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PART II

“They might chirp and chaffer, come and go
For pleasure or profit, her men alive—
My business is hardly with them I trow,
But with the empty cells of the human hive;
—With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch,
The church’s apsis, aisle or nave,
Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch,
Its face set full for the sun to shave.”
—Browning.

SECTION I
Arrival—The Piazza

THAT traveller will best attune himself to the peculiar charm of Venice, who arrives after sunset, when evening has veiled the somewhat unlovely approach to the city by railway. For the great lagoon State ever set her face to the sea and adorned herself to welcome her guests as they were rowed from Fusina, or as they sailed up from the Adriatic, to land at the Molo, the chief landing-stage by the Piazzetta. The modern visitor arriving by train is like one who should enter a stately mansion by the stables. Once, however, in his gondola, the “black Triton” of the lagoons, gliding along the waterways to the strangers’ quarter by lines of houses and palaces, whose walls, timeworn or neglected, sometimes degraded, will be mellowed under the dim light of the infrequent lamps, he will be caught by the spell which Venice casts over those who come to her.

But there are two Venices: the Venice of the canals and the Venice of the streets. The traveller will do well therefore to go on foot to some of the sights he would see, for by no other means can he do justice to the varied beauty of the streets, the quaint fragmentary remains of ancient architecture, the brilliant patches of colour, the little shrines, and all the countless details that go to make the by-ways of the city so full of surprise and pleasure to the pedestrian. The difficulty of finding one’s way from point to point has been greatly exaggerated. Anyone with a map and a normal sense of direction can with a little patience reach his destination. The churches are usually situated on or near a campo; a stream of people will generally be found passing along the streets and over the bridges between the campi, and a well-worn track marks the more frequented ways. If he should find himself blocked by a canal or a blind alley, a short deviation to the right or left will generally lead to one of the 380 bridges by which, to use Evelyn’s picturesque phrase, the city is tacked together. Even if hopelessly lost, a soldino given to a boy will soon bring him to where he would go. The waterways, 150 in all, are divided into canali and rii. The canale is the broader, the rio the narrower stream. The rii are by far the greater in number. But the pedestrian is more concerned with street nomenclature. A fondamenta is a way alongside a canale or rio; a calle is a street with houses on either side; ruga or rughetta (French rue, ruelle) was first applied to streets with a few new houses here and there; the appellation was retained in later times when the houses or shops became continuous; a salizzada is one of the earliest of the paved streets, generally near a church; a rio terra, a rio filled up and paved; a piscina, a fish-pond treated in the same way; a ponte, a bridge; a campo, a paved, open place, formerly a field; a campiello, a smaller campo; a corte, a court. Avoid a vico cieco, or a viccolo cieco, which have no thoroughfare. The city is divided into six sestieri or wards, subdivided into parocchie or parishes. The houses are numbered by sestieri, the numbers reaching to thousands. The Merceria, a crowded thoroughfare, leads from under the Clock Tower in St Mark’s Square, after many kinks and turns, to the Rialto bridge over the Grand Canal, which is spanned by two other bridges about equidistant from the Rialto bridge. E. and W. of the Rialto, in addition to these bridges, numerous ferries (traghetti) make either bank of the Grand Canal easy of access, and small steamers (vaporetti) call at frequent piers the whole length of the chief waterway. Travelling by gondola, therefore, is to be regarded as a luxury rather than a necessity. The gondola bears the same relation to Venetian life as does the cab or carriage to the dweller in an ordinary town. The average tide is about twenty inches: on exceptional occasions, the difference between high and low tides has been six feet.

The Piazza of S. Marco offers to the traveller a scene of unparalleled interest. Eastwards it is adorned by the most wonderful group of Byzantine and Gothic architecture in Europe. To the N. is the rhythmic symmetry of Pietro Lombardo’s Procuratie Vecchie, ending with the Clock Tower[80]; to the S. are the Procuratie Nuove, Scamozzi’s tasteless elaboration of Sansovino’s lovely design for the Libreria Vecchia on the Piazzetta. Westward is the baser structure of Napoleonic times. Opposite the Porta della Carta of the Ducal Palace stood for a thousand years the old Campanile, like a giant sentinel set towards the lagoons to watch over the city. On the morning of July 14th, 1902, to the stupefaction of the Venetians, the huge tower, which in its massive strength seemed to defy the tooth of time, gently collapsed, as though weary of its millennial watch, crushing in its fall Sansovino’s beautiful Loggetta and the N. side of the Libreria Vecchia, but miraculously doing no further hurt. When the Venetians recovered from the shock and learned how mercifully exempt from toll of human life the disaster had been, and that St Mark’s and the Ducal Palace were unscathed, they remembered their protector and said: È stato galant’uomo S. Marco (St Mark has been a good fellow). Ten months later, when the King and Queen of Italy, during their visit to Venice, turned to look at the site of the old tower, a lament was heard in the crowd of people: I varda dove gera el nostro pavaro morto (They are going where our poor dead one lies). The foundations laid a thousand years before, were found to be as sound as ever, and a new Campanile has now been raised to replace, though it cannot restore, the old one, which, with all its dramatic history and romantic associations, has disappeared for ever.