Venice (10 page)

The church in Venice, though, is something more than all things bright and beautiful. It is descended from Byzantium, by faith out of nationalism: and sometimes to its high ritual in the Basilica of St Mark there is a tremendous sense of an eastern past, marbled, hazed and silken. St Mark's itself is a barbaric building, like a great Mongolian pleasure pavilion, or a fortress in Turkestan: and sometimes there is a suggestion of rich barbarism to its services too, devout, reverent and beautiful though they are.

In Easter week each year the Patriarch and his clergy bring from the vaults of the church treasury all its most sacred relics, and display them ceremonially to the people. This ancient function is heavy with reminders of the Orient. It takes place in the evening, when the Piazza is dark, and the dim lights of the Basilica shine mysteriously on the gold mosaics of its roof. The congregation mills about the nave in the half-light, switching from side to side, not knowing which way to look. A beadle in a cocked hat, with a silver sword and the face of a hereditary retainer, stands in a peremptory eighteenth-century attitude beside a pillar. The organ plays quietly from its loft, and sometimes there is a chant of male voices, and sometimes a sudden hubbub from the square outside when the door of the church is opened. All is murmurous and glinting.

A flash of gold and silver from an aisle, a swish of stiff vestments, the clink of a censer, and presently there advances through the crowd, clouded in incense, the patriarchal procession. Preceded by flurrying vergers, clearing a way through the congregation, it sweeps slowly and rheumatically up the church. A golden canopy of old tapestry sways and swings above the mitred Patriarch, and around it walk the priests, solemn and shuffling, clasping reverently the celebrated relics of St Mark's (enclosed in golden frames, jewelled caskets, crucifixes, medieval monstrances). You cannot see very well, for the crowd is constantly jostling, and the atmosphere is thick; but as the priests pass slowly by you catch a queer glimpse of copes and
reliquaries, a cross set with some strange sacred souvenir, a fragment of bone in a crystal sphere, weird, ornate, elaborate objects, swaying and bobbing above the people as the old men carrying them stumble towards the altar.

It is an eastern ceremonial, a thing of misty and exotic splendour. When you turn to leave the great church, all those holy objects are placed on the rim of the pulpit, and all those grave priests are crowded together behind, like so many white-haired scholarly birds. Incense swirls around them; the church is full of slow shining movement; and in the Piazza outside, when you open the door, the holiday Venetians stroll from café to café in oblivion, like the men who sell Coca-Cola beneath the sneer of the Sphinx.

If the Venetians are not always devout, they are usually kind. They have always had a reputation, like other money-makers, for generosity to the poor. The five Great Schools of Venice, of which the Scuola di San Rocco is now the most famous, were charitable associations set up to perform ‘temporal works of mercy': and even Baron Corvo, in his worst years of disillusionment, had to admit that when it came to charitable causes the Venetians were extraordinarily generous. The indigenous beggars of the city are treated with indulgence, and are seldom moved on by the easy-going police. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evenings at the bottom of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano, and who is often to be seen, pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafés, and planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud and quite incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are always a few
innocents to be seen following the melodic line with rapt knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, held upside-down and close to the stomach.

I suspect the Venetians, who still have a strong clan feeling, may sometimes be less forbearing towards unfamiliar loafers. Now and then you see gypsies who have penetrated the city from the mainland in their colourful long-skirted dresses, and who whine their way from square to square with babies in their arms and skinny hands outstretched. I myself have a weakness for gypsies, but the Venetians are evidently not addicts, and you hardly ever see a Romany beggar rewarded. I was once a beggar in Venice myself. One bleak winter evening my boat engine broke down, and I needed a few lire to take the ferry-boat home. Providence, I assured myself, in a city so divinely founded, would certainly provide: and sure enough, presently there approached me a monk from one of the mendicant orders, whom I had often seen carrying sacks from household to household, and who was now returning to his nearby convent. I stopped him and asked him for the loan of 100 lire until the next day: but chill and suspicion was the response I got; and cold the doorstep upon which, at the entrance to the monastery, my family and I were left in lonely hope; and tortuous were the channels through which the consent of the Abbot was vainly sought; and gruff was the porter who told us to go and wait in the adjacent church; and low-voiced the consultation of friars which reached us sibilantly as we stood in the nave; and hasty and off-hand were the manners of the monk who at last approached me sidelong, as if unwilling to come too close, and thrust the coin into my hand as you might offer a bone to an unreliable terrier; and irritating was my conviction, when I returned to repay the loan next morning, that the doorman who casually accepted it, beneath the grinning
memento mori
decorating his portal, almost certainly pocketed the money for himself.

