Venice Read online

  Even more, I sometimes think, do the Venetians love their animals. I have never seen one ill-treated in Venice. Even in Roman days the people of the Veneto were so kindly to their beasts that they were repelled by the bloody circus spectacles of their day, and preferred chariot races. There are very few mortal children in the pictures of the Venetian masters, but nearly every painter has portrayed birds and beasts, from the budgerigars of Carpaccio’s Two Courtesans to the fine big retriever who stands in the foreground of Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi. A multitude of little dogs prances through Venetian art, a menagerie of lions, camels, dragons, peacocks, horses and rare reptiles. I once went to an exhibition in Venice that consisted of some fifty portraits, all by the same artist, all meticulously executed, all very expensive, and all of the same cat.

  Venice is one of the world’s supreme cat-cities, comparable in my experience only with London and Aleppo. It is a metropolis of cats. Now and again the sanitary authorities have conducted a cat-hunt, to sweep away vagrants and scavengers: but so fond are the Venetians of their cats, even the mangiest and scabbiest of them, that these drives have always ended in ignominious failure, and the animals, spitting and scratching, have been hidden away in back yards and boxes until the hygiene men have gone. The population of cats thus increases each year. Some lead an eerily sheltered existence, and are rarely allowed out of doors, only appearing occasionally, like nuns, upon confined and inaccessible balconies. Many more are only half-domesticated, and live on charity, in old drain-pipes from which sympathetic citizens have removed the grilles, under the seats of laid-up gondolas, or in the tangled recesses of overgrown gardens. You may see them any morning wolfing the indigestible entrails, fish-tails and pasta, wrapped in newspapers, which householders have laid down for them: and on most winter afternoons an old lady arrives to feed the cats of the Royal Gardens, near St Mark’s, while a man in a sweeping overcoat so manipulates the flow of a nearby drinking fountain that a jet of water is projected into a declivity among the paving-stones, forming a cat’s basin or bath.

  They are odd and sometimes eccentric animals. Although they are constantly eating, and often turn up their whiskers fastidiously at a mess of spaghetti lying on a doorstep, they seldom grow fat: the only fat cats in Venice (except at Christmas, when they all seasonably swell) are the rat-catchers of the churches. They are never harshly treated, and are often positively molly-coddled, but they are usually very timid. They hardly ever climb trees. They do not answer to ‘puss, puss’, but if you go to the statue of Giuliano Oberdan, at the end of the Public Gardens, and make a noise something like ‘chwirk, chwirk’, there will be a threshing of tails among the shrubbery, as of fishes flailing in a net, and a small multitude of cats will bound out of the bushes to greet you. At a trattoria on the Rio del Ponte Lungo, on Giudecca, there used to be a small white cat with one yellow eye, and one blue: this may remind otologists, so I learnt from a letter in The Lancet, of the white forelock and heterochromia of Wardenburg’s syndrome, and the cat was probably deaf, and a reluctant hunter. It was very probably of Saracen descent, born of a Crusader’s booty, for such asymmetrical cats are particularly common in the Levant.

  Venetian cats often lead a kind of communal life, uncharacteristic of the species, lazing about in each other’s company, and sometimes dashing down a back-alley with four or five companions, like soft grey wolves, or greyhounds. Sometimes a brave nonconformist, swept off his feet by such a pack, dares to express the opinion that the hygiene men were right – there are too many cats in Venice. In 1947 Daniele Varè, ‘the laughing diplomat’, put a complaint about them into one of the old denunciation boxes. ‘There Are’ (so said his deposition) ‘Too Many Cats In The Sestiere Of Dorsoduro’: but there the paper remains, for nowadays those old receptacles are not emptied from one century to another.

