Venice Read online

  By and large it is still true. Modern Venice is rich in conscientious craftsmen, people of strong and loyal simplicity, such as one imagines in the sea-ports of early Victorian England. The specialist workmen of Venice are still impressive, from the men at the garage at the Piazzale Roma, who skilfully steer cars by manipulating the two front wheels, to the myriad picture-framers of the city, whose hearts must sink at the very thought of another sunset Rialto. Splendid horny craftsmen work in the sawdust shambles of the boat-yards – in Venetian, squeri – where the tar cauldrons bubble and stink, and they caulk the boats with flaming faggots. Crusty old men like London cabbies, holding antique hooks, stand beside the canals in long flapping greatcoats looking rheumily for gondolas to help alongside. Even the drivers of grand motor boats sometimes hide an agreeable heart behind a pompous exterior: and there are few kindlier policemen than those who patrol the canals in their little speedboats, or solemnly potter about, buttoned in blue greatcoats, in flat-bottomed skiffs (an activity dramatically described in one guide book as ‘controlling the water-ways from swiftly moving punts’).

  And among them all, the very image of Venice, straight-descended from Carpaccio, moves the gondolier. He is not a popular figure among the tourists, who think his prices high and his manner sometimes overbearing: and indeed he is frequently a Communist, and no respecter of persons, and he often shamelessly pumps the innocent foreigner with inaccurate information, and sometimes unfairly induces him to disregard the tariff (‘Ah, but today is the feast of San Marcuola, signor, and it is traditional to charge double fares on this holy day’). I have grown to like and admire him, though, and I can forgive a few peccadillos among men who live on a four-months’ tourist season, and scrape the winter through as part-time fishermen and odd-job workers. The gondoliers are usually highly intelligent: they are also tolerant, sardonic, and, with some grumpy and usually elderly exceptions, humorous. They are often very good-looking, too, fair and loose-limbed – many of their forebears came from the Slav coast of Istria and Dalmatia – and they sometimes have a cultivated, worldly look to them, like undergraduates punting on the Cherwell, naval officers amusing themselves, or perhaps fashionable ski instructors.

  The gondoliers still have a strong sense of guild unity. Their co-operative is a powerful force in Venice, and in the past they even had their own communal banks, run on a system of mutual risk. Not long ago each traghetto, or gondola ferry-station, was organized in its own assertive guild (they still maintain the protocol, though the officials are now municipally appointed). Nowadays, though nearly every gondolier is soil affiliated to a traghetto, they are all members of one co-operative. Each gondola is privately owned – your gondolier is not necessarily the owner, possession often running in families – and profits go to the proprietor, the co-operative being merely a negotiating agency, a system of social security, and a common convenience – and sometimes a political organ too. Competition between gondoliers is, nevertheless, strictly governed, and the celebrated gondoliers’ quarrels, dear to generations of travel writers, often have a distinctly stagy air to them. Nor are other classes of watermen welcomed at their stands. Only fifty sandoli, the smaller passenger boats of Venice, are officially licensed: all the others you see, blandly stealing custom from the gondolas, are darkly described as being ‘outside the law’.

  Yet for all this protectionism, an old Venetian practice, the gondoliers are generally broad-minded men, and are unexpectedly sympathetic to amateurs and aliens. Never a testy word will you hear from them, when your craft zigzags in a flurry of indecision across their path: and when at last you stagger to the quayside, wet from the lagoon, with your ropes trailing and your engine seized, a broken gunwale and a torn trouser-leg, they will welcome you with amusement, explain to you again (for they are whole-hog Venetians) about salt getting into the carburettor, and send their kind regards to the children.

