Laurence Hutton

“ A town in which the sound of wheels and hoofs is never known, in which the stillness of the narrow, ravine-like canals is seldom broken, unless by the fall of an oar or the cry of a gondolier, fatigues one by its unceasing calm. I do not remember to have been so much struck with any place on entering it. I do not recollect ever to have been so soon tired of a residence in a capital.”
The very absence of the noise of hoof and{55} wheel, the very silence of which he complains, are, to most tired-minded travellers, the greatest of the charms of the capital city of Venice. ”

“ Bakers and poets, in Venice, seem to have a mutual attraction, for there are men still living here who remember Gautier when he was a lodger over the baker’s shop in the Campo S. Moisè, on the left-hand side, and opposite the corner of the church, as one goes towards the Square of St. Mark. His landlord, like Byron’s, was a Merchant of Venice in bread and cakes, in a retail way; and the establishment is still to be seen on the same spot, its window filled with the staff of life of all sizes and in every shape, some of the latter often fantastic. ”

“ But hardly one of the millions of Venetian youths who, for more than two centuries, have cooled themselves under the stars, by the side of Polo’s old well and Polo’s old marble balustrade, between the acts of the play or the ballet, ever heard of Mark the Millionaire, or care where he lived or where he died. ”

“ LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE It is almost impossible for any one who is at all familiar with the voluminous amount of literature relating to the history and to the art of Venice, to refrain from quoting, voluntarily or involuntarily, what he has read and absorbed concerning “the dangerous and sweet-charmed town,” which Ruskin calls a golden city paved with emerald, and which Goethe said is a city which can only be compared with itself. ”

“ Whatever is old is magnificent, from the madonnas of Gian Bellini to the window of the Cicogna Palace on the Fondamenta Briati. Whatever is new is ugly, from the railway-station at one end of the Grand Canal to the gas-house at the other. And the iron bridges, and the steamboats, and the drop-curtain in the Malibran Theatre are the worst of all.
When the English-speaking and the English-reading visitors in Venice, for whom this volume is written, overcome the feeling that they are predestined to fall into one of the canals before they leave the city ”

“ There is, probably, no part of the mansion left, as Petrarch knew and loved it, except, perhaps, the pavement of the court-yard. Even the old marble well is not as old as the days of the great poet. The interior of the establishment is not now seen of the public, except by permission of the military authorities, but it is one of the most interesting of the Landmarks of Venice, because of its association with the two immortal men who once adorned it. ”

“ The Spezzeria is not a street, but a district of the town, near the Rialto Quarter. It was devoted, in Byron’s day, to the dealers in spices. His Merchant of Venice, therefore, should have been a vender of drugs, sugars, coffees, spices, wax-candles and the like, in wholesale. But, alas for the romance of it all! tradition, in Venice, says that he was a plain, commonplace baker who lived, in good enough style, not in the Spezzeria, but in the Frezzeria, the Street of the Makers of Arrows. ”

“ It is so warm that we are going out presently in the gondola, to take up a few dropped stitches. Venice, after all, is incomparable, and during this visit I have penetrated into little slits of streets in every direction on foot. The canals only give one a visiting acquaintance. The calli make you an intimate of the household. ”

“ So strange and so strong is the power of fiction over truth, in Venice, as everywhere else, that Portia and Emilia, Cassio, Antonio, and Iago, appear to have been more real here than are the women and men of real life. We see, on the Rialto, Shylock first, and then its history and its associations; and the Council Chamber of the Palace of the Doges is chiefly{6} interesting as being the scene of Othello’s eloquent defence of himself. ”

“ Venice, even now, is a grand spectacular show; and no drama ever written is more dramatic than is Venice itself. Mr. Howells prefaces his Venetian Life by an account of the play, and the by-play, which he once saw from a stage-box in the little theatre in Padua, when the prompters, and the scene-shifters, and the actors in the wings, were as prominent to him as were the tragedians and comedians who strutted, and mouthed, and sawed the air with their hands, in full view of the house ”