  One Venetian cat became an international celebrity. He lived in the 1890s at a coffee shop opposite the main door of the Frari church, and until recently, if you had a cup of coffee among the frescoes of its front room, you would find that he was still not forgotten. Nini was a white torn who was so skilfully exploited by his owner, partly in the interests of trade, partly of charity, that it became the smart thing for visitors to Venice to call upon him: and if you asked the barman nicely he would bring out a big album from beneath his espresso machine, dust it reverently down, and let you look at Nini’s visitors’ book. Among his callers were Pope Leo ΧΙII, the Tsar Alexander ΙII, the King and Queen of Italy, Prince Paul Metternich, the Negus Menelik Salamen, and Verdi, who scribbled a few notes from Act III of La Traviata (first performed, disastrously, at the Fenice). When Nini died, in 1894, poets, musicians and artists all offered their fulsome condolences, now stuck in the book, and a sculptor did a figure of the animal, which used to stand on the wall beside the shop. ‘Nini!’ said one obituary tribute. ‘A rare gem, most honest of creatures!’ Another spoke of ‘an infinite necessity for tears’. He was ‘a gentleman, white of fur,’ said a third, ‘affable with great and small’. There was a gloomy funeral march in the book, and a long Ode On The Death of Nini: and Horatio Brown, the English historian of Venice, who spent much of his time in the State Archives of the Frari, around the corner, ended a poem with the lines:

  Yours was indeed a happy plight,

  For down the Frari corridors,

  The ghosts of ancient senators

  Conversed with you the livelong night.

  It was all done in a spirit of dead-pan satirism that was essentially Venetian, and you had to look very hard in the eye of the barman, as he wrapped the book in brown paper and put it carefully away, to detect a distant thin flicker of amusement.

  For myself, I love the cats of Venice, peering from their pedestals, sunning themselves on the feet of statues, crouching on dark staircases to escape the rain, or gingerly emerging into the daylight from their fetid subterranean lairs. Shylock defined them as ‘necessary and harmless’, and Francesco Morosini, one of the great fighting Doges, thought so highly of them that he took one with him on his victorious campaigns in the Peloponnese. There are few more soothing places of refuge than a Venetian garden on a blazing summer morning, when the trees are thick with green, the air is heavy with honeysuckle, and the tremulous water-reflections of the canals are thrown mysteriously upon the walls. The rear façade of the palace before you, with its confusion of windows, is alive with gentle activity. On the top floor an elderly housekeeper lowers her basket on a string, in preparation for the morning mail. From a lower window there issues the harsh melody of a housemaid’s song as she scrubs the bathroom floor. In the door of the ground-floor flat a girl sits sewing, in a black dress and a demure white apron, with a shine of polished pans from the kitchen lighting her hair like a halo. From the canal outside comes a pleasant buzz of boats, and sometimes the throaty warning cry of a bargee. On a neighbouring roof-garden an artist stands before his easel, brush in one hand, coffee cup in the other.

  And dotted all about you in the grass, in attitudes statuesque and contented, with their tails tucked around them and their eyes narrowed in the sunshine, one licking his haunches, one biting a blade of grass, one intermittently growling, one twitching his whiskers – all around you sit the cats of the garden, black, grey or obscurely tabby, like bland but scrawny guardians.

  There used to be many horses and mules in Venice – so many in the fourteenth century that they were compelled by law to wear warning bells. In the fifteenth century Michel Steno, a rip-roaring playboy Doge, had 400 horses, their coats all dyed yellow: it is said that one ingenious foreign diplomat asked him from what region of Italy this distinctive breed sprang. One of the bells of St Mark’s Campanile was called the Trottoria, because when it sounded the patricians used to trot to the Council Chamber on their mules. According to some theorists the Bridge of Straw, beside the Doge’s Palace, is where they used to tether their mounts with a comforting nosebag during legislative sessions. Later there was a celebrated riding-school near the church of
San Zanipolo, with stabling for seventy-five horses: and beside the Frari there was a successful coach-builder, whose firm went on building carriages so long after the disappearance of the Venetian horse, shipping them to customers on the mainland, that most eighteenth-century pictures of the Campo dei Frari show a specimen outside the workshop.

