Venice Read online

  Perhaps it is not fanciful to imagine two surviving consequences of the system, which indeed had a new lease of life under the Fascists. One is that Venetians like to preserve their privacy, shuttering their flats and locking their back doors, so that you can live on one floor of a palace for weeks without catching a glimpse of the people downstairs. Nowadays they have warning mirrors attached to their window-sills; in earlier times there used to be grilles in the drawing-room floor, enabling the householder to see in good time what monumental bore was arriving at the water-gate (there is. still one in Goldoni’s house, near the church of the Frari).

  The second consequence, a corollary, is that the Venetians have a habit of minding other people’s business. Many a fussy citizen loves to interfere, if you let your children wander down the water-steps. Many a know-all will give you the benefit of his advice, if you carry more passengers in your boat than the law allows. The Venetians have an insatiable interest in your movements and purposes, and can never resist telling you how mistaken you are, or advising you how to do it better. If the luggage is stolen from your car, as it stands in the Piazzale Roma, the first reaction of Venetians is not to find the missing suitcase, or apprehend the thief, but to give you a short lecture on the evils of carelessness – and the next is to say, with a judicious raising of the eyes, ‘Ah, these Italians, they’ll do anything!’ as if to make it absolutely clear that no proper Venetian ever stole a hat-box.

  For all the blank doors of its apartments (distorted television voices seeping through their hinges, as you toil up the echoing stairs) Venice is a gossipy provincial city, where your movements are eagerly observed and your visitors adroitly analysed. If you take a picnic lunch to a far corner of the lagoon, somebody is sure to have seen your boat steal out, and when you come home at night through the empty garden a surreptitious chink of light, momentarily appearing in the shuttered mass of the palace, testifies to the alertness of the second floor. Somebody once told me that Venice used to be an important clearing-station for the British Secret Service. Certainly its ear-to-the-ground propensities are catching, and nobody is a better Venetian than I am myself, when it comes to curiosity.

  5

  On Women

  The women of Venice are very handsome, and very vain. They are tall, they walk beautifully, and they are often fair (in the sixteenth century Venetian ladies used to bleach their hair in the sunshine, training it through crownless hats like vines through a trellis). Their eyes are sometimes a heavy-lidded greenish-blue, like the eyes of rather despondent armadillos. Rare indeed is a dishevelled Venetian woman, and even the Madonnas and female saints of the old masters are usually elegantly dressed. The most slovenly people to be seen in the city are nearly always tourists – cranks and water-colour artists apart.

  The Venetians are not, by and large, rich: but they have always spent a large proportion of their money on clothes and ornaments, and you will hardly ever see a girl dressed for pottering, in a sloppy sweater and a patched skirt, or in that unpressed dishabille that marks the utter emancipation of the Englishwoman. The girls at the University, who are either studying languages, or learning about Economics and Industrial Practices, look more like models than academics: and the housemaids, when they walk off in scented couples for their weekend pleasures, would hardly seem out of place at Ascot, or at a gala convention of the Women Lawyers’ Association.

  This love of dress is deep-rooted in the Venetian nature. The men are very dapper, too, and until quite recently used to cool themselves with little fans and parasols in the Public Gardens – ‘curious’, as Augustus Hare observed austerely in 1896, ‘to English eyes’. As early as 1299 the Republic introduced laws restricting ostentation, and later the famous sumptuary laws were decreed, strictly governing what people might wear, with a special magistracy to enforce them. They were never a success. When the Patriarch of Venice forbade the use of ‘excessive ornaments’, a group of women appealed directly to the Pope, who promptly restored them their jewellery. When the Republic prohibited long gowns, the Venetian women caught up their trains in intricate and delicious folds, fastened with sumptuous clasps. When it was announced that only a single row of pearls might be worn, with a maximum value of 200 ducats, the evasions of the law were so universal, so ingenious and so brazen that the magistracy gave up, and turned its disapproving eyes elsewhere. In the eighteenth century Venetian women were the most richly dressed in Europe, and it took an Englishwoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to observe that since everybody wore masks at the opera anyway, there was consequently ‘no trouble in dressing’.

