Venice Read online

  Much of the colour and richness of the city still comes from the church – its myriad wonderful buildings; its processions and festivals and treasures; its incense and organ music, billowing through curtained doors into dim-lit squares; its thousands of monks, biting their lower lips in self-deprecation as they make their rounds of mendicancy, or swarming athletically up dizzy wires to attend to the lamps of the Frari. Priests are ubiquitous in Venice, and I remember with particular delight walking towards the Zartere on the morning of Palm Sunday, and meeting on the quayside a column of cheerful chattering nuns, all pink, black and wimpled white, scurrying home to lunch with their palms held high and joyful. On Sunday afternoons the churches are full of ill-disciplined children’s classes, the cracked voices of youths, the high tinny catechisms of little girls: and almost every Venetian water-bus has a small crucifix on the wall of the steersman’s cabin.

  The church in Venice, though, is something more than all things bright and beautiful. It is descended from Byzantium, by faith out of nationalism: and sometimes to its high ritual in the Basilica of St Mark there is a tremendous sense of an eastern past, marbled, hazed and silken. St Mark’s itself is a barbaric building, like a great Mongolian pleasure pavilion, or a fortress in Turkestan: and sometimes there is a suggestion of rich barbarism to its services too, devout, reverent and beautiful though they are.

  In Easter week each year the Patriarch and his clergy bring from the vaults of the church treasury all its most sacred relics, and display them ceremonially to the people. This ancient function is heavy with reminders of the Orient. It takes place in the evening, when the Piazza is dark, and the dim lights of the Basilica shine mysteriously on the gold mosaics of its roof. The congregation mills about the nave in the half-light, switching from side to side, not knowing which way to look. A beadle in a cocked hat, with a silver sword and the face of a hereditary retainer, stands in a peremptory eighteenth-century attitude beside a pillar. The organ plays quietly from its loft, and sometimes there is a chant of male voices, and sometimes a sudden hubbub from the square outside when the door of the church is opened. All is murmurous and glinting.

  A flash of gold and silver from an aisle, a swish of stiff vestments, the clink of a censer, and presently there advances through the crowd, clouded in incense, the patriarchal procession. Preceded by flurrying vergers, clearing a way through the congregation, it sweeps slowly and rheumatically up the church. A golden canopy of old tapestry sways and swings above the mitred Patriarch, and around it walk the priests, solemn and shuffling, clasping reverently the celebrated relics of St Mark’s (enclosed in golden frames, jewelled caskets, crucifixes, medieval monstrances). You cannot see very well, for the crowd is constantly jostling, and the atmosphere is thick; but as the priests pass slowly by you catch a queer glimpse of copes and reliquaries, a cross set with some strange sacred souvenir, a fragment of bone in a crystal sphere, weird, ornate, elaborate objects, swaying and bobbing above the people as the old men carrying them stumble towards the altar.

  It is an eastern ceremonial, a thing of misty and exotic splendour. When you turn to leave the great church, all those holy objects are placed on the rim of the pulpit, and all those grave priests are crowded together behind, like so many white-haired scholarly birds. Incense swirls around them; the church is full of slow shining movement; and in the Piazza outside, when you open the door, the holiday Venetians stroll from café to café in oblivion, like the men who sell Coca-Cola beneath the sneer of the Sphinx.

  If the Venetians are not always devout, they are usually kind. They have always had a reputation, like other money-makers, for generosity to the poor. The five Great Schools of Venice, of which the Scuola di San Rocco is now the most famous, were charitable associations set up to perform ‘temporal works of mercy’: and even Baron Corvo, in his worst years of disillusionment, had to admit that when it came to charitable causes the Venetians were extraordinarily generous. The indigenous beggars of the city are treated with indulgence, and are seldom moved on by the easy-going police. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evenings at the bottom of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano, and who is often to be seen, pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafés, and planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud and quite incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are always a few innocents to be seen following the melodic line with rapt knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, held upside-down and close to the stomach.

  I suspect the Venetians, who still have a strong clan feeling, may sometimes be less forbearing towards unfamiliar loafers. Now and then you see gypsies who have penetrated the city from the mainland in their colourful long-skirted dresses, and who whine their way from square to square with babies in their arms and skinny hands outstretched. I myself have a weakness for gypsies, but the Venetians are evidently not addicts, and you hardly ever see a Romany beggar rewarded. I was once a beggar in Venice myself. One bleak winter evening my boat engine broke down, and I needed a few lire to take the ferry-boat home. Providence, I assured myself, in a city so divinely founded, would certainly provide: and sure enough, presently there approached me a monk from one of the mendicant orders, whom I had often seen carrying sacks from household to household, and who was now returning to his nearby convent. I stopped him and asked him for the loan of 100 lire until the next day: but chill and suspicion was the response I got; and cold the doorstep upon which, at the entrance to the monastery, my family and I were left in lonely hope; and tortuous were the channels through which the consent of the Abbot was vainly sought; and gruff was the porter who told us to go and wait in the adjacent church; and low-voiced the consultation of friars which reached us sibilantly as we stood in the nave; and hasty and off-hand were the manners of the monk who at last approached me sidelong, as if unwilling to come too close, and thrust the coin into my hand as you might offer a bone to an unreliable terrier; and irritating was my conviction, when I returned to repay the loan next morning, that the doorman who casually accepted it, beneath the grinning memento mori decorating his portal, almost certainly pocketed the money for himself.