But if I was cynical then, I am less so today, for now I know Venice better, and have no doubt that if I had entered some slatternly dockside tavern that evening, and put my case to the ill-shaved sinner behind the bar, he would have lent me the money in a trice,
and thrown in a glass of sour white wine as a bonus, Compassion really is a powerful emotion among the simpler Venetians. In the eighteenth century the idea of pain was so insufferable to them that even characters in a play, if they happened to be killed, had to take a quick posthumous bow, to reassure the anxious audience, and accept its sympathetic cries of ‘
Bravo i morti!
' This is a melancholy city at heart, and its inhabitants are constantly shaking their heads in pity over some pathetic new evidence of the world's sadness. When a visitor from Bologna was drowned in the Grand Canal one evening, my housekeeper was almost in tears about him next day; and when a funeral goes by to the cemetery of San Michele, you may hear the onlookers muttering to themselves in condolence: ‘Oh, the poor one, oh, dead, dead, poor thing – ah, away he goes, away to San Michele,
il
povero
!'

Bad weather, too, is a subject for tender distress; and the fate of poor Venice herself, once so powerful; and sometimes a stroke of international ill fortune, a train accident in Uruguay, the failure of a conference, a princess unmarried or a sportsman discarded, summons a brief gleam of poignancy into the Venetian eye. Searing indeed is the sorrow that lingers for months, even years, after the death of a second cousin, so that the very mention of the cemetery is enough to send a mask of mourning fleeting across the bereaved features: and whenever the Venetian woman mentions her dear Uncle Carlo, who passed to a higher realm, as you will have long ago discovered, on 18 September 1936 – the mere thought of Uncle Carlo, and the whole business of the day must be momentarily suspended.

There is a trace of the morbid to this soft-heartedness. Venetians are fascinated by dead things, horrors, prisons, freaks and malformations. They love to talk, with a mixture of heartburn and abhorrence, about the islands of hospitals and lunatic asylums that ring Venice like an incantation, and to demonstrate with chilling gestures the violence of some of the poor inmates. Fierce was their disappointment when the corpse of their beloved Pius X, laid in state in its crystal coffin, turned out to have a gilded mask for a face (he had been dead for forty years, and they were curious about his condition).

There is something Oriental, too, about the predictability of their
emotions. A sort of etiquette or formality summons the tears that start so instantaneously into the eyes of Maria, when you mention her poor relative, as if her affliction were no more than an antique ritual, like the wailing of hired mourners at an Egyptian funeral. It is a custom in Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, to announce deaths by posting notices in shops and cafés, often with a photograph; and elaborate is the sadness of the people you may sometimes see distributing these announcements, and extraordinary its contagiousness, so that for a few moments after their departure the whole café is plunged in gloom, and the very hiss of the espresso machine is muffled.

