Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

by M. F. Mansfield

Though it doesn’t look it, the gondola is the most manageable craft propelled by man. It snakes in and out of crooked waterways and comes to a landing with far less fuss than anything ever pushed by steam or gasoline. All the same they are not as swift, though their pace is astonishing when one considers their bulk and weight.

It has been the fashion to laud the sweet idealism of the gondola and all that appertains thereto, not forgetting the gondolier, but when one has heard that backwater sailor’s cajoleries and cadences beneath his window for most of the long night one’s views in the morning will be considerably modified. “Cousin of my dog!” the gondolier will call his gondola, “Owl!” “Idiot!” “Sheriff of the Devil!” “Silly Ass!” “Miscreant of Rhodes!” and “Bag of Bones.” Such epithets shouted full and strong, if only to an inanimate gondola, will take a good deal of idealism out of nature.

With the Venetian palaces and churches and canals rank in popular interest its great piazzas. The importance of these great open spaces in the daily life of the people of the island city cannot be overestimated. Gaiety, noise and life are the characteristics of each, whether one is at San Marco or on the Rialto.

Gastronomical delights in Italy are largely of one’s own choosing. At Venice, where, of Italian cities, the tourist is most largely catered to, one may fare well or ill.

It’s a great experience to sit at one of the little tables at Florian’s, or at the Aurora on the opposite side of the Piazza of San Marco, and leisurely enjoy the spectacle spread out before one. At any time of the day or night it is the most burning, feverish spot in all the Venetian archipelago, though at midday, it is true, the sun-baked Piazza is deserted, even by the pigeons.

In the afternoon, as the shadows lengthen, and a slim suspicion of a sea-breeze wafts in from the lagunes, it is fairyland, peopled, if not with fairyfolk, at least with as conglomerate a horde as may be seen in Europe. As a performance the piece were almost worthy of its setting; it is a burlesque and a comedy of manners in one. If only you are “out of season,” when the English and Americans and Germans are still by their own firesides, and the cast of characters is made up of the peoples of the south and east, the comedy is all the more amusing, and you sip its charms as you sip your coffee and forget that such a personage as Baedeker ever existed. Usually tourists come to the Piazza, after they have done the surrounding stock sights, to buy two soldi-worth of maize and feed the pigeons. They would do better to watch the passing show from the vantage point of a little table at Florian’s.

Besides its treasures of art and architecture, one of the sights of Venice is Florian’s, celebrated for a hundred and fifty years. The specialty of Florian’s is the sabaion doro, made with the yellow of an egg and a small glass of Malaga. It is not bad, but it is a ladies’ drink, for it is sweet. The sorbets, the café turc’ and the vanilla chocolates of the establishment, with the aforementioned golden concoction, have placed it in the very front rank among establishments of its class. It remains open, or did a few years ago, all night. At five o’clock each morning, as the daylight gun went off from the fortress of the Lido, Florian’s put up its shutters, only to open just before midday.

The names of the great who have gathered within the walls of this famous café, and left memories behind them, would fill a long roster. Chateaubriand, Manzoni, Byron, Cimarosa, Canova, Léopold-Robert, Alfred de Musset, Balzac and others, many, many others. And many have left behind written souvenirs of their visit.

One thing the stranger to Venice will remark, and that is that here, as much as in any other place in Italy, one is pestered nearly to distraction with the little “extras” of their hotel bills, of the too-importunate guides, of door-openers and door shutters, of guardians of all ranks, of men and boys who call your gondola for you, and of mendicant ragamuffins by profession, or merely because occasion offered and you looked like an “easy mark.” It is the one blight on Venice.

The modest inns of other days have given way to the demands of a more exacting clientèle, but those who would follow Alfred de Musset and George Sand from the Palace of the Doges to the Hotel Danieli will have no trouble in getting a lodging in that hostelry. Or they may prefer to follow the footsteps of Chateaubriand (who in truth was anticipating a rendezvous with the Duchesse de Berry) to the neighbouring Hotel de l’Europe.