Venice Read online

  All these splendours died with the Republic. The decline of Venice had been protracted and painful. It began with Vasco da Gama’s great voyage, which broke her eastern monopolies: but for three more centuries the Serenissima retained her independence, sinking, through infinite declensions of emasculation, from power to luxury, from luxury to flippancy, from flippancy to impotence. Her wide Mediterranean Empire was lost in bits and pieces – Negroponte, Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, the Ionian islands, the Peloponnese, all to the rampant Turks. By the eighteenth century Venice was the most unwarlike State in Europe. The English use their powder for their cannon,’ said a contemporary Italian observer, ‘the French for their mortars. In Venice it is usually damp, and if it is dry they use it for fireworks.’ Venetian soldiers were ‘without honour, without discipline, without clothes – it is impossible to name one honourable action they have performed’. Addison described the purposes of Venetian domestic policy as being ‘to encourage idleness and luxury in the nobility, to cherish ignorance and licentiousness in the clergy, to keep alive a continual faction in the common people, to connive at viciousness and debauchery in the convents’. Eighteenth-century Venice was a paradigm of degradation. Her population had declined from 170,000 in her great days to 96,000 in 1797 (though the Venetian Association of Hairdressers still had 852 members). Her trade had vanished, her aristocracy was hopelessly effete, and she depended for her existence upon the tenuous good faith of her neighbours.

  No wonder Napoleon swept her aside. The Venetians, temporizing and vacillating, offered him no real resistance, and he ended their Republic with a brusque gesture of dismissal: ‘Io, non voglio più In-quisitori, non voglio più Senato; sarò un Attila per lo state Veneto’ – ‘I want no more Inquisitors, no more Senate: I will be an Attila for the Venetian State.’ The last of the Doges, limply abdicating, handed his ducal hat to his servant with the febrile comment: ‘Take it away, we shan’t be needing it again.’ (The servant did what he was told, and kept it as a souvenir.) The golden horses of the Basilica, the lion from his pedestal in the Piazzetta, many of the treasures of St Mark’s, many of the pictures of the Doge’s Palace, many precious books and documents – all were taken away to Paris, rather as so many of them had been stolen from Constantinople in the first place. Some diamonds from St Mark’s Treasury were set in Josephine’s crown, and a large statue of Napoleon was erected on Sansovino’s library building, opposite the Doge’s Palace. The last ships of the Venetian Navy were seized to take part in an invasion of Ireland: but when this was cancelled they were sent instead to be sunk by Nelson at Aboukir.

  The Great Council itself ended the aristocratic Government of Venice, by a vote of 512 yeas to 30 nays and 5 blanks, and for the words ‘Pax Tibi Marce’, inscribed on the Venetian lion’s open book, there was substituted the slogan ‘Rights and Duties of Men and Citizens’. ‘At last,’ observed a gondolier in a phrase that has become proverbial – ‘at last he’s turned over a new leaf.’ The dungeons of the Doge’s Palace were thrown open: but according to Shelley only one old man was found inside them, and he was dumb. Even the poisons of the Council of Three had gone stale, and could hardly kill a fly.

  *It was the end of an era: for Venice, for Europe, for the world. There was, however, one final resurgence of national fire before Venice, united at last with the mainland, became just another Italian provincial capital. She was passed by the French to the Austrians; by the Austrians back to the French; after Waterloo, to the Austrians again: and in 1848, when half Europe rebelled against Vienna, the Venetians rose to arms too, proclaimed themselves a Republic again, expelled their Austrian occupiers, and defied the might of the Empire.

