Venice Page 8

  They are mostly a drab grey colour, only occasionally relieved by a semi-albino with a white head, and they seem to me to have a verminous flavour to them. Their headquarters is the Piazza. There the stones of the Basilica are thick with generations of their droppings, and near the porphyry lions of the northern Piazetta stands their private bird-bath, beside an antique well-head. There, at the right time of day, they assemble in their shiftless thousands, gobbling and regurgitating on the pavement, a heaving mass of grey, riding on each others’ backs, pushing and swelling and rustling in an obscene frenzy to get at the maize and breadcrumbs: and only a few old world-weary doves, wedged among the pillars, or propped cynically beside a chimney-pot, prefer to watch this gluttony from a fastidious distance.

  7

  Pageantries and Panaceas

  The Venetians grew rich on silks, spices and other exotics conveyed by their merchant ships from eastern bazaars: and just as they love fineries, so they have an Oriental taste for pageantry and display. This was encouraged by the wise men of the Republic, on the old assumption about bread and circuses. The Venetian calendar was lavish with feasts, shows and exhibitions, from the grand ceremony of the Doge Wedding the Adriatic to the manifestations of St Mark’s Day, when every husband gave his wife a red rose of undying loyalty. Brilliant were the pageant-fleets that used to escort the Doge on his ceremonial duties, and the Carnival which became, in the end, the prime fact of Venetian life was one long gaudy night.

  Until 1802 there used to be bull-baitings in the Venetian squares, in which snarling dogs were pitted against tethered bulls: they were astonishingly ill-organized, if we are to go by one seventeenth-century painting, which depicts the entire square of San Polo in a condition of chaos, bulls charging in all directions, women scattering, hats flying, dogs barking, and only a few masked beauties, in virginal satins, stalking through the turmoil disdainfully serene. There were hilarious public fist fights, sublimating the old vendettas between factions, and degenerating into glorious free-for-alls: you can still see on the Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), or on the bridge beside the church of Santa Fosca, the footprints, cemented in the pavement, that formed the touchline of the game. There were magnificent regattas, and gymnastic competitions, and religious processions, and even, in earlier times, knightly jousts. There were ceremonial gun salutes in the Piazza, until it was found that their vibrations were loosening the precious mosaics of the Basilica. Sometimes the Republic mounted an official display of whole-hog extravagance, to celebrate some distant and often illusory victory, forestall an incipient subversion, or impress a visiting dignitary: and it was these chimerical affairs that gave Venice her legendary aura of gold and grotesquerie.

  The most memorable of all such galas was arranged for the visit of Henry IIΙ of France, in 1574 – an event which, though it had no particular political consequences, so engraved itself upon the Venetian memory that it is included in most lists of significant Venetian dates. Triumphal arches of welcome were designed by Palladio and decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese, and Henry (aged twenty-three) was conveyed to the city in a ship rowed by 400 Slav oarsmen, with an escort of fourteen galleys. As this fleet sailed across the lagoon, glass-blowers on a huge accompanying raft blew objects for the King’s amusement, their furnace a gigantic marine monster that belched flame from its jaws and nostrils: and presently it was met by a second armada of curiously decorated boats, fanciful or symbolic, elaborate with dolphins and sea gods, or draped in rich tapestries. At Venice the palace called Ca’ Foscari, on the Grand Canal, had been especially prepared for the visitor. It was embellished with cloth of gold, carpets from the East, rare marbles, silks, velvets and porphyry. The bed-sheets were embroidered in crimson silk. The pictures, specially acquired or commissioned, were by Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Paris Bordone, Tintoretto and Veronese. For the principal banquet, in the gigantic Great Council Chamber of the Doge’s Palace, the sumptuary laws were temporarily suspended, and the most beautiful women of Venice appeared all in dazzling white, ‘adorned’, as one historian tells us, ‘with jewels and pearls of great size, not only in strings on their necks, but covering their headdresses and the cloaks on their shoulders’. There were 1,200 dishes on the bill of fare, the 3,000 guests all ate off silver plate, and the tables were decorated with sugar figures of Popes, Doges, Gods, Virtues, animals and trees, all designed by an eminent architect and fashioned by a pharmacist of talent. When Henry picked up his elaborately folded napkin, he found that it was made of sugar, too. Three hundred different kinds of bonbon were distributed, as the meal sank to a conclusion, and after dinner the King saw the first opera ever performed in Italy. When at last he went out into the night, he found that a galley, shown to him earlier in the evening in its component parts, had been put together during the banquet on the quay outside: it was launched into the lagoon as he emerged from the palace, complete with a 16,000 lb cannon that had been cast between the soup and the soufflé.