  Among the patrician ladies of old Venice, as among the women of Arabian harems, there was nothing much to think about but clothes and babies. Venetian mores were bred out of Byzantium, and respectable women were closely guarded and carefully circumscribed. Clamped in their houses out of harm’s way, they were little more than tools or playthings, western odalisques: even the Doge’s wife had no official position. No item of dress was more popular among Venetian aristocrats than the absurd towering clogs, sometimes twenty inches high, which obliged their wives to totter about with the help of two servants (and which, since they made great height socially desirable, have perhaps left a legacy in the unshakeable determination of modern Venetian women to wear the highest possible heels in all circumstances).

  Only two women have played parts of any prominence in Venetian history. The first was Caterina Cornaro, who married the King of Cyprus in 1472 and was officially adopted as a ‘daughter of the Republic’ in order to ensure Venetian control of the island: her husband died a year after their marriage, the Venetians took over, and poor Caterina languished away in gilded exile at Asolo, signing herself to the last as ‘Queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia, Lady of Asolo’. The second was Bianca Cappello, daughter of a noble house, who ran away with a Florentine clerk in 1564: she was condemned to death in absentia, such was the disgrace of it all, but presently rose in the world to become Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and was promptly reclasped to the Venetian bosom as another ‘daughter of the Republic’. She died of poisoning in 1587, but the Republic did not go into mourning, just in case it was the Grand Duke who had poisoned her.

  It was only in the eighteenth century that the upper-class Venetian woman came into her own, and even now a cloistered feeling of anachronism often surrounds her. Sometimes a beautiful young blonde is to be seen in Venice, gracefully rowing her own boat: but the gondoliers do not even consider the possibility that she might be Venetian, and airily point her out as English, American or German, according to the nationality of their passengers. With her maids, her always exquisite clothes, her waiting gondolier, and the almost insuperable difficulty she has in getting out of one cushioned gondola and into another, the Venetian lady is scarcely the kind to go messing about in boats. She is often rich and often influential (‘the flat downstairs’, I was once told by a house agent, ‘is occupied by a lady, with her husband’): but there are few professional women in the city, and one sometimes pines, in an ambience so perfumed and cosseted, for a hard-boiled New York career woman, with her heart – or part of it, anyway – deep in the propagation of soap flakes.

  Other classes of Venetian women were not so sheltered under the Republic. Burghers’ wives and daughters were always freer and often better educated. Poor women lived a life of rugged equality, and Venetian working women today are often jolly gregarious characters, like figures from a Goldoni comedy, throwing hilarious ribaldries across the post-office counter, or sitting plumply at their knitting on the quaysides. Courtesans, in sixteenth-century Venice, were not only celebrated and honoured, but often people of cultivation, with a taste for art and poetry (though the law at one time decreed that each such girl must carry a red light at the prow of her gondola). In earlier centuries there was a celebrated brothel, the Casteletto, at the end of the Rialto bridge, famous throughout Europe for the beauty and skill of its girls. Later, when Venice was beginning her decline, the prostitutes became courtesans, incr
eased in wealth and respectability, burst the confines of the bordels, and gave the city its lasting reputation for lascivious charm. At the end of the sixteenth century there are said to have been 2,889 patrician ladies in Venice, and 2,508 nuns, and 1,936 burgher women: but there were 11,654 courtesans, of whom 210 were carefully registered in a catalogue by a public-spirited citizen of the day, together with their addresses and prices – or, as the compiler delicately put it, ‘the amount of money to be paid by noblemen and others desirous of entering their good graces’. The cheapest charged one scudo, the most expensive thirty, and the catalogue reckons that the enjoyment of them all would cost the intemperate visitor 1,200 gold scudi.

