a characteristic detail, of which I must make mention, its sign, originally written in three languages Italian, French, and German, of which the Teutonic lettering, concealed no doubt during the siege of Venice, could be made out, vaguely, beneath the daub, not having been redone out of patriotism. Such silent protests against the foreign yoke are found everywhere.

Sitting on our balcony, releasing before me lightly-floating puffs of tobacco from the Levant, I am about to pen a sketch of Venetian life.

It is still morning; the cannon-shot from the frigate, announcing that the port is open has but now sent its white smoke over the lagoon; an angelic salute vibrates from the city’s thousand bell towers. Patrician and bourgeois Venice slumbers deeply as yet; but the poor devils who sleep on the steps of the houses, on the palazzo stairways, or at the foot of the columns, have already quit their beds, and shaken the night dew from their damp and ragged clothing.

Each boatman at the landing-stage washes the sides of his gondola, brushes the cloth of its felze, polishes the iron stem at the bow, shakes out the Persian carpet which lines the floor of the boat, spruces up the black leather cushions, and puts everything in order, ready to be summoned to his task.

Larger vessels bringing supplies to the city are beginning to arrive from Mestre and Fusina; from the Zuecca (Giudecca), a sort of maritime suburb lined with buildings on one side and gardens on the other; and from Chioggia, Torcello, and other places on the mainland or islands.

Those boats piled high with fresh vegetables, grapes, peaches, leave behind them a sweet smell of fruit and verdure, which contrasts with the pungent scent of boatloads of tuna, red mullet, octopi, oysters, sea-lice, crabs, shellfish, and other ‘fruits of the sea’, according to the picturesque Venetian expression.

Others, carrying wood and coal, moor by the water gates to deliver their goods, then resume their peaceful course. The wine comes not in barrels, as with us, nor in goatskins, as in Spain, but in large open vats which it dyes to a purple hue darker than blackberry juice. The epithet ‘dark’, which Homer never fails to apply to wine, would be perfect for these products of the vineyards of Friuli and Istria.

Drinking water to fill the cisterns is delivered in the same manner; because Venice, despite its aquatic location, would die of thirst like Tantalus, not possessing a single spring. In the past they brought water from Fusina via the Brenta canal. Now, the artesian wells, excavated by François Degousée, happily supply most cisterns. There is hardly a campo that lacks one. The orifice of these tanks, surrounded by a coping like that of a well, furnished the most delightful motifs born of the fantasies of Venetian architects and sculptors: sometimes, around this drum, of bronze, marble, or stone, they wrapped a Corinthian capital, hollowed out in the middle; sometimes a monstrous face; elsewhere, bacchanals involving children, and garlands of flowers or fruit, unfortunately too often worn away by the friction from ropes and copper buckets. These tanks filled with sand, in which the water remains fresh, grant a particular character to the squares; they are opened at certain times, and the women come to draw water from them, as Greek slaves did from the ancient fountains.

Ah! Here a gondola hooks itself on to another. One might compare them, on seeing them attack each other with axe-like prows, to two hostile swans plucking at each other’s plumage with their beaks; one of the gondoliers failed to hear, or heard too late, the other’s cry of warning, a kind of screech in some unknown jargon. A dispute begins and the two champions argue like Homeric heroes before the battle; standing on the stern, each brandishes his oar. You might think they would sink each other. Fear not, there is far more noise than action. Cries of ‘Corpo di Bacco’, and ‘Sangue di Diana’, wing their way from one side to the other, but soon swear words from mythology are no longer enough. Insults and blasphemies crisscross, ever-increasing in intensity: lame-duck, mud-frog, clawless-crab, sea-louse, dog and son of a cow, ass and son of a sow, murderer, ruffian, sneak, tedesco (Teuton), these are the delightful qualifications they lavish on one another. Associating the heavens with their quarrel, they insult their respective saints: ‘Your Madonna’s a mare not worth two candles’ cries one. ‘Your saint’s a fool without a miracle to his name,’ replies the other. I have used kinder terms than theirs.

It should be noted that their vociferations become all the more outrageous as the boats drift further away, and the interlocutors of this furious dialogue move increasingly out of reach.

Soon only a hoarse croaking is heard, which fades in the distance.

Here, an official gondola passes, the Austrian flag at the rear, bearing a stiff and chilly functionary, his chest adorned with decorations, to some inspection or other; there, another carries phlegmatic English tourists; while that one, lean as a skate, threads its way, mysteriously and discreetly, seaward. Its folded down felze, its drawn blinds, shelter two lovers who are off to lunch, indulgently, at the tip of Quintavale; this one, heavier and wider, carries beneath its tendonetto, striped in white and blue, a decent family going to bathe in the sea at the Lido, on that beach whose fine sand still bears the hoofprints of Byron’s horses.

But now the church opens its doors. A crimson procession emerges, bearing a crimson bier, to be placed in a crimson gondola. Here one mourns in purple. A corpse is being embarked for the cemetery, located on that island in the lagoon off Murano. The priests, bearers, candlesticks, and church ornaments occupy the front of the boat. Go sleep, poor victim, beneath sand impregnated with sea-salt, in the shadow of an iron cross that the seagull’s wing will brush! For a Venetian’s bones, dry land is too heavy a covering.

Since I am about this funereal subject, allow me to say that in Venice, when someone dies, they affix to their house, and those in the neighbouring streets, by way of announcing the departure, a printed notice that gives the name, age, and place of birth of the deceased, and the illness to which they succumbed, affirming that they received the sacraments, and died a good Christian, and seeking the prayers of the faithful on behalf of the dead.

Let us quit these melancholy ideas; its furrow has closed behind the crimson boat; let us think of it no more. Let us be as forgetful as the water’s flow, which retains not the slightest trace; it is of life, not death, we must think!

Part XIII: Everyday Details

On the bridge come and go young girls, working-girls, shop-girls, domestic servants, in blouse and petticoat, beneath a long shawl; on their necks are coiled, like cables, those long twists of reddish blonde hair so dear to Venetian painters. I salute, from my window, models who sat for Paolo Veronese, who pass by without remembering that they posed, three hundred years ago, for The Wedding Feast at Cana. Old women, masked in the national bauta, hasten to arrive in time for the Mass, the last bell for which rings out from San Moisè.

Hungarian soldiers, with blue trousers, and black ankle-boots, with grey coats of woven-ticking, make the bridge resound under their heavy, regular steps, carrying wood to their barracks to heat soup or cook food for their bowls.

