Venice (23 page)

The preliminary bell rings on the corner of the Basilica. The Moors, swivelling athletically from the waist, sound the hour with dignity. The shutters open beside the strange old clock. Out come the three Magi, led by the trumpeting angel. They bow creakily to the Madonna, shuffle stiffly around her, and with a whirring and grating of antique mechanisms, disappear inside. The little doors close jerkily behind them, the cogs grind into silence, and all is still. A sigh of amusement and pleasure runs around that gaudy crowd, and it is the long, hot, breathless sigh of a summer in Venice. Packing away
their cameras, the Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Japanese, Britons, Indians, Australians, Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other visiting monsters push their way towards a pink ice-cream, stoically count their money for lunch, or resume their earnest trek around the Tintorettos.

For Venice is a kind of metropolis, in the sense that all the world comes to visit her. If I stand upon my balcony and survey the square mile or so that lies within my vision, I can envisage the shades of an extraordinary gallery of people who have been, at one time or another, my neighbours: Duke Sforza the great mercenary, Byron and Ruskin, Réjane, Goethe, Galileo, two Popes, four Kings, Cardinal Pole, de Pisis, Chateaubriand, Barbara Hutton, Taglioni the dancer, Frank Lloyd Wright (whose house beside the Palazzo Balbi was never built), Baron Corvo (whose gondola was rowed, in his shameless last years, by a crew of four flamboyant gondoliers).

In the little square opposite my apartment Casanova was born. In the house to the right, with the flower-pots in the window, W. D. Howells lived. To my left is the palace where Wagner wrote the second act of
Tristan
, and just beyond it the terrace from which Napoleon once watched a regatta. Near by is the Ca' Rezzonico, one of the great houses of the world: Browning died in it, the Pope Clement XIII lived in it, the Emperor Francis II stayed in it, Max Beerbohm wrote about it. Across the canal is the home of the Doge Cristoforo Moro, sometimes claimed to be the original of Othello, and to my right is a palace once owned by a family so uncountably rich that it is still called Palazzo degli Scrigni – the Palace of the Money-Chests.

Around the corner is d'Annunzio's ‘little red house', where he made love to Duse and wrote
Notturno
in the dark of blindness. At the Convent of La Carità, now part of the Accademia, Pope Alexander ΙII, exiled from Rome, is said to have worked for six months as a scullion, until he was recognized by a French visitor and
so completely restored to power that the Emperor himself came to Venice to beg his pardon. Don Carlos, Charles VII of Spain, used to own the house beyond the mosaic factory. In the enchanting Palazzo Dario de Regnier ‘lived and wrote like a Venetian', as his memorial plaque says. La Donna of
La Donna' è Mobile
lived in the Palazzo Barbaro. In the little Corte Catecumeni, away to my right, malleable Turkish prisoners used to be confined until they had learnt their Catechism, and could embrace Christianity. Wherever I look, I can fancy the shadows of famous men – and of one obscure and pitiful woman, for it was from the balcony of the Palazzo Mocenigo that one of Byron's Venetian paramours threw herself in desperation into the canal.

Venice was an essential port of call in the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, when fashionable English visitors awaited their audiences of the Doge as eagerly as they now queue, humming a tune from
Ancient and Modern
, to pay their respects to the Pope. Even now, until you have seen Venice there is an asymmetrical gap in your education. Not many foreigners still rent entire Venetian palaces for the season, but few famous names of the western world have not, at one time or another, appeared in the hotel registers of the city. The Venetian summer season still summons the envoys of the
haut monde
, in their yachts, Cadillacs or Pipers, to the assemblies of the Serenissima – the Venetians have a fine airport on the mainland for the big jets, and a smaller one on the Lido for private and chartered aircraft, more numerous every year. The most lavish ball of the 1950s, anywhere in the world, was given by a Mexican millionaire at the Palazzo Labia (some of whose previous owners, long ago, had the habit of throwing gold plate in the canal, for the show of it, and later secretly fishing it out again, for thrift).