  But if I was cynical then, I am less so today, for now I know Venice better, and have no doubt that if I had entered some slatternly dockside tavern that evening, and put my case to the ill-shaved sinner behind the bar, he would have lent me the money in a trice, and thrown in a glass of sour white wine as a bonus, Compassion really is a powerful emotion among the simpler Venetians. In the eighteenth century the idea of pain was so insufferable to them that even characters in a play, if they happened to be killed, had to take a quick posthumous bow, to reassure the anxious audience, and accept its sympathetic cries of ‘Bravo i morti!’ This is a melancholy city at heart, and its inhabitants are constantly shaking their heads in pity over some pathetic new evidence of the world’s sadness. When a visitor from Bologna was drowned in the Grand Canal one evening, my housekeeper was almost in tears about him next day; and when a funeral goes by to the cemetery of San Michele, you may hear the onlookers muttering to themselves in condolence: ‘Oh, the poor one, oh, dead, dead, poor thing – ah, away he goes, away to San Michele, il povero!’

  Bad weather, too, is a subject for tender distress; and the fate of poor Venice herself, once so powerful; and sometimes a stroke of international ill fortune, a train accident in Uruguay, the failure of a conference, a pri
ncess unmarried or a sportsman discarded, summons a brief gleam of poignancy into the Venetian eye. Searing indeed is the sorrow that lingers for months, even years, after the death of a second cousin, so that the very mention of the cemetery is enough to send a mask of mourning fleeting across the bereaved features: and whenever the Venetian woman mentions her dear Uncle Carlo, who passed to a higher realm, as you will have long ago discovered, on 18 September 1936 – the mere thought of Uncle Carlo, and the whole business of the day must be momentarily suspended.

  There is a trace of the morbid to this soft-heartedness. Venetians are fascinated by dead things, horrors, prisons, freaks and malformations. They love to talk, with a mixture of heartburn and abhorrence, about the islands of hospitals and lunatic asylums that ring Venice like an incantation, and to demonstrate with chilling gestures the violence of some of the poor inmates. Fierce was their disappointment when the corpse of their beloved Pius X, laid in state in its crystal coffin, turned out to have a gilded mask for a face (he had been dead for forty years, and they were curious about his condition).

  There is something Oriental, too, about the predictability of their emotions. A sort of etiquette or formality summons the tears that start so instantaneously into the eyes of Maria, when you mention her poor relative, as if her affliction were no more than an antique ritual, like the wailing of hired mourners at an Egyptian funeral. It is a custom in Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, to announce deaths by posting notices in shops and cafés, often with a photograph; and elaborate is the sadness of the people you may sometimes see distributing these announcements, and extraordinary its contagiousness, so that for a few moments after their departure the whole café is plunged in gloom, and the very hiss of the espresso machine is muffled.

  A streak of sentimentality runs through Venetian life, surprising in a city of such stringy fibre. A Venetian crowd usually has a soft spot for the under-dog, and the last competitor in the regatta always gets a kindly cheer. I once saw the aftermath of a fight between two youths, beside the Rial to bridge. One was a willowy, handsome young man, who had placed a tray of packages on the stone steps beside him, and was engulfed in tears; the other a bronzed, tough and square-cut fish-boy, a Gothic boy, with a stentorian voice and a fist like iron. The slender youth was appealing to the crowd for justice, his voice breaking with grievances, now and then hoisting his shirt from his trousers to exhibit his bruises. The fish-boy was pacing up and down like a caged lion, sporadically pushing through the spectators to project an insult, now spitting, now giving his opponent a contemptuous shove or a grimace of mockery. My own sympathies were whole-heartedly with this uncouth ruffian, a Venetian of the old school: but the crowd clustered protectively about the other, and a woman ushered him tearfully towards the Rialto, out of harm’s way, amid murmured commiserations on all sides. One man only held himself aloof, and seemed to share my sympathies. He was a dwarf, a little man dressed all in black, with a beret on his head, who stood on tiptoe at the back of the crowd, peering between its agitated shoulders: but I was mistaken, for when I caught this person’s eye, and offered him a guilty and conspiratorial smile, he stared back at me balefully, as you might look at an unrepentant matricide, or a man with a well-known penchant for cruelty to babies.