  According to some historians the poor young King, who dressed very simply himself, and liked to wander around cities incognito, was never quite the same again, and lived the rest of his life in a perpetual daze. Many other visitors were similarly staggered by the colour and luxury of Venice. Thomas Coryat from Somerset wrote wildly in 1610 that he would deny himself four of the richest manors in his county, rather than go through life without seeing the city. A fifteenth-century Milanese priest was shown the bedroom of an eminent Venetian lady, decorated with blue and gold to the value of 11,000 ducats, and attended by twenty-five maids, loaded with jewellery: but when he was asked what he thought of it, ‘I knew not how to answer’ (says he convincingly) ‘save by the raising of my shoulders.’ ‘I have oftentimes observed many strangers’, wrote one old Englishman, ‘men wise and learned, who arriving newly at Venice, and beholding the beautie and magnificence thereof were stricken with so great an admiration and amazement, that they woulde, and that with open mouth, confesse, never any thing which before time they had seene, to be thereunto comparable.’

  Venice is not quite so sumptuous nowadays, but she still enjoys her round of pageants, her almanac of festivals. Some are natural and popular, some blatantly touristic, but none are without fun or beauty. There is the great feast of the Redentore, when a bridge is thrown across the wide canal of the Giudecca to the church of the Redemption on the other side, and the night is loud and bright with fireworks. There are starlight concerts in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, and band performances in the Piazza. There are regattas still, and candle-lit sacred processions, and the great art festival of the Biennale. There is the annual Film Festival, a thing of minks and speedboats, to which the world’s exhibitionists flock as dazzled moths to lamplight. Every night in summer there are serenades on the Grand Canal, when tremulous sopranos and chesty tenors, enthroned in fairy-lit barges, lurch uncomfortably down the waterway among the vaporetti, introduced over a loud-speaker in unctuous American English, and sometimes closely pursued, in a dissonance of arias, by a rival fleet of troubadours.

  The municipal department of tourism, which pleasantly defines one of its activities as Organizing traditional festivals’, diligently maintains the old celebrations and sometimes launches new ones: and there seems scarcely a day in the Venetian summer without its own ceremonial, a procession of clergy around St Mark’s, a Festival of Lights, a Traditional Custom or An Old Venetian Fête, the Century Regatta (for elderly gondoliers), an Artistic Floodlighting of the Palaces, a Romantic Moonlight Serenade. When the image of Our Lady of Fatima was brought to Venice in 1959, it was landed at St Mark’s by helicopter. Modern Venetian ceremonies usually begin half an hour late, and there is a strong taste of the travel agency to their arrangements (‘and this, you see, is the very same traditional festival followed by the ancient Doges, from time immemorial, according to old-hallowed custom’): but somewhere among their sham and tinsel glitter you can still sometimes fancy a glow of old glory, and imagine King Henry watching, with his guard of sixty silk-dress
ed halberdiers, through the taffeta hangings of his palace.

