There were professional jesters, too, who joked on their own account, and there was usually somewhere a black African buffoon-contortionist; and there were long-legged tumblers, called ‘guaghe,’ absurdly dressed as women, who kept the crowd laughing, and while the people looked on they chewed the pods of carobs, which were sold off trays with nuts and other things by the Armenians who moved about in the throng. In the motley multitude nobles and magistrates
Mutinelli, Ult.
and foreign ambassadors elbowed each other, and great ladies and light ladies, all effectually disguised under the ‘tabarro,’ the ‘bauta,’ and the mask, which were allowed in public during the Fair.
The Espousal of the Sea was the great ceremony of the week, and the one which most directly recalled the visit of Alexander III. It was last performed by the last Doge in 1796, the six-hundred-and-eighteenth time, I believe, since its institution, and all the ancient ceremonial was carefully followed.
On the eve of the Ascension, the Bucentaur was hauled out of the Arsenal and anchored off the Piazzetta
Mutinelli, Lessico.
in full view of the delighted population. It was no longer the ‘Busus aureus,’ built by the Senate in 1311, and towed by a small boat from Murano, called the ‘peota.’ In four hundred years new ones had been constructed several times, and the last
CHURCH OF THE MIRACLE
Bucentaur was built in 1728. It was about one hundred and fifteen feet over all, with twenty-two feet beam, and was twenty-six feet deep from upper poop-deck to keel. In length and beam it had therefore about the dimensions of a fair-sized schooner yacht, but it was vastly higher out of water, and was flat-bottomed, so as to draw very little. The consequence was that even in smooth water it might have been laid over by a squall, and it was never used except in absolutely fine weather. It was rowed by one hundred and seventy-eight free artisans from the Arsenal, who swung forty-two oars, each of which, however, according to the model now preserved, consisted of three, linked and swung together in one rowlock. The rowers occupied what we should call the main deck, and the upper deck was fitted up