Burano

“ But the special interest in Burano is the lace-making, which is now in full revival, thanks to the Countess Marcello, and other benevolent patrons, whose efforts have reproduced the Point de Burano in its old patterns. The hundreds of girls in the Fabbrica di Merletti di Burano are certainly more than good-looking, and are improving in their work each year. ”

“ For the rest, the interest of Burano is in Burano itself in the aggregate; for the church is a poor gaudy thing and there is no architecture of mark. And so, fighting one's way through small boys who turn indifferent somersaults, and little girls whose accomplishment is to rattle clogged feet and who equally were born with an extended hand, you rejoin the steamer. ”

“ Burano is noisy and dirty. The people are rough in manner and speech, and the children bold and persistent in following strangers. The muscular development of the Buranelli and their statuesque figures are the only traits that one can admire in them. The men are occupied in fishing and towing barges, filled with lagoon mud, which goes to enrich the soil of Pordenone. They have the reputation of doing good work for reasonable pay. ”

“ And the sensation was as different from that with which we had begun the day, as the glory of the mountains was from the wild sea-marsh where we sat, and the sorrowful salt water stealing by.
We left Torcello and went on to Burano, a small island about a mile from Torcello. The men are fishers, the women lace-makers. A few canals traverse it, and it has a large population. It belongs to itself alone, and the indwellers have kept their distinct type for centuries. For centuries they have been poor, rough, and helpful to one another. A British working man would think their life starvation. ”

“ Torcello is of a different quality. Burano is intensely and rather shockingly living; Torcello is nobly dead. It is in fact nothing but market gardens, a few houses where Venetian sportsmen stay when they shoot duck and are royally fed by kitcheners whose brass and copper make the mouth water, and a great forlorn solitary cathedral.
History tells us that in the sixth century, a hundred and more years after the flight of the mainlanders to Rialto and Malamocco, another exodus occurred, under fear of Alboin and the invading Lombards, this time to Torcello. ”

“ The way out is round the green island of S. Elena, skirting the Arsenal, the vastness of which is apparent from the water, and under the north wall of Murano, where its pleasant gardens spread, once so gay with the Venetian aristocracy but now the property of market gardeners and lizards. Then through the channels among the shallows, north, towards the two tall minarets in the distance, the one of Burano, the other of Torcello. Far away may be seen the Tyrolean Alps, with, if it is spring, their snow-clad peaks poised in the air ”

“ The children assail you for coppers, and, in their desire to be satisfied, pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges ”

“ Leo alone knows nothing of it, and has possessed nothing, nor did he ever wish to; he has been willing that nothing should be his own, not a flower in the garden, not anything but his prayers, and even these I think he has oftenest shared. But the visit to Burano put an idea in his head. It is, perhaps you know, a factory town where they make lace, and the people live there with good wages, many of them, but also much poverty. There is a poverty which is a grace, but there is also a poverty which is a great misery, and this Leo never had seen before. ”

“ The church possesses a wonderful Entombment by Tintoretto.
BY A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD
San Servolo is a very small island beyond San Giorgio, yet one of the brightest jewels in the coronet of the lagoon—almost entirely covered with buildings.
Burano has a population of some nine thousand. The people are chiefly engaged in fishing and in towing. One sees boatfuls of them returning from the sea; and lines of them towing heavy mud-filled barges on the way to Pordenone, all the men stepping in time with one another and bending to the rope with a will. ”

“ In the old days terrible quarrels used to arise among the women, either in the market-place or when they sat in their doorways making that exquisite 166 lace for which the town is famous. To the present day lace is made at Burano, and even now the women quarrel over their work. ”

“ As was usual in those times, among the condottieri, Brunoro adopted different lords, and fought sometimes in parties to which, at others, he was opposed. In these vicissitudes, he incurred the anger of the King of Naples, who, seizing him by means of an ambuscade, plunged him into a dungeon, where he would probably have finished his days, but for the untiring and well-planned efforts of his wife. To effect his release, she spared no means; supplications, threats, money, all were employed, and, at last, with good success. She had the happiness of recovering her husband. ”

“ It became known, that he had praised the methods used by the Arians or Unitarians in expounding their doctrines, adding that they refer all things to the ultimate cause, which is the Father: this, with other heretical propositions, being brought to the notice of the Holy Office, Bruno found himself in the position of being first observed and then threatened. He was warned of the danger that hung over him by some friends, and decided to quit Naples. He fled from the convent, and took the road to Rome, and was there received in the monastery of the Minerva. ”

“ To the outsider, Brunai is a city of hideous old women, for such alone are met with in the thronged market place where some hundreds of market boats jostle each other, while their inmates shriek and haggle over their bargains, or during a water promenade while threading the labyrinths of this Oriental Venice ”

“ In poetry, too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who struck the key-note of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called ‘Carmina Burana.’ A frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the rhymed verses. ”

“ The old art is lost. Still, Murano is interesting. There is perhaps more life in it than in any other of the islands. Workmen sift glass upon the pavement; women, at the doors, sit busily knitting, or stringing beads; fishermen, clothed in a dark greenish grey, are disentangling their nets, which hang over the boats in apparently inextricable confusion; there are street vendors of all kinds, calling out the nature of their wares to the passerby. There are five thousand inhabitants in the city of Murano. Its grand canal is almost as broad as that of Venice. ”

