by Jan Morris
New channels are still being cut through the lagoon. One leads direct to the new oil port of Sant’ Ilario, south of Mestre, avoiding the city of Venice altogether. It enters the lagoon by the Porto di Malamocco, which was the chief Venetian port of entry in the days of Austrian rule; and slashing through a web of minor channels, islets and swamps, ends among the oil-tanks in what used to be one of the queerest and loneliest reaches of the lagoon – where centuries ago the powerful abbey of Sant’ Ilario, suzerain of the surrounding flat-lands, maintained its private port of entry at the mouth of the River Lama. The new canal is deep enough (as no other channel is) to take ships of 100,000 tons and the passage of its super-tankers from Kuwait or Tripoli, has profoundly altered the hushed and dejected character of the south-western lagoon.
Another new canal, to the north of Venice, links the city with the Marco Polo airport, and conveys arrivals theatrically, in scudding high-powered motor boats, directly from the customs sheds to the Piazza of St Mark, by way of the municipal cemetery. Like Venice herself, the lagoon is changing: fight though the conservatives may to ensure that its peculiar aureole, as one Victorian poet expressed it
… burns and blazes
With richest, rosiest hue,
Where red San Giorgio raises
Its belfry in the blue
– struggle manfully though they may, the world is overtaking these solitary but dramatic places.
I am only half-sad about it, because for me the excitement of the lagoon lies less in its pale or lurid silences than in its sense of age-old activity. One of the best places I know to watch the ships go by is the wide free channel of the Porto di Lido, where the Canale San Marco sweeps out to sea. Bulbous black buoys mark this tremendous water-way, and two long stone moles protect it, extending to the twin lighthouses that mark the extremity of Venice. On the Lido shore stands the old tower of San Nicolò, from which the first of all weather-cones was hoisted five centuries ago. To the east, a wide, calm, empty water-way leads to Treporti, and you can just see, far away among the haze, one lonely white house on a distant promontory. At the junction of the waters, scowling and vigilant, the castle of Sant’ Andrea awaits another impudent frigate, or peers through its gun-slits towards the ruffians of Dalmatia.
Here you switch off your engine, allow your boat to rock with the sea-swell, and let the traffic of the lagoon stream past you. A squadron of fishing boats lies idle and becalmed upon a sand-bank, waiting for the tide or the shell-fish. A dredger thumps away behind you, surrounded by dirty lighters, like acolytes. The ferry-steamer for Treporti, steering dear of the big Sant’ Erasmo mud-bank, sweeps in a spacious curve around the marker buoy and swings away towards the shore. Over the mole you can see the riggings of fishing smacks, meandering to and fro off the Lido sands; and sometimes a tangled crabman’s boat, a riddle of nets, ropes and buckets, slides swiftly past you with an air of intense and urgent preoccupation. A dapper little speedboat hurries towards some unfrequented bathing beach; a languid yacht tacks between the lighthouses; eight jolly men, seven portly women, twelve children, three dogs and a picnic basket lollop hilariously by in a motor boat with a cotton canopy, keeping close inshore and all talking at once.
And through them all the big ships sail, as they have for a thousand years: the cruising liners, the elegant white tankers from the Persian Gulf; a submarine from Malta, spouting jets of water from the base of its streamlined conning-tower; a succession of limping old freighters, rust-streaked and beery; and sometimes, if you are lucky, a great white cruise ship, proud and beautiful, pounding by in the misty sunshine like another old argosy, its passengers crowding the sun-decks and clustered on the forecastle, its crew bustling about the companion-ways, and its captain just to be seen upon his bridge, gazing grandly through his binoculars, as though he is awaiting a signal flag from St Mark’s to welcome him home from Cathay.
26
On the Edge
It is ninety miles around the perimeters of the lagoon, but it is still all Venice: tempered, watered, vulgarized, often neglected, but always tinged with the magic of the place – ‘a breath of Venice on the wind’. Only fifty years ago most of the lagoon shore was untouched by progress, sparsely inhabited, scarcely visited by tourists from one decade to the next. The old guide books speak tantalizingly of unspoilt strands and virgin beaches, and make it sound as though a trip to the villages on the rim of the lagoon required a sleeping-bag and a bag of beads.