“ According to tradition, a certain Hercules named Erasmus came, in 1506, to lend his shoulder to the support of the load; and found something to do. Erasmus in the workshop of Aldus, printing, perhaps, his own Adages, is a picture for a poet or a painter to conjure with. Venice in all its glory never saw a greater sight. ”

“ So much of Italian literature and art is associated with the stately and beautiful mementoes of past centuries, that the literary and æsthetic interest of these scenes will transcend for most of us their value as historical examples of landscape art. ”

“ The stranger in Venice, accustomed to the nomenclature of the streets and the avenues, the alleys and the courts, of the cities and towns with which he is familiar in other parts of the world, may be interested to learn that here a large canal is called a Rio, or a Canale; that a Calle is a street open at both ends ”

“ Byron spent the winter of 1816-’17 in Venice. On the 17th of November, 1816, he wrote to Moore: “I have fallen in love, which, next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use, as I can swim) , is the best, or the worst, thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the house of a Merchant of Venice, who is a good deal occupied with business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year.” ”

“ Not far from Brown, in the same grounds, lies Eugene Schuyler, “Statesman, Diplomatist, Traveller, Geographer, Historian, Essayist,” who died at the Grand Hotel in Venice in 1890.
G. P. R. James, who died in Venice in 1860, was buried in this same Protestant Cemetery. The tablet over his grave, blackened by time, broken and hardly decipherable, contains the following epitaph, said to have been the composition of Landor: “His merits as a writer are known wherever the English language is, and as a man they rest on the heads of many. ”

“ Having, like Shakspere’s banish’d Norfolk, retired himself to Italy, here in Venice he gave his body to this pleasant country’s earth, in 1323 or thereabouts. How far the rest of the quotation is applicable to his peculiar case no man, of course, can say. Polo was called by{14} alliterative neighbors “Mark the Millionaire”—hence the “Corte Millione”; and the rich man, proverbially, does not find heaven a place of easy access. ”

“ In his concluding passages Elze described the University of Padua at the close of the Sixteenth Century, when there were representatives of twenty-three nations among its students. He said that not a few Englishmen took up their abode in Padua, for a longer or a shorter time, for the purposes of study; all of whom must naturally have visited Venice. ”

“ Robert Barrett Browning in 1888, and here at the close of the next year the poet died. He had said to Miss Browning, not very long before, that he wished to be buried wherever he might chance to breathe his last: if in England, by the side of his mother; if in France, by the side of his father; if in Italy, by the side of his wife. Further interments having been prohibited in the English Cemetery in Florence, where lies his wife, his body was placed temporarily in the chapel of the Mortuary Island{63} of S. Michele here. ”

“ His fine library is now a portion of the Library of St. Mark.{37}
During another visit to Venice Ruskin lived in the house of Rawdon Brown (q. v.) ; and after Mr. Brown’s death he lodged at the Hotel Europa. All this information was gathered from his personal guide, who described him as “a very curious man, who looked at things with his eyes shut,” imitating, as he spoke, that half-closed-eyelid gaze of a near-sighted person so familiar to all normally visioned observers. ”

“ A poor portrait, not contemporaneous; his desk; his inkstand; his pen; and some of his manuscript Armenian exercises are reverently preserved. An aged monk who came to Venice after Byron’s day showed me,{50} one sunny afternoon, his own apartment, which he said had once been the English poet’s. Although large and comfortable, and scrupulously clean, it is scantily and plainly furnished, and is not very inviting in itself. It has but one window, which is almost directly over the main entrance of the establishment, with an outlook on to the little canal and the open waters beyond. ”

“ To go back to the men of other days. Addison came to Venice in the winter of 1699-1700. His remarks upon Italy are entertaining enough, although of the guide-book order, and he is uniformly silent regarding his experiences here. As Walpole said of him, he travelled through the poets and not through Italy; all his ideas were borrowed from the descriptions, not from the reality, and he saw places as they had been, not as they were.
Goldoni is one of the few native actors of Venice who merit an encore here. ”