This gallimaufry of the rich, though it sometimes conjures evocative visions of eighteenth-century Venice, nevertheless does much to corrupt the spirit of the place. Unctuous sycophancy oozes from the grander hoteliers as the summer advances, and even the rhythms of the canals are sometimes shattered when there advances ponderously past the Salute, ensign hugely at the stern, some ostentatious motor cruiser from ports west, all cocktail bars and high fidelity. It is
often only a sweeping glance that such visitors grant to the old place, for they are off to the Lido in the evening, merely returning to Venice now and then for an expensive dinner or a well-publicized party: but it is enough to tarnish the pride of the city, so patronizing does their brief survey feel, and so uncomprehending. Many an Anglo-Saxon uses Venice as a summer refuge from stricter conventions at home. Many a loud and greasy visitor brings to Harry's Bar a sudden whiff of the property developer or the take-over bid – for when you think of sudden fortunes, you often think of Venice. (But other richer men, disembarking from their schooners or swift aeroplanes, still bring to Venice some lost sense of power and worldly style.)

In its great centuries Venice was more than a mere spectacle, and the world came here not only to look at the golden horses or pay tribute to Titian, but to swop currencies, to invest funds, to rent ships, to talk diplomacy and war, to take passage, to learn the news from the East, to buy and to sell. The Fair of the Ascension attracted traders, manufacturers, financiers and even fashion designers from all Europe (a big doll, dressed in the latest fashion, was set up in the Piazza to act as a mannequin for the modes during the coming year). And the most celebrated of all Venetian institutions was the great commercial exchange of the Rialto, one of the prime facts of European history. To Europeans of the Middle Ages, the Rialto was as formidable a presence as a World Bank or a Wall Street today. It was the principal channel of finance between East and West, and the real power-house of the Venetian Empire.

The earliest of all State banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century, and for 300 years the banks of the Rialto dominated the international exchanges. From its business houses the argosies set out to the Orient, to Flanders and to England: most of the ships belonged to the State, and were built to a standard pattern (for easy servicing), but the money invested in them belonged to the merchants of the Rialto. On the walls of the Rialto colonnade a huge painted map illustrated the great trade routes of Venetian commerce – to the Dardanelles and the Sea of Azof, to Syria, Aleppo and Beirut, to Alexandria, to Spain, England and Flanders; and before it the merchants would assemble to watch the progress of their fortunes,
like staff officers in an operations room. Beside the Rialto were the Venetian Offices of Navigation, Commerce and Shipping – the ultimate authorities, in those days, on matters commercial and maritime.

To the emporia of this famous place the whole world came for its gold, its exotic textiles, its coffees and spices, sometimes brought to Venice through countries that Europeans had never even heard of: even Henry IIΙ of France thought it worth while to wander around the Rialto shops incognito, in search of bargains. Throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Europe asked with Antonio: ‘What's new on the Rialto?': until in the long run the seven caravels of Vasco da Gama, rounding the Cape to India, ended the Venetian monopoly of the Oriental trade, and laid the Rialto low. So sensitive was the Venetian commercial sense that when, one dark morning in 1499, the news of da Gama's voyage arrived in the city (long before the explorer had returned to Portugal) several of the Rialto banks instantly failed.

Today there are still banks around the eastern end of the Rialto bridge: but the old commercial meeting-place is now a popular market, lively, noisy, and picturesque, and only a few gnarled reminders of its great days remain to stimulate your sense of history. To understand the impact of the Venetian decline, there is no better exercise than to go to the western end of the bridge, near the church of San Giacomo, and survey the scene with one eye on the market-women, and one on the absent magnificos.

The great enterprises have vanished. All around you now, beneath the crooked hump of the bridge, is the animation of petty trade. Under the arcades are the jewellers, their windows full of sovereigns, Maria Theresa dollars, gilded ornaments, and you can see them through their open doors, looking fearfully shrewd, weighing minuscule gold chains (for St Christopher medallions) in desperately delicate scales. In the passage-way is the Erberia, the vegetable market: a jolly, pushing, hail-fellow place, its stalls loaded with succulent peaches, onion strings, bananas, untidy heaps of fennel, lettuces, green jagged leaves like dandelions, gherkins, rigid hares, plucked quails in immaculate rows, spinach, slices of coconut
beneath cooling sprinklers, potatoes, dead upside-down seagulls, pieces of artichoke floating in buckets, magnificent apples, vivid radishes, oranges from Sicily and carnations from San Remo. The market men are cheerful and skilled in badinage, the shoppers earnest and hurried, and sometimes a thoughtful lawyer, in his white tabs, stalks through the hubbub towards the criminal courts.