  Times had drastically changed since 1797, and her leaders this time were men of the middle classes – professional men, lawyers, academics, soldiers. The difference in morale was astonishing. The president of the revolutionary republic was Daniele Manin, a half-Jewish lawyer who bore the same surname as the last of the Doges, and was determined to restore its honour. The Government he established was able, honest and popular. It was no mere nationalist protest body, but a fully organized administration, running Venice as a aty-State. The revolutionaries published their own Official Gazette; opened correspondence with the British and French Governments, without getting any support from them; and printed their own paper money, which was widely accepted. The London Times said of them: ‘Venice has again found within her walls men capable of governing, and people always worthy to be free.’ The citizenry, in a last surge of the old spirit, made great personal sacrifices to sustain this brave campaign. One man gave a palace on the Grand Canal, another an estate on the mainland, a third a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Some of the remaining treasure of St Mark’s was sold to raise war funds, and more was melted down for bullion. Except for Venetian elements of the Austrian Navy, which had long since been demoralized, all sections of the population seem to have behaved, by and large, with honour: and at one period Manin himself was recognized, a bespectacled private in the Civic Guard, on sentry-go in the Piazza.

  But the cause was hopeless. The revolution began in March 1848 – Via Marzo 22, the main western approach to the Piazza, is named for the day – and for a full year Venice was invested by the Austrians. The lagoon was vigilantly blockaded. Austrian shells, lobbed from the mainland, fell in many parts of the city, and are still to be seen, stuck together like glutinous candies, decorating war memorials or embedded in the façades of churches. Provisions ran desperately short, cholera broke out. Without foreign help, the Venetians had hardly a chance, and in August 1849 the Austrian General Gorzkowsky accepted Manin’s surrender and reoccupied the city. Manin was exiled, with thirty-nine of his colleagues, to Paris, where he survived for the rest of his days by giving Italian lessons to young ladies: only to return to the vast, dark, awful tomb that lies beneath the northern flank of St Mark’s.

  Venice subsided into sullen thraldom, boycotting everything Austrian, even the military band in the Piazza. Long after the triumph of the Risorgimento, when all the rest of Italy (bar Rome) was free, she remained subject to Vienna: until in 1866, after the Prusso-Austrian war, Bismarck rewarded the new Italy for her support by handing her the Serenissima. Venice became part of the Italian Kingdom, and was an entity no more.

  Since then she has been a port, an art centre, something of a factory: but above all a showplace. In the First World War she was a base for the Italian operations against the Austrians: two-thirds of her people were removed elsewhere, and from the Campanile you could see the observation balloons above the front-line trenches. During Mussolini’s regime she was an obediently Fascist city, her inhabitants soon discovering that jobs were easier to get and keep if you toed the party line. In the Second World War, though there was sporadic and sometimes heroic partisan activity in the city, the Venetians only offered serious resistance to the Germans in 1945, when the result was a foregone conclusion anyway. As for the British, when they took Venice in the last days before the Armistice, they found only two classes of opposition: one from gondoliers, who demanded a higher tariff; the other from motor-boat owners who, reluctant to see their pampered craft requisitioned yet again by the rough soldiery, did their best to smuggle them away to Como or Lake Garda.

  The Venetians are no longer lordly. They were great a long time ago, and nobody expects them to be great again. No patriotic diehards writhe in impotence, to see their great Republic prostituted. The enormous Archives of the State have become no more than a scholar’s curiosity. The Doge’s Palace, the most splendid assembly hall on earth, is a museum. The Venetians have long since settled in their groove of resignation, and there remains only an old essence of power, a pomade of consequence, an echo of trumpet-calls (provided by the string orchestra at the Quadri, stringing away irrepressibly, its rigid smiles tinged with despair, at the rhythms of Colonel Bogey).

  Gone are the great diplomats, the sealed crimson despatch-boxes, the secret liaisons, the Austrian Envoy in his box at the opera, His Excelle
ncy the Ambassador of The Most Christian Kingdom presenting his credentials to the Illustrious Signory of The Most Serene Republic. There are only Consulates in Venice nowadays. The Americans, the Argentinians, the Brazilians, the British, the French, the Greeks, the Panamanians and the Swiss all maintain ‘career consuls’: the rest are represented by Italians. The Americans own a house near San Gregorio. The British rent an apartment beside the Accademia (three-quarters of their work is concerned with the Commonwealth, rather than the United Kingdom). The Argentinians and the Danes live on the Grand Canal. The French live elegantly on the Zattere. The Panamanians have a villa on the Lido. The Monagesques occupy an uncharacteristically tumble-down house behind San Barnaba. The others are scattered here and there across the city, in back-alleys and culs-de-sac, or high on second floors.

