Lido di Venezia

“ To the south stretches the long island reaching from the Porto di Lido to Malamocco, its sands now sparkling like gems. The fort of San Niccolo guards the entrance to the Lagoon; the little island of St. Elena is passed, and Murano is seen to the north. But glances only can be spared for these; for Venice itself, with its towers and domes, its {3} belfries, spires, and crosses, its palaces all lacework and arabesques, rises above, while all around, on the canal, numbers of light, curiously shaped boats and sombre gondolas are gathering,—their boatmen clamoring for news and customers. ”

“ May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden than ever as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her people and the strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual comedy, or at least a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though the Lido has been spoiled. ”

“ On his return to Venice, he constructed the magnificent fortress of S. Andrea del Lido, a stupendous work, now threatened with ruin, owing to erosion by currents set up by the new dykes near the Lido. The Palazzo Grimani on the Grand Canal, the Ponte del Bucintoro at the Arsenal are by this master, whose architecture so dominates Verona. He was an earnest, God-fearing man, of grave, subdued, yet cheerful disposition, generous and tender-hearted. ”

“ Art took possession of the highest spots; and thus arose Venice, formed out of a group of a hundred isles, and surrounded by hundreds more. Moreover, at an incredible expense of money and labour, deep canals have been dug through the marshes, in order, that, at the time of high water, ships-of-war might pass to the chief points. What human industry and wit contrived and executed of old, skill and industry must now keep up. The Lido, a long narrow strip of land, separates the lagunes from the sea, which can enter at only two points,—at the castle and at the opposite end, near Chiozza. ”

“ The Lido has for me a peculiar melancholy charm, and I have often wondered that I should have felt the presence of beauty in a spot so destitute of any exceptional elements of beauty. For beyond the fact that it knows the changing moods and hues of the Adriatic, this narrow strip of sand-stifled verdure has no very rare distinction. In my own country I know many a sandy beach, and many a stunted copse, and many a tremulous ocean line of little less purity and breadth of composition, with far less magical interest. The secret of the Lido is simply your sense of adjacent Venice. ”

“ It was a vehicle no less pleasant for the longer excursions on the lagoon. Shaded by its awning, or sheltering under its black covering, what could be more pleasant than to slide over the water to the sandy Lido for a refreshing dip in the Adriatic, or seek the Cathedral of Murano, or, yet further afield, pass by lonely islets to visit Torcello and its oldest church? Venice the silent and the gondola are exactly suited. There is no more restful mode of locomotion ”

“ Such as it is, however, you will not scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is classical and indispensable, and those who, at that glowing hour, have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon, will not easily part with the impression. ”

“ I saw a procession of clerics in their vestments passing along the Piazza San Marco accompanied by the people with unconcealed derision.
It was very difficult for Ritter to induce me to interrupt my daily arrangements even to visit a gallery or a church, though, whenever we had to pass through the town, the exceedingly varied architectonic peculiarities and beauties always delighted me afresh. But the frequent gondola trips towards the Lido constituted my chief enjoyment during practically the whole of my stay in Venice. ”

“ George’s land at Barmouth, large numbers of the English populace now go to bathe. Of the Venetians, beyond St. George’s island, many go now to bathe on the sands of Lido. But nobody thinks of playing a play about queens and fairies, to the bathers on the Welsh beach. The modern intellectual teacher erects swings upon the beach. There the suspended population oscillate between sea and sky, and are amused. Similarly in Venice, no decorative painter at Lido thinks of painting pictures of St. Nicholas of the Lido, to amuse the modern Venetian. ”

“ The feeling is a painful one, and with the necessity for becoming again a forgetful wanderer, remembering home only as a dream, one shrinks from such things. The reception of a letter, even, destroys a day.
There has been a grand festa to-day at the Lido. This, you know, is a long island, forming part of the sea-wall of Venice. It is, perhaps, five or six miles long, covered in part with groves of small trees, and a fine green sward; and to the Venetians, to whom leaves and grass are holyday novelties, is the scene of their gayest festas. They were dancing and dining under the trees ”

“ LADY LINDSAY. THE SOUL THAT ENDURES
On an evening of late September Venice revealed herself to one of her lovers amidst a spectacle beyond any range of dreams. Evening was closing in upon the city with cloud and breeze.... The tide was low, and land and water stretched out in interchanging coils of olive and azure beneath a purple storm-cloud, whilst ever against the bar of the Lido rolled the sea, dyed with that celestial blue that sometimes steals from the Adriatic into the basin of San Marco [Pg 112] to prostrate itself at the conquering Lion’s feet. ”

“ There is no deep stirring of the spirit in a symphony of light and colour; but purity, peace, and freshness make their way into our hearts.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
AT THE LIDO
Of all these afternoon excursions, that to the Lido is most frequent. It has two points for approach. The more distant is the little station of San Nicoletto, at the mouth of the Porto. With an ebb-tide, the water of the lagoon runs past the mulberry gardens of this hamlet like a river. There is here a grove of acacia-trees, shadowy and dreamy, above deep grass, which even an Italian summer does not wither. ”