A streak of sentimentality runs through Venetian life, surprising in a city of such stringy fibre. A Venetian crowd usually has a soft spot for the under-dog, and the last competitor in the regatta always gets a kindly cheer. I once saw the aftermath of a fight between two youths, beside the Rial to bridge. One was a willowy, handsome young man, who had placed a tray of packages on the stone steps beside him, and was engulfed in tears; the other a bronzed, tough and square-cut fish-boy, a Gothic boy, with a stentorian voice and a fist like iron. The slender youth was appealing to the crowd for justice, his voice breaking with grievances, now and then hoisting his shirt from his trousers to exhibit his bruises. The fish-boy was pacing up and down like a caged lion, sporadically pushing through the spectators to project an insult, now spitting, now giving his opponent a contemptuous shove or a grimace of mockery. My own sympathies were whole-heartedly with this uncouth ruffian, a Venetian of the old school: but the crowd clustered protectively about the other, and a woman ushered him tearfully towards the Rialto, out of harm's way, amid murmured commiserations on all sides. One man only held himself aloof, and seemed to share my sympathies. He was a dwarf, a little man dressed all in black, with a beret on his head, who stood on tiptoe at the back of the crowd, peering between its agitated shoulders: but I was mistaken, for when I caught this person's eye, and offered him a guilty and conspiratorial smile, he stared back at me balefully, as you might look at an unrepentant matricide, or a man with a well-known penchant for cruelty to babies.

There are many such dwarfs and hunchbacks in Venice, as observers have noted for hundreds of years, and they too are treated with kindness (though there used to be a superstition to the effect that you must keep thirty paces away from a lame man, which perhaps contributed to Lord Byron's well-known reluctance to appear in the Piazza in daylight). Many are given jobs as sacristans or cleaners in churches, and flit like smiling gnomes among their shadowy chancels. There are also many and varied originals, women a-flutter with scarves and anachronistic skirts, men talking angrily into the night from the parapets of bridges. Artists are really artists in Venice, and meet jovially to eat enormous meals in taverns. In the spring evenings a group of apparently demented girls used to dance beside the Grand Canal outside my window, and sometimes in the middle of the night you will hear a solitary opera-lover declaiming Tosca into the darkness from the poop of a water-bus. Foreigners of blatant individualism have always frequented Venice, from George Sand in tight trousers at the Danieli to Orson Welles massively in Harry's Bar: but they have never disconcerted the Venetians, long accustomed to the extremes of human behaviour. At the height of the Venetian autocracy, in the fifteenth century, a well-known exhibitionist used to parade the canals in a gondola, shouting abuse at the regime and demanding the instant obliteration of all aristocrats everywhere. He was never molested, for even the stern Council of Ten had a soft spot for the eccentric.

You may also be drunk in Venice, oddly enough, without antagonizing the town. Though most proper Venetians have lost their taste for the bawdy, and are a demure conventional people, nevertheless their evenings are frequently noisy with drunks. Often they are visitors, or seamen from the docks, but their clamour echoes indiscriminately through the high walls and water-canyons of the place, and sometimes makes the midnight hideous. In Venice you may occasionally see a man thrown forcibly from a bar, all arms and muddled protests, just like in the films; and rollicking are the songs the Venetian students sing, when they have some wine inside them. I once heard a pair of inebriates passing my window at four o'clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them
riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices: but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.

The practical tolerance of Venice has always made it a cosmopolitan city, where east and west mingle, and where (as Shakespeare rightly said) ‘the trade and profit of this State consisteth of all nations'. Settlers of many races contributed to the power and texture of the Republic, as you can see from the paintings of the masters, which often picture turbaned Moors and Turks among the crowds, and sometimes even negro gondoliers. Venice in its commercial prime was like a bazaar city, or a caravanserai, where the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians and the Dalmatians all had their quarters, and the Germans and the Turks their great emporia. One of the pillars of the Doge's Palace illustrates this diversity: for there, side by side upon a column-head, are the faces of a Persian, a Latin, a Tartar, a Turk, a Greek, a Hungarian, a bearded Egyptian and a surprisingly innocuous Goth. (We need not suppose, though, that the old Venetians had many illusions about equality. Around the corner there are eight more faces, on another capital: seven are hideous, one is handsome, and this ‘thin, thoughtful and dignified portrait', says Ruskin, ‘thoroughly fine in every way', is meant to express the ‘superiority of the Venetian character over that of other nations'.)

