Suddenly the wind changes. The rain ceases. Light is breaking in the west. The weather-vane on the Campanile glows and flashes. Now a flood of sunshine bursts forth from a halo of lemon-colored sky. The joyous pigeons glint like flakes of gold. Then a shout comes from the Molo. The sea is falling! The gondolier who has dared the centre of the Piazza springs to his oar, strips off his oilskins, throws them into his boat, and plunges overboard waist-deep, seizing his gondola by the bow. The boys dash in on either side. Now for the Molo! The crowd breaks into cheers. On it goes, grounding near the Porta della Carta, bumping over the stone flagging; afloat again, the boatmen from the Molo leaping in to meet it; then a rush, a cheer, and the endangered gondola clears the coping of the wall and is safe at her moorings.
Half an hour later the little children in their white summer dresses, the warm sunshine in their faces, are playing in the seaweed that strews the pavements of the Piazzetta.
LEGACIES OF THE PAST
“WILL you have the kindness to present Professor Croisac’s profound adoration to the Contessa Albrizzi, and say that he humbly begs permission to conduct his friend, a most distinguished painter, through the noble salons of her palazzo?”
It was the Professor, standing bareheaded on the landing-steps of the entrance to the Palazzo Albrizzi, the one lonely glove breaking the rounded outline of his well-brushed hat. He was talking to a portly Italian who did duty as Cerberus. As for myself, I was tucked back under the tenda, awaiting the result of the conference, Espero smiling at the old fellow’s elaborate address and manners.
The porter bowed low, and explained, with much earnestness, that the Illustrissima was then sojourning at her country-seat in the Tyrol; adding that, despite this fact, the whole palace, including the garden and its connecting bridge, from the courtyard to the roof, was completely at the service of the Signor Professore.
“And all for two lire,” whispered Espero, to whom the old gentleman was a constant source of amusement, and who could never quite understand why most of his talking was done with his back bent at right angles to his slender legs. So we followed the porter up the stone staircase, around its many turns, to the grand hall above, with its rich pictures panelled on the walls, and so on through the various rooms of white stucco and old gold brocades, to the grand salon, the one with the famous ceiling.
The night before, over a glass of Torino vermouth at Florian’s, the Professor had insisted that I should not live another day until he had piloted me through all those relics of the past, illustrative of an age in Venice as sumptuous as it was artistic.
First of all I must see the gorgeous ceilings of the Albrizzi; then the curious vine-covered bridge leading out of the Contessa’s boudoir to a garden across the narrow canal, as secluded as the groves of Eden before Adam stepped into them. Then I must examine the grand Palazzo Rezzonico, begun by Longhena in 1680, and completed sixty years later by Massari; once the home of Pope Clement XIII., and again made immortal as sheltering the room in which Browning had breathed his last. There, too, was the Barbaro, with its great flight of stone steps sweeping up and around two sides of a court to the picturesque entrance on the second floor,—the Barbaro, with its exquisite salon, by far the most beautiful in Europe. There was the Palazzo Pisani, built in the fifteenth century, its galleries still hung with Venetian mirrors; and the Palazzo Pesaro, designed by this same Longhena in 1679, the home of an illustrious line of Venetian nobles from Leonardo Pesaro down to the Doge Giovanni, with its uncanny row of grotesque heads of boars, bulls, and curious beasts studded along the water-table of the first story, a hand’s touch from your gondola, so grotesque and quaint that each one looked like a nightmare solidified into stone. There were also the Dandolo, where lived the great Doge Enrico Dandolo, the conqueror of Constantinople,—conqueror at ninety-seven years of age; the Farsetti, where Canova studied, in his time an academy; the Barbarigo, where Titian once held court; the Mocenigo, where Byron lived; not to mention the veritable home of the veritable Desdemona, including the identical balcony where Othello breathed his love.