Views and Opinions

by Ouida

After the outrage to Rome, the injury done to Venice is the most irreparable, the most inexcusable.

The wanton destruction of the island of Saint Elena is, after the destruction of the Ludovisi and other historic gardens in Rome, the most disgraceful act of the sacrilege of modern Italy. It is barbarism without one shadow of excuse or plea of obligation. This loveliest isle had been spared by all hostile fleets and armies. It lies at the very mouth of the lagoon opening out from the Grand Canal. It arrests the eyes of all who go to and fro the Lido. It was, a little while ago, a little paradise of solitude, fragrance and beauty. Its thickets of wild rose, of jessamine, and of myrtle, were filled with song-birds. Its old church, the oldest in the Veneto, stood, grey and venerable, amidst the shade of green acacias and flowering oleanders. The little world of blossom and of melody, hung between the sea and sky, had a holiness, a pathos, a perfection of woodland loveliness not to be told in words; there no sound was heard except the bells of the matins and vespers, the lapping of the waves, the whir of the white gulls’ wings, and the echo of some gondolier’s boating song. To sit in its quiet cloisters, with the fragrance of its wild gardens all around, and see the sun set beyond Venice, and the deep rose of evening spread over the arch of the skies and the silver plain of the waters, was to live a little while in the same world that Giorgione and Veronese knew. It seems like a vision of a nightmare to find these cloisters levelled and these gardens and trees destroyed; the whole island made a grimy, smoking mound of clay and ruins. Yet thus it is. The government has chosen to make it a site for a factory and foundry; and, not content with this defilement, is throwing up, upon it and beside it, acres of the stinking sand and clay dredged up from the canals, intending in due time to cover this new soil with other factories and foundries, full in the face of the Ducal Palace, a few furlongs from the Piazza of St Mark. Viler devastation was never more iniquitously or more unpardonably wrought.

Meantime the very commonest care is refused to such interesting and priceless houses as the House of the Camel, which is let out to a number of poor and dirty tenants, with its eponymus alto-relievo made the target for the stones of the children; while in the same quarter of the Madonna dell’ Orta, close at hand, a manufacturer is allowed to send the mouths of his steam-tubes hissing through the iron arabesques and between the carved foliage of a most noble Gothic doorway belonging to a deserted church.

I am aware that it is useless to protest against these things. The soul in the country is withered up by small greeds. All these irreparable injuries are done that municipal councillors may pocket some gain, and any stranger who has the money necessary can purchase from the Conscript Fathers of the hour the right to defile, to annex, to violate, to destroy the fairest and most sacred places in Italy. The goddess is given over to the ravishing of any boor who brings a money-bag.

The scholar, the poet, the archæologist are all abhorred in modern Italy; their protests are impatiently derided, their reverence is contemptuously ridiculed, their love of art, of nature, or of history, is regarded as a folly, ill-timed and inconvenient, lunatic and hysterical. But the new-comer who proposes a machine, a chimney, a monster hotel, a bubble company, or a tramway station, is welcomed with open arms; it is considered that he means ‘progress,’ i.e., that he means a subsidy for some one, a general scramble for gold pieces.

Emile de Lavaleye has demonstrated, in his recent Lettres d’ Italie, that these works in Venice, so fatal to the city, cannot ever result in any financial profit; that, with coal forty francs a ton, it is impossible they should ever bring any; that all industry of the kind is artificial and pernicious in Italy, and ends in impoverishing the many to enrich a few.

It is a wanton love of destruction which can alone lead a people who possess neither iron nor coal to make foundries and factories in Venice, the most lovely and luminous city of the sea. These works cannot be ever profitable at Venice, by reason of the immense cost of the transport there of the metals and combustibles necessary for their development. Yet in every direction their foul smoke is rising, and dimming that translucent air so dear to every painter from Carpaccio to Aïvarnovski. From the Zattere alone no less than fourteen factory chimneys are visible.

The Fondamenté Nuové was in the days of the Doges the riva, consecrated to the villas and pleasure-gardens of the Venetian nobles; their palaces were only for winter habitation or ceremonious use, but the beautiful garden-houses facing Murano were their retreat for mirth, ease and recreation of all kinds, with nothing between them and the silvery lagoon except the clouds of foliage and of blossom which then covered these little isles. Nothing would have been easier than to make this shore now what it was then, and it would even have been undoubtedly profitable to have done so. Will it be credited that, instead, it has been selected as the especial site of gas-works and iron-works and all abominations of stench and smoke, whilst, instead of the laughing loveliness of flowering lawns leaning to touch the sea, there is a long and dreary brick embankment, on which you can walk if you choose, and recall, if you can, the ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’?

‘La lumière de Venise‘ has been the theme of all poets and the enchantment of all travellers for centuries; that opal-hued, translucent, ethereal light has been the wonder of every wanderer who has found himself in the enchantment of its silvery radiance. ’On nage dans la lumière,’ is the just expression of Taine, to describe the exquisite effulgence of the light in Venice. Yet this wonder, this delight, this gift of Nature from sea and sky, the modern masters of the fate of Venice deliberately sacrifice, that a few greedy commercial adventurers may set up their chimneys on the shores consecrated to St Mark.

The Venetian populace have still in themselves a sense of colour and a passion for verdure; in every little calle and at every traghetto an acacia grows and a vine climbs; on the sails of the fishing and fruit boats there are painted figures, and in the garb of those who steer them there is still picturesque choice of form and hue. But in the Venetian municipality, as in every other Italian municipality, all taste is dead, all shame is dead with it; and the only existence, the only passion, left in their stead, are those of gain and of destruction. On the Giudecca hideous factories, which belch out the blackest of smoke close to the dome of the Church of the Redentore, have been allowed to pollute the atmosphere and disgrace the view; and in every shed or outhouse where anyone has a fancy to stick up the iron tube of an engine, similar smoke passes forth, making day frightful and clouding the lagoon for miles.