Venice

by Jan Morris

  Well over a million foreigners came to Venice in a normal recent year. Confessions in most western languages are heard regularly in the Basilica. Americans are the most numerous visitors, followed by Germans, the French, Britons, Austrians, Swiss, Danes, Belgians, the Dutch, Canadians and (as one reference table discreetly puts it) Miscellanians. Ten thousand cars sometimes cross the causeway in a single summer day, and the buses are often so many that when they have disgorged their passengers at the Piazzale Roma they retreat to the mainland again, and you may see them parked hugger-mugger in the sunshine beneath a fly-over of the great bridge, like country coaches behind the cricket pavilion. There are 170 well-known hotels and pensions in Venice, and at the height of a good season they are all full. I have been outside the Basilica at three o’clock on a summer morning, and found earnest tourists consulting their guide books in the moonlight. There is an attendant at one of the garages who claims that long before he can see the registration plate on the back of the car, he can tell the occupant’s nationality by the look in the driver’s eye.

  Thus through the loose gilded mesh of the city there passes a cross-section of the world’s spawn, and it is one of the pleasures of summer Venice to watch the sea-monsters streaming by. Germans appear to predominate, for they move in regiments, talk rather loud, push rather hard, and seem to have no particular faces, merging heavily into a jolly sunburnt Volkswagen mass. The Americans are either flamboyant to the point of repulsion, in crimson silk, or gently unobtrusive in drip-dry cotton: the one kind sitting studiously in a trattoria with its intelligent children and its large-scale map; the other vigorously décolletée, violently made up and slightly drunk, at a corner table in Harry’s Bar.

  The British seem to me to provide the best of the men (often distinguished, frequently spare, sometimes agreeably individualist) and the worst of the women (ill tempered, hair unwashed, clothes ill fitting, snobby or embarrassingly flirtatious). The French are nearly all delightful, whether they are scholarly elderly gentlemen with multi-volumed guide books, or students of existentialist sympathies with purple eyelids and no lipstick. The Japanese are almost obliterated by their mountainous festoons of photographic equipment. The Indians are marvellously fragile, exquisite and aloof. The Yugoslavs seem a little dazed (and are said by gondoliers to be the meanest visitors of all). The Australians are unmistakable. The Canadians are indistinguishable. The Russians no longer come. The Chinese have not arrived yet.

  Confronted by these multitudes, in summer the character of Venice abruptly coarsens. The cost of a coffee leaps, if you are anywhere near St Mark’s, and is gradually reduced, in topographical gradations, as you take your custom farther from that avaricious fulcrum. The waiters of the Piazza brush up their brusquest manners, in preparation for the several hundred people each day who understandably believe that there must be some mistake in the bill. Souvenir stalls spring up like garish fungi, and the market is suddenly flooded with straw hats, gondoliers’ shirts, maps printed on headscarves, lead gondolas, spurious antiques –‘originalissimi’, as the old dealers used to say – a million water-colours and a thousand paperweights in the shape of St Mark’s Campanile.

  The unsuspecting visitor, stepping from the steamboat, is accosted by a pair of ferocious porters, who carry his bags the fifteen-odd feet into his hotel lobby and demand, as their compulsory payment for this service, the price of a substantial meal, with wine. The withered sacristans of the famous churches, brushing the dust from their cassocks, emerge eagerly from the shadows to drag you to the very last dismal pseudo-Titian of the vestry. Pampered young men pester you to visit their showrooms. The cry of ‘Gondola! Gondola!’ follows you like an improper suggestion down the quays. There is a queue for the lift to the top of the bell-tower. Enough people peer into the horrors of the dungeons each morning to make Casanova’s head reel. There is a shop near St Mark’s so well adapted to every possible shift in the balance of power that the homesick tourist may buy himself the flag of Yemen, the Ukraine, Bolivia, or even the United Nations.

