CHAPTER XXIII.
“Beautiful Venice.”
FROM Florence we went to Venice—eight days thereafter, to Bologna.
We “did” Venice leisurely and with great delight.
“The one place on the Continent that bored me!” I once heard a young lady declare at an American watering-place;—a sentiment heartily seconded by several others. “You can do everything there in two days!” continued the critic. “After that, it is the stupidest old hole in creation. I thought I should have died!”
Our friend, Miss M—- had been in Venice in December, and described the blackened fronts of palaces dripping and streaming with rain; low clouds excluding the sea-view; lead-colored drains where poets had seen canals, and a depressing silence through which the gondolier’s cry was like—“Bring out your dead!”
We were prepared to behold the ghost of a city, whispering hollowly of a sublime Past;—a monotonous succession of ditches washing the slimy foundations of crumbling walls;—almost the stillness and desolation of a desert. We left Florence on a hot day; the railway train was crowded; the long, dusty ride the least picturesque we had had in Italy. It was late in the afternoon when we alighted at the station-quay and saw our first gondola. It was wedged in with fifty others against the pier, so tightly that the manner of its extrication was a mystery. A bend of the gondolier’s wrist did it all. He had held up his hand, and Caput had nodded. In a minute more he had brought his craft close to our feet, and balanced himself by means of a long pole with a paddle at the end, while he raised his cap and offered his services. He had a family gondola, black as a hearse, a murderous-looking battle-axe, edge outward, fastened to the prow, and seats for six upon the cushions under a striped awning. Our luggage was quickly disengaged from the confused mass discharged from the baggage-car, and stowed away in the bows; we settled ourselves among the cushions and shot out into the canal out of sight and hearing of the noisy station.
We were in Venice! The Bride of the Sea! Venice of the Doges—of the thousand isles—of the cloudy-winged thousand years! Heat, dust, fatigue went out of our minds with the play of the cool air over our faces, the ripple of the salt-water under the keel of our boat. For this was also the Venice of our old-time poetic fancies—not the sad city photographed upon imagination by our friends’ descriptions. The lofty palaces were ancient, blurred and seamed, but not ruinous—the smooth sunniness of the canals allured the eye on to the sea, the highway and bulwark of the city. Groves of masts streaked it here and there, line and spar delicately defined against the flushing west. At longer intervals, government buildings or warehouses sat blackly upon the breast of the water, the tide lapping their thresholds twice a day. Purplish banks, lying close to the horizon in the hazy amber distances, were the lidi and murazzi—(sand hills and embankments)—protecting the Lagune from oceanic irruptions in tempestuous weather. All this was lost, presently, by the narrowing of the watery highway and closer line of buildings. The canals were dull tracks but for the tossing wake in the middle of each as our gondolier cleft a path with his long-armed sweep. His call before turning a corner was a guttural dissyllable, not easy of imitation. Poets—and Mark Twain—say gondoliers used to sing. We never heard them. Our Antonio, our first acquaintance, and our faithful boatman and guide until he deposited us at the station, the morning of our departure—could not sing a note. Nor could any of his professional brethren, he said.