Of all these alien residents the most resilient have been the Jews, who enjoyed a position in medieval Venice half-way between protection and persecution. They first came to the city in 1373, as refugees from the mainland, and were originally forced to live (or so most historians seem to think) on the island of Giudecca, which may be named after them, or may come from the word ‘judicato', implying that it was ‘adjudged' a suitable place for Jews, vagabonds and rogues. In the sixteenth century the first of all the Ghettos was
instituted for them, in the north-western part of the city. It was on the site of a disused ironworks – the word ‘ghetto' is thought to have been medieval Venetian for a foundry – and all the Jews, now suddenly supplemented by fugitives from the wars of the League of Cambrai, were forced to live in it.

They had to wear a special costume (first a yellow hat, later a red); they were relentlessly taxed on every conceivable pretext; they had to pay through the nose for permission, frequently renewable, to remain in the city at all. Their Ghetto was windowless on its outside walls, to cut it off entirely from the rest of the city, and its gates were locked at sunset. Christian guards (paid, of course, by the Jews) prevented all entry or exit after dark. Yet though the Jews were so harshly circumscribed, and squeezed for all financial advantage, they were physically safer in Venice than almost anywhere else in Europe. The Venetians found them useful. Once or twice there were the usual canards about Jewish baby-burners; in 1735 the official commissioners appointed to govern the affairs of the Jews had to report that the Ghetto was bankrupt; but over the centuries the Venetian Jews, protected against public violence or religious fanaticism, enjoyed periods of high prosperity and prestige.

In the seventeenth century the ladies of the Ghetto were described as ‘gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold and rings adorned with precious stones … having marvellous long trains like Princesses that are borne up by waiting women serving for the same purpose'. Henry VIII consulted a learned Venetian Jew when he was planning his divorce suit against Katherine of Aragon. Some of the rabbis of Venice were celebrated throughout Europe, and it became a fashionable practice for visitors to attend a sermon in a Ghetto synagogue. Napoleon abolished the Ghetto in 1797: and when, in 1848, the Venetians rebelled against their Austrian masters, their leader was half-Jewish, and Jewish brain-power gave the revolutionary Republic its astonishing financial stability.

People have often observed an affinity between Venetians and Jews – a common aptitude for money-making, a similar sense of wry humour, a shared feeling of national exclusion. One Edwardian visitor wrote of the ‘Hebrew bearing' of the priests of St Mark's.
Somebody else has mentioned the conviction with which Venetian painters depicted Old Testament patriarchs. Today it is very difficult to tell who is a Jew in Venice. Lord Fisher, who had British Israelite sympathies, used to say that the faces of the Lost Tribes were obviously different from those of the other Jews, ‘otherwise they wouldn't be lost': but often the male Venetian face, grave and meditative, has a striking Jewish cast to it, redolent of Venice's Eastern commerce, and the infusions of Oriental culture (and blood, too) that have enriched the city down the centuries.

There are still about 800 Jews in Venice. Some still live in the three sections of the Ghetto,
Vecchio
,
Nuovo
,
Nuovissimo
– Old, New and Newest: the story goes that when Napoleon's soldiers threw open the gates, the inmates were so debilitated that they had not the strength to move, and have stayed there ever since. Many more live in other parts of the city. They are mostly middle-class citizens and professional men – only a few are very rich – and they retain a strong sense of community. The tall teeming houses of the Ghetto are still poor, and the canal behind them, upon which the guards used to float watchfully about in scows, is usually thick with slime and refuse: but there is a comfortable Jewish old people's home, and a well-endowed meeting hall, and an interesting little museum. The Jewish cemetery on the Lido island, once Byron's riding-ground and a playing field for ribald adolescents, is now handsomely maintained. Of the five Ghetto synagogues – one originally for Levantine Jews, one for Spaniards, one for Italians and two for Germans – two are still used for services (another is part of the museum, and the rest are high and inaccessible in tenement blocks).