  A scholarly Venetian once remarked that his city had fostered three bad practices hitherto unknown in Italy – adulation, Lutheranism and debauchery: but he did not sound altogether censorious. Venice in her heyday, despite a streak of salty puritanism in her character, was tolerant about sex. A favourite subject of the Venetian masters, it has been observed, was Christ Defending the Woman Taken in Adultery, and even the established church was fairly easy-going with libertines: it was only with reluctance and after long delay that the administration of the Basilica, in the seventeenth century, closed the chapel of San Clemente because of the scandalous things that were known to go on behind the altar. Gay young nuns were seen on visiting days in habits distinctly décolletés, and with clusters of pearls in their virginal hair. In the wildest days of carnival even the Papal Nuncio used to wear a domino. Family chaplains looked benignly upon the Venetian institution of the cicisbeo, the handsome young man who, in the dying years of the Republic, used to stand in constant attendance upon each great lady of Venice, even sometimes helping her maids to dress her. ‘The only honest woman in Venice’, a wry husband remarked to a friend one day, ‘is that one there’ – and he pointed to a little stone figure carved on a wall above a bridge: Venice took his point, and to this day the bridge, near the Frari church, is called The Bridge of the Honest Woman.

  Today all is changed. Except at the more sophisticated levels of hotel society, sin is hard to come by in modern Venice. Brothels – ‘houses of toleration’ – are no longer permitted by Italian law, and the police deal severely with harlots. When some modest bordel is uncovered, the newspapers make a great fuss about it – ‘an operation brilliant, delicate and complete’, glowed the Gazzettino when the police recently pounced upon a backstairs stew in Dorsoduro. One distinguished foreign diplomat, it is true, discovered not long ago that his cook had been running a small but profitable brothel on the third floor of his consulate; but there is no red-light district in Venice. The sailors who wander through the city from their ships often look uncharacteristically lost and ill at ease, and you sometimes overhear disgruntled American business men trying to obtain guidance from reticent barmen (‘My score so far is precisely zero, and I don’t like it that way, see? Comprenez, amico? Hey?’).

  Venice nowadays is a regenerate city, free of public vice and aberrations, where a politic eye is still winked at the idiosyncrasies of foreigners, but where men are generally men, and women usually marry. The convent of the Penitents, reserved for remorseful harlots, has long since closed its doors – it stands on the Cannaregio, nearly opposite the slaughter-house, and offered a five-year reform course for its inmates. So has the home for fallen women, near San Sebastiano, that was founded by the most famous and cultured of all the courtesans, the prostitute-poetess Veronica Franco. This is not one of your smoky, hole-in-corner, juke-box cities, and here the Italo-American culture, that garish cross-breed, is kept at bay by water and tradition. A notice appeared on the walls of the city one recent summer day, sponsored by the Society for the Protection of Youth in Venice, begging citizens and visitors to wear garments ‘in accordance with the propriety of our city, which, being proud of its traditional standard of high morality, cannot approve of scanty or unbecoming clothes’. I thought of the whoopee days of carnival as I read this sober appeal, of the masked Nuncio and the simpering cicisbei, the harlots and the hedonists, and ‘O Tempora,’ I breathed as I hitched my trousers up, ‘O Mores!’

  But for all its reformation, Venice remains a sexy city still, as many a ravished alien has discovered. It is a city of seduction. There is sex and susceptibility in the very air of the place, in the mellow sunshine stones of its pavements, the shadows of its courtyards, the discretion of its silent black gondolas (which sometimes, as Byron remarked, ‘contain a deal of fun, like mourning coaches when the funeral’s done’). In the summer evenings symmetrical pairs of lovers, neatly balanced, occupy each water-side seat of the Public Gardens: and the steps that lead down to the Grand Canal from the Courtyard of the Duke Sforza are worn with moonlight ecstasies.