  There are many such dwarfs and hunchbacks in Venice, as observers have noted for hundreds of years, and they too are treated with kindness (though there used to be a superstition to the effect that you must keep thirty paces away from a lame man, which perhaps contributed to Lord Byron’s well-known reluctance to appear in the Piazza in daylight). Many are given jobs as sacristans or cleaners in churches, and flit like smiling gnomes among their shadowy chancels. There are also many and varied originals, women a-flutter with scarves and anachronistic skirts, men talking angrily into the night from the parapets of bridges. Artists are really artists in Venice, and meet jovially to eat enormous meals in taverns. In the spring evenings a group of apparently demented girls used to dance beside the Grand Canal outside my window, and sometimes in the middle of the night you will hear a solitary opera-lover declaiming Tosca into the darkness from the poop of a water-bus. Foreigners of blatant individualism have always frequented Venice, from George Sand in tight trousers at the Danieli to Orson Welles massively in Harry’s Bar: but they have never disconcerted the Venetians, long accustomed to the extremes of human behaviour. At the height of the Venetian autocracy, in the fifteenth century, a well-known exhibitionist used to parade the canals in a gondola, shouting abuse at the regime and demanding the instant obliteration of all aristocrats everywhere. He was never molested, for even the stern Council of Ten had a soft spot for the eccentric.

  You may also be drunk in Venice, oddly enough, without antagonizing the town. Though most proper Venetians have lost their taste for the bawdy, and are a demure conventional people, nevertheless their evenings are frequently noisy with drunks. Often they are visitors, or seamen from the docks, but their clamour echoes indiscriminately through the high walls and water-canyons of the place, and sometimes makes the midnight hideous. In Venice you may occasionally see a man thrown forcibly from a bar, all arms and muddled protests, just like in the films; and rollicking are the songs the Venetian students sing, when they have some wine inside them. I once heard a pair of inebriates passing my window at four o’clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices: but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.

  9

  Minorities

  The practical tolerance of Venice has always made it a cosmopolitan city, where east and west mingle, and where (as Shakespeare rightly said) ‘the trade and profit of this State consisteth of all nations’. Settlers of many races contributed to the power and texture of the Republic, as you can see from the paintings of the masters, which often picture turbaned Moors and Turks among the crowds, and sometimes even negro gondoliers. Venice in its commercial prime was like a bazaar city, or a caravanserai, where the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians and the Dalmatians all had their quarters, and the Germans and the Turks their great emporia. One of the pillars of the Doge’s Palace illustrates this diversity: for there, side by side upon a column-head, are the faces of a Persian, a Latin, a Tartar, a Turk, a Greek, a Hungarian, a bearded Egyptian and a surprisingly innocuous Goth. (We need not suppose, though, that the old Venetians had many illusions about equality. Around the corner there are eight more faces, on another capital: seven are hideous, one is handsome, and this ‘thin, thoughtful and dignified portrait’, says Ruskin, ‘thoroughly fine in every way’, is meant to express the ‘superiority of the Venetian character over that of other nations’.)

  Of all these alien residents the most resilient have been the Jews, who enjoyed a position in medieval Venice half-way between protection and persecution. They first came to the city in 1373, as refugees from the mainland, and were originally forced to live (or so most historians seem to think) on the island of Giudecca, which may be named after them, or may come from the word ‘judicato’, implying that it was ‘adjudged’ a suitable place for Jews, vagabonds and rogues. In the sixteenth century the first of all the Ghettos was instituted for them, in the north-western part of the city. It was on the site of a disused ironworks – the word ‘ghetto’ is thought to have been medieval Venetian for a foundry – and all the Jews, now suddenly supplemented by fugitives from the wars of the League of Cambrai, were forced to live in it.

  They had to wear a special costume (first a yellow hat, later a red); they were relentlessly taxed on every conceivable pretext; they had to pay through the nose for permission, frequently renewable, to remain in the city at all. Their Ghetto was windowless on its outside walls, to cut it off entirely from the rest of the city, and its gates were locked at sunse
t. Christian guards (paid, of course, by the Jews) prevented all entry or exit after dark. Yet though the Jews were so harshly circumscribed, and squeezed for all financial advantage, they were physically safer in Venice than almost anywhere else in Europe. The Venetians found them useful. Once or twice there were the usual canards about Jewish baby-burners; in 1735 the official commissioners appointed to govern the affairs of the Jews had to report that the Ghetto was bankrupt; but over the centuries the Venetian Jews, protected against public violence or religious fanaticism, enjoyed periods of high prosperity and prestige.