Venice (13 page)

The life-stream of Venice arrives on wheels – her goods and her visitors, even the poor cattle for her municipal slaughter-house: but once at the station or the Piazzale Roma, all this mass of men and material, this daily army, must proceed by water or by foot. Thomas Coryat, before he visited Venice, met an English braggart who claimed to have ‘ridden through Venice in post': this was, as Coryat indignantly discovered, ‘as gross and palpable a fiction as ever was coyned'. Nobody ever rode through Venice in post, and there are still no proper roads in the city, only footpaths and canals. ‘
Streets Full of
Water
', Robert Benchley cabled home when he first arrived there, ‘
Please Advise
'.

The only wheels in Venice proper are on porters' trollies, or perambulators, or children's toys, or on the antique bicycles used by a few taciturn knife-sharpeners as the motive force for their grindstones. To grasp what this means, go down to the causeway in the small hours of the morning, and see the convoys of trucks and trailers that wait there in the half-light to be unloaded – scores of them every morning of the year, parked nose to tail, with their drivers sleepy at the wheel, and their bales and packing-cases bursting from the back. Some of this material will be loaded into ships and taken to sea: but most of it must be conveyed into Venice, on barges, rowing-boats,
trollies, and even in huge conical baskets on the backs of men. The bridges of the lagoon have linked Venice irrevocably with the mainland: but she remains a wet-bob city still, in which Chateaubriand, who so rashly complained about her wateriness a century and a half ago, would feel no less irritated today.

The central artery of Venice is the Grand Canal, and from that incomparable highway the smaller canals spring like veins, through which the sustenance of the city is pumped daily, like insulin into the system of a diabetic. There are said to be 177 canals, with a total length of twenty-eight miles. They follow old natural water-courses, and meander unpredictably through the city, now wide, fine and splendid, now indescribably tortuous. The Grand Canal is two miles long; it is seventy-six yards wide at its grandest point, and never less than forty; it has a mean depth of about nine feet (thirteen feet at the Rialto bridge, according to the Admiralty Chart); and it is lively with incessant traffic. Other Venetian waterways are infinitely less imposing – they have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub. One canal goes clean under the church of Santo Stefano, and you can take a gondola along it if the tide is low; others are so narrow that only the smallest kind of boat can use them, or so short that there is only just room for their names on the map.

Their usefulness varies according to the tide, and the tide itself varies according to the time of year. The maximum spring tide is probably about seven feet, and the average rise and fall (at the Dogana entrance to the Grand Canal) is just over two feet. These fluctuations drastically alter both the appearance and the efficiency of the city. ‘Like the tide – six hours up and six hours down', is how a Venetian saying describes the supposedly mercurial character of the citizenry. When the tide is low, the underpinnings of the Venetian houses are revealed in all their green and slimy secrecy. The bottoms of the canals are laid hideously bare, putrescent with rubbish and mud, and some of the smaller waterways almost dry up altogether, so that no boat with a propeller can use them. But when the swift scouring tide sweeps in from the Adriatic, clean, fresh and young, swelling down the Grand Canal and seeping through all its tribu
taries – then the whole place is richened and rejuvenated, the water surges into the palace doorways, the dead rats, broken dolls and cabbage-stalks are flushed away, and every canal is brimming and busy. Sometimes an exceptional spring tide topples over the edge, flooding the Piazza of St Mark, and people go to their favourite café in gondolas, or hilariously pole their boats about among the colonnades. And once every few centuries the canals freeze over, as you may see in an enchanting picture at the Ca' Rezzonico, and the Venetians build fires upon the ice, skate to the islands of the lagoon, and impertinently roast their oxen in the middle of the Grand Canal.

The canals have tempered the impact of the causeway. Venice is no longer an island, but her people are still islanders by temperament, for life in roadless Venice is still slow, erratic and sometimes infuriating, and totally unlike existence in any other city on the face of the earth. The Venetian business man can never summon his Alfa. The Venetian urchin cannot leap whistling upon his bicycle. The housewife has to take a boat to market, and the small boy has to walk each morning across a cavalcade of bridges, through a maze of alleyways, to be at school on time (the parents, if of nervous disposition, can often follow his progress half-way across the city, by mounting a powerful telescope on the terrace).