Above the stalls stands the old church of San Giacomo, a poky but friendly little place, which is known to the Venetians familiarly as San Giacometto, and stands among the vegetables precisely as the church of St Paul's stands in Covent Garden, only awaiting an Eliza. Its big twenty-four-hour clock appears in a famous painting by Canaletto, but has had a dismal mechanical history. It went wrong several times in the fourteenth century, and had to be renewed ‘for the honour and consolation of the city'. It stopped again in the eighteenth century, apparently at four o'clock. In 1914 a traveller reported that it always showed the time as three in the afternoon, and until a few years ago it was permanently stuck at midnight precisely.

Beneath this unreliable piece, hidden away among a clutter of sheds and packing cases, you will find the Gobbo di Rialto, one of the best-known images of medieval Venice. He stands now, abandoned and neglected, among a mass of boxes and old vegetables: a small hobbled granite figure of a man, supporting a flight of steps and a squat marble column. He used to be called a hunchback, but he is really only bent with burdens, for in the hey-day of the Rialto his responsibilities were great. Upon his pedestal the decrees of the Republic were promulgated, in the days when Venetian law was written in blood and enforced with fire: and to his steps men convicted of petty crimes were forced to run naked from St Mark's, hastened by a rain of blows, until at last, breathless, bleeding and humiliated, they fell chastened at his knobbly feet and embraced him in blind relief.

And around the corner, beside the Grand Canal, there lies the incomparable fish market of Venice, a glorious wet, colourful, high-smelling concourse of the sea, to which in the dawn hours fleets of barges bring the day's supply of sea-foods. Its stalls are lined deliciously with green fronds, damp and cool: and upon them are
laid, in a delicately-tinted, slobbering, writhing, glistening mass, the sea-creatures of the lagoon. There are sleek wriggling eels, green or spotted, still pugnaciously alive; beautiful little red fish packed in boxes like shampoos, heads upwards; strange tube-like molluscs, oozing at the orifice; fine red mullet, cruel pseudo-sharks, undefeated crabs and mounds of gem-like shell-fish; skates, and shoals of small flat-fish, and things like water-tarantula, and pools of soft bulbous octopus, furiously ejecting ink; huge slabs of tunny, fish-rumps and fish-steaks, joints of fish, fish kidneys, innards and guts and roes of fish: a multitude of sea-matter, pink, white, red, green, multi-limbed, beady-eyed, sliding, senuous, shimmering, flabby, spongy, crisp – all lying aghast upon their fresh green biers, dead, doomed or panting, like a grove of brilliant foliage among the tundra of Venetian stone.

By the eighteenth century the quayside beside the fish market, once the economic centre of the western world, had become a dawn promenade for Venetian revellers, haggard or distraught after the night's love and gaming, and it was the fashionable thing to appear there at first light, displaying all the proper signs of dissipation. Today the Rialto is not even loose-living, only picturesque. There is a sad irony to the description on the apse of San Giacomo, a memento of its Gothic days: ‘Around This Temple Let The Merchant's Law Be Just, His Weight True, And His Covenants Faithful.' No Shylocks now demand their securities beneath the arcades of Rialto; no giggling courtesans sweep their mud-stained skirts through its market in the dawn; only the greengrocers shout, the housewives haggle, and the tourists on the bridge anxiously consult their exposure meters. You must look at the Rialto with an inner eye: just as, when I inspected the view from my terrace, I saw not only the passing boatmen, and my small son stumbling across the bridge to school, but Napoleon too, pouting on his balcony, and the lovely sick Duse, and Othello, and Corvo, and all those poor imprisoned infidels, desperately memorizing their articles of faith behind the Salute.