The Illustissimi, former nobles now ruined, displaying a proud air still, in their clean but threadbare clothes, take themselves off to Florian’s, the meeting place of the aristocracy, that excellent coffee-shop, the recipe for which Constantinople transmitted to Venice, for nowhere does one drink better. Elsewhere, perhaps, these apparitions from the past would rouse a smile; but the people of Venice love their old nobility, who seem to them always both fine and familiar.

Nothing is done in the ordinary way in this city of fantasy. The music of the streets, instead of riding the hip of whoever turns the handle, is borne about by water: here, hand-organs travel in gondolas.

One happens to pass beneath our balcony; it is one of those large mechanical versions manufactured in Cremona, the home of fine violins. Nothing is less like those boxes producing false notes, whose toothless barrels fail to raise more than a few of the keys, which, at home, make the dogs howl in anguish at the corners of crossroads; trumpets, triangles, and Basque drums, form a complete orchestra, to the sound of which a set of mechanical puppets dance a ball enclosed in their wooden niche. It is like an opera overture on the march.

More than one boat deviates from its course to enjoy the melody a little longer, and the musical gondola glides forward followed by a small flotilla of dilettantes travelling the canals to follow its sound.

What boat is this that passes by, with a kind of bluish monster moored to its flank which splashes and plashes, and makes the water leap and foam? Aboard, are fishermen who exhibit a dolphin, a marine curiosity caught in their nets, and who hold out their caps to the windows, and gondolas, to gather a few coins. Strong ropes, skilfully knotted, hold the creature half in its element, half in the air, for all to see. It barely resembles that fantastic monster heraldry calls a dolphin, that chimera which holds a place between fish and ornamentation. In this large rounded head, ending in a beak, one fails to find the heraldic pitting and prominent mantling displayed on coats of arms. Arion, with his lyre, would cut none too fine a figure astride one of that species.

Now let us take a look at the square. The picture is no less lively. The fried-fish shop, a booth of canvas and wooden planks, is open for business at the foot of the bridge; the stove is in operation, and the air is full of the odour of smoke and the pungent aroma of boiling oil: fried food occupies a significant place in Italian life. Moderation in eating is a southern virtue which is easily compounded by laziness, and there is little cooking done at home. All send out for food from these open-air eateries; pasta, fritters, octopus-arms, and fried fish, that others, less ceremoniously, consume on site!

The ‘fish-fryer’, forgive me a neologism needed on this trip to Italy, is a big, broad, strong, potbellied, kind of obese Hercules, a species of Palforio (the innkeeper in Alfred de Musset’s play ‘Les Marrons du feu’), with scarlet cheeks, a parrot’s beak, ears adorned with tufts of hair, and a head of shiny black curls, like the pile of an Astrakhan lambskin hat. He squares to his role like a king on his throne, behind him three or four rows of large bright stamped-copper pans, like ancient shields hung on the bulwarks of triremes.

The seller of pumpkin, a dish the Venetians are fond of, also displays his offering in lumps that resemble loaves of yellow wax that he sells in slices. A young girl, at the window, beckons to the man, and lowers, on the end of a rope, a basket in which she retrieves a piece of pumpkin whose size accords with the money she sends down. This convenient way of gaining provisions suits the Venetian nonchalance.

A group has formed in the middle of the campo, a group soon swelled with all the passers-by and all the idlers, disgorged by the bridge, on their way, through the alley beside the church, to the Calle Frezzaria or to St. Mark’s Square, the two busiest places in Venice.

A space left free at the centre of the gathering reveals a poor, dilapidated devil, wearing a mournful hat, and dressed in pitiful clothing and frayed trousers; by him is an old dreadful female companion, a combination of one of the Fates and a witch, in as wretched clothes as the man. A covered basket is placed on the ground in front of them.

A lean, dirty, hairy dog, but one with the intelligent look of a learned creature adept at all sorts of tricks, gazes at the old couple with that human look that a dog exhibits before its master: it appears to be awaiting a sign, or command.

Are we to witness the dog’s performance? Yet music is lacking, and the poor creature is not dressed as a marquis.

The old man makes a gesture. The dog, all attention, races to the basket, and lifts with his teeth one of its flaps; he pauses a few seconds, then, pushes the other flap open with his nose; he emerges triumphant, holding in his mouth a little piece of folded paper, which he places at the feet of the old woman; he repeats this trick several times, and his companions take up the tickets extracted thus from the basket.

The dog is drawing lottery numbers. Those he retrieves in good condition must, infallibly, win; the lottery players of both sexes, of whom there are many in Venice, as in all poor countries, where the hope of a sudden fortune gained without work acts vigorously on the imagination, have great confidence in the numbers fished out thus by the dog.

Viewing the deep misery, and starved faces of the couple, and the lean anatomy of the dog whose lottery numbers were to earn so many crowns, we wondered why these poor devils benefited so little from this method of winning a fortune that they granted others, so generously, for a few sous.

This simple thought had not occurred to any there. Perhaps the diviners of lottery-numbers are like sorcerers, who cannot foresee the future for themselves; clairvoyant on behalf of others, they are blind when it comes to themselves; else, these two unfortunates would have been guilty of not being millionaires at the very least.

Venice is full of lottery stations. The winning numbers, inscribed, on cards framed with flowers and ribbons, in fantastic letters of azure, vermilion, and gold, excite the greed of passers-by. In the evening, they are illuminated, brightly, by candles and lamps: the favourite numbers, the numbers which must infallibly be drawn, according to those calculations of probability dear to the lottery-players, who are as certain upon this subject as Siméon Poisson, of the Institut de France, are also exhibited with great pomp. Some players, who stubbornly follow these imaginative strategies, despite numerous disappointments, buy them nonetheless, and try again, doubling or tripling their stakes in mathematical progression.

In France, the lottery has been abolished on the grounds that it is immoral. Perhaps it is kinder not to rob the unfortunate of all hope. Why force these poor devils to accept the certainty of never possessing a single sou? The dream of a big win, the paradisial idea of a quartet or quintet of winning numbers, allows many who despair to await their end in patience.

Our gondola was due to collect us at three o’clock. Antonio was at the water gate: we had thanked the gondoliers of the Hotel Europa but rented a gondola for the month, which is less expensive and more convenient. Antonio is an amusing young lad of fifteen or so, very alert, clever, quite handy with the oar, laboring to good effect at the stern of the boat, with his Chioggiotto hat and his Indian cotton jacket with Persian designs. He has only one fault: he takes too lively an interest in the legs of those pretty women entering and exiting his gondola; the other day a little gold slipper supporting an embroidered silk stocking, descending three steps of pink marble, almost made us capsize through the efforts of our too ardent gondolier. Except for this failing, he is very pleasant; love preserves him from drunkenness. Cupid saves him from Bacchus, as the classicist might say.

