Mut. Costumi.
The ‘hall of the fireplace’ was more than any other part of the house a special feature of Venetian dwellings, and was as necessary to them as the balcony that ran round the inner court. To this day the Venetians boast that their ancestors invented the modern chimney flue, and that while King Egbert still warmed himself like a savage before a fire of which the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, the poorest Venetian fisherman had a civilised fireplace before which he could warm his toes as comfortably, and with as little annoyance from smoke, as any fine lady of the twentieth century.
Another peculiarity of the early Venetian house which has come down to our day was that it almost always had two entrances, the one opening upon the
A WATER DOOR NEAR ST. BENEDETTO
water, and the other, at the back, upon land. In those days this back door almost always gave access to a bit of garden, in which flowers and a few kitchen vegetables were carefully cultivated, but these gardens were soon crowded out of existence by the necessity for larger and more numerous houses.
The palace of the Doge differed from other Venetian dwellings chiefly by its size and its battlemented walls, and was very far from resembling what we see to-day in its place. It was destroyed by fire again and again, and only here and there some fragment of the original walls was incorporated in the new buildings which the doges were so often obliged to construct for themselves. A high battlemented wall joined the island of Olivolo with Rialto and enclosed the ducal palace.
The churches were out of all proportion richer and better cared for than the private dwellings, and were generally built after the model of the Roman basilica, with an apse and a portico for worshippers, which frequently served as a shelter for all sorts of little shops and money-changers’ booths, very much like the temple in Jerusalem. These churches have been rebuilt and repaired again and again till there is little left of the originals; but many fragments of them have been used again, here a light column, there a bit of mosaic, a carved capital, a piece of early sculpture or a delicate marble tracery—all of them, more often than not, of better workmanship and in purer taste than the later buildings they now help to adorn.
The centre and focus of Venetian life was Saint Mark’s Square, but it was altogether a different place in those days. It was, indeed, nothing but an irregular open space, a field of mud in winter, a field of dust