The beautiful little Gothic Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, built in the Fourteenth Century and done over at the end of the Nineteenth, on the right bank of the Grand Canal, going towards the Rialto, and near the Grand Hotel, seems to have no excuse, either from tradition or from any confusion of names, for calling itself “the House of Desdemona” at all. Its only dramatic interest to-day consists in the fact that it has been the home of Signora Eleonora Duse, the leading actress of Italy, who is called by her admirers the Italian Sara Bernhardt, although she has genius enough of her own to warrant her being compared with no one but herself.
And thus perish, at the hands of a transatlantic, present-day iconoclast and grubber after the truth, two of the most cherished of the Landmarks of Venice.
Mr. Hare is of the opinion that the Doge Christoforo Moro, buried in the Church of S. Giobbe in the Canareggio District, is the Moro of the Othello legend, although he died in 1470, almost half a century before Signor Tassini married him to Desdemona; and his tomb, in the chancel of the church, as Mr. Hare points out, “is ornamented with the moro or mulberry, which was his family device.” It will be remembered that Othello inherited from his mamma a handkerchief spotted with strawberries (mulberries?) which played an important part in the great tragedy of his life.
Christoforo Moro lies under a large flat stone in front of the altar of the church. The slab has been greatly defaced by the tread of generations of priests and of acolytes, but its carvings still bear distinct traces of fruits which to-day look as much like strawberries as mulberries, while certain of their leaves are decidedly of the strawberry form. A portrait of Doge Moro hangs in the sacristy of S. Giobbe. It exhibits a face in which there are no signs of the duskiness which dramatic tradition has given to Othello during all these years, but which is hard enough to have silenced the most dreadful belle who ever frighted the isle from its propriety.
Mr. Hare also explains that a story very like to that of Shakspere’s Othello was told
THE OTHELLO HOUSE
in the seventh novella of the third decade of Giovanni Battista Cinthio’s collection of stories, called the Ecatomiti, in which the name of the heroine is the same, and in which the original Iago suggested to Othello that a stocking filled with sand might be an admirable weapon against his wife if it were judiciously applied to her back. Mr. Hare quotes Bishop Bollani as writing in 1602, June 1st: “The day before yesterday, a Sanudo, living in the Rio della Croce, on the Giudecca, compelled his wife, a lady of the Cappello family, to go to confession, and the following night, towards the fifth hour, plunged a dagger into her heart and killed her. It is said that she had been unfaithful to him, but the voice of her neighborhood proclaimed her a saint.”
The voice of the gallery has proclaimed Desdemona a saint ever since!