  The advent of the arched bridge in Venice turned the canals into highways, and ousted the horse. The last man to ride along the Merceria is said to have been a convicted procurer, condemned to be dressed up in yellow clothes and driven through the streets on a donkey, with a huge pair of horns on his head. By the eighteenth century a horse was such a rarity that Mrs Thrale reported seeing a queue of poor people paying to examine a stuffed carcase in a sideshow. The horselessness of Venice became an international joke, and the Venetians became notorious as appalling horsemen, just as they have a reputation for atrocious driving today. One old tale tells of a Venetian who kept his spurs in his pocket, instead of on his heels, and who was once heard murmuring to his mare: ‘Ah, if you only knew what I had in my pocket, you would soon change your step!’ Another Venetian, having trouble with a cantankerous horse, is said to have produced his handkerchief and spread it in the wind. ‘So that’s why he goes so slowly,’ he exclaimed. ‘He’s got the wind against him!’ A century ago, though you could still go riding in the Public Gardens, a contemporary observer noted the curious fact that the only people who did so seemed to be ‘young persons of the Hebrew persuasion’. Fifty years ago one old horse still spent the summer months in the gardens, pulling a rake and a lawn-mower: and I am told that when, each autumn, he was floated away in a scow to Mestre the children jeered him on his way, the gondoliers reviled him, and even the passengers on the passing ferries threw their catcalls and cigar-butts in his wake. Today there is not a single live horse left in the city of Venice, and if you feel like a canter you must go to the resort island of the Lido, and take a turn along the sands.

  There are, however, some gorgeous artificial horses. The equestrian statue of the condottiere Sforza, which figures in Dürer’s The Knight and the Death, has long since vanished from Venice. There remain the excellent horseback figure of King Victor Emmanuel, on the Riva degli Schiavoni; the incomparable Colleoni statue at San Zanipolo; and, tucked away in a museum room within the Basilica, the four bronze horses which stood for 700 years upon its façade, and which so impressed Goethe that he wanted to get the opinion of ‘a good judge of horseflesh’ on them. No pampered thoroughbred, no scarred war-horse has enjoyed so romantic a career as these. Their origins are lost – some say they are Greek, some Roman: but we know that they were taken from Trajan’s Arch in Rome to Constantinople, where they were mounted on the tower of the Hippodrome. There Enrico Dandolo found them, and shipped them home to Venice: a hoof of one was broken on the way, and the ship’s captain, named Morosini, kept it as a souvenir, later mounting it above the door of his house in Campo Sant’ Agostin. The horses were repaired in Venice, and mounted at first outside the Arsenal: but presently they were elevated to their grand eminence upon St Mark’s, and became so symbolic of Venetian pride and glory that the Genoese, when they were at war with Venice, used to boast that they were going to ‘bridle the horses of St Mark’ – as much as to say that they intended, before very long, to hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line. Napoleon’s engineers removed them laboriously from the Basilica (they weigh 1,700 lb each) and took them to Paris, where they stood for thirteen years in the Place du Carrousel. The Austrians removed them again, after Waterloo, and restored them to St Mark’s in a grand ceremony which, owing to the political fevers of the time, the Venetians themselves silently boycotted. In the First World War they were shipped away in a barge for safety: through the lagoon and down the dismal tributaries of the Po, watched all along the route by sad groups of villagers, and eventually to the garden of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, once the seat of Venetian Ambassadors (where they were joined by the Colleoni, and by Donatello’s great Gattame-lata from Padua). In the Second World War they were taken down from their gallery again, and packed away safely in a warehouse.

  Now they have left their belvedere for good, victims of conser-vationism – they were alleged to be suffering from the pollution of the air – to be replaced above the Piazza by dull replicas. I am not alone in thinking they would have been better left where they were, as the grandest of all trophies and the noblest symbols of Venetian independence. I can hardly bear to think of them shut away out of the sunshine, because they always seemed to me, as to generations of Venetians, truly living creatures, animated by the genius of their unknown creators. For all their wanderings, they used to seem, up there on their proud pedestals, ageless and untired. I often saw them paw the stonework, at starlit Venetian midnights, and once I heard a whinny from the second horse on the right, so old, brave and metallic that St Theodore’s crocodile, raising its head from beneath the saintly buskins, answered with a kind of grunt. There are many dogs in Venice. You will often meet examples of the fluffy white breed, all wispy tail and alertness, immortalized in the paintings of Carpaccio (the most famous of them all gazes, with an appealing mixture of impatience and affection, at the preoccupied St Jerome in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni). There are many poodles, and many rather nasty Alsatians, whose muzzling, compulsory under Italian law, makes them figures of impotent fun to the more impertinent cats of the place. There is a pair of Tibetan terriers in a palace on the Grand Canal, and I once saw a young business man, sitting on his haunches in the Via 22 Marzo, fanning an exhausted bull terrier with his briefcase. Best of all, there are countless dogs of indeterminate breed, tough, black, self-reliant animals, who guard the boats and boatyards of Venice, and are often to be seen riding down the Grand Canal on the prows of barges, tails streaming, heads held high, in attitudes marvellously virile and conceited.