  The Venetians still love a show, and do not care about its stage management – they used to be enthusiastic followers of that most frankly artificial art, puppetry. When that ghastly serenade floats by each evening, there are always Venetians leaning tenderly from their balconies to hear the music, and watch the undeniably romantic bobbing of the gondola prows in the half-light. Given half a chance, they would climb aboard the barge and join in the chorus themselves. I once helped to make a television film in Venice, and it was wonderful with what ease and pleasure the Venetians in the street performed before our cameras (except those who, following an irrepressible instinct, asked us how much we were planning to pay them). Beside the Riva degli Schiavoni, away from the hotels, there are two long tunnel-like tenements, strung with washing, which run away from the sea into a huddle of houses. Here our Roman cameraman deployed the local inhabitants for the scene we wanted, poised beside their washing-boards, frozen in gossip, precariously balanced on doorsteps, immobilized in archways, static in windows. There they stood for two or three minutes, patiently waiting. The exposure was estimated; the producer approved the arrangements; the script-writer had a look through the viewfinder; the sun shifted satisfactorily; the steamer in the background was nicely framed through the washing; and suddenly the cameraman, pressing his key, bawled ‘Via!’ In an instant that tenement was plunged in frantic activity, the housewives scrubbing furiously, the gossips jabbering, the passers-by vigorously passing, the old ladies leaning energetically from their windows, and a multitude of unsuspected extras, never seen before, precipitately emerging from back-doors and alleyways – an old man in a black hat, sudden coveys of youths, and a clown of a boy who, abruptly appearing out of a passage, shambled across our field of vision like a camel, till the tears ran down the script-writer’s face, and the whole community dissolved in laughter. The Venetians are not an exuberant people, but they have a long comical tradition, and they love acting. Eleanora Duse herself was born in a third-class railway carriage as her father’s Venetian dialect troupe puffed from one performance to the next, and Harlequin, like Pantaloon, was invented in Venice. The very word ‘zany’, as the cameraman reminded me that morning, comes from a Venetian theatrical character – his name was Giovanni, and he acted crazy.

  Now and then the Venetians still arrange a grand spectacle outside the usual tourist round, and recapture some of the old spontaneity. In 1959 there was returned to the city, to lie in state for one month, the body of Pope Pius X, one of the few canonized pontiffs of recent times. This holy man had been Patriarch of Venice for seven years, until his elevation to the papacy in 1903, and he is still venerated in the city. Scores of churches contain his effigy, and many an elderly lady will teil you, with a look of respectful affection in her eye, tales of his simplicity and goodness. He was a man of poverty – he wore his predecessor’s robes, to save buying new ones, and towards the end of the month he sometimes had to make a visit to the Monte di Pieta, the pawnshop of Venice. He scorned convention, pretence and stuffiness, and was thus more popular among the common people than among the aristocrats. He once demonstrated to a lady, in private audience at the Vatican, the steps of a Venetian dance. When a nun asked for a pair of his old stockings, as a remedy for her rheumatism, and later pronounced herself entirely cured, the Pope declared it very odd – ‘I wore them myself far longer than she did, and they never did me any good!’

  All Venice mourned when this good person left the city for the consistory that was to elect him Pope. There is a moving photograph that shows him stepping into his gondola for the last time, to go to the railway station. In the foreground an elderly gondolier stands solemn and bareheaded, holding his oar; a bald man kneels to kiss the old priest’s hand; a small boy, clutching a pillar, stares pale-faced from the background; and the scene is framed with groups of anxious, silent, sad women. It was almost certain that he would be the next Pope: but he cheerfully bought a return ticket to Rome, and he said to the crowds, in a phrase that has become famous: ‘Never fear, I shall come back. Dead or alive, I shall return to Venice!’ – ‘O vivo ο morto ritornerò!’

  Half a century later another Patriarch of Venice became Pope: and one of the first acts of Giovanni ΧΧIIΙ, a man of much the same kind, was to fulfil his predecessor’s promise, and return to the city the embalmed body of Saint Pius X. A marvellous procession conveyed it down the Grand Canal to the Basilica. First came the countless gondolas of the clergy, each rowed by a white-clad gondolier: a melange of crosses, surplices, purple cassocks, stout bishops and stooping monks, Armenians with bushy beards, Dominicans in white, rosy country parsons, foxy-faced thinkers, tremulous old saints and pallid novices, all smiling and cushioned deep in their seats. Then came the dream-like barges of the Venetian tradition, their crews in vivid medieval liveries, silver or blue castles at their prows and sterns, heavy draperies trailing in the water behind (supported by corks, to keep them ponderously afloat). The bells of Venice rang. Plainchant issued from a hundred loudspeakers. Flags, bunting and an occasional carpet flapped from the windows of the canal-side palaces. Thousands of school children, massed upon the quays and bridges, threw rose petals into the water. Police boats scurried everywhere, and by the Accademia Bridge a reporter in a speedboat spoke a purple commentary into his walkie-talkie.