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-à-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. Some are the increments of an old religion, some the bequests of history, some are just civic quirks. In Venice ‘
Sempre diretto!
' will always lead you to some world-familiar landmark, the Campanile of St Mark's, the Rialto, the sumptuous Piazza or the Grand Canal itself: but you must walk there crookedly, through a hall of curiosities.

Venice was always alone in the world, always unique in manners as in status. If you go to the big monastic building next door to the Frari, walk upstairs and speak nicely to the man at the reception desk, you will find yourself admitted to the State Archives of the Venetian Republic, in which are reverently preserved the records of independent Venice from its earliest beginnings until its fall. It is the most complete such State memorial on earth. Wild statistics surround its contents, born out of the secrecy of the old State, and often find their way into the most reputable guide books. Some say it contains 14 million volumes, others that it has 1,000 rooms. The nineteenth-century geographer Andrea Balbi, crazed by his theme, calculated that the separate leaves of its documents and volumes numbered 693,176,720, that placed end to end they would be 1,444,800,000 feet long and would extend eleven times round the circumference of the earth, and that they would cover so wide an area that the entire human race would stand upon their surface. Even as late as the 1850s the innermost secrets of the Council of Ten were still protected in the Archives, but now that every corner is accessible to scholars, people seem to agree that its 280 rooms contain something like 250,000 books, documents and parchments. The earliest date from 883 (when Alfred the Great was on his throne, and Charlemagne hardly dead).

Its warren of chambers, once the cells of a Franciscan monastery, are packed to the ceilings with this extraordinary documentation, file after file, quarto after quarto, huge illuminated manuscripts, hand-
drawn maps, land titles, deeds, rolls of the nobility, official proceedings of the Great Council – a vanished society perpetuated, like a long-dead Pope in a crystal coffin, or an ear of corn from a pyramid. There is a smell of parchment and old powdery ink: and in a small room near the entrance a man is busy micro-filming family trees for those modern Venetians who wish, upon payment of a suitable fee, to confirm their descent from the pages of the Golden Book.

A sense of historical continuity also haunts the streets and buildings of Venice. ‘Yes,' said my housekeeper one day, telling me the origins of the Salute church, ‘yes, when the plague ended we all put our hands in our pockets, every one of us, and we all gave a little money, and built the church in gratitude.' It happened just 300 years ago, but so strong is the sense of family in Venice, and so compressed are all its centuries, that Emilia half-believed she had contributed a few lire herself. Venice is full of such perpetual echoes – from the very name of the Frezzeria, the Street of Arrow-Makers (where they still make wicker baskets, like quivers), to the shipyards of the Arsenal, where the tankers are repaired in the very same shipyard that Dante visited six centuries ago. In the Campo San Zan Degola there is a carved stone head popularly believed to represent a legendary villain called Biagio, who chopped poor children up and sold them as stew in his restaurant: the tale springs from the Middle Ages, but if you visit the image you will still find it smeared with mud, a token of Venice's long and unforgiving memory. Alongside the Riva degli Schiavoni, the Quay of the Slavs, you may still often see ships from Dalmatia. The sugar supplies of the city have been unloaded at the same place – where the Alley of Sugar meets the Zattere – since the earliest days of the Republic. The Dogana is still an active customs house. The oldest of the
traghetti
have been in continuous existence at least since the thirteenth century.

Here the past and the present have been repeatedly smudged, so that the old often seems contemporary, and the new is quickly streaked with age. They play football in the grandiose Renaissance courtyard of the Palazzo Pisani, near the Accademia. They perform plays in the Ridotto, once the most celebrated gaming-house in Europe. They have exhibitions in the old School of the Shoemakers,
beside San Tomà; they make chairs in the School of the Tanners, in Santa Margherita; and if you buy yourself a glass of beer in the café that stands opposite the main door of Santo Stefano, you will be standing in the old School of the Woolworkers, once so flourishing that it possessed five Carpaccio paintings of its own. The very materials of Venice seem timeless, for often they were old already, when the Venetians stole them and brought them home to the lagoons: and even an idea like the design of the cupola came to Venice from Byzantium, and went to Byzantium from Rome.

