These barks are still beautiful, and make more beautiful the waters on which they sail. Their bow still keeps that noble, subtle, and audacious curve which every artist loves. It is painted on either side with various designs fitted to carry the eye forward with the rush of the boat through the waters—angels blowing trumpets, the virgin leaning forward in impassioned listening—and these, in many colours, glimmer from far on the sight, and are often seen shining in the wave below. On the dark sails, of which there are two, the sun, the stars, angel heads, St. George and the Dragon, St. Anthony, the Virgin in glory, symbolic designs, a radiant sun, geometrical patterns, are painted in orange, blue and pale sea-green on the dark body of the sail, which is generally of deep red. The orange is most often introduced in bands or patterns among the red: and when the fishermen take pleasure in their coloured patterns, the blue, green, and white are added to the orange.
It is a wonderful sight to see these fishing barks drawn up along the great quay from the public gardens to the Ducal Palace, with all their sails hoisted after a stormy day, to dry in the gay sunlight. From end to end the long line burns with the colours of which the Venetian painters were so enamoured. It is as delightful to stand on the sea-wall on the Lido, near the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, where the lagoon opens into the Adriatic, and watch these barks coming in from the sea, one by one; glowing in the lovely light, changing the waters below into orange, red, and black, edged with gold. Sometimes, grouped into a mass, they cluster together in the deep places of the canals, or lie in a changing crowd together near the mouth of the Piave, nets, mast and sails one glow of shifting colour. Sometimes, when fine weather comes after the storm which has driven home the whole fleet, they all go out together, and the whole lagoon seems full of their glory, as pushing through the water-lanes, they cross one another and interweave a dance of colour and of freedom. Sometimes, as the sun sets, one of them, anchored alone, takes into the hollow of its sail the whole blaze of the globe of fire as it sinks over the Euganean hills.
These pictures are taken out of the realm of mere artistic pleasure by thoughts of the hard labour and the rough struggle of the fishers’ toil for wife and children as they sail on stormy Adria. Indeed, they are as full of humanity as of beauty. They have also the charm of historical sentiment. The first fugitives to Rialto saw these barks much as we see them. The builders of the city, its early merchants and warriors, its voyagers and artists, the Dukes that fought the son of Charles the Great, or harried the nests of the Dalmatian pirates, or subdued the Orient; the ambassadors who sued or defied the Senate, visitors from every quarter of the globe, the luxurious wretches who degraded, and the cowardly crew who sold Venice; the patriots who defended her; those who mourned under the yoke of Austria, those who rejoiced in the great deliverance—one and all have looked with many a thought that charmed their heart upon the fishing boats of Venice. With them Venice began; by them she has been fed from the beginning even until now. They are a vital part of her sea charm.
The live lagoon itself is of endless interest. It has quite a little population of its own. Boys and men, clothed only in a loose shirt, and with the glowing skin the sun and sea create, move to and fro over the shallow spaces fishing for sea-spoil, sometimes white against the purple arch of the stormy sky, sometimes like a pillar of rose in the setting sun; and their slow, unremitting labour, which means for them no more than an escape from starvation, makes one ashamed to think so much of beauty, unless we bind it up with the trouble of the world.
A livelier, more comfortable population is that of the birds. I have only seen gulls in the lagoon, but they fly, in great delight and with less talk than in the north, about the cluster of islands near Torcello, and feed in flocks over the shallows when the tide leaves the sea-grasses bare; animating, enlivening the desolate shores, and gossiping so gaily that for the moment of our notice of them, it is hard to believe that a thousand years of the rise, the glory and the decay of a great people have been represented on the waters and the islands they make their pasture and their playground.
The islands in the lagoon are full of charm. I do not speak of Torcello or Burano, the first of which is famous in the pages of Ruskin, and the other inhabited by a crowd of fisher-folk and lace-makers; or of those closely knit to Venice itself, such as Murano, San Giorgio, or those of the Giudecca; nor even of San Michele, where the dead of Venice lie washing in the water; though it was once a place I visited every week when the small blue butterfly was born. The old wall was still there and its decayed brickwork, and I used to fancy that the souls of the dead were in the azure insects that never ceased to flit in whirling, silent flight among the wild grass and over the tombstones of that solitary place—souls so small, so courteous to one another, so beautiful in colour and in movement that I thought the charm of the sea had entered into their nature, that they desired to charm, but were unconscious of their charm.