  Thus, in a blaze of gold, there appeared beneath the Rialto bridge the barge called the Bucintoro, successor to the magnificent State vessels of the Doges (the last of which was turned into a prison hulk at the fall of the Republic, and later broken up for firewood). A crew of young sailors rowed it, in a slow funereal rhythm, each stroke of the oar summoned by a single drum-beat from a ferocious major-domo in the well of the ship – a man who, glaring angrily from oarsman to oarsman, and striking his drum with ritual dedication, looked like an old slave-driver between decks on a galley. Slowly, heavily, eerily this barge approached us along the canal, its gold gleaming, a vast crimson textile streaming from its high stern into the water, until at last, peering down from our balcony, we could see beneath its carved gilded canopy into the ceremonial chamber beneath. There lay the corpse of the great Pope, embalmed in a crystal coffin, in a splendour of vestments, rings and satin, riding calm and silently towards St Mark’s.

  They took Pope Pius to the Basilica, and laid him upon the High Altar, and a multitude of pilgrims filed around his coffin, touching the glass with reverent fingers, or kissing the panelling. But when the ceremonies were over that day I took out my boat and followed those rich fantastic barges away from the Piazzetta. They plunged across the choppy Giudecca Canal, their duties done, like so many Viking long-ships. Their high poops were engraved against the sunset, their crews sweated in silhouette, their pennants fluttered in a rising wind, and their draperies trailed heavily against the tide. Past a hulking British freighter they laboured, down the shore of the Giudecca; past the Lido car-ferry; past the disused flour-mill at the end of the island; past the cranes on Sacca Fisola; until as the light began to fail they reached their destination, the crews took off their brilliant costumes and lit their cigarettes, and those peacock craft were pulled from the water, stripped of their fabrics, and put away in corrugated-iron sheds until the next festivity.

  Behind all this Renaissance veneer, the splendour of the Venetian façades, the beautifully dressed women and the pomaded men, there remains a layer of squalor. There are still drab slums in Venice, despite housing programmes that have transformed whole areas of the city, and there are still many people whose simplicity borders upon the primitive. Less than a century ago Venice was a city wreathed in folk-lore, as a glance at almost any nineteenth-century description will confirm – ‘in Venice the omens of death are many and various’, ‘the belief in witches is chiefly confined to women’, ‘the different factions of Venice each have their bombastic songs’, ‘the best place to hear a traditional story-teller is among the plane trees of the Public Gardens, whither the Venetians of the lower o
rders make their way for the beguilement of their summer evenings’. Most of these picturesque beliefs and customs have, so far as I can discover, died. No folksy costumes are worn in Venice, and a characteristic demonstration of contemporary taste is the silent crowd which, through the dreary winter evenings, sits spellbound before the television set in every city café.

  Occasionally, though, to this very day, a quaint tale or a kitchen quirk will remind you of the knotty medieval roots of Venice, a city of water-peasants. Venetians still point to the lamps that burn before the Madonna on the Piazzetta façade of the Basilica, and tell you the story of the baker’s boy, who was wrongly executed for murder, and in whose memory (so they have wrongly supposed for several centuries) the lights flicker remorsefully night and day. A few Venetians still believe a hunchback to be a symbol of good luck. They still paint great eyes on the bows of their boats – or more often euphemistic stars – to keep away ill fortune. They still invest their religion with a particular aura of magic and necromancy.

  I was once filming inside the courtyard of a disused convent, now inhabited by a myriad squatter families. Washing hung dismally across the old cloisters, and was draped about the ancient well-head (clamped together with wires, to keep it from disintegrating); and there were pots and pans in the derelict dormitory windows, and ramshackle partitions and privies in the remains of the refectory. The place was cold and dirty, and a few raggety children played among its debris. A young woman was hanging up sheets in the yard, and we asked if we might photograph her, to inject some animation into an otherwise torpid scene: but as she walked obligingly towards our cameras, a searing cry came from a window directly above us. There, propped witch-like on a window-sill, was a dreadful old woman all in black, with a face that was withered and blotchy, and a voice of curdling severity. ‘Don’t let them do it!’ she screeched. ‘It’s the evil eye! They did it to my poor husband, only last year, the same wicked thing, and within a month he died! Send them away, the evil ones! Send them away!’ The young woman paled at these horrific words; the cameraman gaped; and as for myself, I was out of the courtyard on the quay before the last cracked echoes of her indictment had died away amongst the washing.