[104] Collegi. Gasparo was educated in the Somaschan establishment at S. Cipriano on the island of Murano.
[105] Casanova, in the first chapter of his Memoirs, says that he suffered during his boyhood from the same violent hæmorrhages.
[106] Gozzi might have cited Galileo, whose style, formed by the study of the "divine" Ariosto, is a model of exquisite and urbane Italian diction.
[107] Compare what Goldoni says about the marionette theatre at his grandfather's country-seat. In some of the great villas of the Venetian nobility these private stages were built on an enormous scale. The account of Marco Contarini's theatre at Piazzola near Padua, and of the sumptuous dramatic performances which took place there, reads like a passage from the Arabian Nights. See Romanin's Storia di Venezia, vol. vii. p. 550.
[108] I may here say that the title of cavaliere, or knight, was commonly given to members of patrician families at Venice, irrespective of their being laymen or in orders.
[109] Gaspara Stampa was born at Padua, but was a gentlewoman of Milan by descent. She died about 1554, at the age of thirty. If this edition of Gaspara Stampa's Rime is the one prepared for publication by Luisa Bergalli (Gozzi's sister-in-law), there is the same confusion of dates here as I have noticed above. It was published when Gozzi had reached his seventeenth year.
[110] A tablet over the entrance to the restaurant at the Calcina on the Zattere, records that Apostolo Zeno dwelt there. It was, perhaps, to this house that young Gozzi paid his visit. Zeno (b. 1668, d. 1750) exercised considerable influence over the Italian drama. He wrote plays for music and oratorios. For some years he held the post of Cesarean poet at Vienna, which he resigned to the more celebrated Metastasio.
[111] Luisa Pisana Bergalli was born at Venice in 1703, of humble parentage, being descended from a Piedmontese shoemaker. Luigi Mocenigo and Pisana Cornaro held her at the font, and gave her their two Christian names. She showed distinguished talents in early youth, and was educated by the painter Rosalba Carriera, afterwards by Caterino and Apostolo Zeno. At twenty-three she published a tragedy and an anthology of Italian poems by female writers; at twenty-five another tragedy; at thirty a translation of Terence, and a comedy dedicated to Count Jacopo Antonio Gozzi. It appears from this dedication to Le avventure del poeta that she was the protegée of both Count Gozzi and his wife, and on the best of terms with their children. She was thirty-five and Gasparo was twenty-five when they married. See Tommasei, Storia Civile nella Letteraria, pp. 185-188.
[112] The title Provveditore Generale di Mare was given to the supreme head of the Venetian naval and military forces in the Levant. He resided at Corfu, where he maintained a princely court, and ruled like a sovereign, being only responsible for his actions to the Senate. Next in importance to this functionary was the Provveditore Generale di Dalmazia, of whose Court we shall hear much in Gozzi's Memoirs. Casanova, who went to Corfu in the train of the Prov. Gen. Dolfino, called Il Bucentoro because of his grand manner, and the father of the famous Caterina Dolfin Tron, gives an excellent account of the Court there, its military, naval, and civil establishment. Chapters xiii.-xvi. of the first volume of his Memoirs deserve to be compared with the corresponding part of Gozzi's.
[113] Not at seventeen, but at twenty. Gozzi was born in 1720, and Quirini took the government of Dalmatia in 1740.