If you visit one on the day of the Passover, you may see how trim, bright and gregarious the Venetian Jews are today. The Rabbi stands hunched and scholarly on his high dais. The usher wears his tall top-hat at a rakish angle. A few well-dressed women peer down from the oval gallery, high in the ceiling of the synagogue. On the men's side of the floor the congregation sits placid or devout: on the women's side there is a flurry of bright dresses and floral hats, a bustle of starched children, a cheerful buzz of gossip and a veil of perfume (
Ca'
d'Oro
, perhaps, named for a palace on the Grand Canal, or
Evenings in
Venice
, with a blue gondola and a pair of lovers on the package). All seems vigorous and uninhibited, and it is moving to remember, as the porter at the door ushers you politely into the sunshine, that you are standing in the middle of the very first of all the sad Ghettos of the world.

On the walls outside, though, two inscriptions are worth reading before you leave the place. One is a sixteenth-century notice declaring the intention of the Republican magistrates to repress the sin of blasphemy, as committed both by Jews proper and by converted Jews. ‘They have therefore ordered this proclamation to be carved in stone in the most frequented part of the Ghetto, and threaten with the cord, stocks, whip, galleys or prisons all who are guilty of blasphemy. Their Excellencies offer to receive secret denunciations and to reward informers by a sum of a hundred ducats to be taken from the property of the offender under conviction.'

The other inscription is a modern one. It records the fact that of the 8,000 Italian Jews who lost their lives in the Second World War, 200 were Venetians. From the first plaque the Jews, presumably at the fall of the Republic, have roughly removed the image of the Lion of St Mark, symbol of their servitude: but the second plaque they put up themselves.

At the other end of the city, beyond the Piazza of St Mark, stood the Greek quarter of Venice, once thriving, rich and assured. Only a century ago the Greek colony lent a familiar splash of colour to the city, and had its own meeting-places and restaurants, and even its own café in the Piazza. Venice once paid hazy allegiance to the Byzantine Emperors, and though the Venetians later quarrelled violently with Constantinople, and engineered the temporary downfall of the Greek Empire, nevertheless the Serenissima was always close to the world of the Greeks, and deeply influenced by its ways. The Greeks, grocers and money-lenders to the Levant, were money-lenders here too, and flourished in many a minor business in the days before visas and import licences. For several centuries they fluctuated in religious loyalty between Rome and Constantinople, one bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was
simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch. The Government did not often press the issue, for it welcomed the presence of the prosperous Greek merchants, and until 1781 the Greek Church in Venice maintained a precarious communion with Rome, only becoming frankly schismatic when Napoleon proclaimed liberty of conscience throughout conquered Venetia.

In the heyday of the colony there were 10,000 Greeks in Venice. They established a school, the Phlangineion, which became one of the great centres of Greek culture abroad, when the Turks overran the homeland. Longhena designed a building for it, which still stands, and Sansovino built the adjacent church of San Giorgio dei Greci. Many of the most brilliant Venetian courtesans were Greeks. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Greek wines were drunk at all the best Venetian tables. Many Greeks of great wealth came to Venice after the fall of Constantinople, and Venetians sometimes owned, when the political winds were blowing right, villas and gardens in the Morea.

Even now you are never far from Greece in Venice. Not only are there the Byzantine treasures of the city, and the Greek overtones to its history and culture: almost any summer day you may see a sleek white Greek steamer, a breath of the Aegean, sailing in with the morning tide, or embarking its befurred and portly passengers for an archaeological cruise. There is a Greek Consul in Venice, and a Greek institute of Byzantine studies: and sometimes in the season one of the prodigious Greek magnates will land at St Mark's from the tender of his yacht, with his dazzling mistress or his complacent wife, his immaculate captain and his sleek secretaries, bringing to these severe porticoes a full-blown vision of the merchant-venturers.