Among the islands, though perhaps it cannot justly be called an island, The Lido claims the greater interest. It extends, right opposite to Venice, for five miles—a long low ridge of heaped-up sand, a quarter of a mile broad—from San Nicolo to Malamocco. It is the chief guard of Venice from the Adriatic. At each end is a passage to the open sea whose dark blue waves break on the white, brown, and yellow sand of its sea-ward side; on the other, the ripples of the lagoon lap the low wall which looks out on Venice across the quiet water. At the northern end stands the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, one of the patron Saints of the city; in its apse the Venetians lodged the bones of the saint they had stolen with all the cleverness of Ulysses. His spirit watched for their welfare and defended the great port of their town. At a short distance from the Church we come to the very point of the Lido. Opposite is the Fort of San Andrea and the long island of San Erasmo, the first of a succession of Lidi curving inwards like a bow to the mainland near the mouth of the Piave, and sheltering Torcello, Burano and other islands in the northern lagoon. In days gone by, this succession of low-lying shores was clothed with pines—as the coral islands of the Pacific are with palms—a dark, green, narrow, flower-haunted wood, which, rising as it were out of the breast of the sea, must have charmed the mind with a hundred fantasies. Not a tree of it is left, though the soil is rich and fertile. Between San Erasmo and the Lido the deep sea-channel opens out to Adria—an historic strait of waters—through which a thousand thousand ships have gone out for war and trade and pleasure in all the splendour of the past, and returned with music, victory and treasure. It was through this opening that the Doge, attended by all the warriors, ecclesiastics, counsellors, statesmen and great merchants of Venice, in his gorgeous galley, moved by some hundred oars, and surrounded by all the boats of Venice, with music, and shouting and triumph, went forth to wed the sea, and dropped along with holy-water his ring over the stern with equal humility and pride. It was here that on a night of furious storm the three great saints who cared for the safety of the Republic, St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicolas, delivered Venice from the demon-ship which was bringing from the sea pestilence and destruction on the faithful city. Everyone knows the legend, and a noble picture in the Accademia tells the story of how the fisherman—whose boat St. Mark had hired to take him at dead of night through a roaring gale to San Giorgio Maggiore and then to San Nicolo—brought to the Doge in the morning the ring St. Mark, before he embarked on this expedition, had taken from the treasury of his Church. “Give that,” he said, as returning, he landed on the Piazzetta, “to the Doge, and bid him send it back to my Church.” And the Doge, knowing the ring, believed the story of the night. Nor is this the only record in art of the legend. There is an unfinished picture attributed to Giorgione of the three Saints in their fishing boat meeting at the mouth of the Lido the ship of hell, and repelling it with the Cross. The sea is tossed into violent surges, huge masses edged with fiery foam, over which the deep-bellied purple clouds are driven by the tempest. The demons man the racing ship that seems to shiver as it is suddenly stayed in the very entrance of the port. Clouds and sea in raging storm, lit by the flashing of the lightning in the collied night, are represented in so modern a manner, and with so modern a feeling for nature, that it seems as if Turner’s spirit had entered into the pencil of Giorgione.
So wild a sea is rarely seen breaking on the Lido. On the whole, the long low shore, save when the Scirocco drives the sand in a river through the air, is peaceful enough; and there are few chords of colour stranger or more strangely attractive than the dark sapphire sea leaping in joy and with the sound of trampling horses on the pale yellow belt of sand fringed with the green meadows, with acacia, maize, and fig trees, with the pale leaves of the Canne, and with the low plants, sea-holly, dry reeds, and thistles which grow on the edge of the sand where the last breath of the foam-drift plays upon them—blue, yellow, and various green, mingling together, for so it often seemed to me, into a mystic harmony.
The meadows near San Nicolo, dotted with low acacia shrub, are lovely—a place of beloved repose and beauty. Between them and the landing stage at Sant’ Elisabetta was once the rude neglected Jewish Cemetery. The grave-stones are all collected now and placed within an ugly walled-space with a small chapel, and an iron-railed gate. No history, no sentiment can collect round this hideous enclosure. It was but right and reverent to redeem the tombstones from careless neglect; but it might have been done with some feeling for beauty. When first I knew Venice, the grave-stones lay entangled and overgrown with tall lush grasses, dwarf acacias white with blossom, and wild-flowers. In spring the daffodils were gay and golden there; in summer the wild rose threw its trailers and its starry flowers over their desolation. Some stones stood erect, others had fallen. The flat stones lay at every angle; and on all of them long inscriptions in Hebrew recorded the love and honour paid to the departed by the persecuted race, who were forced to lay their dead on this wild and uninhabited shore. The place was full of history. It symbolised the unhappy fortunes of the race in the days of enmity and persecution. Here Shylock and Tubal, I thought, were housed at last. Here rested many a Jew, whose life was as noble as that of Shylock was base. The flowers had taken care of them, and woven over them a web of beauty. Nature had repaired the cruelty and intolerance of man. I should have bought the whole ground and surrounded it with a low wall, had I been a Jew; and tended the flowers, and left the place to itself. The birds and the insects loved it. It was as pathetic as it was beautiful.
Beyond it is the Church of St. Elizabeth where the bathers land. Five minutes’ walk takes one across from the lagoon to the seashore, bordered by hillocks of shifting sand “matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,” and itself close to the blue incoming of the waves, luminous with shells, and hard enough to ride on with a great pleasure, such pleasure as Byron and Shelley had day by day