“ I look down from any window into one of the cracks called streets; the people look as if they were being threaded into the Scriptural needle’s eye, and a hand-organ looks like a barricade.” “Cracks called streets” is good. ”

“ In a copy of his last will and testament, I read, however, that he left a certain sum of money to the Monastery of Saint Lawrence here, “where I desire to be buried.” He certainly buried his father, Nicolò Polo, in the old and original Church of S. Lorenzo; and the natural inference is that he himself lies somewhere{15} within its precincts. The sarcophagus erected for the elder Polo by the filial care of the younger Polo is known to have existed, until towards the end of the Sixteenth Century, in the porch leading to the church. ”

“ Mr. Howells, upon his first arrival in Venice, lodged, for a time, in the house of his predecessor as American Consul, in a little street behind the Square of St. Mark. Then he removed to the Campo S. Bartolommeo, on the Rialto side of the square, and later he lived in the Campo S. Stefano before he began house-keeping in the Casa Falier, a queer little mansion on the right-hand side of the Grand Canal, three doors from the infamous Iron Bridge. ”

“ And thus perish, at the hands of a transatlantic, present-day iconoclast and grubber after the truth, two of the most cherished of the Landmarks of Venice.
Mr. Hare is of the opinion that the Doge Christoforo Moro, buried in the Church of S. Giobbe in the Canareggio District, is the Moro of the Othello legend, although he died in 1470, almost half a century before Signor Tassini married him to Desdemona; and his{10} tomb, in the chancel of the church, as Mr. Hare points out, “is ornamented with the moro or mulberry, which was his family device.” ”

“ That the descendants of the men who decorated the palaces of five or six hundred years ago could have conceived, or endured, the wall-papers, the stair-carpets, and the hat-racks in the Venetian hotels of the present, is beyond belief. ”

“ In 1828, the whole establishment having become a ruin, Sarpi{25}’s bones were carried to the Seminary belonging to, and adjoining, S. Maria della Salute. They were next transferred to a private house in the parish of S. Biagio; then they were kept, for a time, in the Library of Saint Mark, in the Doge’s Palace, and finally they were placed under a slab, near the main entrance of the Church of S. Michele, on the Cemetery Island of that name, where, after having been once more disturbed, in 1846, it is to be hoped they will be permitted to rest.
The church of the Servites no longer exists. ”

“ Signor N. Barozzi, in a volume entitled Petrarca e Venezia, published in Venice in 1874, reprints, from the old plan of the city, now in the Archæological Museum, a rough sketch of Petrarch’s house during his residence here between 1362 and 1368; and he seems to establish the fact that it was hired by the poet, not presented to him by the city, as is generally believed. It was then called the Palazzo del Molin, and it stood near to the Ponte del Sepolcro on the Riva degli Schiavoni, a broad promenade and wharf a short distance east of the Ducal Palace. ”

“ A CHARACTERISTIC CANAL
{27}
the Queen of the Adriatic. Neither of the two men of the race who made it famous in the annals of literature was born here, but they were both of them visitors here, although neither of them has left any record as to where or when. Isaac D’Israeli, however, in a paper upon “Venice,” among his Curiosities, in refuting Byron’s statement that “In Venice Tasso’s Echoes are no more,” takes bodily and literally, without credit, Goethe’s description of how he “entered a gondola by moonlight. ”

“ If tradition, for the once, speaks truly, these very doves are the direct descendants of the carrier-pigeons which brought to Admiral Dandolo information from spies in Candia leading to the capture of the island, and which may have received grains of barley from the hand of Petrarch himself. As such do the doves of the present day receive grains of barley from me.
Mr. Brown, in his admirable study of The Venetian Printing Press, says that Aldus is not known, of a certainty, to have lived in the house, or even on the site of the house, No. ”

“ If you are offered here an article of original, homemade, present-time antiquity for five lire, you may depend upon getting it for two lire and a half, and you may be sure that it costs you, even then, about twice as much as it is worth. ”