Trade and traffic churn their way heavily through the Venetian watereways, sometimes so busily and so uncomfortably that the whole place feels clogged and constipated with slow movement. The entire organization of one's private life is governed by the presence of the water. I was once leaning over the Grand Canal with a Venetian acquaintance when she suddenly breathed an extended and despondent sigh, surveyed the canal from one end to the other, and exclaimed: ‘Water! Nothing but water! If only they'd fill the thing up, what a road it would make!'

The canals, some of which have ninth-century origins, have been successfully deepened to allow the passage of larger boats: but they also act as the drains of Venice, and are continually silting themselves up. Until the sixteenth century several rivers flowed through the middle of the lagoon, and they brought so much sediment with them
that at one time the canals of Venice were almost choked, and you could walk from the mainland to the city without wetting your feet. The rivers were then diverted to the edges of the lagoon, and today the only mud that enters is sea-mud, to be swept out by the tide again each day. Every year, though, a mountain of excrement falls into the canals, and if you wander about Venice at low tide you will see, sometimes well above the water-line, the orifices by which, in the simplest possible process, most of the city's sewage leaves its houses. (Many houses nowadays have septic tanks, emptied periodically into barges: but here and there you may still see, jutting from the façades of old palaces, the little closets that used to act as the lavatories of Venice, emptying themselves directly into the water beneath, like the external privies that are attached to the hulls of Arab dhows.)

Tons of muck flows into the canals each day, and gives the crumbling back-quarters of Venice the peculiar stink – half drainage, half rotting stone – that so repels the queasy tourist, but gives the Venetian amateur a perverse and reluctant pleasure. Add to this the dust, vegetable peel, animal matter and ash that pours into every waterway, in defiance of the law, over the balconies and down the back-steps, and it is easy to conceive how thickly the canal-beds are coated with refuse. If you look down from a terrace when the tide is low, you can see an extraordinary variety of rubble and wreckage beneath the water, gleaming with spurious mystery through the green; and it is horrible to observe how squashily the poles go in, when a pile-driver begins its hammering in a canal.

The Venetians have never been much daunted by this substratum. In the fifteenth century they burnt joss-sticks, and ground scents and spices into the soil, to take away the smells: but not long ago even the most fashionable families used to bathe regularly in the Grand Canal, and I am told there was a notice near the Rialto sternly warning passers-by that it was ‘Forbidden To Spit Upon The Swimmers.' As late as the 1980s ragamuffins and wild young blades of the place, in the sweltering summer evenings, were often to be seen taking wild dives into the murk from bridges and quay-sides, and you might sometimes observe fastidious boatmen, with expressions of
unshakeable hygiene, carefully washing out their mugs and basins in the turgid fluid of a backwater.

The civic authorities, though, are necessarily obsessed with sanitation. Much of the foul refuse of Venice, like the mud, is washed away by the tide, without which the city would be uninhabitable – ‘the sea rises and falls there', as a fifteenth-century visitor said, ‘and cleans out the filth from the secret places'. The rest must be removed by man. For centuries each canal was drained and scoured by hand every twenty years or so (culs-de-sac more often, because the tide does not wash through them): only the Grand Canal escaped – it has only been emptied once, when a fourteenth-century earthquake swallowed its waters in an instant and left it dry for two weeks. For nearly thirty years the job has been neglected, so that many of the canals are severely silted, and the effluences that flow into them are obliged to ooze elsewhere. There was a scheme in the early 1990s to dredge them all by mechanical means, but for myself I shall always remember the old shovelling processes as one of the elemental Venetian experiences.

It used to be an ominous sight for the householder, when a boatload of respectable men in overcoats appeared outside her back door, painting numbers in red paint upon the walls: for it meant that her canal was the next to be drained, exposing the bed in all its horror. A vile miasma would then overcome the quarter. The inhabitants shuttered their windows and hastened about with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and far down in the gulley of the empty waterway, beneath the ornate doorways and marble steps of the palaces, you might see the labourers toiling in the sludge. They had erected a little railway down there, and they stood knee-deep in black glutinous filth, throwing it into tipper-trucks and wheeling it away to waiting barges. Their bodies, their clothes, their faces were all smeared with the stuff, and if you engaged them in conversation their attitude was one of numbed but mordant resignation.