Venice is thickly encrusted with the stranger ornaments of religion. She is one of the great reliquaries of the Christian world. Almost every Venetian church has its splinter of sacred bone, its skeleton, its nail, its piece of wood, its patriarchal stone, marvellously encased in gilt, glass and gold, kept reverently in shrines and padded boxes, or behind lush velvet curtains. The bodies of St Mark, St Stephen, St Zacharias (father of the Baptist), St Athanasius (of the Creed), St Roch, St Theodore, St Magnus, St Lucy and many another holy person lie in the churches of the city. The church of San Tomà possesses more than 10,000 sacred relics, including, so it is said, twelve complete saintly corpses (temporarily removed from the church, owing to the damp).

In San Pietro di Castello – a church founded, according to Venetian legend, by the Trojans – stands the throne used by St Peter at Antioch. In the Basilica of St Mark alone there are preserved, or so it has at one time or another been claimed, a knife used at the Last Supper; the stone on which St John the Baptist was beheaded, still stained red in the Baptistery; the skull of the Baptist; an arm of St George; a bas-relief, still wet, carved from the stone that Moses struck; a picture painted by St Luke; two small angel-shrines which once decorated Pontius Pilate's balcony in Jerusalem; a stone on which Our Lord stood while preaching in Tyre; a rib of St Stephen; a finger of Mary Magdalene; a stool belonging to the Virgin Mary; the marble stone on which Our Lord sat when He asked the Samaritan woman for water; the sword with which St Peter cut off Malchus's ear; and a manuscript of St Mark's gospel written in the Evangelist's own hand.

Scarcely less venerated than these ancient relics is the room in
which the Papal Conclave of 1800 met to elect Pius VII to the Pontificate. The conclave had been banished from Rome by Napoleon (the previous Pope, asking if he might be allowed at least to die in Rome, had been told that he could ‘die just wherever he liked'); and it sat in an upstairs room of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, adjoining the Palladian church. The carved wooden seats are still labelled with the names of the thirty-five participating cardinals, as though they had just picked up their wide-brimmed scarlet hats and gone downstairs to the refectory; the Pope's own hat lies in a glass case, resting upon a circle of moth-balls, as if upon ballbearings; and outside the door is the little black stove in which the ballot-papers were burnt, the tell-tale smoke of their ashes emerging through an iron chimney beside the campanile above.

The tombs of Venice, when they are not horrendous, are often wonderfully bizarre. In the church of San Giobbe, before the high altar, you may see the tomb (as we have already seen the house) of ‘the original Othello', the Doge Cristoforo Moro. One theory is that Shakespeare took the tale from a scurrilous pamphlet written about this man, and its exponents like to point to a family device which is engraved upon his memorial. It represents a mulberry (
mora
) – ‘and does not Shakespeare speak, or more probably Bacon, in Act IV, Scene IIΙ, of Othello's
gage d'amour
to Desdemona as “a handkerchief spotted with strawberries”? Do you need more proof, my poor friend? Are you still sunk in obsolete tradition?'

Then to the left of the high altar in the Basilica there is a heart-shaped stone set among the mosaics. Until recently nobody knew what this signified, but during the restoration of the floor the stone was lifted, and beneath it was found a small box containing a shrivelled human organ: it was the heart of the Doge Francesco Erizzo, who died in 1646 – his body lies in the church of San Martino, but he willed that his innermost being should be buried as dose as possible to the patron saint of the Venetians. The Doge Francesco Morosini, who died in 1694, is buried in Santo Stefano beneath the largest funeral slab in Venice, dominating the central floor of the church, and measuring eighteen feet by fifteen. The Doge Andrea Vendramin, buried in San Zanipolo in 1478, is chiefly famous to the
world at large because his effigy there was the subject of a particular scrutiny by Ruskin: convinced that the Venetian Renaissance was instinct with sham, Ruskin borrowed a ladder from the sacristan of the church and mounted the high tomb to prove that the image of the Doge was itself fraudulent, and was only carved on one side, the other being a blank slab of marble.