  Only three Consulates – the American, the British and the French – can afford to run their own motor boats, and when a number of Latin American consuls devised a scheme for sharing one, obvious difficulties of temperament and economy killed it. Only the Argentinians, the French and the Panamanians maintain Consuls-General in Venice, and the Russians maintain nobody at all, their old Embassy being converted into an unusually comfortable pension. Some of the consulates have wider responsibilities on the mainland: but there is an inescapably vacuous, faded flavour to the diplomatic corps of Venice today, and the consuls are largely occupied in comforting disconsolate tourists, pacifying the Italian authorities after sordid dock-side brawls, anxiously living it up with the socialites, or helping with cocktail invitations for visiting warships.

  Just before Lent each year the city enjoys a brief season of Carnival. Recently this has become one of Europe’s great sprees, drawing thousands of visitors and giving new life to hotels and restaurants at a formerly moribund time of the year. The jet-set loves it, its images get into all the fashionable magazines, and the making and selling of its masks appears to give the city a whole new industry and art form.

  Not so long ago, though, what then seemed to be the last echoes of the legendary Venetian Carnival were full of pathos. Its chief celebrants in those days were the children of Venice, who bought their funny faces and moustaches from the chain stores and emerged to saunter through the city in fancy dress: here a devil, here a harlequin, a three-foot-three Red Indian, an infant Spanish dancer, matadors and Crusader ladies and gypsy girls, with real flowers in their baskets and vivid smudges of lipstick on their faces. Each exotic little figure walked alone with its family – the matador had no bull, the Spanish princess no serenader, the clown no tumbling partner; and they used to parade the Riva degli Schiavoni in prim and anxious demurity (for it would never do to crumple the feathers of a Venetian Sioux, or dirty a freshly laundered wimple).

  On the final day of this celebration I was once walking home through the spider’s web of little lanes and yards that surrounds the noble Franciscan church of the Frari; and as I turned a corner I saw before me, in a hurried glimpse, three small figures crossing a square from one lane to another. In the middle walked a thin little man, his overcoat rather too long for him and buttoned down the front, his gloves very neat, his hat very precise, his shoes very polished. Clutching his right hand was a tiny pierrot, his orange pom-pom waggling in the half-light. Clutching his left hand was a minuscule fairy, her legs wobbly in white cotton, her skirt infinitesimal, her wand warped a little with the excitement and labour of the day. Quickly, silently and carefully they crossed the square and disappeared from view: the fairy had to skip a bit to keep up, the pierrot cherished a sudden determination to walk only on the lines between the paving-stones, and the little man trod a precarious tight-rope between the indulgent and the conventional.

  How small they looked, and respectable, I thought to myself! How carefully their mother had prepared them, all three, to survive the scrutiny of their neighbours! How dull a time they had spent on the quayside, walking self-consciously up and down! How thin a reflection they offered of Venice’s rumbustious carnivals of old, her Doges and her masked patricians, her grand lovers, her tall warships and her princely artists! How touching the little Venetians, tight buttoned in their alley-ways!

  But as I meditated in this patronizing way my eyes strayed upwards, above the tumbled walls of the courtyard, above the gimcrack company of chimneys, above the television aerials and the gobbling pigeons in their crannies, to where the great tower of the Frari, regal and assured, stood like a red-brick admiral against the blue.

  THE CITY

  11

  Ex-Island

  Venice stands, as she loves to tell you, on the frontiers of east and west, half-way between the setting and the rising sun. Goethe calls her ‘the market-place of the Morning and the Evening lands’. Certainly no city on earth gives a more immediate impression of symmetry and unity, or seems more patently born to greatness. On the map Venice looks like a fish; or a lute, Evelyn thought; or perhaps a pair of serpents locked in death-struggle; or a kangaroo, head down for a leap. But to understand the modern topography of the place, you must throw the street plans away and go to the top of the great Campanile of St Mark, above the bustling Piazza. You can make the ascent by lift: but if you prefer to take a horse, like the Emperor Frederick III, there is a spiral ramp for your convenience.

