As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling. The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years’ study of Venetian history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St. Mark’s Square.
The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians—we never knew their names—gave access also to a house in the story above them, which belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as “Co. Prata.” I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the country to spend the winter in the city. Prata’s “Co.,” we gradually learnt, meant “Conte,” and the little counts and countesses, his children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the count’s vassals came to the riva [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and corncobs for fuel—and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long as he remained “Co.” we yearned to know who and what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.
Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little people, just married, came to live in Venice.
They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence, tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and “This is my wife, the new mistress,” said the young Paron [Footnote: Padrone in Italian. A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
“Serva sua!”
The Parona, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of beauty.
As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker, and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once; but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash, never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning, the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the Rialto among a hundred greengrocers’ stalls in all parts of the city; bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker’s; there is a butcher’s stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’ worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent’s worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian fashion, and “guard our strangeness.”
