Jewellers and tailors and dealers in luxuries did their best to elude all such laws, but during a considerable time they were not successful, and it is probable that the temper of the Venetian ladies was severely tried by the prying and paternal ‘Provveditori.’ The only
Molmenti, vita Privata.
women for whom exceptions were made were the Dogess and the other ladies of the Doge’s immediate family who lived with him in the ducal palace. His daughters and grand-daughters were called ‘dozete,’ which means ‘little dogesses’ in Venetian dialect, and they were authorised to wear what they liked; but the Doge’s more distant female relations had not the same privilege.
At the coronation of Andrea Gritti, one of his nieces appeared at the palace arrayed in a magnificent gown of gold brocade; the Doge himself sent her home to put on a dress which conformed with the sumptuary laws. Those regulations extended to intimate details of private life, and even affected the furnishing of a noble’s private apartments. There were clauses which forbade that the sheets made for weddings and baptisms should be too richly embroidered or edged with too costly lace, or that the beds themselves should be inlaid with gold, mother-of-pearl, or precious stones.
Then the gondola came into fashion as a means of getting about and at once became a cause of great extravagance, for the rich vied with each other in adorning their skiffs with the most precious stuffs and tapestries, and inlaid stanchions, and the most marvellous allegorical figures.
In the thirteenth century the gondola had been merely an ordinary boat, probably like the modern ‘barca’ of the lagoons, over which an awning was rigged as a protection against sun and rain. The gondola was not a development of the old-fashioned
ON THE ZATTERE
boat, any more than the modern racing yacht has developed out of a Dutch galleon or a ‘trabacolo’ of the Adriatic. It had another pedigree; and I have no hesitation in saying, as one well acquainted with both, and not ignorant of boats in general, that the Venetian gondola is the caïque of the Bosphorus, as to the hull, though the former is rowed in the Italian fashion, by men who stand and swing a sweep in a crutch, whereas the Turkish oarsman sits and pulls a pair of sculls of peculiar shape which slide in and out through greased leathern strops. The gondola, too, has the steel ornament on her stem, figuring the beak of a Roman galley, which I suspect was in use in Constantinople before the Turkish conquest, and which must have been abolished then, for the very reason that it was Roman. The ‘felse,’ the hood, is a Venetian invention, I think, for there is no trace of it in Turkey. But the similarity of the two boats when out of water is too close to be a matter of chance, and it may safely be said that the first gondola was a caïque, then doubtless called by another name, brought from Constantinople by some Greek merchant on his vessel.
In early times people went about on horses and mules in Venice, and a vast number of the small canals were narrow and muddy streets; but as the superior facilities of water over mud as a means of transportation became evident, the lanes were dug out and the islands were cut up into an immense number of islets, until the footways became so circuitous that the horse disappeared altogether.