The colony itself survives, though it has dwindled to about fifty members. You can see it almost in its entirety, supplemented by a few resident Russians, at a feast-day service in San Giorgio dei Greci, now unashamedly Orthodox. The ceremonials there are beautifully calm and mysterious, set against a background of dim shimmering ikons and golden crosses. Much of the service, in the Greek way, is conducted at an inner altar, invisible to the congregation: but in the
body of the church the people observe their own devotions with an impressive lack of self-consciousness, walking up the nave all alone with elaborate crossings and genuflections, to kneel before a crucifix; entering the sanctum, apparently unannounced, to receive the personal blessing of the priest; singing the canticles in a style by no means flippant or irreverent, but oddly detached. When the priest emerges from the curtains of the altar, black-hatted and heavily bearded, and passes gravely down the nave with his censer, all those Greeks bow gracefully at his passing, allowing the incense to flow around their heads, as the Arabs use it to sweeten their beards.

There are still Armenians in Venice, too. They have a famous monastery on one of the islands of the lagoon, and they have a church, Santa Croce degli Armeni, tucked away in the Alley of the Armenians, near San Giuliano. The Armenians formed the oldest of the foreign communities in Venice. They were firmly established at the beginning of the twelfth century, and their position was consolidated when a Doge who had made a fortune in their country left part of it to establish an Armenian headquarters in Venice. The Armenians were merchants, shopkeepers, financiers, money-lenders, pawnbrokers (they paid depositors partly in money, but partly in watered white wine, just as the coloured labourers of the Cape used to be paid in tots). It is said that the plague first came into Venice with Armenian immigrants, but they were never harried or victimized: in Venice, as a sixteenth-century Englishman observed, it signified nothing ‘if a man be a Turk, a Jew, a Gospeller, a Papist or a believer in the Devil; nor does anyone challenge you, whether you are married or not, and whether you eat flesh and fish in your own home'.

A few Armenians still live in the Alley of the Armenians, and any Sunday morning you will find seven or eight people, mostly women, attending Mass in the church (the Armenian Church, the oldest Established church in the world, is nowadays split between Catholics and Orthodox: the Armenians in Venice are in communion with Rome). It is a strange little building. Its campanile, now silent, is so surrounded by tall buildings and chimneys that you can hardly see it: its façade is unobtrusively hidden away in a row of houses, and only
the cross on the door shows that it is a church at all. Inside it is shabby but brightly decorated, and the floor of the vestibule is covered with memorial slabs, extolling the virtues of eminent Venetian Armenians – ‘He lived as a Lion', says one, ‘Died as a Swan, and will Rise as a Phoenix.' The congregations are usually poorly dressed: and though the priest has splendid vestments, and conducts the services with lordly grace, his solemn young acolyte will probably be wearing blue jeans and a pullover. A sense of ancient continuity informs the proceedings, for the church of Santa Croce stands on the very same site that was given to the Armenian community by that indulgent Doge, eight centuries ago.

The Germans, whose links with Venice are old and profitable, also have their church in the city: the chapel of the Lutherans, which has, since 1813, occupied a comfortable first-floor room near the church of Santi Apostoli. Its congregations are small but extremely well dressed; its lighting is discreetly subdued; and on the door a notice says: ‘The service is conducted in German: do not disturb.'

For a taste of Venetian Englishry, go on a summer morning to the Anglican Church of St George, which is a converted warehouse near the Accademia bridge. Its pews are usually full, and the familiar melodies of Ancient and Modern stream away, turgid but enthusiastic, across the Grand Canal. The drone of the visiting padre blends easily with the hot buzz of the Venetian summer, and when the service ends you will see his surplice fluttering in the doorway, among the neat hats and tweedy suits, the white gloves and prayer-books, the scrubbed children and the pink-cheeked, tight-curled, lavender-scented, pearl-necklaced, regimentally brooched ladies that so admirably represent, year in, year out, east and west, the perennial spirit of England abroad.