  And chanting a sing-song melody of triumph, the guides of Venice come into their own again. ‘Guides’, wrote Augustus Hare in the 1890s, ‘are usually ignorant, vulgar and stupid in Venice, and all but the most hopelessly imbecile visitors will find them an intolerable nuisance’ (though in later editions of his book he dropped the bit about the imbeciles). Nevertheless the guides of Venice flourish, the directors of itineraries boom, and many a poor holiday-maker staggers home at the end of a day’s pleasure as though she has been grinding corn on a treadmill, or attending some crucial and excruciating viva voce. There are 107 churches in Venice, and nearly every tourist feels he has seen at least 200 of them: for the guides and guide books presuppose an unflagging whip-lash energy in their victims, an utter disregard for regular meals, and an insatiable appetite for art of all periods, standards and purposes.

  One itinerary, for example, suggests that the unhappy visitor spends his first morning looking at the Basilica of St Mark (the mosaics, the Treasury, the horses’ gallery, the museum, the eight side-chapels, the celebrated floor, the Baptistery, the Atrium, the Nicopoeia Madonna, the Pala d’Oro, the Rood Screen and the Sacristy); and the Piazza outside (the Campanile, the Clock Tower, the Library, the Archaeological Museum, the columns of St Mark and St Theodore, the two Piazzettas, the Correr Museum, Florian’s and Quadri’s); and the Doge’s Palace (the exterior arcades, the Giants’ Staircase, the State Chambers, Tintoretto’s Paradise, the Armoury, the Bridge of Sighs, the Dungeons, the Bocche di Leone). He should move on that afternoon to the Accademia Gallery (all twenty-four rooms); the Scuola di San Rocco (all sixty-two Tintorettos); the Frari church (the Bellini Madonna, Titian’s Assumption, the tombs of Titian and Canova, the Pesaro altar piece, the Memorials and the very fine choir stalls); the markets (fish and vegetables); and the small church of San Giacomo di Rialto, which well repays the trouble of a short but attentive inspection. And he should end the day with ‘a quiet moment or two’ upon the Rialto bridge, before returning to his hotel, so the book thoughtfully suggests, restfully by gondola. Haggard are the faces of tourists I have seen, desperately following such a course, and inexorable, unwavering, unrelenting are the voices of the lecturers so often to be heard, dogmatic but unscholarly, riding above the silences of San Giorgio or the Salute.

  Alas, the truth is that most visitors to Venice, in any case, move among her wonders mindlessly, pumped briskly through the machine and spewed out along the causeway as soon as they are properly processed. An old-fashioned Englishman, once invited to produce a tourist slogan for a Middle Eastern country, suggested the cruel backhander ‘Where Every Prospect Pleases’: and there are moments in the high Venetian summer when even the lily liberal, surveying the harum-scarum harlequinade of tourism that swirls around him, must stifle some such expression of intolerance. Seen against so superb a setting, art and nature exquisitely blended, Man can seem pretty vile.

  But though crowds do not suit some parts of the city – the grey districts of the north-west, the quiet canals behind the Zattere, the reaches of the inner lagoon – nevertheless the great Piazza of St Mark’s is at its very best on a hot day early in summer, when visitors from the four corners of the earth are inspecting its marvels, and Venice is one great itchy palm. During Ascension week, by an old and obscure tradition, images of the three Magi, preceded by an angel-herald, emerge each hour from the face of the Clock Tower and rotate in homage around the Virgin (in any other week of the year you can see them packed away, rigid and bulge-eyed, in a glass cupboard inside the tower, near the big revolving drums that carry the figures of the clock). This is the time to inspect the Piazza. As the huge cosmopolitan crowd waits around the clock for the appearance of those quaint old sages, you can capture to perfection the summer flavour of Venice.

  The great square is dressed for entertaining. The two celebrated cafés, Florian’s and the Quadri – one on the south side of the square, one on the north – have arranged their chairs and
tables symmetrically upon the pavement, and their orchestras string away in blithe disharmony (Florian’s specializes in the sicklier musical comedy melodies, now and then graced with a popular classic, but at the Quadri you sometimes hear the drummer indulging in something precariously approaching jazz). The flags of Italy and Venice fly from the three bronze flagstaffs before the Basilica – symbolic of lost Venetian dominions, Crete, Cyprus and the Morea. Down the Piazzetta there is a glimpse of sparkling water, a flicker of gondoliers’ straw hats, a shifting web of moored boats: and the shadowy Merceria, with its glittering shops, falls away out of the sunshine like a corridor of treasure.

  The patterned floor of the Piazza is thick with pigeons, and two or three women at little trestle stalls are invitingly rattling their packets of maize. Round and round the arcades, cool and shaded, mills a multitude of tourists, looking for lace and picture postcards, and almost every table has its holiday couple – he reading the Daily Mail, she writing laboriously home. A girl in a tartan cap lounges beside her ice-cream box beneath the colonnade. The professional photographer in the middle of the square stands in an Edwardian attitude beside his old tripod camera (which stays in the Piazza all night, like a shrouded owl on a pedestal); and the fourteen licensed postcard hawkers wander ingratiatingly from group to group, their trays siting around their shoulders upon frayed and well-rubbed leather straps. On every step or balustrade, on the ledges around the base of the Campanile, on the supports of the two columns of the Piazzetta, around the flagstaffs, beside the little porphyry lions – wherever there is a square foot of free sitting space, hundreds of young people have settled like birds, spreading their skirts and books around them.

  There are faces everywhere, faces bronzed and flushed in the cafés, faces peering back from shop windows (framed in lace napkins and Canaletto prints), faces high in the obscurity of the Campanile belfry, faces looking down from the dock Tower itself, a tide of faces, wondering, irritated, delighted, amorous, exhausted, pouring constantly from the funnel of the Merceria. And all around you before the clock stands the core of this great daily crowd, chattering and expectant, a turmoil of cottons, dark glasses, conical hats, guide books, thonged sandals; a clutch of honeymooners, a twitching of children, a clash of tongues – ‘all the languages of Christendom’, as Coryat said, ‘besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Eth-nicks’; here a stiff Englishman, trying not to gape, here a jolly soul from Iowa, every ounce a tourist, from the enamelled ear-rings dangling beneath her bluish hair to the tips of her pink-varnished toe-nails. All is shifting, colourful and a little sticky, as it must have been in the hey-day of the Venetian carnival, when this city was ‘the revel of the earth, the Masque of Italy’, a boast, a marvel and a show.

  The preliminary bell rings on the corner of the Basilica. The Moors, swivelling athletically from the waist, sound the hour with dignity. The shutters open beside the strange old clock. Out come the three Magi, led by the trumpeting angel. They bow creakily to the Madonna, shuffle stiffly around her, and with a whirring and grating of antique mechanisms, disappear inside. The little doors close jerkily behind them, the cogs grind into silence, and all is still. A sigh of amusement and pleasure runs around that gaudy crowd, and it is the long, hot, breathless sigh of a summer in Venice. Packing away their cameras, the Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Japanese, Britons, Indians, Australians, Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other visiting monsters push their way towards a pink ice-cream, stoically count their money for lunch, or resume their earnest trek around the Tintorettos.

  19

  New on the Rialto

  For Venice is a kind of metropolis, in the sense that all the world comes to visit her. If I stand upon my balcony and survey the square mile or so that lies within my vision, I can envisage the shades of an extraordinary gallery of people who have been, at one time or another, my neighbours: Duke Sforza the great mercenary, Byron and Ruskin, Réjane, Goethe, Galileo, two Popes, four Kings, Cardinal Pole, de Pisis, Chateaubriand, Barbara Hutton, Taglioni the dancer, Frank Lloyd Wright (whose house beside the Palazzo Balbi was never built), Baron Corvo (whose gondola was rowed, in his shameless last years, by a crew of four flamboyant gondoliers).

  In the little square opposite my apartment Casanova was born. In the house to the right, with the flower-pots in the window, W. D. Howells lived. To my left is the palace where Wagner wrote the second act of Tristan, and just beyond it the terrace from which Napoleon once watched a regatta. Near by is the Ca’ Rezzonico, one of the great houses of the world: Browning died in it, the Pope Clement XIII lived in it, the Emperor Francis II stayed in it, Max Beerbohm wrote about it. Across the canal is the home of the Doge Cristoforo Moro, sometimes claimed to be the original of Othello, and to my right is a palace once owned by a family so uncountably rich that it is still called Palazzo degli Scrigni – the Palace of the Money-Chests.