  6

  Minor Venetians

  The Venetians love their children, sometimes with a sickly intensity. Venetian fathers carry their babies with unashamed delight, and Venetian mothers show signs of instant cardiac crisis if little Giorgio ventures within six feet of the water. Venetian children are exquisitely, if sometimes rather ludicrously dressed: the minutest little baby girls have pocket handkerchiefs tied under their chins, as head-scarves, and even the waxen Christ-children of the churches, lapped in tinsel tawdry, sometimes wear lace-embroidered drawers.

  It is not altogether an easy city for children to live in. It has no dangerous traffic and few unspeakable rascals; but Venice is inescapably urban, and only lucky children with gardens, or with parents indulgent enough to take them to the distant park, have somewhere green to play. Blithe but pathetic are the groups of urchins to be found entertaining themselves, in hot dry squares or dripping alleyways, with their inexplicable Venetian games – the most popular is governed by the accuracy with which a child can thrown the old rubber heel of a shoe, but is so hedged about with subtleties and qualifications that for the life of me I have never been able to master the rules. The State schools of Venice are excellent and lavishly staffed, but they generally occupy tall, dark, overheated buildings, heavily decorated with potted plants. There are no playing fields or yards, and even the mid-morning break (or so my own children lugubriously assure me) is celebrated indoors, with a biscuit or an orange at a blank brown desk.

  And in the afternoons, when school is over – children under ten only go in the mornings – and their mothers take them for a breath of air along the quayside, dauntingly spotless are those infants’ clothes, unscuffled their polished shoes, neat their gloves and impeccable their hair, as they stroll sedately along the quay, beside the dancing lagoon. In the winter months there is a fair on the Riva degli Schiavoni, near St Mark’s, with the usual assembly of roundabouts, bumper-cars, swings and candy-floss men, revolving colourfully against a background of ships’ funnels and riggings. All the apparatus of gaiety is there, with a tang of the sea as well, but I have never wandered through that fairground without being struck by the pathos of it all, so restrained do the children seem to be, so ardently delighted by every bump of the merry-go-round. Many Venetians seem to work their children very hard, loading them with homework, foreign languages and mathematics, to sustain the family honour, or get them into universities, and keeping them up late at night. Little Venetians often seem old beyond their years, and frighteningly well-informed. When the Doge’s Palace was burnt in 1479, the only record left of Petrarch’s inscriptions upon the walls was the notebook of Marin Sanudo, who had taken the trouble to copy them down when inspecting the palace at the age of eight. (He went on to write a history of the world in fifty-five volumes.)

  But not all Venetian children are solemn or scholastic, and many are unusually attractive. Venetian working-class women often raise their children with a bluff common sense: a single open-handed smack on the face from a benevolent washer-woman instantly and permanently cured my elder son of the unpleasant habit of spitting. In the summer dog-days a stream of mudlarks, as in an old-fashioned Hollywood musical, throw themselves contrapuntally across your path into the canals, and some beguiling tombo
ys can be seen most afternoons up to their thighs in the mud-flats of the inner lagoon. Rumbustious gangs of boys parade the Zattere, fighting each other with great wooden bludgeons or rapiers, or racing about on roller-skates; and I remember with affection a group of children who climbed one afternoon to the canvas roof of a water-bus stop on the Grand Canal, and who were tumbling about in the sunshine on its taut elastic surface like so many small acrobats, to the bewilderment and consternation of the passengers waiting underneath. The little girls of Venice are over-dressed but often adorable; and the more bedraggled the urchin, the more familiar he will be to the English visitor, for as you clamber down the social ladder, away from the grand palaces towards the tenements, so the children get scruffier, and more at ease, and less subdued, and more rough-and-tumble, until at last, among the shabby homes of the poor districts, you find boys and girls so blue-eyed, fair-haired, cocky, friendly and unkempt that you may imagine yourself home in your own garden, hopelessly summoning Henry to wash his hands for tea, or disengaging Mark from his collection of earthworms.