  Now and then they have regattas, partly impelled by the power of tradition, partly by the Tourist Office. In many a smoky trattoria you will see, carefully preserved behind glass, the trophies and banners of a regatta champion, or even his portrait in oils – it is customary to commission one: and there is still a lingering trace of popular enthusiasm to these races, a faint anthropological echo of folk rivalries and ancestral feuds. Fiercely and intently the competitors, sweatbands to match their colourful oars, pound down the Grand Canal, or swing around the marker buoy beside the public Gardens. A raggle-taggle fleet of small craft follows their progress, speedboats and rowing-boats and tumble-down skiffs, half-naked boys in canoes, big market barges, elegant launches, yachts, all tumbling hilariously along beside the gondolas, with their ferry steamers swerving precariously towards the quay, and a fine surge of foam and clatter of engines, as in some nightmare University Boat Race, half-way to a lunatic Putney.

  But the best moment of the regatta comes later, in the evening. Then the new champions, pocketing their prize-money or grappling with their sucking-pig (the traditional fourth prize) are fêted by their fellow-gondoliers: and you will see them, gaily-hatted and singing jovially, parading down the Grand Canal in a large grey barge, with a row of bottles on a neatly spread table, a cheerful impresario playing an accordion, a string of fluttering pennants, and a radiation of fun, bonhomie and satisfaction.

  Under the Republic none of these working men had any share in the running of the State. A small hereditary aristocracy, enumerated loftily in the Golden Book, preserved all power for itself. Only occasionally was the Book opened for the inclusion of a newly elevated patrician, honoured for prowess in war, for particular fidelity to the State, or for a suitable (but of course purely symbolic) fee. Thirty families were ennobled for service in the wars against Genoa, and sometimes rich commoners from the mainland bought their way into the Venetian aristocracy, as you might buy yourself membership at Lloyds. It took generations, though, for such parvenus to be accepted by the old aristocrats, who often thought so highly of themselves, not without reason, that they shuddered at the very thought of going abroad and being treated like ordinary folk.

  The working people, in return for their labour and loyalty, were governed fairly and often generously, but they had not one iota of political privilege, and could only occasionally alter the course of events by a riot or a threatened mutiny. Generally they remained astonishingly faithful to the system. There were only three serious revolutions in the history of the Serenissima, all in the fourteenth century, and none of them was a proletarian eruption. The most serious, the Tiepolo rising of 1310, was mounted by aristocrats: and it was baulked, so tradition tells us, by ‘an old woman of the people’, who dropped a stone mortar smack on the head of the rebellious standard-bearer, and plunged the rest into confusion (she is still doing it, in stone, in a plaque on the site of her house in the Mercepa, the principal shopping street of Venice, while a tablet inserted in the pavement below indicates the point of impact). Throughout the protracted decline of Venice the people remained pathetically proud of their Republic, and when at last the leveller Napoleon arrived, it was liberal patricians, not disgruntled plebs, who were his most vociferous supporters – the Countess Querini-Benzoni, Byron’s celebrated ‘blonde in a gondola’, danced round a Tree of Liberty in the Piazza of St Mark, wearing only an Athenian tunic, and hand-in-hand with a handsome revolutionary poet.

  Like England, another marine oligarchy, Venice was given stability and cohesion by a sense of common purpose. The English felt themselves ‘a happy breed of men’, a ‘band of brothers’, for all the disparities between earl and labourer: and the Venetians, too, in their great days, had this sense of shared fortune, and considered themselves to be first of all, not rich men or poor men, privileged or powerless, but citizens of Venice. Since Venice was never feudal, she was never hamstrung by private armies or serfly obligations, like the cities of the Italian mainland. Beneath the patrician crust, the merchant classes and working men had carefully defined rights of their own, and the Venetian aristocrats, though terribly
complacent, do not seem to have treated their social inferiors with crudity or contempt. Venetians of all kinds revelled in the wild days of Carnival, and the young blades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their riotous clubs and fanciful costumes, appear to have been regarded with the same kind of half-envious tolerance that readers of the London newspapers may reserve for the King’s Road gallants.

