From him I turn for a moment to another type,—the ciceroni,—only, however, to mention a single example. She was a young girl who undertook to show the visitor, fresh from the glories of the ducal palace, through the black labyrinths of the ducal prison. She took two wax tapers, lighted them, gave him one, keeping the other herself, and jingled a great bunch of keys. Then the really pretty and graceful maiden led the way down a worn, slippery, dark staircase, up another across the Bridge of Sighs, down again, telling all the way fearful legends of the place, and plunged deeper into the shadowy recesses at every step.
“Are you not afraid?” she is asked.
“A Venetian girl feels no fear,” is her answer.
That is a terrible interior, however, with its range upon range of hideous cells; but worst of all is a vault, without a spark of natural light in it, which seems as if dug in the rock. Its roof is stained by lampblack; its walls bear traces of clamps and chains. “Here the secret executions took place; here the son of a doge was beheaded for daring to love a foreign lady. Only great criminals—that is, great lords—were put to death here.” I wonder whether this tender turnkey, if she had prisoners under her charge, would be pitiless to them. There is something painful in the contrast between such a gaol and such a gaoler.
Leaving her, you pass across the square with its corner group of beggars, its swarm of bare-headed children, its clusters of boys with their hair flowing wild, and their brown necks and chests exposed, who give you an idea that they are expecting their photographs to be taken, but who, nevertheless, bake themselves in the sun languidly enough, and act upon the national maxim, “bisogna stare allegro.” There is but a solitary influence which can rouse your true Venetian to a state of excitement, and that is the presence of death. Rich or poor, he hates it; rich, he rides or rows away to the farthest possible distance; poor, he hides, if he can, until the object of his abhorrence is removed. Somehow these vagrants of the island city never starve. They earn, by one means or another, sufficient for the day, which signifies sufficient for dinner,—two pennyworth of fish, ready cooked, as already described; one pennyworth of soup, and one of bread; and it may be suspected that women and girls do a principal part of whatever work is done in Venice at all.
You turn into a sequestered nook, resembling one of the smaller courts opening upon Fleet Street, and a number of damsels, without dulcimers, are chattering or singing. These are the pearl-threaders, for pearl-threading is a universal occupation, just as embroidery was at one time in England. The wealthy do it for amusement, the humbler classes for gain, of which, as I have said, a very little goes a long way. It is a popular saying, “You may die of love or hatred in Venice, but not of hunger;” still, you see many ragged, hollow-eyed, and pallid wretches, who, in former days, might have been mistaken for lottery-hunters; but those times, happily, have passed away, though they presented a spectacle sufficiently interesting four or five years ago....
Some one has compared Venice to a page of music, with its curious streets, palaces, museums, canals, and bridges; resembling lines, notes, double notes, points, crotchets, pauses; its long and straight, its short, narrow and crooked ways; its open spaces scattered up and down; its mounting and descending of bridges. I cannot myself see the truth of the comparison; but so much may be readily admitted,—that the stranger can easily lose his way, and not easily find it again, in this maze of land and water, worse than Amsterdam. Unless, however, the wanderer has some business on hand, the very best way to see Venice is to be lost in it; because then, instead of the regulation round of sights, a thousand unexpected novelties strike the eye, in the narrow, ill-paved, and generally noiseless streets that intersect the islands, though the hoof of a horse or rumbling of a wheel is never heard in them.
Opening upon these dingy and tortuous thoroughfares are many of those back entrances to the mansions of the opulent, which play so prominent a part in romance and drama, though, as a rule, they are inhabited by the poorest of the poor to whom an abode is a retreat, not a home,—since their lives are habitually passed out of doors. As for furniture, a bedstead and a huge chest or coffer, with a stool or two, and a small but solid table, constitute the inventory,—if exception be made of the bowls, and spoons, and bread-knives which the inmates carry abroad when they intend to banquet beneath that sky in which Tintoretto and Veronese exulted.
Nothing of marble or mosaic here; nothing of gold or purple; only squalor, such as is never seen in a town of Holland; such as is seldom met with, indeed, anywhere out of Ireland or Italy. The water, however, mingles so intricately with the land that it is impossible to go many steps without coming upon a bridge and a canal,—not the canal of the artist, all blue except where richer tints are reflected by the architecture on either side, but narrow, crooked, overhung by ugly houses, and rather less sweet to the nostrils than becomes a city famous for its love of violets. Hither come the itinerants of the public places when the last loiterers have left the square of St. Mark’s and there is no longer a chance of selling fried cakes or fish, salt mutton or salt tripe, mock pearls or gold thread to string them upon; and here my glimpse closes upon Venice, a thousand times described, yet rarely, I think, from this particular point of view.