Right at the end of the Ria degli Schiavoni, beyond the public gardens, at the tip of Quintavalle, on the island of San Pietro di Castello, is the house of an old fisherman named Ser Zuane, famous for its fish dinners, like the Trafalgar Tavern or the Ship Tavern at Greenwich, or like La Râpée in Paris.

We formed the idea of dining there and, making the gondola linger a little, we nonchalantly enjoyed a spectacle of which the eye cannot tire, though it be viewed every day, being so admirable, magical, and perpetually new. We saw pass before us, between sky and water, as on a panoramic scroll, the Zecca, Sansovino’s ancient library, the columns of the Piazzetta, the Doge’s Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, the Hotel Danieli, the Ria degli Schiavoni, lined with shops and boats to most picturesque effect, the Cà di Dio embankment which prolongs the line of the quay, and the public gardens, whose greenery and freshness belie the idea that there is nothing in Venice but bricks, marble, and water.

Having skirted the gardens, we approached the residence of Ser Zuane, via the canal from San-Pietro di Castello; boats pulled up on the sand, picturesquely stranded; nets stretched out in the sun; and beams and planks forming a rustic landing-stage fronted his dwelling, which is very simple indeed, and would provide a piquant motif for a maritime sketch by Eugène Isabey.

The finest room in the house had been prepared for us, but we had our covers transported to the end of the garden, beneath an arbour shaded by vine and fig leaves, and from which hung a few fruits of the gourd growing there. The garden, full of vegetables, flowers, and weeds, was unkempt enough to be charming. This vegetation, bushy and free-growing, pleased us more than over-ornate planting.

Ser Zuane, though no doubt a little annoyed by this preference of ours, incomprehensible as ever to ordinary folk, for a wooden bench and a trestle table, under a mass of greenery, rather than a horsehair chair before a mahogany one, in a room full of mirrors and prints of the Rue Saint-Jacques, showed himself no less jovial or cordial towards us.

Ser Zuane’s wife, who seems to enjoy despotic authority at home, is a large and cheerful gossip, of a high colour, and bastioned by formidable charms. She likes to make witty remarks to which her aged husband replies. I know not if this Philemon and Baucis of fish-frying are happy, but they have a lot of children, like the princes and princesses of fairy tales. Zuane even claims that he is still young enough to add to their extensive lineage, but his wife says that is mere pretence.

Each country has its local cuisine, its particular dishes. Marseille is proud of its bouillabaisse, aioli and clam chowder; Venice has pidocchi soup, which is pleasanter than its unsavory name. Pidocchi (sea lice) are a species of crustacean that collect in lagoons and canals. The best pidocchi are those from the basins of the Arsenal.

Pidocchi soup is a classic dish of Ser Zuane’s, and any traveller who appreciates local colour owes it to his conscience to taste some, prepared by the hand of the old Adriatic fisherman. I declare, hand on stomach, a preference for bisque or turtle soup; but nevertheless, pidocchi broth, suitably well-seasoned with spices and aromatic herbs, has indeed its own charm, especially when supped beneath a Quintavalle vine.

The rest of the dinner, which a Carthusian superior-general would not have disavowed, consisted of oysters from the Arsenal with fine herbs, pinkish-white marine crayfish, mullet and sole from Chioggia poached in bouillon, red mullet, and pan-fried sardines, all washed down with wine from Valpolicella, and a Picolit from Conegliano, with, for dessert, those beautiful ruddy and golden fruits ripened in the sun on the hills of Monselice, Este, and Montagnana.

At dessert, as we drank a bottle of the wine of Samos, as warm and honeyed as a Homeric wine, the old woman came to chat with us, cheerfully and familiarly, like a hostess of former times; she offered a large bouquet, hastily plucked from her garden, and tied with rush-grass, to the wife of a friend who shared our repast, a charming person with Spanish features, whose round white arm protruded from the black lace which bordered her sleeve.

The old woman exclaimed at the whiteness and beauty of this arm, which she kissed several times with that grace familiar to the ordinary folk of Venice, about whose respectful courtesy there is nothing servile.

The bill was brought to us, written on the back of a plate. It came to a fair amount, but we had consumed a delicious and interesting meal, and, as foreigners, we were obliged to pay a third more than a native of the country, that being the rate of exchange; there was nothing to say; so, we made not the slightest comment, and the fisherman accompanied us to the landing-stage where our gondolas awaited.

We went for a walk in the public gardens, on the island nearby; there is a large promenade planted with trees, forming an obtuse angle with the sea, terminating, at its tip, in a mound surmounted by a café frequented by drinkers and street musicians. Children and young girls have fun sliding down its gentle slopes, covered with soft grass.

The view extends across the lagoon, into the distance: one can see Murano from the top, the island where glass is made; San Servolo, where there is a hospital for the insane; and the low line of the Lido, with its dunes, restaurants, and domed trees. Rows of piles, indicating the depth of water, form species of alleyways in this shallow sea, where banks of kelp and sea-wrack float. The perspective is enlivened by the perpetual toing and froing of sailing boats and other vessels.

The public gardens, on feast days, contain a most delightful collection of Venetian beauties. It is there that one can study at ease the type characterised by the playwright Carlo Gozzi as biondo, bianco and grassoto (blonde, pale, and ample).

The presence of the Austrians must necessarily have modified the Venetian type, although unions are rare because of the natural aversion of the two nationalities for each other, and we still find, in reality, examples of the women who posed for Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese.

The young girls walk about in groups of two or three, most of them bareheaded their opulent blonde or auburn hair dressed with a good deal of taste. The brown hair of the south is quite rare in Venice among the women, though common in the men. I had already noticed that oddity in Spain, in Valencia, where the male population have black hair, and olive complexions, with the haggard sunburnt appearance of a tribe of North-African Bedouins, while the women are blonde, white, and bright of feature, like Lancashire farmers’ wives. Yet this variation in tints is excellent. Adam was brick-coloured, Eve the colour of milk, providing painters with the happiest of contrasts.

We saw some very charming faces there, a distinctive memory of which would be difficult to reproduce without an artist’s pencil. I will try to outline some of the general features. The lines of the visage, without achieving the Grecian regularity, that almost architectural regularity, which is a commonplace of true beauty, nonetheless possess a rhythm which is lacking in Northern faces, more tormented by the thoughts and multiple cares born of civilisation. The line of the nose is purer, cleaner in profile, than the noses of northern women, always full of the capricious and unexpected. The eyes also have a bright placidity unknown to us, which recalls the clear and tranquil gaze of wild creatures: they are often very black, despite the blonde colour of the hair; the mouth possesses that smorfia, a sort of disdainful smile full of provoking charm, which gives so much character to the heads drawn by the Italian masters.

