ENTRANCE TO THE MERCERIA
pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side.” This must not be confounded with Signor Rhodomante’s establishment, where Evelyn was entertained two centuries earlier. Evelyn’s Black Eagle, after many inquiries among the oldest residents of its neighborhood, and after much interesting and fluent interchange of bad Italian and worse English, was discovered to be the ancient house near the Rialto Bridge, now numbered 5238 Calle dei Stagneri, on the Ponte della Fava, and close to the Campo S. Bartolommeo, where stands the Goldoni statue. The house has retired to private life, and is, at present, the home of a practising lawyer in good standing.
Ruskin’s Black Eagle died an unnatural death in 1880, when a certain unusually narrow street was wiped out of existence, under the direction of a chief magistrate (whose name was Dante di Siego Alighieri), to make way for the broad avenue now known as the Street of the 22d of March. The inn was in a retired corner, but on the line of travel between the larger hotels and the Square of S. Moisè. Not a stone of it seems to be left in Venice now.
Ruskin himself, while preserving and polishing The Stones of Venice, was very fond of an old-fashioned modest little inn, called La Calcina, in the Zattere Quarter, on the corner of the Campiello della Calcina and by the bridge of the same name. Ruskin’s rooms were over the portico, looking out on the Giudecca Canal, and in fair weather he breakfasted and dined under the shadow of a pergola of vines in the very small garden in the rear of the house.
On the Zattere side of this hostelry, over a little gateway in a passage leading to the garden, is a tablet stating that here died the celebrated poet Apostolo Zeno, in 1750. He was born in Venice, eighty-two years before. He came of an old Venetian family, distinguished in the world of letters. He was a poet, “and the reformer and renovator” of the melodrama in Italy, and he wrote works of a serious as well as of a romantic character. His fine library is now a portion of the Library of St. Mark.
During another visit to Venice Ruskin lived in the house of Rawdon Brown (q. v.); and after Mr. Brown’s death he lodged at the Hotel Europa. All this information was gathered from his personal guide, who described him as “a very curious man, who looked at things with his eyes shut,” imitating, as he spoke, that half-closed-eyelid gaze of a near-sighted person so familiar to all normally visioned observers.
In what is now called the Casa Brown, a stone’s-throw from the Calcina Inn, and in the home of his warm friend and literary executor Mr. Horatio F. Brown, lived and worked, while in Venice, John Addington Symonds, and herefrom he went, in the spring of 1893, to Rome to die. Symonds’s apartments were on the lower floor of the house, which stands on the Bridge and Campiello Incurabili, of the Zattere. In the upper story were written Mr. Brown’s Venetian Studies, Life on the Lagoons, The Venetian Printing Press, etc.
Rawdon Brown lived and died in the Casa della Vida; S. Marcuolo—the address is taken from one of his own visiting-cards. He occupied the second and third floors of this house, which fronts upon the Grand Canal, nearly opposite the Church of S. Eustachio; and many of his contemporary Men of Letters, besides Ruskin, were here his guests. He bequeathed his apartments and their contents to two faithful old servants.