A Wanderer in Venice

by E. V. Lucas

It was while Coryat was in Venice that one of these giants, I know not which, performed a deed of fatal savagery. The traveller thus describes it: "A certaine fellow that had the charge to looke to the clocke, was very busie about the bell, according to his usuall custome every day, to the end to amend something in it that was amisse. But in the meane time one of those wilde men that at the quarters of the howers doe use to strike the bell, strooke the man in the head with his brazen hammer, giving him such a violent blow, that therewith he fell down dead presently in his place, and never spake more."

At the third turning to the right out of the Merceria is the church of S. Giuliano, or S. Zulian, which the great Sansovino built. One evening, hearing singing as I passed, I entered, but found standing-room only, and that only with the greatest discomfort. Yet the congregation was so happy and the scene was so animated that I stayed on and on—long enough at any rate for the offertory box to reach me three separate times. Every one present was either poor or on the borders of poverty; and the fervour was almost that of a salvation army meeting. And why not, since the religion both of the Pope and of General Booth was pre-eminently designed for the poor? I came away with a tiny coloured picture of the Virgin and more fleas than I ever before entertained at the same time.

At the end of the Merceria is S. Salvatore, a big quiet church in the Renaissance style, containing the ashes of S. Theodore, the tombs of various Doges, and a good Bellini: a warm, rich, and very human scene of a wayside inn at Emmaus and Christ appearing there. An "Annunciation" by Titian is in the church proper, painted when he was getting very old, and framed by Sansovino; a "Transfiguration" by Titian is in the pretty sacristy, which, like many of the Venetian churches, is presided over by a dwarf. A procession of Venetian sacristans would, by the way, be a strange and grotesque spectacle.

The best of the S. Salvatore monuments is that by Sansovino of Doge Francesco Venier (1554-1556), with beautiful figures in the niches from the same hand—that of Charity, on the left, being singularly sweet. When Sansovino made these he was nearly eighty. Sansovino also designed the fine doorway beneath the organ. The most imposing monuments are those of Caterina Cornaro (or Corner) the deposed queen of Cyprus, in the south transept; of three Cardinals of the Corner family; and of the Doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, each with his patron saint above him. The oddity of its architecture, together with its situation at a point where a little silence is peculiarly grateful, makes this church a favourite of mine, but there are many buildings in Venice which are more beautiful.

Opposite, diagonally, is one of the depressing sights of Venice, a church turned into a cinema.

Leaving S. Salvatore by the main door and turning to the left, we soon come (past a hat shop which offers "Rooswelts" at 2.45 each), to the Goldoni Theatre. Leaving San Salvatore by the same door and turning to the right, we come to Goldoni himself, in bronze, in the midst of the Campo S. Bartolommeo: the little brisk observant satirist upon whom Browning wrote the admirably critical sonnet which I quote earlier in this book.

The comedies of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) still hold the Italian stage, but so far as translations can tell me they are very far from justifying any comparison between himself and Molière. Goldoni's Autobiography is not a very entertaining work, but it is told with the engaging minuteness which seems to have been a Venetian trait.

The church of S. Bartolommeo contains altar pieces by Giorgione's pupil, Sebastian del Piombo, but there is no light by which to see them.

It was in this campo that Mr. Howells had rooms before he married and blossomed out on the Grand Canal, and his description of the life here is still so good and so true, although fifty years have passed, that I make bold to quote it, not only to enrich my own pages, but in the hope that the tastes of the urbane American book which I give now and then may send readers to it. The campo has changed little except that the conquering Austrians have gone and Goldoni's statue is now here. Mr. Howells thus describes it: "Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San Bartolommeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from S. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.

"Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery—nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.