LETTER XXXI.
VENICE—THE FESTA—GONDOLIERS—WOMEN—AN ITALIAN SUNSET—THE LANDING—PRISONS OF THE DUCAL PALACE—THE CELLS DESCRIBED BY BYRON—APARTMENT IN WHICH PRISONERS WERE STRANGLED—DUNGEONS UNDER THE CANAL—SECRET GUILLOTINE—STATE CRIMINALS—BRIDGE OF SIGHS—PASSAGE TO THE INQUISITION AND TO DEATH—CHURCH OF ST. MARC—A NOBLEMAN IN POVERTY, ETC., ETC.
You will excuse me at present from a description of Venice. It is a matter not to be hastily undertaken. It has also been already done a thousand times; and I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the public prints of the United States. I proceed with my letters.
The Venetian festa is a gay affair, as you may imagine. If not so beautiful and fanciful as the revels by moonlight, it was more satisfactory, for we could see and be seen, those important circumstances to one's individual share in the amusement. At four o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge of boats across the Giudecca were cut away, and the broad canal left clear for a mile up and down. It was covered in a few minutes with gondolas, and all the gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad promenade between the city and the festal island. I should think five hundred were quite within the number of gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was busy work for the eyes to the right and left, with the great proportion of beauty, and the rapid glide of their fairy-like boats. And the quietness of the thing was so delightful—no crowding, no dust, no noise but the dash of oars and the ring of merry voices; and we sat so luxuriously upon our deep cushions the while, threading the busy crowd rapidly and silently, without a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element that sustained us.
Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their prows, and these had won the first and second prizes at the last year's regatta. The private gondolas fell away from the middle of the canal, and left them free space for a trial of their speed. They were the most airy things I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and as slender and light as they could well be, and hold together. Each boat had six oars, and the crews stood with their faces to the beak of their craft; slight, but muscular men, and with a skill and quickness at their oars which I had never conceived. I realized the truth and the force of Cooper's inimitable description of the race in the Bravo. The whole of his book gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and one thanks him constantly for the lively interest which he has thrown over everything in this bewitching city. The races of the rival boats to-day were not a regular part of the festa, and were not regularly contested. The gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely, and the people soon ceased to be interested in them.
We rowed up and down till dark, following here and there the boats whose freights attracted us, and exclaiming every moment at some new glimpse of beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, probably from never walking, and other indolent habits consequent upon want of exercise; and an oriental air, sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the whole race. One feels that he has come among an entirely new class of women, and hence, probably, the far-famed fascination of Venice to foreigners.
The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar to Italy, and which are richer and more enchanting in Venice than in any other part of it, from the character of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud; but at the horizon the sky was dyed of a deep orange, which softened away toward the zenith almost imperceptibly, the whole west like a wall of burning gold. The mingled softness and splendor of these skies is indescribable. Everything is touched with the same hue. A mild, yellow glow is all over the canals and buildings. The air seems filled with glittering golden dust, and the lines of the architecture, and the outlines of the distant islands, and the whole landscape about you is mellowed and enriched with a new and glorious light. I have seen one or two such sunsets in America; but there the sunsets are bolder and clearer, and with much more sublimity—they have rarely the voluptuous coloring of those in Italy.
It was delightful to glide along over a sea of light so richly tinted, among those graceful gondolas, with their freights of gayety and beauty. As the glow on the sky began to fade, they all turned their prows toward San Marc, and dropping into a slower motion, the whole procession moved on together to the stairs of the piazzetta; and by the time the twilight was perceptible, the cafés were crowded, and the square was like one great féte. We passed the evening in wandering up and down, never for an instant feeling like strangers, and excited and amused till long after midnight.
After several days' delay, we received an answer this morning from the authorities, with permission to see the bridge of sighs, and the prisons of the ducal palace. We landed at the broad stairs, and passing the desolate court, with its marble pillars and statues green with damp and neglect, ascended the "giant's steps," and found the warder waiting for us, with his enormous keys, at the door of a private passage. At the bottom of a staircase we entered a close gallery, from which the first range of cells opened. The doors were broken down, and the guide holding his torch in them for a moment in passing, showed us the same dismal interior in each—a mere cave, in which you would hardly think it possible to breathe, with a raised platform for a bed, and a small hole in the front wall to admit food and what air could find its way through from the narrow passage. There were eight of these; and descending another flight of damp steps, we came to a second range, differing only from the first in their slimy dampness. These are the cells of which Lord Byron gives a description in the notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold. He has transcribed, if you remember, the inscription from the ceilings and walls of one which was occupied successively by the victims of the Inquisition. The letters are cut rudely enough, and must have been done entirely by feeling, as there is no possibility of the penetration of a ray of light. I copied them with some difficulty, forgetting that they were in print, and, comparing them afterward with my copy of Childe Harold, I found them exactly the same, and I refer you, therefore, to his notes.