In the Frari, to the right of the high altar, is the tomb of the unhappy Doge Foscari, who was deposed in 1457 and died (apparently of a broken heart) a few days after his own son's execution for treason. It is a huge and pitiful edifice, to which, for five centuries, no guide had pointed without retelling the story of the family disgrace: but beneath it an inscription records a touching sequel. Two and a half centuries after the poor old Doge's death a descendant named Alvise Foscari ordered, as an act of family loyalty, that his own heart should be inserted into the tomb of shame: and so it was, in 1720. (The Doge immediately opposite, the fifteenth-century Nicolo Tron, will be seen to have a bushy beard: he grew it upon the death of a favourite son, and refused ever to shave it, as an emblem of perpetual mourning.)

And in the church of the Scalzi, the barefoot Carmelites, is the tomb of the last of all the Doges, Ludovico Manin, 120th in the succession, who surrendered his Republic with scarcely a whimper to the rampant forces of Napoleon, and died ingloriously five years later. The Manins came to Venice from Florence, flourished in commerce, and bought their nobility at the time of the wars with Genoa; but the last Doge was scarcely a stalwart figure, and his visiting card was decorated with a design of a nude Adonis asleep beneath an oak tree. There is thus an ironic melancholy to this simple tomb. It is a plain sombre slab in a side-chapel, and on it is engraved a stark inscription. ‘
Cineres Manini
', it says – ‘The Ashes of Manin'.

Venetian art, too, is rich in curiosities. The city's pellucid feeling of delusion has always been exploited by her artists in tricks and wrinkles of perspective and proportion. Nothing is quite symmetrical in Venice – the Piazza is not only irregular, but also slopes towards the Basilica, and has a floor pattern that does not fit. Buildings are
deliberately top-heavy, like the Doge's Palace, or fantastically embellished with mock draperies, like the vast church of the Gesuiti, which is so bafflingly decorated with marble drapings, curtains, carpets and tapestries that you leave it in a dizzy state of disbelief. Perspective ceilings shift heavily as you walk; writhing clumps of angels float about in the blue, reminding me of the edible frogs in the Hong Kong fish market, which are clamped together with wires, alive but congealed, and present an animated multi-limbed appearance, as though they have twelve legs apiece. Arms and ankles protrude from canvases, like Pordenone's famous horse's head in the church of San Rocco. Bells swing gaily out of painted skies. Mock Venetian blinds shade non-existent windows. If you look behind the angels that stand so triumphantly upon the portico of the Gesuiti, you will find that their buttocks are hollow, and are frankly sustained by struts of iron. The great dome of the Salute is supported by huge stone buttresses, elaborately scrolled: but they are not really necessary, for the dome is made of wood.

One winter morning, when the Doge's Palace was empty of tourists, and the custodians of the Great Council Chamber were elsewhere, I stealthily removed my shoes and mounted the steps to the Doge's Throne; and sitting there in that portentous seat, and looking at the great painted ceiling above me, I realized how carefully considered were the perspective distortions of Venetian art. All those gigantic images and symbolisms, those Goddesses and Victories and Virtues, now seemed to be performing privately for me. I could look Venezia straight in the eye, without cricking my neck. I could receive the Tribute of the Conquered Provinces without moving my head. It was as though Veronese, Tintoretto, Bassano and Palma Giovane were themselves standing before me, bowing low and awaiting my approval. This experience had an elevating effect upon me. When I had tiptoed down the steps again, and replaced my shoes, and assumed an air of innocent scholarly interest, I looked behind me to find that the footprints of my stockinged feet on the polished wooden steps of the throne were, if not twice as large as normal, at least twice as confident.

Venetian Baroque is sometimes gloriously eccentric. The façade of
San Moisè usually stops the tourists in their tracks, it is so laughably elaborate; and inside is a gigantic altar piece, built of shiny granite blocks, which reproduces, almost life-size, Jehovah, Moses, the Tablets, Mount Sinai and all. Another splendid altar is in the church of San Marziale (a divine whose legend, if I have got the right one, is described in my dictionary of saints as ‘an extravagant forgery'): it seems to represent a holy hermit inside his cave, for beneath its slab there crouches, his halo just fitting in, a single forlorn and lonely sage, rather as children of artistic bent are sometimes to be seen huddled beneath grand pianos.