Today Herr Baedeker would find it much more suitable for delicate constitutions, and could safely advise that stomach pills, portable wash-basins and topees will not be required. Wherever the car can go, modernity has followed. Of the perimeter of the Venetian lagoon, only the lidi, the central bulwarks against the Adriatic, are inaccessible by road – and you may even take your Lancia there, if you load it on a car ferry. The other seaward barriers, the Littorale di Cavallino and the Lido di Sottomarina, are in effect protrusions of the mainland, and you can drive all the way along them – on Cavallino, indeed, to a point within three miles of the Piazza itself. There are still places on the mainland shore that are remote and unfrequented, if only because nobody much wants to live there, but they are disappearing fast. In the middle of the lagoon you can still feel uncomfortably isolated: on its edge you are seldom very far from a telephone, a parish priest or a Coca-Cola.
The enfant terrible of the lagoon, and some would say its new master, is Mestre. Until the First World War it was no more than a castle-village, surrounded by forts and scratchy farmland. Today it is a hideous industrial city, straggling, unkempt, dirty, shapeless and nearly always (or so it seems) blurred in drizzle. Its docks at Porto Marghera are, in hard commercial terms, the new Venice. When people speak of Venice as the oil port of Europe, they really mean Mestre. Its shipyards are among the most important in Italy, and the half-built ships on their slipways loom patronizingly over the Venice causeway. Its factories employ 30,000 men, producing chemicals, aluminium, zinc, coke, plate-glass, paint, canned foods, instruments, and millions of gallons of refined oil. In Mestre the roads and railways converge upon Venice: and the place is spreading so fast and frowardly that before long we may expect to see its drab tentacles extending along half the mainland shore of the lagoon, from the new oil port in the south to the new airport in the north. Administratively, Mestre is part of Venice, and many of the guide books list its hotels together with those of the Serenissima. There are no sadder people on earth than those unfortunates who inadvertently book rooms there, or accept some claptrap advice about its advantages, and are to be seen emerging from their hotel lobbies, spruced and primped for an evening’s gaiety, into the hubbub, traffic jams, half-completed streets and dowdy villas of this dismal conurbation.
This particular stretch of shore, nevertheless, has always been the classic point of embarkation for Venice. Nearby the remains of the diverted Brenta enter the lagoon, and it was at Fusina, the little port at its mouth, that generations of travellers boarded their gondolas and were slowly paddled, as in a dream, towards the distant pile of the city. From Fusina, by ‘the common ferry which trades to Venice’, Portia travelled from Belmont to her seat of judgement: Shakespeare called it ‘the tranect’, a word that has baffled generations of commentators, and may perhaps be a corruption of traghetto. From here, too, the heavy-laden barges used to take fresh river water to the city. In Montaigne’s time it was also a portage: barges were lifted from the Brenta by a horse-powered pulley, wheeled across a spit of land, and lowered into the canal that crossed the lagoon to Venice. Later a little railway line was built to Fusina, and today the buses come down there from Padua to connect with the Venice ferry boats.
It is only two or three miles from the centre of Mestre, but it is still suggestively calm and ruminative, like a place on the edge of great mysteries. Herds of sheep wander about its grassy river-banks, guarded by laconic shepherds in cloaks and floppy tall-crowned hats. There is a quaint little landing-place, with a stuffy café, and the remains of the o
ld railway rot away beside the river levee. The road wanders through wide water meadows, and ends abruptly at the edge of the lagoon; and there, sitting lazily upon a bollard, you will often find a grey-clad sentry with a rifle, gazing absently across the water. ‘The object which first catches the eye’, wrote Ruskin at the climax of a magnificent descriptive passage, ‘is a sullen cloud of black smoke … which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice.’ Today, if you catch your first glimpse of the city from this classic foreshore, the first thing you will see is the big grain elevator, and the second is the untidy iron silhouette of the port. It may remind you of Cardiff docks or Jersey City: but it is Venice.