What is particularly charming about Venetian women, is the nape, the line of the collarbone and the summit of the shoulders. One cannot imagine anything more slender, elegant, finer, or rounder. There is something of the swan or the dove in those necks, as they undulate, bow, and bend; at the back of the head little wisps of hair of all kinds frolic, little rebellious curls, that escaped the comb’s teeth, with effects of light, the gleams of the sun’s rays, and patches of shadow to delight the colourist. After a walk in the public gardens, one is longer surprised at the golden splendour of the Venetian school of painters; what we thought an artist’s dream is only an often-inferior translation of reality. I have followed behind some of those shapely necks, without even trying to see the face above them, intoxicated by those pure lines and that warm paleness.

I even took a most confusing walk, once, through the skein of Venetian streets, while following the beautiful neck of a girl who could make nothing of me, thinking me a most persistent and foolish gentleman.

She was a tall girl, wondrously dark-haired, with a striking resemblance to the actress Rachel (Elizabeth Félix) as regards the elegance of her long, fine body, and the classical lines of her shoulders. She had such perfect dignity of movement that her large red silken and woollen shawl seemed the purple cloak of a queen. Never did the great tragedienne display more beautiful or nobler folds to her tunic and peplum. The girl was walking quickly, making the ruffles of her blue dress foam about her like waves at the feet of the sea-goddess Thetis, with an ease and alluring pride of which some great coquette might have been jealous. I often lost her amidst the crowds of passers-by; but the red flicker of her shawl guided me like gleams from a lighthouse, and I always found her once more.

My pursuit had commenced in Saint Mark’s Square. Near the Paglia bridge, the lovely woman stopped to speak for a few moments with a swarthy old man, grey of beard and hair, a gondolier or fisherman, who seemed to be her father. The old man gave her some coins, and she plunged into one of those little alleys which lead to the Riva degli Schiavoni. After many a detour in the maze of alleys, sottoportici (sub-porticoes), canals, and bridges which so often lead the stranger astray in Venice, she stopped, no doubt to rid herself of the shadow that followed her at a respectful distance, in front of one of those open-air fish shops, where tuna is sold by the red slice; she haggled for a long time over a piece which she rejected. She started walking again, turning her head imperceptibly to look over her shoulder, casting a glance from the corner of her eye to see if she was free of the shadow’s attentions. When she saw otherwise, she made a bad-tempered gesture which made her even more charming, and continued her journey through the streets, squares, alleyways, passages, and over bridges, in a manner that completely disoriented me. She led me thus, with agile and ever more hurried step, along the side of the Arsenal, through a deserted quarter, to a place where an unfinished church facade rises, and there threw herself like a frightened deer against a door that opened and immediately closed again.

Among all the assumptions that the poor child might have made of my attentions, gallantry, assault, seduction, kidnapping, she surely could not have imagined that she was followed by a poetic art-lover who feasted his eyes on, and sought to engrave in his memory, like a beautiful verse or a beautiful picture, that charming neck he would never see again.

Part XIV: A Vicar’s Debut – Gondolas – Sunset

Leaving the public gardens, one finds oneself on a former canal, filled-in and thereby transformed into a street. It presented the most lively of aspects; outside all the windows, and from all the balconies, hung pieces of damask, lengths of silk brocade, Persian carpets, or such rugs made from pieces coloured like a harlequin’s outfit as they make in Venice, lacework-tablecloths, pieces of flamed silk; and from poorer houses curtains or bed-sheets: every facade offered its flag. One might have thought one was in France at Corpus Christi, at the time when the procession sets off, if the foreignness of the costumes and faces had not alerted one to the contrary; the windows framed groups of three or four girls, or young women in blue and white dresses, with brightly coloured shawls, their aspects lively and joyful, amicably clasped together, leaning over the street, and turning to reply to the young men standing behind them.

The street was crowded with fried-food booths, and sellers of watermelons, pumpkins, and grapes. The acquaioli (water-sellers) added a few drops of kirsch to the water which gave it the coldness of ice and an opal tint. The owners of improvised cafes poured out their brown fruit liqueurs; others sold crudely colourful ice-cream. The bar-restaurants were full of drinkers, celebrating the black wine of Italy and the yellow wine of Greece; an incredible crowd swarmed, in joyful tumult, amidst the narrow space.

The church in front of which we were passing allowed a view, through its open doors, of a conflagration of candles. The main altar dazzled, and, in this warm rosy atmosphere, thousands of lights twinkled like stars; the church was hung with damask laced with gold, and festooned with paper garlands, and the congregation was so large that it was impossible for us to take three steps beyond the threshold.

A tempest of music, basses, flutes and violins, was unleashed beneath the reddened vault, then the voices recommenced their chanting. A service accompanied by music is not uncommon in Venice; but this service was listened to with an attentiveness which is rarely a feature of Italian devotion, always a little sensual and distracted.

A parish priest was ‘making his debut’ as a curate or vicar, I know not which, and that was the reason for the celebration. Sonnets and odes in praise of his evangelical virtues and his Christian charity were plastered on all the walls: in Italy, everything is an opportunity for a sonnet; they are penned for marriages, births, birthdays, recoveries from illness, deaths; they shower them on opera divas; the sonnet is in Italy what the advertising poster is with us, an innocent and poetic version, above all a genuine one, a naive outpouring of the childish admiration that the people of the South, more passionate than those of the North, feel the need to express with regard to everything. In these sonnets, there is a dreadful compounding of metaphors and conceits; stars shoot at all times, planets dance sarabands, and they make omelettes of suns and moons. Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone is more often recalled than one thinks.

Walking along the Cà di Dio embankment to return to the Piazzetta, we saw some young men from the city, amateur oarsmen like our Parisian boatmen, who were launching their gondola at high speed against the bank of the quay, and, at the height of the action, halting the boat dead in its track, a few inches from the stone cladding. The practice is dangerous but graceful; seeing it travelling at speed, one thinks the boat will be smashed to a thousand pieces, but not so; they back water and start again. It is thus that Arab and Turkish horsemen urge their mounts, at the gallop, against a wall, then reign them in, still on all four legs, thereby achieving immobility, suddenly, after the violence of their approach. The Venetians of olden days were once able to watch these equestrian performances in the Atmeidan, the Hippodrome, of Constantinople, and adapted them to create something similar in their own homeland, where the horse is, so to speak, a chimerical being.

