À Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca,
Vivre et mourrir là.
TIMBER BOATS FROM THE SHORES OF THE ADRIATIC
There are now at Saint Blaise no pastoral and poetic places where lovers could stroll hand in hand by the pale moonlight: the gardens, somewhat marshy, are cultivated principally for market purposes. The Giudecca Canal is the commercial harbour of Venice. The churches of Redentore and Maggiore lie on the farther side of it. In this canal a group of small vessels lie all day long at anchor—twenty or thirty of them, laden with wood brought from the Istrian coast, and sold in Venice. When it has been disposed of, the captain calls his crew from the distant cafés and wine-shops, releases the watch-dog from his post on deck, weighs anchor, and creeps down the Adriatic to reload again with fuel. This is all the Venetian commerce of to-day—this and a few beads, glass, wood-carving, lace, and bric-à-brac, such as would scarcely load a modern trading-ship. Nine hundred years ago the trade of Venice was important. By the close of the eleventh century, the city was commercially supreme in Europe. Yet she manufactured nothing. She was supreme simply by the exercise of the merchant's calling. She was Europe's greatest ship-owning power and commercial head. Her merchants, conveying cloth, velvet, serge, canvas, various precious and commercial metals, glass beads, and other goods, received in return drugs, spices, dyes, precious stones, rugs, silks, brocades, cotton, and perfumes, which were sold at a high rate of profit. The population of Venice was then two hundred thousand; the annual exports were valued at ten million ducats; there were three hundred sea-going vessels, eight thousand sailing vessels, three thousand smaller craft, seventeen thousand mercantile sailors, and a powerful navy with eleven thousand able-bodied seamen.
San Giorgio is of note as the place for red mullet from the Adriatic. Nothing equals the fish: none other is so appetising, so red and fresh in colour—one would feel inclined to eat of it if only for its hue. The best place to procure mullet is in a certain tavern where gondoliers and sailors mostly congregate: here they can drink wine free of duty. The tavern is invariably filled with such men, all stretched out on benches round the table. San Giorgio is the place for sunsets also: from nowhere else in the lagoon can one see such a marvellous variety, such changes of sea and sky. The church possesses a wonderful Entombment by Tintoretto.
BY A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD