Venice Read online

  Venice used to be a great place for love potions, alchemists, fumigations, salivations of mercury, vapour baths, quacks and wise women. Casanova’s earliest memory was of a Venetian witch, surrounded by black cats, burning drugs and pronouncing incantations over him, for the cure of a nose-bleed. (He was inclined that way himself: when the Venetians eventually arrested him, it was, so they said, partly for his Voltairean notions, and partly because of his interest in sorcery.) In 1649 a Venetian doctor offered the State an ‘essence of plague’ to be spread among the Turks by infusing it into textiles sold in enemy territory: the Republic did not use his invention, but to prevent anyone else getting hold of it, instantly locked the poor man up in prison. The well that gave fresh water to the Arsenal, we are told, was always pure because two rhinoceros horns had been thrown into it. Even now, you sometimes see medical mountebanks successfully promoting their cures in Venice. Outside the church of San Francesco di Paola I once came across a man who claimed to produce miraculous unguents from the juices of marmots, two of which animals sat despondently on a table in front of him. He was surrounded by skins, bottles and testimonials, like a medicine man. He guaranteed instant relief for rheumatism, arthritis, stiffening in the joints, colds in the nose, appendicitis, old age, warts, dry skin, falling hair and vertigo; and he was doing a brisk trade among the morning shoppers.

  In the Middle Ages no sensible visitor to Venice left without a bottle of Teriaca, a celebrated potion that cured practically everything (except, its brewers had to admit, the plague). This panacea contained gum arabic, pepper, cinnamon, fennel, rose petals, opium, amber, aromatic leaves from the East and more than sixty kinds of medicinal herbs. It was brewed at certain times of the year, under strict State supervision, in great cauldrons beside the pharmacies – outside a chemist’s shop in Campo Santo Stefano you can still see indentations in the ground, where the feet of the cauldrons used to rest. An emasculated version of the medicine is still sold in Venice, at the Pharmacy of the Golden Head, beside the Rialto bridge. A fine and secretive cat, sustaining the spirit of the thing, sits upon the counter of this shop, and the Teriaca is kept in a big glass jar on a shelf against the wall. The wrapper has a golden head upon it, crowned with laurels, and the instructions say that the mixture will be found useful in dealing with afflictions ‘intestinal, nervous, verminous and stomachic’. A layer of coarse brown paper follows, and the Teriaca is contained in a cylindrical metal container, like a fat cartridge case. A brown treacly fluid oozes from the lid of this receptacle: but whether this is actually the mixture, or whether it is merely some sealing substance, I am unable to say; for to tell the truth I have never had the courage to take the top off.

  With the primitive goes the filthy. Venice is a dirty city, for all its grand façades and its well-swept alleys. There are strict laws against the throwing of rubbish into the canals – punishable, if the offence is repeated, by imprisonment: but a vile mass of refuse is thrown in anyway, and the Venetian housewife thinks nothing of emptying her rubbish-basket and dust-pan out of the open window, where its miscellaneous muck can be blown by the winds across the city, into the neighbour’s garden, up and down the back-alleys. After a night or two in a side canal, my boat is hideous with rubbish, from orange peel to torn letters, and odious is the flotsam that swirls and gurgles past you if you sit beside the water for a moment of meditation. This is partly because the Venetian drainage system is simplicity itself, usually consisting of pipes out of houses into canals; and partly because the Venetians have only rudimentary instincts of hygiene. For several hundred years Venetian officialdom has worried itself about the civic sanitation, but the average citizen pours her slops into the canal as blithely as ever she did in the Middle Ages. This was, I am told, the last big Italian city to revive the Roman practice of baths in houses: and though the poor woman’s parlour is usually spick and gleaming, her back yard is often horrible. The canals of Venice are lined with accumulations of garbage, and nothing is more strongly worded, in the whole range of travel literature, than Herr Baedeker’s warning against Venetian oysters.

  Dirty, too, is the unsuspected pall of smut which falls through this pellucid atmosphere in winter, and keeps the laundry ever a little short of perfection. This is, though, the fault not of the Venetian housewife, but of the old Venetian architects. Their chimneys are charmingly inconsequential in appearance (somebody once wrote a book about them) and were specifically designed to prevent flying sparks in a city that was often ravaged by fire. With their complicated double flues and inner chambers, however, they are confoundedly difficult to clean. The Venetian chimney-sweep works from the top, lowering bundles of twigs on cords and then pulling them out again. This entails endless scrambles across rickety roof-tops, clutching antique cornices, swarming over tottering balconies. I once chanced to look out of my bedroom window to see the jet-black face of one of these men hanging almost upside-down from the roof above. He had a bundle of sticks in his hand, and a rope around his shoulders, and behind him were all the pinnacles, towers and curious weather-vanes that form the setting of his labours: but there was nothing really unfamiliar about him, for when he smiled I recognized him instantly as a member of that prime and splendid fraternity, the universal brotherhood of sweeps, whose cheerful sooty attitudes have so endeared themselves to the world that even the most aloofly unsuperstitious of brides, swathed in silk and clouded in Chanel, is pleased to see one at her wedding.

  8

  ‘Poi Cristiani’

  The Venetians are not quite so religious as you might suppose from their multitude of churches and their mystical origins. ‘About the same as the Romans,’ an official at the Patriarchate once told me, after judicial thought, ‘perhaps a bit better than the Milanese’ – and these were, he seemed to imply, scarcely celestial standards of judgement. The great force of popular faith, which sustained the Republic through many trials, and was apparently still potent half a century ago, has lost its dominance. Today the great religious festivals are often ill attended, and the supreme summer services at the Basilica generally attract more tourists than Venetians. In some parts of the city, in the Italian manner, religion is laced with politics, so that Catholic and Communist slogans angrily confront each other on shop walls: but there is no sense of priestly power in Venice, and democratic though its Christian Democrats may be, they are not always very profoundly Christian.

  The texture of the city, of course, is shot through with Christian symbols, and there are well-known miracles for every quarter. At the ferry station of Santa Maria Zoberugo a devout virgin, denied the use of the ferry to the church, walked across the Grand Canal instead. In the Basilica there is a wooden crucifix which, struck by a blasphemer, gushed forth blood. An angel once broke the fall of a workman who slipped from St Mark’s Campanile, catching him in mid-fall and gently restoring him to his scaffolding. From the Riva degli Schiavoni a fisherman sailed on a voyage across the lagoon commissioned by Saints Mark, Nicholas and George, in the course of which they exorcized a shipload of demons (the fisherman asked anxiously which of the saints was going to pay him). In 1672 an old and simple-minded sacristan fell from the campanile of Santi Apostoli, but was miraculously caught by the minute hand of the clock, which, slowly revolving to six o’clock, deposited him safely on a parapet. In the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, beside the Basilica, a slave was rescued from judicial blinding by the intervention of St Mark, who projected himself upside-down into the assembly and, as a famous Tintoretto demonstrates, froze the burning brand in mid-air. There are miracle-working Madonnas in the churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Madonna dell’ Orto, and the figure of the Virgin in San Marziale came to Venice of its own accord by sea from Rimini.

  The celebrated Nicopeia Madonna in the Basilica, one of many such ikons supposed to have been painted by St Luke, is still reverenced; a picture said to be by Giorgione, formerly in the church of San Rocco, was long believed to have miraculous powers; and in all parts of the city there are curative relics, shri
nes and statues. The silver hearts of votive offerings decorate almost every Venetian church. One grateful supplicant to the Giorgione picture, whose misery we do not know, had a marble cast of the painting made in thanksgiving – and this was prophetic, for presently the picture was removed from the church and placed in the neighbouring Scuola di San Rocco, and now only the votive copy remains. Another grateful worshipper hung a rifle beside a picture of the Madonna near the chapel of the Mascoli in the Basilica: it hangs there still, but nobody seems to know its story.

  There are 107 churches in the city proper – one for every 2,000 inhabitants – of which some 80 are still in use. Venice, including its mainland suburbs and its islands, houses 24 men’s convents and about 30 women’s, from at least 13 different Orders. There are some 230 priests in Venice, under a Patriarch who is nowadays nearly always a Cardinal, and who shares his title, in the Western countries, only with the Patriarchs of Lisbon and the West Indies. There have been 51 Bishops of Venice, and 144 Patriarchs, and between them they have produced 3 Popes and 17 Cardinals. More than 100 saints are represented in the street names of the city, from St Julian the Martyr, who is now thought never to have existed at all, to San Giovanni in Olio – St John the Evangelist, who is said to have emerged unharmed from a vat of boiling oil into which the Emperor Domitian had plunged him. There are churches of St Moses and St Job, and the Madonna is honoured in a series of exquisite eponyms – St Mary of the Lily, of Consolation, of Health, of Grace, of The Garden, of the Friars; St Mary the Fragrant, St Mary the Beautiful, St Mary the Processional, St Mary the Mother of the Lord.

  But it seems a dying order that is represented by these pieties. Only the guides speak of the Venetian miracles with much air of conviction, and the young Venetians tell the old stories, often enough, with a fond but patronizing smile. Rome, indeed, has never maintained an easy hold over Venice. Veneziani, pot Cristiani, is how her people used to describe themselves – Venetians first, Christians afterwards. ‘Redeem us, Ο Christ!’ sang the choir of St Mark in the Middle Ages. ‘O Christ, reign! Ο Christ, triumph! Ο Christ, command!’ The response, though, was not so orthodox, for the other half of the cathedral would answer: ‘To the Most Serene and Excellent Doge, Health, Honour, Life and Victory Perpetual!’

  ‘Are you a Venetian?’ I once asked a saintly Dominican in the church of San Zanipolo. ‘No, thank God!’ he replied, in a genuinely grateful tone of voice. This is a citizenry more hard-boiled, sceptical and sophisticated than the peasantry of the mainland countryside. The ‘Show Me State’ is an old sobriquet for Missouri, implying a tendency to look gift horses attentively in the mouth; it would do equally well for Venice. The Republic was never feudal, and its political system was never amenable to clerical intimidation. There was a time, early in the seventeenth century, when Venice hesitated on the brink of Protestantism (with Sir Henry Wotton, the British Ambassador, energetically trying to push her over). Several times in her history she was indicted or excommunicated by the Pope; during Paolo Sarpi’s period of office as theological adviser to the Doge, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the quarrel with the Holy See was so profound that Venice became the champion of secular State rights, and two bishops languished in the prisons of the Doge’s Palace.

  Her painters were sometimes notable for an almost pagan profligacy and riot of imagination. Veronese, indeed, was summoned before the Inquisition of the Holy Office for including ‘dogs, buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such absurdities’ in a picture he had painted of the Last Supper. He replied that he had allowed himself ‘the same licence as poets and madmen’, and this the inquisitors seemed to accept, not without humour. They ordered him to ‘correct’ his picture, but instead he simply altered its title, and today it hangs in the Accademia as the Feast at the House of Levi, dwarfs, Germans, dogs and all. (‘What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?’ asked the inquisitors during the hearing. ‘He is a servant’, replied the artist blandly, ‘who has a nose-bleed from some accident.’)

  For in her heyday Venice was subservient to the Papacy only when she found it convenient. Her parish priests were elected by a ballot of parishioners, under State direction, and the Pontiff was merely notified of their appointment. Bishops were nominated in the Senate, and even the Patriarch could not convene a synod without the permission of the Doge. All priests had to be of Venetian birth, and they could never be sure of their customary privileges: in the fifteenth century clerics convicted of various immoralities were hung in cages high on the side of St Mark’s Campanile, sometimes living there for a year on bread and water, sometimes allegedly starving to death, and providing one of the principal tourist attractions of the city. The Grand Council of Venice met pointedly on Sundays and feast days, and time and again its policies on the slave trade, and on intercourse with Muslims, were in direct defiance of Papal decrees. A party of fifteenth-century Christian missionaries, lost in the Balkan hinterland, eventually turned up for sale in the Venetian slave market: and when da Gama found the sea route to India, the Venetians openly incited the Sultan of Egypt to make war upon the Portuguese, offering to find timber for the necessary warships, and to provide shipwrights, caulkers, cannon-founders and naval architects. In the Venetian priorities, Venice came unmistakably first.

  The true cathedral of the city (until 1797) was San Pietro di Castello, on the eastern perimeter: but its practical spiritual centre was the Basilica of St Mark’s – the Doge’s private chapel. During the period of the great interdict, in 1606, one priest, wary of Venetian pride but not wishing to disobey the Pope, announced that he was waiting for the Holy Ghost to tell him whether to celebrate Mass or not: the Republican Government replied that the Holy Ghost had already inspired them – to hang anyone who refused. ‘Will you kindly kneel?’ said an eighteenth-century Venetian senator to a visiting Englishman, as the congregation in the Basilica fell on their knees before the Host. ‘I don’t believe in transubstantiation,’ the Englishman replied. ‘Neither do I,’ said the senator, ‘but either kneel down or get out of the church!’

  The churches of Venice have thus had their ups and downs. The blackened chapel of the Rosary in the church of San Zanipolo, which was burnt in 1867, was deliberately destroyed, so the monks tell you darkly, ‘by Anti-Religious’. The church of San Gerolamo once became a brick factory, and had smoke belching from its bell-tower. The church of Sant’ Elena was used as an iron-foundry. The church of San Bartolomeo, in the fifteenth century, was used as a civil service school. The church of Santa Marina, in the nineteenth, was used as a tavern, and a visitor reported that its servants, hurrying between customers and bar, used to be heard shouting: ‘A jug of white in the Chapel of the Madonna! The same again at the Altar of the Sacrament!’ Madonna dell’ Orto has been, in its time, a stables, a straw store and a powder magazine. The church of San Vitale is now an art gallery, its frenzied abstracts supervised in serene splendour by a Carpaccio above the old high altar. The church of San Leonardo is the practice-room of the municipal band, heavily decorated with photographs of whiskered long-dead maestros. There is a church used as a factory on Giudecca, and another provides some of the galleries of the Accademia, and a third is a cinema in Campo Santa Margherita. San Basso is a lecture hall. San Vio only opens on one day each year – its saint’s day. Santa Maria Maggiore is part of the prison.

  Some of the finest Venetian churches – San Zanipolo, San Marcuola, San Lorenzo, San Pantaleone – have never been finished, as their brick façades show. Many others have disappeared. Four churches were demolished, at Napoleon’s orders, to make the Public Gardens. One, by Palladio, vanished beneath the foundations of the railway station. The remains of one lie beneath the great red mills at the western tip of Giudecca, and the wreck of another still lingers beside the docks. Sant’ Aponal was once put up for auction; so was San Paternian, but as nobody bought it they pulled it down instead to make way for the statue in Campo Manin. A Byzantine column near the station bridge is all that remains of t
he church of Santa Croce, which still gives its name to one of the Venetian postal districts. As long ago as 1173 the Venetians were placed under papal interdict for altering the church of San Geminiano without the Pope’s permission – they wanted to improve the appearance of the Piazza; in the end Napoleon demolished it altogether, but it is said to have looked, in its final version, exactly like the church of San Maurizio, near the Accademia bridge. In the 1860s there were serious demands for the demolition of St Mark’s Basilica itself, made by those Italian iconoclasts who, sick to death of being treated as curators in a national museum, wanted to knock all of old Italy down, and start afresh.

  Today the worst is probably over. The priest at the Patriarchate may tell you, with a meaning sigh, that Venice is a religious city by tradition: but at least there is not much active hostility to the faith. Religious processions are no longer derided, as they were, so Wagner tells us, as recently as 1858 (partly, no doubt, because many priests collaborated with the Austrian overlords). The church suffers no ignominies in Venice. Its buildings are usually immaculate, and you will find little of that damp rot and neglect so deliriously apparent to the old Protestant guide books. Several disused churches have been restored, and the activities of the church, from youth clubs to magazines, are inescapable. The Patriarch is one of the great men of Venice, and most citizens, even the agnostic, have strong feelings about him. Cardinal Sarto, who became Pope Pius X, is remembered with real affection, especially among the poorer people. One of his successors is less happily recalled. ‘We Venetians, we like sympathetic people.’ you will be told, ‘we like simple people, kind people’ – and here your informant, looking up from her washing, will give you a long sickly smile, intended to indicate compassion, understanding, humility. ‘But this Cardinal So-and-So, he was not at all like that, he was always cost – urgh!’ – and with this sharp guttural expletive she will look up again, this time her face congealed in a condition of unutterable hauteur, its eyes drooping contemptuously, its chin compressed. ‘Ah, no, no, no, we did not like him – but then, guarda, along came Cardinal Roncalli, Pope Giovanni XXIII – ah, ah, so different …!’ And so intense will be the sickly smile this time, so brimming the eyes with admiration, so limp the entire body under its load of commiseration, that she is quite unable to finish the sentence, wipes her face with the corner of her apron, and returns to the sink speechless. The Patriarchs of Venice do not go unremarked.