More than one young patrician still dons jacket, cap and traditional belt, and directs a gondola himself, with great ease. Foreigners also take to the practice, mainly the English, in their role as a nautical people. Many of them pay the gondola owners for the opportunity to practice the difficult art of navigating in Venetian style.

Every morning, a young man, with a most gentlemanly air, passed beneath our balcony, who was working on his oarsmanship with sweat and dedication; he was making visible progress, and by now must be worthy to be received into the Nicolotti or the Castellani clan; if he continues, he will perhaps be able to aspire to being baptised in sepia ink, which is still done, in secret, when it is a question of crowning a leader of one of these gondolier factions (see George Sands: ‘Lettres d’un Voyageur’, Letter II).

There’s many a beautiful sunset in Paris. If one leaves the Tuileries via the Place de la Concorde and turns one’s face towards the Champs-Élysées, it is difficult not to be stunned by the magnificent spectacle which presents itself: the trees en masse, the Egyptian obelisk, the magical perspective of the great avenue, the arch of the Arc de Triomphe open to the void, make an admirable frame for the sun which sinks in a splendour more dazzling to our eyes than that of the day gone by.

But there is a sight even more beautiful: sunset in Venice, as you come from the Lido, Quintavalle, or the public gardens.

The row of houses on the Giudecca punctuated by the dome of the Redentore; the Dogana with its square tower, surmounted by the twin statues of Hercules supporting that of Fortune; the two domes of Santa Maria della Salute, rounded like milk-filled breasts, all go to form a wonderfully varied outline, which is highlighted, strongly, against the sky, and provides the background to the picture.

The island of San Giorgio Maggiore, nearer to the eye, serves as a repoussoir, with its church, its dome and its brick bell-tower, a diminutive twin of the Campanile, which can be seen to the right, above the old Library and the Doge’s Palace.

All these buildings bathed in shadow, since the light is behind them, reveal azure, lilac, and purple tones, on which are outlined in black the silhouettes of boats at anchor; above them a fiery splendour breaks forth, a firework-display of light rays; the sun sinks into masses of topazes, rubies, amethysts that the wind sets flowing at every instant, in the form of ever-changing cloud; dazzling rockets burst between the two domes of the Salute, and sometimes, depending on the point where one is placed, a Palladian spire intersects the sun’s disk.

Without doubt, the scene is truly beautiful. But what doubles the enchantment of the spectacle is that it is echoed by the waters. The sun’s preparation for rest, more magnificent than that of any king, has the lagoon for a mirror: all this light, these fiery rays, this phosphorescence, streams on the glittering waves, in prismatic trails of flame. It shines, it scintillates, it blazes, it flows as an ever-seething brightness. The bell-tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, draws, with its opaque shadow, stretching into the distance, a path pf darkness through the watery conflagration, seeming to heighten itself disproportionately, and making it seem to possess a base in the depths of the abyss. The building’s silhouette seems to swim between twin skies or twin seas. Is this the sky’s reflection one sees in the water, or the water’s reflection in the sky? The eye wavers, and everything is bathed in a general confusion of light.

The splendid spectacle reminded me of the passage from El Mágico Prodigioso by Calderon, where the poet, describing a sunset through the mouth of the student Cyprian (See Act I, lines 77-78), depicts the clouds and the waves that grant:

Al gran cadáver del dia,

Son monumento de plata:

To the grand corpse of day,

His tomb of silver.

But let me leave a scene, so impossible to describe, regretful that Félix Ziem, who has painted so pretty a sunrise in azure, argent and rose-pink, from the Piazzetta, was not given to adding, as a pendant, a sunset painted from San Servolo, or the Riva dei Schiavoni; which would have freed me from attempting a depiction.

We disembarked at the Piazzetta landing-stage, which was crowded with a riot of gondolas, and headed towards the Piazza through the arcades of Sansovino’s old Library, today the Viceroy’s Palace. Let me note, in passing, a characteristic detail: in the places where we would, sensibly, place a Rambuteau Column (public urinal) at home, one finds a large black cross bearing the word, rispetto, a recommendation which is less than piously observed. It is a singular use of the mark of our redemption, to use it to protect dubious corners. Is there not some pagan reminiscence here, a translation, in the Italian manner, of Virgil’s lines:

…………‘procul, o procul este, profani,’

conclamat vates, ‘totoque absistite luco;’

…………‘Away, stand far away, O you, profane ones,’

the priestess cried, ‘absent yourselves from all this grove;’

(Aeneid, Book VI:258-29)

I ask forgiveness of my readers, and especially my female readers, for my somewhat coarse remark, but it is an aspect of manners that one can and should note. It portrays Italy more vividly perhaps than some generalised grand dissertation.

It is on the Piazza, at around eight o’clock in the evening, that life in Venice reaches its maximum intensity. One can imagine nothing more cheerful, more lively, more amusing. The setting sun shines, a brightest pink, on the facade of Saint Mark’s, which seems to blush with pleasure and sparkle ardently in these last rays. A few late pigeons return to the gable or cornice where they must sleep, till morning, their heads under their wing.

The Piazza is lined with cafes, like the Palais-Royal in Paris, with which it shares more than one resemblance; the most famous of all is Caffè Florian, a rendezvous for the aristocracy. Then there are the Caffès Suttil, Quadri, and Costanza frequented by the Greeks, and the Imperatore d’Austria, where the Germans and Levantines meet.

These cafes possess nothing remarkable by way of ornamentation, especially when compared to the superb establishments, overburdened with gilding, paintings, and mirrors, of this type, in Paris: they consist of a few very simple rooms, with quite low ceilings, where one never sits, unless it be on the worst of wintry days; the only characteristic decoration to be noted, are some panels of filigreed coloured glass in the windowed interior doors of Caffè Florian.

The former proprietor of the cafe Florian was well-regarded by the old Venetian nobility, for whom he executed all manner of small unofficial services. He was also a friend of Canova, who modelled the feet of this coffee-shop owner afflicted by gout, so that his shoemaker could make him shoes guaranteed not to trouble him. This evidence of good nature on the part of the illustrious artist, for whom the beautiful Pauline Borghèse did not disdain to pose naked, is most touching.

The coffee is excellent in Venice, as I have said; it is served on leather trays, accompanied by a glass whose tasting occupies the entire leisure hours of the Venetians. The ices and granitas are unremarkable except for their low price; they are far from the exquisite refinements of Spanish iced drinks. I found none of note other than a certain grape or verjuice sorbet, very cool, and very tasty.

