Never have you seen any such interior. Hung with the priceless fabrics and relics of the earth, it is to you one moment a great mosque, studded with jewels and rich with the wealth of the East; then, as its color deepens, a vast tomb, hollowed from out a huge, dark opal, in which lies buried some heroic soul, who in his day controlled the destinies of nations and of men. And now again, when the mystery of its light shimmers through windows covered with the dust of ages, there comes to this wondrous shrine of San Marco, small as it is, something of the breadth and beauty, the solitude and repose, of a summer night.
When the first hush and awe and sense of sublimity have passed away, you wander, like the other pilgrims, into the baptistery; or you move softly behind the altar, marveling over each carving of wood and stone and bronze; or you descend to the crypt and stand by the stone sarcophagus that once held the bones of the good saint himself.
As you walk about these shadowy aisles, and into the dim recesses, some new devotee swings back a door, and a blaze of light streams in, and you awake to the life of to-day.
Yes, there is a present as well as a past. There is another Venice outside; a Venice of life and joyousness and stir. The sun going down; the caffès under the arcades of the King’s Palace and of the Procuratie Vecchie are filling up. There is hardly an empty table at Florian’s. The pigeons, too, are coming home to roost, and are nestling under the eaves of the great buildings and settling on the carvings of San Marco. The flower girls, in gay costumes, are making shops of the marble benches next the Campanile, assorting roses and pinks, and arranging their boutonnières for the night’s sale. The awnings which have hung all day between the columns of the arcades are drawn back, exposing the great line of shops fringing three sides of the square. Lights begin to flash; first in the clusters of lamps illuminating the arcades, and then in the windows filled with exquisite bubble-blown Venetian glass, wood carvings, inlaid cabinets, cheap jewelry, gay-colored photographs and prints.
As the darkness falls, half a dozen men drag to the centre of the Piazza the segments of a great circular platform. This they surround with music-rests and a stand for the leader. Now the pavement of the Piazza itself begins filling up. Out from the Merceria, from under the clock tower, pours a steady stream of people merging in the crowds about the band-stand. Another current flows in through the west entrance, under the Bocca di Piazza, and still another from under the Riva, rounding the Doges’ Palace. At the Molo, just where poor Carmagnola stepped ashore, a group of officers—they are everywhere in Venice—land from a government barge. These are in full regalia, even to their white kid gloves, their swords dangling and ringing as they walk. They, too, make their way to the square and fill the seats around one of the tables at Florian’s, bowing magnificently to the old Countess who sits just inside the door of the caffè itself, resplendent, as usual, in dyed wig and rose-colored veil. She is taking off her long, black, fingerless silk gloves, and ordering her customary spoonful of cognac and lump of sugar. Gustavo, the head waiter, listens as demurely as if he expected a bottle of Chablis at least, with the customary commission for Gustavo—but then Gustavo is the soul of politeness. Some evil-minded people say the Countess came in with the Austrians; others, more ungallant, date her advent about the days of the early doges.
By this time you notice that the old French professor is in his customary place; it is outside the caffè, in the corridor, on a leather-covered, cushioned seat against one of the high pillars. You never come to the Piazza without meeting him. He is as much a part of its history as the pigeons, and, like them, dines here at least once a day. He is a perfectly straight, pale, punctilious, and exquisitely deferential relic of a by-gone time, whose only capital is his charming manner and his thorough knowledge of Venetian life. This combination rarely fails where so many strangers come and go; and then, too, no one knows so well the intricacies of an Italian kitchen as Professor Croisac.
Sometimes on summer evenings he will move back a chair at your own table and insist upon dressing the salad. Long before his greeting, you catch sight of him gently edging his way through the throng, the seedy, straight-brimmed silk hat in his hand brushed with the greatest precision; his almost threadbare frock-coat buttoned snug around his waist, the collar and tails flowing loose, his one glove hanging limp. He is so erect, so gentle, so soft-voiced, so sincere, and so genuine, and for the hour so supremely happy, that you cannot divest yourself of the idea that he really is an old marquis, temporarily exiled from some faraway court, and to be treated with the greatest deference. When, with a little start of sudden surprise, he espies some dark-eyed matron in the group about him, rises to his feet and salutes her as if she were the Queen of Sheba, you are altogether sure of his noble rank. Then the old fellow regains his seat, poises his gold eyeglasses—a relic of better days—between his thumb and forefinger, holds them two inches from his nose, and consults the menu with the air of a connoisseur.
Before your coffee is served the whole Piazza is ablaze and literally packed with people. The tables around you stand quite out to the farthest edge permitted. (These caffès have, so to speak, riparian rights—so much piazza seating frontage, facing the high-water mark of the caffè itself.) The waiters can now hardly wedge their way through the crowd. The chairs are so densely occupied that you barely move your elbows. Next you is an Italian mother—full-blown even to her delicate mustache—surrounded by a bevy of daughters, all in pretty hats and white or gay-colored dresses, chatting with a circle of still other officers. All over the square, where earlier in the day only a few stray pilgrims braved the heat, or a hungry pigeon wandered in search of a grain of corn, the personnel of this table is repeated—mothers and officers and daughters, and daughters and officers and mothers again.
Outside this mass, representing a clientèle possessing at least half a lira each—one cannot, of course, occupy a chair and spend less, and it is equally difficult to spend very much more—there moves in a solid mass the rest of the world: bareheaded girls, who have been all day stringing beads in some hot courtyard; old crones in rags from below the shipyards; fishermen in from Chioggia; sailors, stevedores, and soldiers in their linen suits, besides sight-seers and wayfarers from the four corners of the earth.
If there were nothing else in Venice but the night life of this grand Piazza, it would be worth a pilgrimage half across the world to see. Empty every café in the Boulevards; add all the habitués of the Volks Gardens of Vienna, and all those you remember at Berlin, Buda-Pesth, and Florence; pack them in one mass, and you would not half fill the Piazza. Even if you did, you could never bring together the same kinds of people. Venice is not only the magnet that draws the idler and the sight-seer, but those who love her just because she is Venice—painters, students, architects, historians, musicians, every soul who values the past and who finds here, as nowhere else, the highest achievement of chisel, brush, and trowel.