The marriage generally comes off on a Sunday. Who weds on Monday goes mad; Tuesday will bring a bad end; Wednesday is a day good for nothing; Thursday all manner of witches are abroad; Friday leads to early death; and, as to Saturday, you must not choose that, parchè de sabo piove, "because on Saturday it rains!"
The bride has two toilets—one for the church, one for the wedding dinner. At the church she wears a black veil, at the feast she appears crowned with flowers. After she is dressed and before the bridegroom arrives, the young girl goes to her father's room and kneeling down before him, she prays with tears in her eyes to be forgiven whatever grief she may have caused him. He grants her his pardon and gives her his blessing. In the early dawn the wedding party go to church either on foot or in gondolas, for it is customary for the marriage knot to be tied at the conclusion of the first mass. When the right moment comes the priest puts the vera, or wedding ring, on the tip of the bride's finger, and the bridegroom pushes it down into its proper place. If the vera hitches, it is a frightfully bad omen. When once it is safely adjusted, the best man steps forward and restores to the bride's middle finger the little ring which formed the lover's earliest gift; for this reason he is called compare de l'anelo, a style and title he will one day exchange for that of compare de San Zuane.
At the end of the service the bride returns to her father's house, where she remains quietly till it is time to get ready for dinner. As the clock strikes four, the entire wedding party, with the parents of bride and bridegroom and a host of friends and relations, start in gondolas for the inn at which the repast is to take place. The whole population of the calle or campo is there to see their departure, and to admire or criticise, as the case may be. After dinner, when everyone has tasted the good wine and enjoyed the good fare, the feast breaks up with cries of Viva la novizza! followed by songs, stories, laughter, and much flirtation between the girls and boys, who make the most of the freedom of intercourse conceded to them in honour of the day. Then the music begins, the table is whisked away, and the assembled guests join lustily in the dance; the women perhaps, singing at intervals, "Enôta, enôta, enìo!" a burden borne over to Venice from the Grecian shore. The romance is finished; Marieta and Nane are married, the zornada santa wanes to its close, the tired dancers accompany the bride to the threshold of her new home, and so adieu!
Before leaving the subject of Venetian love-songs it may be as well to glance at a few points characteristic of the popular mind which it has not been convenient to touch upon in following the Venetian youth and maiden from the prima radice of their love to its consecration at the altar. What, for instance, does the Venetian singer say of poverty and riches?—for there is no surer test of character than the way of regarding money and the lack of it. It is taken pretty well for granted at Venice as elsewhere, that inequality of fortune is a bar to matrimony. The poor girl says to her better-to-do lover, "Thou passest this way sad and grieving, thou thinkest to speak to my father, and on thy finger thou dost carry a little ring. But thy thought does not fall in with my thought, and thy thought is not worth a gazette. Thou art rich and I am a poor little one!" Here the girl puts all faith in the good intentions of her suitor: it is not his fault if her poverty divides them; it is the nature of things, against which there is no appeal. But there is more than one song that betrays the suspicion that if a girl grows poor her lover will be only too eager and ready to desert her. "My lady mother has always told me that she who falls into poverty loses her lover; loses friend and loses hope. The purse does not sing when there is no coin in it." Still, on the whole, a more high-minded view prevails. "Do not look to my being a poor man," says one lover,
Che povatà no guasta gentilissa,
—"for poverty does not spoil or prevent gentle manners." A girl sings, "All tell me that I am poor, the world's honour is my riches; I am poor, I am of fair fame; poor both of us, let us make love." One is reminded of "how the good wife taught her daughter" in the old English poem of the fifteenth century:
I pray the, my dere childe, loke thou bere the so well
That alle men may seyen thou art so trewe as stele;
Gode name is golde worth, my leve childe!