Customers settle beneath the arches, or in the Piazza itself, where chairs, wooden benches and tables are installed in front of each café. Formerly, striped tents and awnings were erected in the middle of the square to attractive effect; this picturesque custom has disappeared. Colourful blinds are also starting to become rare; they are far too often replaced by ugly pieces of blue canvas, like cooks’ aprons. They are less conspicuous, and in better taste, say the civilised.

Flower-girls, charming, and streetwise, but nonetheless fiercely virtuous, if one is to believe the tales told of Englishmen, distraught with love, dropping handfuls of banknotes into their baskets without the slightest success, flit around the square and regale the passers-by, and the buyers of their attractive wares: if one refuses them, they give one a little bouquet, with a smile, and run off. It is not customary to pay them on the spot, that would be a gross error; rather, from time to time, one offers them a silver coin as a gift and for good luck.

The flower-sellers give way to sellers of glazed fruit, who walk about shouting: ‘Caramel! Caramel!’ in a deafening manner; their store is a basket containing grapes, figs, pears, and plums, coated with a shiny glaze of candied sugar.

One of them, a little lad of twelve years old or so, amused us by the prodigious volubility with which he uttered his cry. We gave him a few coins, and he always stopped to chat with us; his relations with foreigners from all countries had made him something of a polyglot, and he knew at least a few words of every idiom. This Parisian gamin on the streets of Venice possessed aptitude and intelligence. It even appeared that the viceroy had granted a small pension for his education; but the young caramel-seller had compromised himself, during Daniele Manin’s presidency, since he had been a republican drummer, and his heroic prowess had now resulted in the loss of his position as a state rentier. One evening, a dandy to whom he offered his merchandise with excessive importunity perhaps, dealt him a terrible blow with his cane on his poor skinny little shoulder; he said nothing and shed not a tear, but gave the brute a look which meant ‘Good for a stabbing a few years from now.’ I hoped the account might be settled, along with that of the cruel Loredano (see Byron’s play and Verdi’s opera ‘I Due Foscari’). Urged on by quite natural indignation, I had already lifted a stool to split the skull of this wretched man in his Sunday best. A respect for human life, which I later reproached myself for yielding to, stopped me. I backed away from starting a tumultuous quarrel in a language unfamiliar to me.

We also had as friends a collection of little beggar-children, boys and girls, very blonde and dishevelled, and very pink under their dirt and tan, who only needed a few buckets of water poured over them to set them afloat in the seas, above, of a Veronese sky. One of them had trousers made of selvedges sewn together, which produced the most singular variegation. On one of these strips of fabric one could read the words ‘Broadcloth from Elbeuf’ in yellow letters on a blue background. This harlequin’s costume made up of trimmings was the most picaresque garment in the world.

We sometimes gave a little girl, of ten or so, and the most sensible of the little band, a zwanzig (an Austrian twenty-kreuzter coin), on the condition that she shared it with the others; and it was amusing to see her seeking smaller coins from the money-changer so as to distribute it, or the little scamps finding change from among their rags to achieve their share.

Part XV: The Venetians – William Tell – Girolamo

If any in the world are lazy, and lost to the pleasures of idleness, it is Venetian ladies of the upper class. Use of the gondola has disaccustomed them to walking. They scarcely know how to take a single step. In order for them to venture outside, a conjuncture of rare atmospheric circumstances is required, even in their beautiful and gentle climate. The sirocco, the sun, a cloud that threatens rain, a sea breeze that is too fresh, each is sufficient reason to keep them at home; every tiny thing floors them, and tires them, and their greatest exercise is staggering from their couch to the balcony to smell one of those expansive flowers which flourish so well in the warm and humid air of Venice. This nonchalant, retired life gives them a pure, matt whiteness, an incredible delicacy of complexion.

When it happens to be one of those privileged times that we call, at home, ‘weather for young ladies’, some of them make two or three rounds of Saint Mark’s Square, at the hour when the military band gives its evening performance, and then take a long rest in front of Caffè Florian, in front of a glass of water turned opal by a drop of anise, in the company of their husbands or brothers, or their cavaliere serventes (admirers); but this is rare, especially in the canicular days (the dog-days) during which wealthy or patrician families take refuge on the mainland in their villas on the banks of the Brenta, or on their estates in Friuli, because of the exhalations from the lagoons, which are said to be unhealthy and cause fevers.

Formerly, Levantines abounded in Venice; their fur coats, dolmans, their ample clothes in bright colours, made a varying and picturesque crowd scene, amidst which they moved in a grave and impassive manner. They are rarer now trade has moved elsewhere, and is routed via Trieste; but one frequently encounters Greeks who, with caps adorned with a large silk tassel, a kind of bluish pendant reaching the shoulder, shaven temples, and hair flowing down behind, display that characteristic appearance, that beautiful national clothing, which contrasts so with hideous modern dress. These Greeks, who are mostly only merchants or owners of boats from Zante, Corfu, Cyprus or Syros, have a singularly majestic look, and the nobility of their ancient race is written on their features as in a Golden Book; they stand, in groups of three or four, at the corner of the Piazza, before the Caffè Costanza, which enjoys a monopoly by way of offering mocha and pipes to these children of the Levant.

Around the cafes strolling musicians circulate, performing snatches of opera, the tenors among them singing Lucia or some other tune of Donizetti’s with that smooth tone and admirable Italian ease, by means of which instinct mimics talent despite its errors. Chinese shadow-plays, different from ours, in that the background scene is black while the figures are white, unfold quickly, housed in a canvas frame. The performer, a droll fellow dressed in an ancient tailcoat, and wearing a sort of horned hat like the marquis whom everyone will recall having seen running about the streets of Paris shaking his tow wig and scraping a badly-tuned violin, explains that he was formerly an Opera impresario; but that, as a result of the high cost of employing tenors, and the capricious moods of prima donnas, he has been reduced, thus, to poverty and only manages Chinese shadow-puppets, an inexpensive and docile company if ever there was one.

But a group forms in the middle of the square; attention wanders from the melodious tenors, the Chinese-shadows find their circle of spectators broken; the caramel-sellers cease their monotonous cries; all the café chairs perform a quarter-turn: everything falls silent.

Music-stands are set out, scores are placed on them; the military band arrives, tunes up, and begins. They play the overture to Rossini’s Guillaume Tell.

Just as the Italians possess an instinct for vocal music, so the Germans possess an instinct for instrumental; the overture was executed with precision, in admirable ensemble; however, it lacked the energy, the enthusiasm, the wild ardour that this revolutionary piece imperiously demands. All that summons up love, the delights of pastoral life, the mountain snows, emerald meadows, and azure lakes, the sounds of bells, the fresh alpine scents, was expressed with profound and poetic feeling; but the accents of rebellion and freedom, the indignation of a proud spirit oppressed by tyranny, all the seething tumultuous aspect of the work, was rendered in a soft, timid, evasive manner, as if a mysterious censorship had commanded effeminate harmony to extinguish those bugle-calls, that hiss of arrows, that dull rumbling of a people shaking off their chains.