  Some observers consider that the Venetians’ complete dependency upon aristocratic condescensions bred a servility still apparent in the city. I do not find this to be so. There is, it is true, a degree of social sycophancy in Venice. Venetians are considered more docile than most Italians, and used to be more easily exploited abroad, in the days when Italy provided cheap labour for half Europe. Sometimes a retainer will speak to you of his employers in a hushed and respectful whine, as though he were talking in church. Venetians now, as always, have a healthy respect for the moneyed – more, perhaps, than for the well-bred.

  But generally a sturdy sense of equality pervades Venetian life. It is still, like the rest of Italy, a place of domestic servants, trim-uniformed housemaids, motherly cooks, soft-footed men-servants: but they have a sensible hail-fellow-well-met approach to the problems of the household, with few traces of oily subservience. With a friendly familiarity your housekeeper sits down beside you at the breakfast table, for a rambling discussion of the day’s prospects, or a kind word of correction about how to bring up the children. Many, beaming, and unidentified are the friends and relatives who may appear on your terrace, when a regatta or a serenade goes by: and there is no nicer welcome in the world than the one the babysitter gives you, with her sister beside her at the wireless, when you come home at midnight from a Venetian celebration, blurred but apologetic. A certain child-like simplicity may have been fostered by the old system, and is still evident among the Venetians; there is a suggestion of submissiveness to their character still; but they never feel in the least down-trodden.

  At the other end of the scale there remain the aristocrats and plutocrats of Venice. Some are the descendants of the old Venetian patricians, a few families still inhabiting their ancestral palaces on the Grand Canal, just as they maintain their estates on the mainland. One dowager, I have been told, recently overheard a gondolier pointing her out as the widow of the last Doge – a suggestion which, though possibly flattering to her Venetian pride, assumed her to be rather more than 180 years old. Most of the families of the Golden Book, though, have vanished. There were 1,218 names in it at the fall of the Republic, but many of the old houses were in mortgage to the monasteries, and when Napoleon abolished the Orders he effectively abolished the families too. The ancient oligarchy disintegrated: a community of feckless and indigent patricians, called the Barnabotti, already existed in the quarter of San Barnaba, and by 1840 more than a thousand members of the old nobility were receiving State charity.

  The modern Venetian aristocracy is thus of mixed origins. Some of its members are rich merchants, who long ago crossed the gulf between impotence and privilege. Most are not Venetians by blood at all, but are Romans or Milanese who have houses in the city, and who spend the summer commuting between Harry’s Bar and the Lido beaches. A few are foreigners. Titles are no longer awarded by the Italian Republic, but there are still many Counts in Venice, permitted by custom to retain their rather forlorn distinctions; and not a few Princesses or Baronesses, with Slavonic names, or Russian coronets upoon their visiting cards; and many whose names are preceded by the honorific ‘Nobile Homine’ – ‘N.H.’ for short. There is also much money in the city, supported largely by land ownership. Its grandest apartments are still very, very grand. Its most luxurious motor boats are palatial. Its opera audiences, though thick-set, are sumptuously dressed. A few families still maintain their private gondolas, and are to be seen sweeping down the Grand Canal in a glitter of brasswork, rowed by two oarsmen in blazing livery.

  I once passed an idle breakfast looking through the Venice telephone directory to see which of the names of the Doges were still represented in the city. Most of the early incumbents have understandably vanished into the mists of legend. Of the first twenty-five, according to the chroniclers, three were murdered, one was executed for treason, three were judicially blinded, four were deposed, one was exiled, four abdicated, one became a saint and one was killed in a battle with pirates. (Seventy-five of the first seventy-six, all the same, are confidently portrayed in the Great Council Chamber of the Doge’s Palace.) The later names are still mostly on the telephone. There were 120 Doges in all, between the years 697 and 1797. They bore sixty-seven different names, the honour often running in families, and thirty-nine of these appear in the book. Sometimes there are two or three representatives of the name. Sometimes there are ten or twelve. A surprising number seem to be either Countesses or horse-butchers. A good many are probably descended from servants of the old families, rather than from the families themselves. The name of the first Doge does not appear; nor does the name of the last; but there is one impressive subscriber, Count Dottore Giovanni Marcello Grimani Giustinian, who bears three ducal names at a go.