“ When he appeared before the tribunal of the Holy Office at Venice, being asked to declare who and what he was, he said: "My name is Giordano, of the family of Bruno, of the city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. There was I born and brought up. My profession has been and is that of letters, and of all the sciences. My father's name was Giovanni, and my mother was Francesca Savolini; and my father was a soldier. He is dead, and also mother. ”

“ The one left Naples carrying in his heart the Pagan and Christian traditions of the noble enterprises and the saintly heroism of Olympus and of Calvary, of Homer and the Fathers, of Plato and St. Ignatius; the other was filled with the philosophical thought of the primitive Italian and Pythagorean epochs, fecundated by his own conceptions and by the new age; philosopher and apostle of an idea, Bruno consecrated his life to the development of it in his writings and to the propagation of his principles in Europe by the fire of enthusiasm. The one surprised the world with the melody of his songs ”

“ Much ingenuity has been exercised in attempting to find a reason for Bruno’s choice of a religious life; but the Church was almost the only career open to a clever and studious boy, whose parents were neither rich nor powerful. The Dominicans.The Dominican Order into which he was taken, although the narrowest, and the most bigoted, [14] was all-powerful in the kingdom, and directed the machinery of the Inquisition. Naples was governed by Spain with a firm hand, and the Dominican was the chosen order of Spain. ”

“ I am known as The Funaro—the extravagant woman whose lovers are legion, and of whom stories of reckless waste and ingenious fraud are told by the jeunesse dorée in every city in Italy. Ask of any of the smart young men who drink at the Gambrinus at Milan, at Genoa, at Rome, or at Florence, and they will relate stories by the hour of my wild, adventurous life, of my loves and my hatreds, of my gaiety and my sorrow. ”

“ Murano, on the 161 whole, is a dreary little town. Wealth, beauty, and elegance have passed away; the country is devoted to cabbages and potato patches. Still, it has charm even in its decay. How beautiful Murano must have been at the time when Cardinal Bembo and so many famous literati lived there! It must have been an earthly paradise, with its luxurious vegetation, lordly palaces, and magnificent gardens. In this city the horse is a quaint and unexpected animal. He is not wanted. He is quite as ridiculous and useless as a unicorn would be in the streets of London. ”

“ The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and waving cornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail, with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running water, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of far-away Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. ”

“ Balik-Papan, rising tier above tier on the dark hillside, and brilliant with a multitude of flashing lights, looks picturesque as Naples itself, when we steam away in the gathering gloom, and the dazzling illumination, reflected in the tranquil sea, appears a miraculous transfiguration. Oil tanks and warehouses, refineries and factories, vanish under the veil of night, and only a fairy vision of unearthly brightness remains as a final recollection of our brief visit to Borneo. ”

“ Up on the heights above, at Rocco Bruna, is a Saracen-built little town with strange dark people who seldom come down from the heights. You go by shady steps between high white walls to a little chapel, and there on Sunday a beloved curé beguiles an innocent little flock with a murmuring, heavenly, sing-song voice, whilst the children with untroubled voices are like larks in a heaven above Monte Carlo, singing, "Sancta, sancta, nostra Dama priez pour nous!" ”

“ The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star of cultivated chivalry. ”

“ The churches of the Land’s End district are not remarkably fine. They are not, however, without interest.
The finest is that of S. Burian, about whom first of all a word or two.
Buriena was an Irish damsel, noted for being both slender and beautiful. In fact, her willowy form obtained for her the nickname of Caol, or “the Slim.” She was a daughter of one Crimthan, “the Fox,” a Munster chieftain, a granddaughter of Aengus, King of Munster, who was baptised by S. Patrick, on which occasion the apostle ran the spike at the end of the pastoral staff into the foot of [Pg 318] the king. ”

“ For her poverty, her misery, she is indebted to the holy Catholic Church, to the infallible agents of God. For the life she has she is indebted to the enemies of superstition. A few years ago Italy was great enough to build a monument to Giordano Bruno—Bruno, the victim of the "Triumphant Beast;"—Bruno, the sublimest of her sons. ”

“ Bruno—you remember Bruno?"
"Bruno!" cried the Baron.23
"Oh! Bruno is all right," she said, and, turning to the others, "Bruno is my man in the studio—my marble pointer, you know. Bruno Rocco, and nobody was ever so rightly named. A big, shaggy, good-natured bear, always singing or growling or laughing, and as true as steel. A terrible Liberal, though; a socialist, an anarchist, a nihilist, and everything that's shocking."
"Well?"
"Well, ever since I began my fountain ... I'm making a fountain for the Municipality—it is to be erected in the new part of the Piazza Colonna. ”

“ We now started together, Lord Byron and myself, in my little Milanese vehicle, for Fusina,—his portly gondolier Tita, in a rich livery and most redundant mustachios, having seated himself on the front of the carriage, to the no small trial of its strength, which had already once given way, even under my own weight, between Verona and Vicenza. On our arrival at Fusina, my noble friend, from his familiarity with all the details of the place, had it in his power to save me both trouble and expense in the different arrangements relative to the custom-house, remise, &c. ”