From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn

by Henry M. Field

At length the train came rushing up, and stopping but a moment for passengers, dashed off like a race-horse over the great plain of Lombardy. But we must not go so fast as to overlook this historic ground. Suddenly, like a sheet of silver, unrolls before us the broad surface of the Lago di Garda, the greatest of the Italian lakes, stretching far into the plain, but with its head resting against the background of the Tyrolean Alps. What memories gather about these places from the old Roman days! In yonder peninsula in the lake, Catullus wrote his poems; in Mantua, a few miles to the south, Virgil was born; while in Verona an amphitheatre remains in excellent preservation, which is second only to the Coliseum. In events of more recent date this region is full of interest. We are now in the heart of the famous Quadrilateral, the Four great Fortresses, built to overawe as well as defend Upper Italy. All this ground was fought over by the first Napoleon in his Italian campaigns; while near at hand is the field of Solferino, where under Napoleon III. a French army, with that of Victor Emmanuel, finally conquered the independence of Italy.

More peaceful memories linger about Padua, whose University, that is over six hundred years old, was long one of the chief seats of learning in Europe, within whose walls Galileo studied; and Tasso and Ariosto and Petrarch; and the reformer and martyr Savonarola.

But all these places sink in interest, as just at evening we reach the end of the main land, and passing over the long causeway which crosses the Lagune, find ourselves in Venice. It seems very prosaic to enter Venice by a railroad, but the prose ceases and the poetry begins the instant we emerge from the station, for the marble steps descend to the water, and instead of stepping into a carriage we step into a gondola; and as we move off we leave behind the firm ground of ordinary experience, and our imagination, like our persons, is afloat. Everything is strange and unreal. We are in a great city, and yet we cannot put our feet to the ground. There is no sound of carriages rattling over the stony streets, for there is not a horse in Venice. We cannot realize where and what we are. The impression is greatly heightened in arriving at night, for the canals are but dimly lighted, and darkness adds to the mystery of this city of silence. Now and then we see a light in a window, and somebody leans from a balcony; and we hear the plashing of oars as a gondola shoots by; but these occasional signs of life only deepen the impression of loneliness, till it seems as if we were in a world of ghosts—nay, to be ghosts ourselves—and to be gliding through misty shapes and shadows; as if we had touched the black waters of Death, and the silent Oarsman himself were guiding our boat to his gloomy realm. Thus sunk in reverie, we floated along the watery streets, past the Rialto, and under the Bridge of Sighs, to the Hotel Danieli on the Grand Canal, just behind the Palace of the Doges.

When the morning broke, and we could see things about us in plain daylight, we set ourselves, like dutiful travellers, to see the sights, and now in a busy week have come to know something of Venice; to feel that it is not familiar ground, but familiar water, familiar canals and bridges, and churches and palaces. We have been up on the Campanile, and looked down upon the city, as it lies spread out like a map under our eye, with all its islands and its waters; and we have sailed around it and through it, going down to the Lido, and looking off upon the Adriatic; and then coursing about the Lagune, and up and down the Grand Canal and the Giudecca, and through many of the smaller canals, which intersect the city in every direction. We have visited the church of St. Mark, rich with its colored marbles and mosaics, and richer still in its historic memories; and the Palace where the Doges reigned, and the church where they are buried, the Westminster Abbey of Venice, where the rulers of many generations lie together in their royal house of death; we have visited the Picture Galleries, and seen the paintings of Titian and the statues of Canova, and then looked on the marble tombs in the church of the Frati, where sleep these two masters of different centuries. Thus we have tried to weave together the artistic, the architectural, and the historical glories of this wonderful city.

There is no city in Europe about which there is so much of romance as Venice, and of real romance (if that be not a contradiction), that is, of romance founded on reality, for indeed the reality is stranger than fiction. Its very aspect dazzles the eye, as the traveller approaches from the east, and sees the morning sun reflected from its domes and towers. And how like an apparition it seems, when he reflects that all that glittering splendor rests on the unsubstantial sea. It is a jewel set in water, or rather it seems to rise, like a gigantic sea-flower, out of the waves, and to spread a kind of tropical bloom over the far-shining expanse around it.

And then its history is as strange and marvellous as any tale of the Arabian Nights. It is the wildest romance turned into reality. Venice is the oldest State in Europe. The proudest modern empires are but of yesterday compared with it. When Britain was a howling wilderness, when London and Paris were insignificant towns, the Queen of the Adriatic was in the height of its glory. Macaulay says the Republic of Venice came next in antiquity to the Church of Rome. Thus he places it before all the kingdoms of Europe, being antedated only by that hoary Ecclesiastical Dominion, which (as he writes so eloquently in his celebrated review of Ranke's History of the Popes) began to live before all the nations, and may endure till that famous New Zealander "shall take his stand, in the midst of a vast solitude, on a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch the nuns of St. Paul's."

And this history, dating so far back, is connected with monuments still standing, which recall it vividly to the modern traveller. The church of St. Mark is a whole volume in itself. It is one of the oldest churches in the world, boasting of having under its altar the very bones of St. Mark, and behind it alabaster columns from the Temple of Solomon, while over its ancient portal the four bronze horses still stand proudly erect, which date at least from the time of Nero, and are perhaps the work of a Grecian sculptor who lived before the birth of Christ. And the Palace of the Doges—is it not a history of centuries written in stone? What grand spectacles it has witnessed in the days of Venetian splendor! What pomp and glory have been gathered within its walls! And what deliberations have been carried on in its council chambers; what deeds of patriotism have been there conceived, and also what conspiracies and what crimes! And the Prison behind it, with the Bridge of Sighs leading to it, does not every stone in that gloomy pile seem to have a history written in blood and tears?

But the part of Venice in European history was not only a leading one for more than a thousand years, but a noble one; it took the foremost place in European civilization, which it preserved after the barbarians had overrun the Roman Empire. The Middle Ages would have been Dark Ages indeed, but for the light thrown into them by the Italian Republics. It was after the Roman empire had fallen under the battle-axes of the German barbarians that the ancient Veneti took refuge on these low-lying islands, finding a defence in the surrounding waters, and here began to build a city in the sea. Its position at the head of the Adriatic was favorable for commerce, and it soon drew to itself the rich trade of the East. It sent out its ships to all parts of the Mediterranean, and even beyond the Pillars of Hercules. And so, century after century, it grew in power and splendor, till it was the greatest maritime city in the world. It was the lord of the waves, and in sign of its supremacy, it was married to the sea with great pomp and magnificence. In the Arsenal is shown the model of the Bucentaur, that gilded barge in which the Doge and the Senate were every year carried down the harbor, and dropping a ring of gold and gems (large as one of those huge doorknockers that in former days gave dignity to the portals of great mansions) into the waves, signified the marriage of Venice to the sea.[3] It was the contrast of this display of power and dominion with the later decline of Venetian commerce, that suggested the melancholy line,

"The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord."

But then Venice was as much mistress of the sea as England is to-day. She sat at the gates of the Orient, and