  From the bell-chamber of this great tower, once you have fought off the itinerant photographers and the picture-postcard sellers, you can see how curiously compact and undistracted is the shape of Venice. To the north stand the heavenly Alps, beyond the Treviso plain, sprinkled with snow and celestially silent; to the south is the Adriatic, a grim but handsome sea; around you stretches the Venetian lagoon, morose but fascinating, littered with islands. The horizons are wide, the air is crystalline, the wind blows gustily from the south; and in the very centre of it all, lapped in mud-banks, awash in history, lies the Serenissima.

  By a paradox of perspective, there is not a canal to be seen from the bell-chamber, only a jumbled, higgledy-piggledy mass of red-tiled roofs, chimneys, towers, television aerials, delectable roof gardens, flapping washing, sculptured saints and elaborate weather-vanes: and the effect is not one of overwhelming grandeur, but of medieval intimacy, as though you are eavesdropping upon a fourteenth-century housewife, or prying into a thane’s back yard. This is not a large city. You can see it all easily, from one end to the other. It is about two miles long by one mile deep, and you can walk from end to end of it, from the slaughter-house in the north-west to the Public Gardens in the south-east, in an hour and a half – less, if you don’t mind shoving. The population of Venice is something over 360,000 but at least two-thirds of these people live in the new mainland suburbs – the big industrial quarter of Mestre and Porto Marghera whose shipyards and shining oil-tanks you can see away to the west.

  The city proper shelters perhaps about the same number of inhabitants as Lincoln, say, or Watford. It is built, so they say, on an archipelago of 117 islets (though where an islet begins and a mud-bank ends, the geologists do not seem quite certain); and its canals and alley-ways follow the contours of the myriad rivulets which complicated these shallows before the arrival of the first Venetians. The sub-soil is soft to an average depth of 105 feet; the mean temperature is 56˚ Fahrenheit; and the altitude of Venice, so one guide book solemnly informs us, is seven feet above sea-level.

  If you look beyond the Piazza you will observe a vague declivity among the buildings, as you may sometimes see, across the plains of the American West, the first distant indications of a canyon. This gulf sweeps in three abrupt but majestic curves clean through the city, dividing it into convenient halves. It is the Grand Canal, which follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto – the origin of the Rialto. Three bridges cross this tremendous waterway, forty-six side-canals enter it, 200 palaces line it, forty-eight alleys run down to it, ten churches stand upon its banks, the railway station stands gleaming at one end, St Mark’s guards the other. It is at once the Seine and the New Jersey Turnpike of Venice, the mir
ror of her beauty and the highway by which the cargo barges, horns blaring and engines a-blast, chug towards her markets and hotels. The ordinary Venetian canal feels frankly man-made: but most people have to stifle an impulse, now and again, to call the Grand Canal a river.

  Around its banks, and on the big neighbouring island of Giudecca, Venice is tightly packed, in six ancient segments. The city is a sequence of villages, a mosaic of old communities. Once each district was a separate island of the archipelago, but they have been jammed together down the centuries, and fused by common experience. Wherever you look from your eyrie you may discern one of these old local centres, with its fine church and its spacious square, its lively market, its homely shops, its banks, its taverns, its private tourist attractions. The very centre of Venice is said to be the pedestal in the middle of Campo San Luca, but the completeness of these various antique settlements means that the city is rich in depth: it has few barren quarters or sterile suburbs. No part of the city, wherever you look, lacks its great monuments or its pungency of character. To the east are the ramparts of the Arsenal, with its frowning tower-gates; to the north-west you may fancy, a blur among the tenements, the grey enclave of the Ghetto; to the south lies the long rib of Giudecca, where the boatmen live; and all around the perimeters of the place range the waterside promenades, lined with steamboats and fishing vessels and bobbing gondolas, a fine white liner at the Zattere, a timber boat from Istria beside the Fondamenta Nuove, where the lagoon sidles away mysteriously to the cemetery-island of San Michele. From the top of the campanile the whole Venetian story seems simple and self-explanatory, and you may let your eye wander directly from the brown sluggish mud-banks that represent the first beginnings of the city, to the golden ornaments and fret-work of St Mark’s, memorials of its resplendent climax.