PONTE PAGLIA ... NEXT THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS
If you continue on, crossing the Giudecca, or if you happen to be coming from Murano or the Lido, you will pass dozens of other boats, loaded to the water’s edge with baskets upon baskets of peaches, melons, and figs, or great heaps of green vegetables, dashed here and there with piles of blood-red tomatoes. All these boats are pointing their bows towards the Ponte Paglia, the bridge on the Riva between the Doges’ Palace and the prison, the one next the Bridge of Sighs. Here, in the afternoons preceding market days, they unship their masts or rearrange their cargoes, taking off the top baskets if too high to clear the arch. Ponte Paglia is the best point of entrance from the Grand Canal, because it is the beginning of that short cut, through a series of smaller canals, to the fruit market above the Rialto bridge. The market opens at daybreak.
Many of these boats come from Malamocco, on the south, a small island this side of Chioggia, and from beyond the island known as the Madonna of the Seaweed, named after a curious figure sheltered by a copper umbrella. Many of them come from Torcello, that most ancient of the Venetian settlements, and from the fruit-raising country back of it, for all Torcello is one great orchard, with every landing-wharf piled full of its products. Here you can taste a fig so delicately ripe that it fairly melts in your mouth, and so sensitive that it withers and turns black almost with the handling. Here are rose-pink peaches the size of small melons, and golden melons the size of peaches. Here are pomegranates that burst open from very lusciousness, and white grapes that hang in masses, and melons and plums in heaps, and all sorts of queer little round things that you never taste but once, and never want to taste again.
These fruit gardens and orchards in the suburbs of Venice express the very waste and wantonness of the climate. There is no order in setting out the fruit, no plan in growing, no system in gathering. The trees thrive wherever they happen to have taken root—here a peach, here a pear, there a pomegranate. The vines climb the trunks and limbs, or swing off to tottering poles and crumbling walls. The watermelons lie flat on their backs in the blazing sun, flaunting their big leaves in your face, their tangled creepers in everybody’s way and under everybody’s feet. The peaches cling in matted clusters, and the figs and plums weigh down the drooping branches.
If you happen to have a lira about you, and own besides a bushel basket, you can exchange the coin for that measure of peaches. Two lire will load your gondola half full of melons; three lire will pack it with grapes; four lire—well, you must get a larger boat.
When the boats are loaded at the orchards and poled through the grass-lined canals, reaching the open water of the lagoon, escaping the swarms of naked boys begging backsheesh of fruit from their cargoes, you will notice that each craft stops at a square box, covered by an awning and decorated with a flag, anchored out in the channel, or moored to a cluster of spiles. This is the Dogana of the lagoon, and every basket, crate, and box must be inspected and counted by the official in the flat cap with the tarnished gilt band, who commands this box of a boat, for each individual peach, plum, and pear must help pay its share of the public debt.
This floating custom-house is one of many beads, strung at intervals a mile apart, completely encircling Venice. It is safe to say that nothing that crows, bleats, or clucks, nothing that feeds, clothes, or is eaten, ever breaks through this charmed circle without leaving some portion of its value behind. This creditor takes its pound of flesh the moment it is due, and has never been known to wait.
Where the deep-water channels are shifting, and there is a possibility of some more knowing and perhaps less honest market craft slipping past in the night, a government deputy silently steals over the shallow lagoon in a rowboat, sleeping in his blanket, his hand on his musket, and rousing at the faintest sound of rowlock or sail. Almost hourly one of these night-hawks overhauls other strollers of the lagoon in the by-passages outside the city limits—some smuggler, with cargo carefully covered, or perhaps a pair of lovers in a gondola with too closely drawn tenda. There is no warning sound to the unwary; only the gurgle of a slowly-moving oar, then the muzzle of a breech-loader thrust in one’s eyes, behind which frowns an ugly, determined face, peering from out the folds of a heavy boat-cloak. It is the deputy’s way of asking for smuggled cigarettes, but it is so convincing a way as to admit of no discussion. Ever afterward the unfortunate victim, if he be of honest intent, cannot only detect a police-boat from a fishing yawl, but remembers also to keep a light burning in his lamp-socket forward, as evidence of his honesty.
When the cargoes of the market boats are inspected, the duties paid, and the passage made under Ponte Paglia, or through the many nameless canals if the approach is made from the Campo Santo side of the city, the boats swarm up to the fruit market above the Rialto, rounding up one after another, and discharging their contents like trucks at a station, the men piling the baskets in great mounds on the broad stone quay.