North-east of Mestre the line of the lagoon shore curves, through marshy and once malarious flat-lands, past salt-pans and water-meadows and duck-flown swamps, to the promontory of Cavallino, a long sandy spit which doubles back upon itself, and reaches almost to Venice. It has seen some bumpy fluctuations of fortune. Its towns have risen, fallen, risen again. Its pine forests were destroyed, and are now growing again. It was once intersected by two important gateways into the Adriatic: one where the Piave entered the sea, now a mere creek, the other the Porto di Treporti, now closed altogether. For centuries Cavallino remained neglected, inhabited only by poor farmers and fishermen, visited only by a few adventurous sportsmen: and there are still sections of this narrow shore that remain infinitely bucolic, rich in birds and earthy vegetables, with frogs croaking in miasmic ditches and pleasant country inns. The ancient village of Treporti still gazes in whitewashed simplicity across the marshes, and some of the creeks of the place are so like the Cherwell that you almost expect to encounter punt-loads of undergraduates, with parasols and gramophones, or hear the distant stroke of Tom.
Progress, though, has recently struck Cavallino with a jazzy vengeance: for not long ago the speculators, eyeing this long line of sandy beaches, built there the brand-new town of Iesolo. Its sands are immensely long and exquisitely fine, flecked with grass and scented with pine-cones. Its hundreds of new buildings are instantly reminiscent of Tel Aviv. It has a race-course, two roller-skating rinks and a psammato-therapic establishment (if you know what that is). It is a big, booming, rip-roaring, highly successful holiday resort, one of the most popular on the Adriatic, and you may see its gaudy posters beckoning you to the lagoon everywhere from Milan to Vienna. Gradations of activity ripple away from it into nearly every part of Cavallino. There are petrol stations, and garages, and excellent bus services. Bulldozers rumble and rip the days away. If you penetrate to the very tip of the promontory, Punta Sabbione, where you may look across the water to the half-hidden pinnacles of Venice, a notice in German will tell you where to park your bicycle, a fizzy drink is awaiting you in its little red ice-box, and presently the car ferry will arrive impatiently from the Lido to ship you away to the Film Festival. If you want a taste of the old Cavallino, a sniff of its dank fragrances, a stroll along its empty sand-dunes, you must make haste: it cannot last much longer.
There is a resort, too, at the other extremity of the lagoon, where the multi-coloured sunshades stand in mathematical patterns on the sands of Sottomarina, and the young bloods ride their motor scooters helter-skelter along the foreshore. The guardian of the southern lagoon, though, and the traditional key to Venice, is still a place of horny and homely instincts. There is a stumpy winged lion on a pillar at Chioggia which has long been a joke among the Venetians – they like to call it the Cat of St Mark: and a streak of pathos, an echo of ridicule, seems to infuse the life of this ancient fishing town, which still feels palsied, scabrous and tumble-down, and sunk in morbid superstition.
A rabble of touts, car-park men, beggar boys and assorted obsequious attendants greet you as you step upon the quayside at Chioggia, or open the door of your car: and the wide central street of the place always seems to be either totally deserted, or thick with fustian youths and flouncy groups of girls. Chioggia is a place of stubborn, sullen character. Its people have a cast of feature all their own, broad-nosed and big-eyed, and their incomprehensible dialect is said to be the language of the early Venetian settlers, with Greek overtones. Their town is rigidly symmetrical, without the endearing higgledy-piggledy intricacies of Venice. Two unwavering causeways connect it with the neighbouring mainland, and it consists of one main street and three canals, all running in parallel, with nine bridges in rectangular intersection.
For all its sense of degeneracy, it is the greatest fishing port in Italy, its fleets ranging the whole Adriatic, and its catch travelling each day in refrigerated trucks as far as Milan, Rome and Innsbruck. Its narrow canals are crammed and chock-a-block with shipping, thickets of masts and sails, packed so tightly hull to hull that you can often walk from one quay to another, and getting a boat out must be at least as difficult as putting one in a bottle. The wharfs and alley-ways of Chioggia are always crowded with fishermen’s wives, wearing black shawls and faded flowered pinafores, sitting at trestle tables, chattering raucously, and doing obviously traditional things with needles, pieces of wood, nets and pestles. The musty churches of Chioggia are hung with the votive offerings of fishermen – crude and touching storm scenes, with half-swamped boats agonizingly in the foreground, and benignant helpful Madonnas leaning elaborately out of the clouds.