The music seemed designed to stop the Venetians from thinking that Gessler’s cap, a sign of Austrian domination before whom they must bow their heads, was forever to be flying from the masthead. The three masts of Saint Mark’s, with their yellow and black banners, were there to ease rapprochement, while the overture if played with greater vigour might have given people the idea of overthrowing the badge of tyranny.

Once the overture is over, the crowd slowly withdraws. Only the odd pedestrian remains, and the birichini, a band of ruffians, whose most honest trade is the sale of contraband cigars, and who pursue one with dubious proposals, because, while one still reads, in the accounts of modern travellers, that Venice turns night into day, it is no less true that at midnight the Piazza is deserted, and certainly lonelier than the Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens) in Paris, at the same hour; which will not prevent tourists, relying on ancient guidebooks that refer to customs discontinued since the fall of the Republic, repeating, for fifty years longer, that the Piazza San Marco teems with people till dawn.

That was once true, when the apartments which rise above the arches of the Old and New Procuracies were alive with players of Faro, masquerade balls (redoutes), and gambling tables, where all the nocturnal world of nobles, knights of industry, and courtesans, indulged in a perpetual carnival lacking nothing, not even its masks, that world of which Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt left such a curious description in his Memoirs.

The offices of commercial brokers; the boutiques where Murano glassware, necklaces of shell and coral, and model gondolas are sold; the shops full of prints, maps, and views of Venice for the use of tourists, close one after the other, till only the cafes and tobacco-sellers remain open.

It was time to reboard our gondola, which was waiting for us at the Piazetta landing stage, near the Duchess of Berry’s lantern. The moon had risen, and nothing is more pleasant than to travel, by moonlight, along the Grand canal, or the Giudecca. It is a romantic pleasure which an enthusiastic traveller of the kind specified by Hoffmann is scarcely permitted to deprive himself on a beautiful, clear August night (Note the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s opera ‘The Tales of Hoffman’). We had yet another reason to wander the lagoon, at an hour when it would have been wiser to go and wrap ourselves in our mosquito net. Who has not heard of gondoliers, who sing verses of Tasso and barcarolles in that Venetian patois so stuttering and lisping that it seems a childish babble? It is one of those commonplaces of travel that it is more polite to reject than accept. The gondoliers have not sung so for a long time. However, the tradition is not yet lost; the older boatmen retain, deep in their memories, some episode of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, which they ask nothing better than to recall for a good tip, and a few glasses of Cyprus wine. Like the girls of Ischia, who only don their beautiful Greek costumes for the English, the gondoliers, wisely, only deploy their melodies to an accompaniment of guineas.

And when, in the evening, a melancholy song,

Like the lovely warbling of an ancient flute,

Seizes your soul, and lifts you to the heavens,

You imagine that song, that melodious tune,

To be the naive thought of a plaintive soul,

Who cannot, by day, in the daunting city,

Pour out his flood of complaints at leisure,

Yet abandons himself, now, to secret music,

To the sweet air, the beauty of the night,

And lingering, oar in hand, consoles himself.

So, tilting your head to listen more closely,

You gaze at the waves which bear the song;

And the gondola passes, amidst dark waters,

Its torch gleams and dies, deep in the lagoon;

And you, still turned towards the point of light,

Your heart still filled with that sweet song,

Whose notes still float on the passing wave,

Ask aloud what is that perfect harmony,

And towards what far shore the music flees.

Then some passer-by replies to you sadly:

‘They are dwellers in Europe’s chilly climes,

Pale strangers ever cloaked there in mist,

Unloved at home, who travelled here to see

If Venice sings still o’er the evening wave;

And heartless, like those devoid of family,

Have bought the body of some humble beauty,

And, for a few coins, complete their pleasure,

By having their gondolier sing Tasso’s lines.’

Despite this fine poetry from Auguste Barbier’s pen, and though we might pass in the eyes of that bilious poet for ‘pale strangers ever cloaked there in mist’ we did not hesitate to give old Girolamo ‘a few coins’, prompted by Antonio, so that the former might play for us, twixt sky and water, a picturesque musical comedy, of which we asked nothing more than to be fooled, ready to abandon ourselves to the enchantment we ourselves had prepared. One might add, as an extenuating circumstance, that we had bought no one’s body, and were reclining there, in chaste solitude, on the ancient Persian carpet of our gondola.

Girolamo was a droll fellow bronzed by the sun, and cured by the sea and the many libations he allowed himself to maintain the suppleness of his throat; possessing a ‘salty’ singing voice, he was obliged, he said, to drink a lot; each stanza had on him, as on a Rabelaisian singer, the same effect as smoked ham, caviar or bottarga (salted mullet roe).

Once we were a little offshore, in the vast channel of the Giudecca, which is almost an arm of the sea, and near, roughly, to the Jesuit church (I Gesuati), whose white façade was silvered by the moon, Girolamo, having lubricated the bronchi with a large swig of liquor, sang for us, in a guttural voice, which was somewhat deep and hoarse, but which spread far over the water, adorned with portamentos and prolonged cadences in the manner of Tyrolean singers: La Biondina in Gondoletta (Anton Lamberti), Pronta la Gondoletta (Luigi and Federico Ricci), and the episode of Erminia among the Shepherds (Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata).

The first of these barcarolles is charming; Rossini has not disdained to place one or two verses amidst the singing-lesson in his Barber of Seville; its tune and lyrics make it almost a model of the genre; the others are little more than variations on the theme. It would be difficult, if not to say impossible, to translate into formal language all the delights and charming diminutives of the Venetian dialect. The song is all about a romantic trip on the water.

A pretty blonde,’ as the song has it, takes a gondola, and the poor thing is pleased to fall asleep in the boat, on the arm of the gondolier, who wakes her from time to time; but the boat’s rocking soon makes the lovely child fall asleep once more. The moon is half hidden in the clouds, the water is calm, the wind has dropped; a little breeze merely fans the beauty’s hair, and lifts the veil that covers her breast. While gazing, in contemplation, at the perfections of his lovely fare, her rounded face, her charming mouth and figure, the gondolier feels his heart stir, a commotion within, a kind of attraction he cannot describe; he respects her sleep, and at first leaves her undisturbed the while, though love tempts him and counsels him to wake her. Then slowly, and gently, he lets himself slip lower, to lie next to this beautiful blonde on the floor of the boat; but who can find rest with a raging fire as his neighbour? In the end, tired of her endless slumber, he takes advantage of the situation, and certainly fails to repent of it. ‘Oh, Heavens!’ he exclaims, in his naive foolishness, ‘What beautiful things she said, and I have done! No, never in my life have I been so happy.’

