Montaigne arrived in Venice in 1580, and his remarks about the city and its inhabitants three centuries ago are quaint and entertaining. He was somewhat disappointed in the show places, but greatly interested in the people. He recorded that he hired for himself a gondola, which he was entitled to the use of, night and day, for two lire per diem, about seventeen sous, as he explained, including the boatman. Provisions here he found as dear as at Paris; but then, in other respects, he considered it the cheapest place in the world to live in, for the train of attendants which one required elsewhere was here altogether useless, everybody going about by himself, which made great saving in clothes; and, moreover, one had no occasion for horses. His stay here was very short. He said of Italy generally that he had never seen a country in which there were so few pretty women. And the inns he found far less convenient than those of France or Germany. The provisions were not half so plentiful, and not nearly so well dressed. The houses, too, in Italy were very inferior; there were no good rooms, and the large windows had no glass or other protection against the weather; the bedrooms were mere cabins, and the beds wretched pallets, running upon casters, with a miserable canopy over them; “and Heaven help him who cannot lie hard!”
Milton was in Venice in the months of April and May, 1639, but the only incident of his stay here which he recorded is that he shipped to England a number of books which he had collected in different parts of Italy; and some of these, we are told, by one who saw them later in the lodging-house in St. Bride’s Church-yard, London, were curious and rare, “including a chest or two of choice music-books from the best masters flourishing then in Italy.”
Among the volumes which Milton bought and studied in Venice was a history of the town, in Latin, printed by the Elzevirs in 1631. It contains the folding-plates of the Rialto, and of the interior of the Council Chamber of the Doges, which are reproduced here; and the well-preserved copy of the same work, bought behind the Cathedral by
THE RIALTO BRIDGE. AS SHYLOCK KNEW IT
the present chronicler, for a few lire, he highly prizes, as presenting views of the public places of Venice contemporary with The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and as, perhaps, having passed here through Milton’s own hands. It was the latest and most authentic chronicle of its kind when Venice received Milton on the bosoms of her canals.
John Evelyn came to Venice in the month of May, 1645, and, as he put it, as soon as he got ashore his portmanteaus were examined at the Dogana, and then he went to his lodging, which was at honest Signor Rhodomante’s, at the Black Eagle, near the Rialto, one of the best quarters of the town. The journey from Rome to Venice, he stated, cost him seven pistoles and thirteen julios. “Two days after, taking a gondola, which is their water-coach,” he said, “we rode up and down their canals, which answer to our streets. These vessels are built very long and narrow, having necks and tails of steel, somewhat spreading at the beak, like a fish’s tail, and kept so exceedingly polished as to give a great lustre.” His first visit was to the Rialto. “It was evening, and the canal where the Noblesse go to take the air, as in our Hyde Park, was full of ladies and gentlemen.... Next day I went to the Exchange, a place like ours, frequented by merchants, but nothing so magnificent.... Hence I passed through the Merceria, one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness of it [!]; and is all the way, on both sides, tapestried, as it were, with cloth of gold, rich damasks and other silks, which the shops expose and hang before their houses from the first floor; ... to this add the perfumes, apothecaries’ shops, and the innumerable cages of nightingales, which they keep, that entertain you with their melody from shop to shop, so that shutting your eyes you could imagine yourself in the country, when, indeed, you are in the middle of the sea.” Evelyn left Venice at the end of March, 1646.
Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice, speaks of “the hostelry of the Black Eagle, with its square door of marble deeply moulded in the outer wall, where we see the shadows of its