as his. But the fact that there still exists a letter addressed to Gregoropoulos at the little narrow Calle del Pistor, close by, and written while Gregoropoulos was employed by Aldus as corrector of Greek manuscript and Greek proof, would seem to imply that the famous printing-press may have stood in the latter street, if such a gutter can be called a street at all. It resembles no thoroughfares elsewhere in the world except the closes of Edinburgh; but it is not unlikely to have been the scene of the birth of the Aldines so dearly prized by the bookworms of to-day. The original Aldus is believed to have settled in Venice about 1488. As Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement remarks, he was no mere printer; and although it is by that name now that he is most frequently regarded, he was a scholar before he was a printer, and he became a printer because of his scholarship. Concerning the many troublesome visitors to his place of business who went there to gossip and to kill their time, Aldus wrote, upon a later establishment: “We make bold to admonish such, in classical words, in a sort of edict placed over our door, ‘Whoever you are, Aldo requests you, if you want anything ask for it in a few words and depart, unless, like Hercules, you come to lend the aid of your shoulders to the weary Atlas. Here will always be found, in that case, something for you to do, however many you may be.’”
Aldo Pio transferred the business in, or about, 1506 to the Campo S. Paternian, now called the Campo Manin; and there he lived and printed good books and good literature, succeeded by his son and his grandson. A very modern Bank for Savings now occupies the site of this establishment, and covers the entire back of the square. But a marble tablet of recent date, placed on its side, bears an inscription to the effect that “Aldo Pio, Paolo, and Aldo II., Manuzio, Princes in the Art of Typography in the Sixteenth Century, diffused, with classic books from this place, a new light of cultured wisdom”; the translation being by Dr. Alexander Robertson. This Campo S. Paternian house was probably that which bore the inscription quoted above, and relating to Atlas and the intellectual Hercules.
According to tradition, a certain Hercules named Erasmus came, in 1506, to lend his shoulder to the support of the load; and found something to do. Erasmus in the workshop of Aldus, printing, perhaps, his own Adages, is a picture for a poet or a painter to conjure with. Venice in all its glory never saw a greater sight.
Luther is known to have passed through Venice a few years later than this. He is supposed to have lodged in the cloisters of the Church of S. Stefano here, on his way to Rome, and to have celebrated mass at its high altar. S. Stefano is near the square of the same name, and it is not otherwise particularly distinguished. It dates back to the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Fourteenth Century.
Another Hercules, as great in his way as was Erasmus, lent the aid of his shoulders to the weary Atlas of the Aldine Press in the Sixteenth Century; to wit, Paolo Sarpi, Scholar, Scientist, Philosopher, Statesman, Author, and Martyr, whom Gibbon called “the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent,” and who is called by his present-day biographer, Dr. Robertson, “the greatest of Venetians.”
Sarpi was born in Venice, in 1552; he was educated in Venice; in Venice he spent the better part of his life; in Venice he died; and in Venice he was very much buried. He was brutally stabbed by hired assassins while crossing the Ponte dei Pugni, in 1607; but he recovered, and did not surrender his indomitable soul until 1623.
Sarpi’s posthumous fate for two centuries was an exceedingly restless one. His body was interred originally at the foot of an altar in the Servite Church here, with which he was intimately associated. In 1624 the Servite friars, warned of an intended desecration of his grave, removed his bones to a secret place in their monastery. The next year they carried them back to the church. In 1722 they were removed to still another part of the same church. In 1828, the whole establishment having become a ruin, Sarpi’s bones were carried to the Seminary belonging to, and adjoining, S. Maria della Salute. They were next transferred to a private house in the parish of S. Biagio; then they were kept, for a time, in the Library of Saint Mark, in the Doge’s Palace, and finally they were placed under a slab, near the main entrance of the Church of S. Michele, on the Cemetery Island of that name, where, after having been once more disturbed, in 1846, it is to be hoped they will be permitted to rest.
The church of the Servites no longer exists. A fragment of its ancient wall and two fine old door-ways, however, are still left. The main entrance, long ago bricked up, remains to-day, with one other old gate, which was the entrance to the monastery; and that is all. The larger portion of the site of the foundation is a flower garden; a modern chapel, dedicated in 1894, occupies a small corner of the ground. And the rest is an industrial school for poor girls, from seven to twenty-one years of age, who here, without cost to themselves, are educated for a self-supporting, useful life; as noble a monument as Paolo Sarpi could wish or have. The remains of the church of the Servites may be reached by the Rio di S. Fosca; and they stand in the parish of S. Maria dell’ Orto. Here Sarpi wrote his almost countless works, from a Treatise on the Interdict, and a History of Ecclesiastical Benefices, to the History of the Uscocks, a band of pirates who infested the Dalmatian coast.
An elaborate statue of Sarpi, erected in 1892, is in the Campo Fosca, near the scene of his attempted murder, and on his direct way between his cloistered home and the Ducal Palace. The Greatest of the Venetians stands, in monumental bronze, with his face to the street and his back to the canal, and in figure as well as in features he suggests in many ways the younger, and the greater, of the D’Israelis, with whom, except in nationality, he had so little in common.
The D’Israelis, it will be remembered, were descended from a line of prosperous Jewish merchants who had lived here in the days when Venice was still, in a measure,