A wonderful variety of boats has been developed by the Venetians over the generations, to make the best use of their unorthodox highways. Their very first chronicler, visiting the wattle villages of
their original island settlements, remarked upon the boats tied up outside every house, for all the world as other people kept their horses. Today the ordinary Venetian is not generally a waterman, and looks at the canals with a mixture of pride and profound distrust; but sometimes you see a motor-boat driver, waiting for his patron, who does not bother to moor his craft, but stands on the quayside holding it with a loose rope, precisely as though it were a champing horse, and he a patient groom in a stable-yard. In the Natural History Museum there is a prehistoric canoe, dug up from a marsh in the lagoon, and now preserved in a fossilized condition. It looks almost as old as time itself, but in its blackened silhouette you can clearly recognize the first developing lines of the gondola.

If you take an aircraft over Venice, and fly low above her mottled attics, you will see her canals thick with an endless flow of craft, like little black corpuscles. Every kind of boat navigates the Venetian channels, for every kind of purpose, and many are unique to the place. There is the gondola, of course. There is the
sandolo
, a smaller but no less dapper boat, also rowed by one standing oarsman, facing forward. There is the
vaporetto
, which is the water-bus. There is the
motoscafo
, which is the motor launch. There is the
topo
, and the
trabaccolo
, and the
cavallina
, and the
vipera
, and the
bissona
, not to speak of semi-mythical rigs like the
barcobestia
, or ceremonial barges like the
bucintoro
, or skiffs from the two old Venetian rowing clubs (the Querini and the Bucintoro), or frisky outboards, or sleek speedboats, or dustbin barges, or parcel-post boats, or excursion launches, or car ferries, or canoes paddled by visiting German students, or inflatables with outboard engines, or yachts, or schooners from Yugoslavia, or naval picket boats, or the smelter's barge with a billowing furnace on it, or ambulance boats, or hearses, or milk-boats, or even the immaculate humming cruise-ships that sail into the wide canal of Giudecca from Athens, the Levant or the Black Sea.

For a cross-section of this vivacious armada, I like to stand on my corner balcony and watch the boats pass down the Grand Canal. Here (for instance) comes the chugging
vaporetto
, loaded deep and foaming at the prow: a trim and purposeful little ship, painted green
and black. Here is a squat fruit barge, loud with oranges and great banana bunches, a haughty black dog at its prow, a languid leathery brown-skinned man steering with a single bare foot on the tiller. An elderly couple, he in a woollen flapped cap, she in a threadbare khaki jacket, laboriously propel a skiff full of vegetables towards some minor city market. Eight students in a heavy hired motor boat stagger nervously towards the Rialto, singing an unconvincing roundelay. Out of a side-canal there lumbers, with a deafening blare of its horn, a gigantic barge-load of cement; its crew are white with dust, wear hats made of newspaper (like the Walrus's Carpenter) and periodically pass around the deck the single stump of a cigarette – a puff for each, and two for the steersman. A Coca-Cola barge potters cheerfully by, bottles clinking: its helmsman wears the standard Coca-Cola uniform, as you may see it on delivery trucks from Seattle to Calcutta, and on his Venetian face there has been transplanted, by the alchemy of capitalism, the authentic Middle American smile.

Backwards and forwards across the Grand Canal the ferry gondolas dart daintily, like water-insects, with a neat swirl and decoration at the end of each trip, as they curve skilfully into the landing-stage. The Prefect rides by in his polished launch, all flags and dignity. From the cabin of a taxi there reaches me an agreeable mixture of Havana and Diorissima, as a visiting plutocrat sweeps by towards the Danieli, with his pigskin suitcases piled beside the driver, and his blasé befurred wife in the stern. Outside the Accademia art gallery they are loading an enormous canvas, an orgasm of angels and fleshy limbs, into a sturdy snub-nosed lighter. A couple of executive-style Milanese scud by in a
sandolo
, rowing earnestly in the Venetian manner – for the rich part-time Venetian, traditional rowing is a substitute for jogging, just as some of the old Venetian boat-types make fashionable yachts. Beyond San Trovaso, splendid between the houses, a liner pulses to its moorings, and behind the dome of the Salute I can see, like the twigs of some exotic conifer, a warship's intricate radar.