Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

Unhappily no such method can ever be even attempted where the remote past is concerned. The men and women of those times lived their own daily lives, found them not always interesting, and passed away without leaving us a single true record of twenty-four hours in the life of a man or a woman. Yet how intensely interesting even one such record would be! How the weary historian, seeking for the simple details of some simple life six hundred years ago, longs to discover a Horace Walpole, a Madame de Sévigné, or most of all a Paston family, amongst the yellow and dusty archives! Something, however, may still be got together to give an idea of what the non-political, non-historical Venice was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

To begin with, though the Republic never showed much inclination to submit to any dictation from the popes, the Venetians were a practically religious people and extremely charitable. With the possible exceptions of Rome and Florence, no city of Italy possessed at that time so many hospices for the poor and hospitals for the sick; and considering the necessary limitations of all philanthropy at that early period, those institutions were managed and kept up with astonishing intelligence and care. I have no intention of compiling a catalogue of the buildings in which old people, invalids, widows, and pilgrims found a temporary or a permanent refuge, as the case might be; but it is worth while to notice here and there the sensitive delicacy with which charity was often exercised, and which seems so little in harmony with the nature of the more important historical events of the period.

Molmenti, Calli e Canali.

There is something very touching, for instance, in the origin of the Ca’ di Dio—literally, ‘The House of God,’ as the old building is called to this day. In the year 1272, one of those pious souls that feel the true and natural intuitions of charity came across that saddest sort of misery which exists here and there in the world, hiding itself as far as possible from every eye, and preferring actual starvation and death to the humiliation of asking alms. These poor people were ladies of good birth, reduced to a condition in which they positively had neither a crust to eat nor a place to lay their heads. The charitable person who found them here and there gathered them at first into a refuge with other poor women where they could at least live and die in peace, but, even in the simplicity of those days, he soon understood that it was moral torture for a starving patrician woman, or the widow of some high magistrate of the Republic, to share bed and board with the poor widows of sailors, fishermen, and artisans, and he created for them, out of sheer delicacy and kindness of heart, a separate refuge in the Ca’ di Dio, where they could enjoy something more than the illusion of a home, and where they were at least blessed with that privacy which is almost the first and last necessity of the well-born.

One is reminded of the rules of that Florentine Confraternity for the relief of the ‘poor who felt shame,’ a body to which Dante belonged. By those rules the brethren were bound to give assistance without lifting the hood that covered their faces, or giving their names, or in any way betraying their individuality, lest the poor person whom they helped should be in some degree humiliated. This really exquisite delicacy of feeling showed itself in the very midst of the worst and fiercest quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, and the rule of the Confraternity expressly commanded the brothers to help their foes as freely as their friends, and to be especially careful never to do anything which could humiliate an enemy in distress.

The chronicles of Florence say nothing of that, and if the Venetian historians mention the Ca’ di Dio at all, it is only in the most passing way. But the historical writers of both cities carefully record the murders, poisonings, and stabbings which brought disaster on their citizens. Should not a true history of civilisation sometimes count also the tears that charity has dried and the anguish she has helped to soothe? The chroniclers abound in accounts of the trials, the sentences, and the executions of the fourteenth century; they can scarcely spare a line to tell us how the Doge and many other devout persons heard mass daily at dawn and recited the Office for the Dead in Saint Mark’s. We

Galliccioli, vi. 150.

know with the utmost exactness the precise number of light ladies who were living in Venice just then: there were eleven thousand six hundred and fifty—a respectable, or rather a disreputable, number for a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants. The quarter of the Castelletto, which had originally been given over to them, no longer sufficed for their needs, and they lived very much where they pleased.

Bembo, Beneficenza.

We know these things, but few remember that at that very time a gentle beseeching voice was heard every evening in the streets and squares of Venice, crying out ‘Pity, pity!’ It was the voice of a poor monk slowly pursuing his way under the balconies of the great palaces, and through the narrower ways where the rich middle class had chosen its abode, for ever asking alms for the poor little children whom he found nightly thrust out, new-born, to die in the streets before morning, even as is done to this day in China. And though it was Venice that cast her children out to perish thus, yet Venice poured alms into the poor monk’s hands so abundantly that his labours prospered beyond his highest hopes. A lady of the Delfini family gave him no less than seventeen houses for his foundlings, and yet these were not enough; he appealed to the government for more room; and this same government, which seems in our view of its history to be for ever deep in politics, in commerce, and above all in spying upon its own citizens, answered Fra Pieruzzo della Pietà, as the monk was called, with a decree that has a very human and tender note in it. It was declared therein that the little foundlings should bring blessings and fortune to all honest people who would offer them a home; and whosoever adopted one of the children was thereby freely licensed to open a shop or to exchange a mean and vulgar occupation for one of the nobler arts. Besides this, the State settled upon