We made the mistake of taking our singer along with us, instead of placing him in a distant boat or listening to his singing from the shore, since the music is more pleasant when heard from far away than close by; but being more poet than musician, I wished to hear the words.

While singing Tasso’s octosyllables, Girolamo took a breath mid-verse, and ended with a kind of bizarre trill, doubtless intended to support and carry the rhyme. From a distance, this harsh and strongly accentuated mode of performance sounds harmonious, and by its very singularity gives you more pleasure than an opera aria sung by Mario (Giovanni de Candia), or by Giovanni Rubini. There are moments of silence, of obscure languor, where the spirit seems to wait for a melody to spring from the depths of all this calm, and the first human utterance that rises from the bosom of the waters, the slightest piano chord that filters through the apertures of a balcony, are welcomed like a benefaction.

While performing his repertoire, Girolamo had granted the bottle such frequent attention, that we were obliged to return and refuel, at a wine-shop on the Fondamente delle Zattere. His liquor renewed, his vivacity returned.

His cheerfulness having increased, after swallowing half a jug of Valpolicella, he began to imitate the noise ducks make when, surprised in the marshes, they fly away, skimming the water and uttering those quack-quack noises that Aristophanes would not have hesitated to translate into an onomatopoeic chorus in another mad comedy of birds or frogs.

To tell the truth, it was the finest piece in his repertoire; he was making a jest of it all, and Antonio let his oar drift, and laughed till he burst into tears. Girolamo seemed very proud of this talent and valued it more than all the rest. He also imitated the whistling of cannonballs, which he had taken the opportunity to study from life, during the siege. As he simulated, with his mouth, the trajectory of the projectiles and their descent into the water, his eyes gleamed noticeably, and he straightened with a certain pride. Though he said not a word regarding those martial events, for a Venetian never abandons prudence, it was not difficult to understand that he had taken an active part in them, and had more than once carried powder and ammunition in his gondola while under fire from the batteries. He must have seen more than one of the cannonballs, that he imitated so well, fall close to him.

Moreover, the government has not sought to remain silent regarding the facts. Quite a few official posters relating to the siege of Venice line the arcades of the Procuracies. There is even a sort of diorama which presents the main events of the attack and defence. This degree of tolerance surprised me quite a bit, I admit; but it is a manifestation of a political deceit which seeks to show Austrian domination as gentler than the absolute regime of the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples.

If one knows nothing of Venice, and has read in the newspapers the story of its long and heroic defence, one expects to find the city ravaged, crushed by cannonballs, filled with piles of rubble and collapsed roofs. Apart from a few stones dislodged from the Palazzo Labia, and some marks from projectiles on the dome and facade of San Geremia at the end of the Grand Canal, one would think nothing had occurred.

To see the effects of the siege, you have to go about the islands, round the forts and outworks that protect a city rendered almost impregnable by its location among the vast shallow lagoons which prevent the approach of heavy artillery. The Austrians deployed aerial bombs; but the wind made them deviate, or they rose too high, burst in the air, and harmed no one; these stray balloon-bombs had even become an object of amusement for the population, who watched them explode in the sky like fireworks.

Venice, from before which Attila retreated, remained untouched by invasion for fourteen hundred years; and until 1797 it retained the status of a republic. Struck by that senile terror which precipitates obsolescent states to their ruin, the city surrendered, without a fight, to a conqueror who, more appreciative of its defensive resources and location, thought it could not be taken, and was about to pass by. Since then, no Doge has mounted the Bucentaur (his ceremonial barge) to celebrate Venice’s marriage with the sea. The Adriatic no longer wears, on its azure finger, the gold ring of a wife, and the eagle of Austria tears with its hooked beak at the flanks of Saint Mark’s winged lion.

But let us set these political considerations aside, which arose from our contemplation of the scene, and return to the Campo San Moisè.

The main thing, before going to bed, is to hunt down the zanzares, atrocious mosquitoes which particularly torment foreigners, at whom they hurl themselves with the pleasure a gourmet takes in savouring an exotic and intriguing dish. At the grocers and pharmacists, they sell a fumigatory powder that one burns on the stove, with all the windows closed, and which drives out, or suffocates, these dreadful insects. I believe this powder to be as unpleasant to human beings as to their cousins, and many lumps on hands and face bear witness every morning to the ineffectiveness of the remedy. The wiser thing is not to place a light near one’s bed, and to wrap oneself tightly in the mosquito-net’s gauze. Fortunately, our skin was accustomed to the south, scorched by the wind, and tanned by travel, thereby repelling the piercing and sucking of these nocturnal blood-drinkers; but there are people with more delicate skin, whom they subject to real torture. The skin turns red, becomes covered with pustules; the face swells from these venomous bites, which cause unbearable itching that neither scratching nor ointment can soothe. We have seen that, for some, a fever follows the hellish hours of darkness; it suffices, in order to be obliged to lie awake all night, to shut one of these buzzing monsters inside the net with you; but we were already acclimatised.

Much has been said regarding how silent Venice is; but you must find accommodation elsewhere than close to a landing-stage to find the statement true. Beneath our window we heard whispers, laughter, outbursts of voices, songs, a perpetual commotion that never ceased till two in the morning. At night, the gondoliers, who sleep during the day while awaiting customers, are as lively as cats, and hold their meetings, which are scarcely less noisy, beneath the arch of some bridge or on the steps of some landing stage. We possessed both landing-stage and bridge. Seated on a marble step, or the stern of their gondola, they eat seafood, and drink Friuli wine, supping happily by the light of the stars and the little lamps illuminating the Madonnas in their niches at street corners. Some of their friends, voluptuous vagabonds, who have church porches for alcoves, and large stone slabs, heated by the day’s sunlight, for mattresses come to join them and enhance the Sabbath. Add a few pretty maidservants, freed by their mistresses’ slumber to seek out some strapping brown-skinned fellow in his Chioggiotto cap, and Persian canvas-jacket, bearing on his chest more amulets than an Amerindian’s wampum or glass-beads, and whose contralto voices, squealing or strident in turn, spread in inexhaustible babbling waves, with that particular sonority of the southern idiom, and you will possess a succinct idea of the silence of Venice, at night.

The End of Parts XI to XV of Gautier’s Travels in Italy

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