In a range of cells still below these, and almost suffocating from their closeness, one was shown us in which prisoners were strangled. The rope was passed through an iron grating of four bars, the executioner standing outside the cell. The prisoner within sat upon a stone, with his back to the grating, and the cord was passed round his neck, and drawn till he was choked. The wall of the cell was covered with blood, which had spattered against it with some violence. The guide explained it by saying, that owing to the narrowness of the passage the executioner had no room to draw the cord, and to expedite his business his assistant at the same time plunged a dagger into the neck of the victim. The blood had flowed widely over the wall, and ran to the floor in streams. With the darkness of the place, the difficulty I found in breathing, and the frightful reality of the scenes before me, I never had in my life a comparable sensation of horror.
At the end of the passage a door was walled up. It led, in the times of the republic, to dungeons under the canal, in which the prisoner died in eight days from his incarceration, at the farthest, from the noisome dampness and unwholesome vapors of the place. The guide gave us a harrowing description of the swelling of their bodies, and the various agonies of their slow death. I hurried away from the place with a sickness at my heart. In returning by the same way I passed the turning, and stumbled over a raised stone across the passage. It was the groove of a secret guillotine. Here many of the state and inquisition victims were put to death in the darkness of a narrow passage, shut out even in their last moment from the light and breath of heaven. The frame of the instrument had been taken away; but the pits in the wall, which had sustained the axe, were still there; and the sink on the other side, where the head fell, to carry off the blood. And these shocking executions took place directly before the cells of the other prisoners, within twenty feet from the farthest. In a cell close to this guillotine had been confined a state criminal for sixteen years. He was released at last by the arrival of the French, and on coming to the light in the square of San Marc was struck blind, and died in a few days. In another cell we stopped to look at the attempts of a prisoner upon its walls, interrupted, happily, by his release. He had sawed several inches into the front wall, with some miserable instrument, probably a nail. He had afterward abandoned this, and had, with prodigious strength, taken up a block from the floor; and, the guide assured us, had descended into the cell below. It was curious to look around his pent prison, and see the patient labor of years upon those rough walls, and imagine the workings of the human mind in such a miserable lapse of existence.
We ascended to the light again, and the guide led us to a massive door, with two locks, secured by heavy iron bars. It swung open with a scream, and we mounted a winding stair, and
"Stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs."
Two windows of close grating looked on either side upon the long canal below, and let in the only light to the covered passage. It is a gloomy place within, beautifully as its light arch hangs in the air from without. It was easy to employ the imagination as we stood on the stone where Childe Harold had stood before us, and conjured up in fancy the despair and agony that must have been pressed into the last glance at light and life that had been sent through those barred windows. Across this bridge the condemned were brought to receive their sentence in the Chamber of the Ten, or to be confronted with bloody inquisitors, and then were led back over it to die. The last light that ever gladdened their eyes came through those close bars, and the gay Giudecca in the distance, with its lively waters covered with boats, must have made that farewell glance to a Venetian bitter indeed. The side next the prison is now massively walled up. We stayed, silently musing at the windows, till the old cicerone ventured to remind us that his time was precious.
Ordering the gondola round to the stairs of the piazetta, we strolled for the first time into the church of San Marc. The four famous bronze horses stood with their dilated nostrils and fine action over the porch, bringing back to us Andrea Doria, and his threat; and as I remembered the ruined palace of the old admiral at Genoa, and glanced at the Austrian soldier upon guard, in the very shadow of the winged lion, I could not but feel most impressively the moral of the contrast. The lesson was not attractive enough, however, to keep us in a burning sun, and we put aside the heavy folds of the drapery and entered. How deliciously cool are these churches in Italy! We walked slowly up toward the distant altar. An old man rose from the base of one of the pillars, and put out his hand for charity. It is an incident that meets one at every step, and with half a glance at his face I passed on. I was looking at the rich mosaic on the roof, but his features lingered in my mind. They grew upon me still more strongly; and as I became aware of the full expression of misery and pride upon them, I turned about to see what had become of him. My two friends had done each the very same thing, with the same feeling of regret, and were talking of the old man when I came back to them. We went to the door, and looked all about the square, but he was no where to be seen. It is singular that he should have made the same impression upon all of us, of an old Venetian nobleman in poverty. Slight as my glance was, the noble expression of sadness about his fine white head and strong features, are still indelible in my memory. The prophecy which Byron puts into the mouth of the condemned Doge, is still true in every particular:—
——"When the Hebrew's in thy palaces,
The Hun in thy high places, and the Greek
Walks o'er thy mart, and smiles on it for his;
When thy patricians beg their bitter bread," &c.
The church of San Marc is rich to excess, and its splendid mosaic pavement is sunk into deep pits with age and the yielding foundations on which its heavy pile is built. Its pictures are not so fine as those of the other churches of Venice, but its age and historic associations make it by far the most interesting.