  Family pride was immensely strong among the old Venetian aristocrats, as you may see from a visit to the museum in the Ca’ Rezzonico: there somebody has gone to the trouble of producing a family tree in which every member is represented by a little wax portrait, mounted behind glass. The Venetians were so keen on genealogy that in the Basilica of St Mark’s there is even a family tree, done all in mosaic, of the Virgin Mary. Whole quarters of the city were named for the major clans, and it was considered a public tragedy when one of the great names died out. The story is still told with regret of the extinction of the Foscaris, the family whose ill-fated forebear, the Doge Francesco Foscari, was the subject of Byron’s tragedy. Their name still appears in the telephone book, but they are supposed to have petered out at the beginning of the last century: the last male representative died an obscure actor in London, and his two surviving sisters both went mad, and were exhibited to tourists by unscrupulous servants as the very last of the Foscaris.

  One of the greatest of all the Venetian houses was the family of Giustinian; but during the twelfth-century wars every male member of the family, bar one, was killed in battle or died of the plague. The single exception was a Giustinian youth who had become a monk, and lived an austere life in a convent on the Lido. All Venice was distressed at the possible extinction of the Giustinians, and a public petition was sent to the Pope, asking him to release the monk from his vows. Permission was granted, the reluctant layman was hastily married to a daughter of the day’s Doge, and they dutifully produced nine boys and three girls. When their job was done, and the children were grown up, the father returned to his monastery and the mother founded a convent of her own, in a distant island of the lagoon. As for the House of Giustinian, it flourished ever after. A Giustinian was almost the only Venetian to maintain the dignity of the Republic in the face of Napoleon’s bullying; and today there are still eleven Giustinian palaces in Venice, a striking memorial to monkly self-denial.

  The purposes of aristocracy were firmly defined in the iron days of the Republic, and all these patrician families had their duties to perform. There were no orders of nobility. You were either a patrician, with your name in the Golden Book, or you were not (when the Austrians took over, any patrician who wished could become a Count). Every Venetian nobleman was in effect an unpaid servant of the State. His life was circumscribed by strict rules – even ordaining, for example, what he might wear, so that impoverished aristocrats were sometimes to be seen begging for alms in tattered crimson silk. Voltaire was shocked to discover that Venetian noblemen might not travel abroad without official permission. If a Venetian was chosen to be an Ambassador, he must maintain his embassy largely at his own expense, sometimes ruining himself in the process; one old gentleman served the Serenissima in this way for eleven years without a penny’s recompense, and asked as his sole reward the particular privilege of keeping a gold c
hain presented to him by one of the European monarchs, a gift which would in the ordinary way have gone instantly into the coffers of the State.

  The patrician was not allowed to refuse an appointment: and at the same time it was essential to the Venetian system that any citizen showing signs of self-importance or dangerous popularity should at once be humiliated, to prevent the emergence of dictators and pour encourager les autres. If you refused a command, you were disgraced. If you lost a battle, you were impeached for treason. If you won it, and became a public hero, you would probably be charged, soon or later, with some trumped-up offence against the State. The fifteenth-century general Antonio da Lezze, for example, defended Scutari for nearly a year against Turkish assaults so ferocious that a cat, stealing out one day across an exposed roof-top, was instantly transfixed by eleven arrows at once, and so sustained that afterwards the expended arrow-shafts kept the place in firewood for several months: but when at last he surrendered the city to overwhelmingly superior forces, and returned honourably to Venice, he was immediately charged with treason, imprisoned for a year and banished for ten more. In Venice a great commander was always a bad risk, and he was seldom left for long to enjoy his gouty retirement.