“ Many citizens of Venice must have been at the Lido port, thronging to meet the merchant vessels, to greet their friends or to have news of them from others. But none came to meet these three travellers; alone they embarked in a gondola bearing their cargo with them. Venice had clothed herself in all her beauty to give them welcome. Which of Cublay’s glories could rival this splendour of the lagoon with its countless treasures of light? ”

“ The gondola is as much a part of Venice as its sunsets, pigeons, and palaces. Let them by special license keep the Traghetti intact, with their shuttles of gondolas crossing back and forth—then, perhaps, the catastrophe may be deferred for a few decades.
As it was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God. Everything else is faded, weatherworn and old, everything filled with sensuous beauty—sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples—the same wonderful Venice that thrills its lovers the world over. ”

“ The Riva is fairly broad, forming a promenade, where one may conjure up the personages of a century ago. For San Nicoletto used to be a fashionable resort before the other points of Lido had been occupied by pleasure-seekers. An artist even now will select its old-world quiet, leafy shade, and prospect through the islands of Vignole and Sant’ Erasmo to snow-touched peaks of Antelao and Tofana, rather than the glare and bustle and extended view of Venice which its rival Sant’ Elisabetta offers. ”

“ They went every afternoon to the Lido, where a wheeled chair met them, and Mrs. Lander was trundled across the narrow island to the beach. In the evenings they went to the Piazza, where their faces and figures had become known, and the Venetians gossipped them down to the last fact of their relation with an accuracy creditable to their ingenuity in the affairs of others. ”

“ Modesty can never have been a Venetian characteristic; nor is it now, when Venice is only a museum and show place. All the Venetians—the men, that is,—whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; for if its walls do not bear witness, glorious and chromatic, to the greatness of a Doge, it is merely because the greatness of the Republic requires the space. In this room, for example, we find Tiepolo allegorizing Venice as the conqueror of the sea. ”

“ It is the effect of Venice as a whole that pleases me, even if it isn't just what artists paint it. The palaces are really much grayer than they look in pictures, and there are never many sails on the canal, and even down toward the Lido there is seldom one of those bright painted sails. ”

“ The gayety of the scene can scarcely be exaggerated; and its whole appearance is so characteristic of Venice, and so unlike any other place, that it is quite impossible to draw a true picture of it in words. From the inauguration of the festa of the Redentore, it has been the custom to pass the night on the water; and about two o'clock the boats all move {76} towards the Lido, there to salute the rising sun, and many of the people rush into the water to hail the God of Day. ”

“ The traveller who delights to linger on St. Mark’s Place, in the Basilica, at the Ducal Palace, in the museums and churches, should also halt long and often at the Rialto. This is a corner with a character quite its own; here crowd together, laden with fruit and vegetables, the black boats that come from the islands to provision Venice, the great hulls laden with cocomeri, angurie, with gourds and water-melons piled in mountains of colour; there the gondolas jostle, and the gondoliers chatter like birds in their Venetian idiom ”

“ I yearn for the white, blinding light and breathless lagoons, and all that makes Venice the Queen City of the World.
Up the narrow canal of San Rocco, Venice
Luigi meets me inside the station. It takes a soldo to get in, and Luigi has but few of them, but he is always there. His gondola is moored to the landing steps outside—a black swan of a boat, all morocco cushions and silk fringes; the product of a thousand years of tinkering by the most fastidious and luxurious people of ancient or modern times, and still to-day the most comfortable conveyance known to man. ”

“ In former times, when Venice was rich and prosperous, many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the whole city took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and the gondoliers were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a numerous and prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice forever, and though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of the Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively few young men among them, and their gains are meagre. ”

“ A more insolent display of public wealth—a more lavish outpouring of human genius in the service of State pageantry, cannot be imagined.
Sublime over all allegories and histories depicted in those multitudes of paintings, sits Venezia herself enthroned and crowned, the personification of haughtiness and power. ”

“ In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice—a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush. Ere we reach the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset has faded. The western skies have clad themselves in green, barred with dark fire-rimmed clouds. The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. The far reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. ”

“ When the summer is over, it is delightful to feel that the gondola is not obligatory, to use it only for excursions on the lagoons, for views on the Grand Canal, for moonlit evenings, and when one is indolent. Venice is quite another place when one walks and makes the acquaintance of the curious, characteristic campi and calli, as well as of some of the people. One of the most charming walks is along the Riva degli Schiavoni, ending at the Arsenal, after various detours. ”

“ The growing wealth of Venice soon attracted the cupidity of her piratical neighbours on the coast of Dalmatia. The swift Liburnian vessels began to raid the Lido, compelling the Venetians to arm their own vessels and thus to form the nucleus of their famous fleet, the importance of which was recognized by the Golden Bull of the emperor Basil, which conferred on Venetian merchants privileges far more extensive than any they had hitherto enjoyed, on condition that the Venetian fleet was to be at the disposition of the emperor. ”

“ All Venetian basements are damp; it is their normal condition. If the water runs in, it will run out again. They have known this Old Sea King for centuries, and they know every whim in his head. As long as the Murazzi hold—the great stone dykes breasting the Adriatic outside the lagoons—Venice is safe. To-morrow the blessed sun will shine again, and the warm air will dry up the last vestige of the night’s frolic. ”