  Thousands of crabs scuttle about the water-lines of Venice. Millions of ants exude from its paving-stones. Mice proliferate, and their beastly black silhouettes often scurry away from your feet down the crumbling corridors of a palace, dart from the stagnant water of a gutter, or disappear beneath the refrigerator. More than once, according to the records of St Mark’s, the nibblings of mice have silenced the great organ of the Basilica. I once found a mouse on my pillow in the middle of the night, and another was once fool enough to immure itself in my bath. The Venetians seal up mouse-holes with cement, hopelessly moving from room to room, like Dame Parting-ton with her mop: and they call mice by their diminutive, topolini, as if to demonstrate that they aren’t scared; but the mice of Venice are a scourge and a horror, all the same, and are no doubt one reason why Shylock, who hardly sounds an animal-lover, tolerated the cats. There are also rats, as in every port. They sometimes eat the breadcrumbs we put out for the pigeons, on the balcony of our third-floor apartment: but generally they keep to the edges of the canals, or slink, grim and emaciated, from one stinking cavity to another, or end their ghastly lives floating pink-bellied down the Grand Canal.

  At one time people kept lions as pets in Venice; fifty years ago a well-known hawker used to tow a floundering dolphin up and down the Grand Canal, while people threw coins from their windows; and in 1819 an elephant, escaping from a visiting menagerie, took refuge in the church of Sant’ Antonin, and was ‘only despatched’, so contemporary records inform us respectfully, ‘by a shot from a piece of ordnance’.

  Most people, though, will remember Venice as a city of birds. Birds are inextricably entangled in her legend, as they are pictured everywhere in her art. It was a flight of birds, so we are told, that inspired the people of Altinum to move into the lagoon; and birds played a picturesque part in the series of visions that inspired the founding fathers to build the first churches in the city – one must be built where they should find ‘a number of birds together’, another ‘where twelve cranes should be in company’. Birds are still conspicuous in Venetian lore, from the swallows which arrive with a flourish in the middle of June (and which use
d to be, before the new antidotes, the principal destroyers of mosquitoes) to the big white seagulls of the lagoon (which are often driven into the city canals by bad weather, and are even to be seen, humiliatingly plucked, hung up for sale in the Rialto market – excellent boiled, I am told, but only in the winter season). Sometimes you see a homely sparrow looking lost among the rooftops, or pecking among the green water-growths at low tide. In a few secluded gardens of the city a vivid goose struts exotically, or a bright tame pheasant preens itself. Thousands of canaries sing in the houses of Venice, their massed cages sometimes blocking entire windows: and there is a shop near the Frari church, a dark and cavernous place, through the shuttered doors of which you can always hear, even in the depth of the night, the rustle of small caged wings and the clicking of beaks. Sometimes a wild swan flies over, with an imperial rhythm, towards the fastnesses of the lagoon or the marshes of Ravenna – and in a fifteenth-century miniature from The Book of Marco Polo lordly white swans are swimming past St Mark’s itself.

  Finally there are the pigeons, most celebrated of the Venetian fauna. They are, by tradition, honoured and protected, and to have a roast pigeon lunch you must go down the road to Padua, or better still find yourself a musty trattoria among the Euganean Hills. Some say this is because Dandolo, when he stormed Constantinople, sent back the news of victory by carrier pigeon. Others believe that it arises from an old Palm Sunday custom, when a flock of pigeons was released in the Piazza, those that were caught by the populace being promptly eaten, those that escaped guaranteed permanent immunity – a ceremony that led in the long run, one pigeon looking very like another, to a safe conduct for them all. Whatever the truth, the pigeons have prospered. They survived some violent epidemics of pigeon-plague, picked up from carrion crows in the Levant, and nowadays never actually die, but merely go out into the lagoon and sink themselves.