The sea-charm of Venice

by Stopford A. Brooke

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

Their very peaks transparent.

Again and again I have seen this apparent transparency of the peaks. That Shelley recorded it is one example of how closely he observed nature, and how accurately he recorded her doings. Much more might be said of the islands; but this seems enough. Each of them, right away to the Piave on one side and to Chioggia on the other, has its history, its religion, and its ruin.

Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of the lagoon is sailing on it. A gondola is scarcely a safe boat to sail, except in a following wind. It has no keel, and it turns over easily, but with one of the great oars behind it steers steadily. Once, with two rowers, I took more than two hours to row from Venice to Torcello against the wind. I sailed back in forty minutes. The lagoon was rough with short tossing waves edged with foam, indescribably fresh and gay. The long boat, with its flat bottom, flew over the surface of four or five waves together, at a torrent speed. I never was so conscious of swiftness, and the boat itself was alive beneath, all its will in its movement, pulling and leaping like an Arab steed. This was delightful; nor is it less delightful, having made friends with the owners of one of the larger boats, to sail up and down the sea-streets of the lagoon, when the wind is fresh and the tide running fast, and the night is dark, save for glimpses of the hurrying moon. The steersman is silent, the sky is silent, the soul itself is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind in the sail and the water round the rushing prow, and these sounds deepen the silence. That which men feel who stand sentinel on the bow of a ship in the midst of the great Oceans, one may feel here close to a busy town. And in the vast solitude and peace the infinite Spirit of Nature comes home to our spirit, and we feel our own infinity.

But quiet is not always the seal of the lagoon. I have seen it tormented and torn with wind, so ravaged that it was impossible to cross from the Piazzetta to San Giorgio Maggiore, so furious that the waves leaped up the quay and ran along the pavement to the space between the orient pillars whence St. Theodore and the Lion of St. Mark watch over the heart of Venice. Nor can I refrain from telling here what once I saw of deadly storm out on the lagoon close by the island of St. James of the Marsh. We had been rowing back from Torcello under a terrible sky, very lofty, of dark purple cloud, smooth as the inside of a cup. Across this, in incessant play, the lightning fled to and fro, not in single flashes, but in multitudes at the same time, ribbons and curling streamers and branching trees of white violet and crimson light. So far away and high they were that the thunder of their movement sent no sound to us. Towards the Alps a white arch seemed to open under the pall of cloud, and in it were whirlings of vapour. The gondolier bent forward and said—We must take refuge. We must land at the island. I laughed, and said—No, we will go on; and I heard him mutter to himself—These English have no fear. And then I thought that he was certain to know far more than I of the lagoon, and I turned and said: “It is not courage we have, but ignorance; do what you think right”; and we drew the boat to the landing of San Giacomo, and crossed the little island to the rampart that looked forth to the mainland; and then, issuing out of the white wrath that seemed to dwell in the cloud-arch, a palm tree of pale vapour formed itself and came with speed. It reached the lagoon near Mestre, and towered out of it to the heaven, its ghostly pillar relieved against the violet darkness of the sky, its edge as clear as if cut down by a knife, and about a yard apparently in breadth. It came rushing across the lagoon, driven by the Spirit of wind which within whirled and coiled its column into an endless spiral. The wind was only in it; at its very edge there was not a ripple; but as it drew near our island it seemed to be pressed down on the sea, and, unable to resist the pressure, opened out like a fan in a foam of vapour. Then, with a shriek which made every nerve thrill with excitement, the imprisoned wind leaped forth, the sea beneath it boiled, and the island, as the cloud of spray and wind smote it, trembled like a ship struck by a great wave. Then the whirlwind fled on to Burano and smote the town. Next morning a number of persons were brought into the Hospital at Venice who had been wounded by the whirl-storm. There is wild weather in Venice and on its waters.

I have known Venice so dark under black wind and rain that it was impossible to read at three in the afternoon in August. I have stood on the Rialto in so heavy a snowstorm that not a single boat crossed the empty, desolate river of the Grand Canal. The palaces were clear in the cold light, their marbles shining in the wet. The tiled roofs were white with snow, and the dark ranges of gondolas moored to the quays were relieved by the snow that lay thickly upon them. The Campaniles rose out of the mist with a touch of snow on their windward side. A gloomier sight, a more unhappy day I never saw. Yet even in this wild weather Venice wore her beauty like a robe and exercised her incessant fascination. I have walked over the Piazza, crunching through the ice that covered its inundated marbles. I have sheltered from the furious rain and wind of a roaring Scirocco under the door of the Hospital in the Square of SS. John and Paul, and seen through the driving slant of rain Colleone proudly reining in his horse, his bâton in his hand, his noble casque outlined like a falcon, and his eager and adventurous face in profile against the dun sky. He looked as he may have looked many a time, leading his men, when wild weather was roving over Lombardy.