Chioggia lives, dreams, talks, and eats fish. Its streets are littered with fish scales. Its fish market is startlingly polychromatic. Its principal restaurant offers an incomparable variety of fish-foods. (A surprising number of tourists come to Chioggia nowadays, and a Swiss visitor to the town once told me, munching a particularly succulent polypus, that he was not even bothering to go on to Venice.) At the hotel boys will come to your breakfast table selling you sponges fresh from the sea-bed, and from your window you may watch the sturdy snub-nosed fishing-boats steaming away to work. Chioggia faces the Adriatic, where the big fish swim, and has its back to the lagoon: and though it is often a disappointment to visitors, I have grown to like the place and its rude people, and feel there is something deep-sea and salt-swept to its manners (even the touts on the quayside are a genial kind of riff-raff, once you have tipped them, or bought one of their desiccated sea-horses). Its reserve is really less surly than phlegmatic, and its people have a local reputation for positively English stolidity. ‘Help! I’m drowning!’ says one Chioggian in a beloved Venetian anecdote. ‘Hang on a minute,’ says the other, ‘I’m just lighting my pipe.’ In the lagoon one day I gave a tow to a boat-load of tattered Chioggian sardine-fishers, and I remember the encounter with a midsummer pleasure: for when they left me in the approaches to Chioggia, they waved good-bye with such dazzling smiles and such indolent, graceful, airy gestures that I felt as though a crew of Tritons were slipping the tow.
Such are the towns of the lagoon shore, from the blatant Mestre to the decadent Chioggia. For the rest, the perimeter is flat, monotonous and often dreary; and to be honest, though there are some interesting places upon it, and some haunting relics of old glories, it is astonishing to me how so drab a frame can contain so glittering a masterpiece: for wherever you stand upon this coast, whether the juke-boxes are screaming beside you at Iesolo, or the fisher-children intoning their shrill catechism in the cathedral at Chioggia, the trolley-buses spitting sparks at Mestre, the oil tanks stinking at Porto Marghera, the flocks of sheep and donkeys trailing absent-mindedly towards Fusina – wherever you are, you are never more than ten miles from Venice herself.
27
Island Towns
But it is not always Venice that you first see from the mainland, for the old Venetians built many island towns before they moved to the Rialto archipelago. There is a hamlet called Altino, east of Mestre, that is the site of the Roman Altinum. It has a little museum beside its church, and a vague air of lost distinction. If you walk from the village across the Trieste road, to the marshy edge of the lagoon, you will see across the fens and puddles (part sea, part land, part salt-bog) a solitary tall campanile. You cannot quite make out what lies around
it, for the light of the lagoon is delusive, and is sometimes crystal clear, but sometimes veiled in shimmer: all you can see among that muddle of marshland is the single red-brick tower, a talisman in the waste. It looks very old, and very proud, and very lonely, and abandoned. It is the campanile of Torcello.
When the frightened ancients left the mainland, they had not very far to go – though in those days the lagoon seems to have been, if dryer, rather wider than it is now. In the course of their successive emigrations, spread over many decades, some went to the Adriatic shore, but many stayed within a few miles of the mainland, within sight of their enemies. In all twelve major settlements were established, from Clugies Major (Chioggia) in the south to Grado, which lies in the next lagoon to the north, and has long since lost all connection with Venice. The people of Altinum, a proud and prosperous city, walked to the edge of the lagoon, as we have done, and chose the island that is now Torcello; or, in another version of events, they were divinely ordered to climb the city watch-tower, and from its eminence, seeing a vision of boats, ships and islands, deduced that they were intended to move into the corner of the lagoon. They took everything they could with them, even to building stone, and around Torcello they built five townships, each named pathetically after a gateway of their lost city. This became the richest and most advanced of the lagoon colonies, in the days when the islets of Rivo Alto were still rude fishing hamlets. ‘Mother and daughter,’ cries Ruskin from the top of Torcello campanile, ‘you behold them both in their widowhood – Torcello and Venice.’