  Around the corner is d’Annunzio’s ‘little red house’, where he made love to Duse and wrote Notturno in the dark of blindness. At the Convent of La Carità, now part of the Accademia, Pope Alexander ΙII, exiled from Rome, is said to have worked for six months as a scullion, until he was recognized by a French visitor and so completely restored to power that the Emperor himself came to Venice to beg his pardon. Don Carlos, Charles VII of Spain, used to own the house beyond the mosaic factory. In the enchanting Palazzo Dario de Regnier ‘lived and wrote like a Venetian’, as his memorial plaque says. La Donna of La Donna’ è Mobile lived in the Palazzo Barbaro. In the little Corte Catecumeni, away to my right, malleable Turkish prisoners used to be confined until they had learnt their Catechism, and could embrace Christianity. Wherever I look, I can fancy the shadows of famous men – and of one obscure and pitiful woman, for it was from the balcony of the Palazzo Mocenigo that one of Byron’s Venetian paramours threw herself in desperation into the canal.

  Venice was an essential port of call in the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, when fashionable English visitors awaited their audiences of the Doge as eagerly as they now queue, humming a tune from Ancient and Modern, to pay their respects to the Pope. Even now, until you have seen Venice there is an asymmetrical gap in your education. Not many foreigners still rent entire Venetian palaces for the season, but few famous names of the western world have not, at one time or another, appeared in the hotel registers of the city. The Venetian summer season still summons the envoys of the haut monde, in their yachts, Cadillacs or Pipers, to the assemblies of the Serenissima – the Venetians have a fine airport on the mainland for the big jets, and a smaller one on the Lido for private and chartered aircraft, more numerous every year. The most lavish ball of the 1950s, anywhere in the world, was given by a Mexican millionaire at the Palazzo Labia (some of whose previous owners, long ago, had the habit of throwing gold plate in the canal, for the show of it, and later secretly fishing it out again, for thrift).

  This gallimaufry of the rich, though it sometimes conjures evocative visions of eighteenth-century Venice, nevertheless does much to corrupt the spirit of the place. Unctuous sycophancy oozes from the grander hoteliers as the summer advances, and even the rhythms of the canals are sometimes shattered when there advances ponderously past the Salute, ensign hugely at the stern, some ostentatious motor cruiser from ports west, all cocktail bars and high fidelity. It is often only a sweeping glance that such visitors grant to the old place, for they are off to the Lido in the evening, merely returning to Venice now and then for an expensive dinner or a well-publicized party: but it is enough to tarnish the pride of the city, so patronizing does their brief survey feel, and so uncomprehending. Many an Anglo-Saxon uses Venice as a summer refuge from stricter conventions at home. Many a loud and greasy visitor brings to Harry’s Bar a sudden whiff of the property developer or the take-over bid – for when you think of sudden fortunes, you often think of Venice. (But other richer men, disembarking from their schooners or swift aeroplanes, still bring to Venice some lost sense of power and worldly style.)

  In its grea
t centuries Venice was more than a mere spectacle, and the world came here not only to look at the golden horses or pay tribute to Titian, but to swop currencies, to invest funds, to rent ships, to talk diplomacy and war, to take passage, to learn the news from the East, to buy and to sell. The Fair of the Ascension attracted traders, manufacturers, financiers and even fashion designers from all Europe (a big doll, dressed in the latest fashion, was set up in the Piazza to act as a mannequin for the modes during the coming year). And the most celebrated of all Venetian institutions was the great commercial exchange of the Rialto, one of the prime facts of European history. To Europeans of the Middle Ages, the Rialto was as formidable a presence as a World Bank or a Wall Street today. It was the principal channel of finance between East and West, and the real power-house of the Venetian Empire.

  The earliest of all State banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century, and for 300 years the banks of the Rialto dominated the international exchanges. From its business houses the argosies set out to the Orient, to Flanders and to England: most of the ships belonged to the State, and were built to a standard pattern (for easy servicing), but the money invested in them belonged to the merchants of the Rialto. On the walls of the Rialto colonnade a huge painted map illustrated the great trade routes of Venetian commerce – to the Dardanelles and the Sea of Azof, to Syria, Aleppo and Beirut, to Alexandria, to Spain, England and Flanders; and before it the merchants would assemble to watch the progress of their fortunes, like staff officers in an operations room. Beside the Rialto were the Venetian Offices of Navigation, Commerce and Shipping – the ultimate authorities, in those days, on matters commercial and maritime.