I have felt as if the very waters trembled, like the palaces, with the appalling roar and shattering clash of such a thunderstorm as I have never known elsewhere; but the most impressive aspect of savage weather is when, in tremendous rain, one stands sheltered under the colonnade, at the corner where the Piazzetta turns into the Piazza. The enormous roof of St. Mark’s, and that of the Procuratie, collect the rain and pour it forth by the great spouts more than a yard in length which project over the pavement from the parapets. From each of these, from hundreds of them, a cataract leaps like a tigress, and falls resounding on the pavement. The noise is deafening, the pavement is half a foot deep in turbulent water, the wind screams, the men are blown across the square, the gondolas rock at the steps and beat against the piles, the thunder roars till the two giant columns, where St. Theodore and the Lion stand in proud serenity, seem to shake, and through the black sap of rain, the lightning flares the Ducal Palace into momentary colour. It is a sight, a sound, not to be forgotten. Tintoret, with his sympathy for the wild work of nature, has seized and recorded this in his picture of the bearing of the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria. The Alexandrian Square he has made into the Piazzetta of Venice. The rain is falling in torrents, the waterspouts cascade to the pavement. The pavement is so deep in the running water that it is looped around the legs of the bearers of the body, fiercely swirling. It is a splendid picture of a Venetian storm, and in the background of it, that we may not lose the sea, the waves of the lagoon are breaking over the quay.

But these impressions are endless. In other towns there is some constancy in the doings of nature. The general aspect of the weather is much the same for a month at a time. In Venice not a day passes without many changes. The various and mutable sea-goddess has her own wild and fickle way with her peculiar people.

Once more, before I leave the lagoon and the islands, I will record a day I spent, when partly by gondola and partly walking, I made the circuit of Venice in pursuit of her sea-charm. Early in the morning I left the Piazzetta and rowed down the Riva dei Schiavoni till I reached the public gardens. Their sea-wall dipped from a path shaded by acacias, thick with white blossom in the spring, into the lagoon, and at the point of the peninsula the gardens make, I looked south along the quay into the very mouth of the Grand Canal, with the Palace and the Campanile on one side, and the Church of the Salute and of St. Giorgio on the other, a glorious group of buildings which seemed to borrow splendour and delight in their own existence from the dancing, sparkling, rippling, glancing, laughing water which surrounded them. It was like an Empire’s gate, and the Empire was the Empire of the Sea. Right opposite, between me and the Lido, lay the Island of Sant’ Elena, like a jewel of emerald and pearl set in the blue enamel of the sea. Its little church was nestled in trees, and over its sea-wall hung dark green and tangled boughs of ilex, and pale acacia, and the golden wealth of fig trees; and all along the parapet roses trailed and the gadding vine, and scented the sweet soft wind. I little thought that, as I write now, there would not be left one trace of all this beauty. I rowed out to it there and landed. The church was used as a granary, but beside it the tiny cloister was still exquisite even in its ruin—paved with marble and brick; its small Gothic arches and the roofs of its remaining rooms garmented and entangled with roses. A carved well stood in the centre, and all around the low wall of the arcades, every leaf and flower gleaming in the sunlight, tall oleanders, pink and white, grew in deep red pots of clay—a place so fair, so sweet and solitary, so noiseless save for the bees, that the delicate soul of St. Francis, whose was the church, would have prayed in it with joy, and praised the Lord who made the world so lovely.

Then I rowed round the wall of the Arsenal to San Pietro di Castello. Behind that church and the Arsenal is the most wretched part of Venice, where the people are poorest and wildest, and the lanes most unkempt and uncared for. Yet it was here, on this outlying island, that for many centuries the Cathedral of Venice claimed the reverence of the city. The old church has long perished, and its unhappy successor stands now in a deserted square with plots of dry and melancholy grass where the fishermen dry their nets, nor has it any dignity or beauty of its own. But I loved the place for its loneliness, and for its wide view across the shining lagoon to the misty plain of the mainland, and beyond to the “eagle-baffling” rampart of the Alps. That wide-expanding view is no longer visible, for the Arsenal has been extended, and shut out its glory. The square is now quite desolate, but it is still worth visiting for its associations. Here every year the Brides of Venice were dowered by the State; here their ravishment by the pirates took place. It was Magnus, Bishop of Altinum, that set up here the first Church of Venice, the same Magnus to whom the Lord appeared in vision and told him to build a Church (St. Salvador) in the midst of the city on a plot of ground above which he should see a red cloud rest. A different vision built San Pietro. St. Peter himself appeared to Magnus and commanded him to set up a Church in his name, where he should find on Rivo Alto oxen and sheep feeding on the meadows. The grass of the Campo still recalls the ancient legend.