Venice (11 page)

The English have always been familiar to the Venetians (and there are astonishing parallels between the histories of the two peoples). There was a regular service of fifteenth-century galleys between Venice and Southampton; each rower was a business man himself, and took a little private merchandise under his seat, to peddle in the Hampshire lanes on his own account. Venetian ships also put in at
Rye, Sandwich, Deal, and the other south coast ports of England, now almost as dead as the Serenissima herself. The private Church of England chapel maintained by Sir Henry Wotton, the English Ambassador, was one of the causes of Venice's worst quarrels with the Holy See. Petrarch, describing a Venetian festival in the fourteenth century, says that among the honoured guests were some English noblemen, ‘comrades and kinsmen of their King', who had come to Venice with their ships on a navigational exercise. English captains and soldiers often fought in the Venetian cause, and the English, in return, sometimes hired Venetian ships and sailors.

In the nineteenth century, when Venice was in the doldrums, it was the complacent English who founded her romantic cult: Browning among the splendours of the Ca'Rezzonico (as it says in a plaque on the wall: ‘
Open my heart and you will see, Graven inside of it, Italy
'); Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a soirée, with a servant carrying his clothes in the gondola behind; Shelley watching the sun go down behind the Euganean Hills; Cobden fêted at a banquet on Giudecca, with an ear of corn in every guest's button-hole; Ruskin, for fifty years the arbiter of taste on Venice, and still the author of the most splendid descriptions of the city in the English language. In Victorian times the English community even had its own herd of seventeen cows, kept in a Venetian garden in imperial disregard of the rules, and providing every subscribing member with a fresh pint daily.

The Americans, too, were soon well known in Venice. W. D. Howells wrote a charming book about the place a century ago, before he turned to novel-writing: he was United States consul in the city, an agreeable sinecure granted him as a reward for writing an effective campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. Another consul, Donald Mitchell, wrote a once-popular book called
Reveries of a Bachelor
, under the pseudonym of ‘Ik Marvel'. Henry James wrote hauntingly about the city, and lived for a time in a house on the Grand Canal. Rich Americans, following the English fashion, took to buying or renting old palaces for the season, and one generous lady, when she died, left a house to each of her gondoliers. In the days when Americanism was synonymous with all that was free, generous, and sensible, the prestige of the United States was very high
in Venice. The sculptor Canova was honorary President of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and when a team of gondoliers took their craft to the Chicago World Fair, so I am told, they came home to Venice as heroes, and lived comfortably on the experience for the rest of their lives.

Nowadays the Venetian summer blazes with affluent visitors, but only a minority of foreign plutocrats prefers a rented palace to an air-conditioned hotel suite. In the winter there are very few foreign residents at all, apart from students at the University and at various language schools – probably less than a hundred, most of them from English-speaking countries. Gondoliers will sometimes tell you, to make you feel at home, that the palace you are passing is owned by an English lady (very beautiful) or an American diplomat (very wealthy); but they are generally years out of date with their information, and picked it up in childhood from the reminiscences of retired predecessors.

In Venice the past and the present are curiously interwoven, as in the minds of very old ladies, who are apt to ask if that dullard Mr Baldwin is still Prime Minister, and sometimes complain petulantly about the ill-treatment of cab-horses. The Venetians have never quite recovered from their loss of glory, and have perhaps never quite accepted it, so that somewhere in the backs of their minds their city is still the Serenissima, the Bride of the Adriatic, the Eye of Italy, Lord of a Quarter and a Half-Quarter of the Roman Empire – dignities which seem to have varied in gender, but never in magnificence. This combination of resignation and persistence gives the people their quality of melancholy, a lagoon-like sadness, unruffled and dry. Melancholia contributes strongly to the Venetian atmosphere, whether it is expressed in overgrown gardens or nostalgic verse: and a Venetian once even wrote a play about ‘the fundamental melancholy of sexual passions'.

A century ago, when the Republic was still alive in the world's
mind, the spectacle of Venice subdued was a good deal more poignant than it is now, and Englishmen, in particular, took a chill pleasure in examining the ruins of the Serenissima from the pinnacle of British success. ‘In the history of mankind', observed one Victorian writer, ‘three peoples have been pre-eminently great and powerful – the Romans in ancient times, the Venetians in the Middle Ages, the English in modern days.'

The Victorian celebrants of Venice loved to draw sententious conclusions from her humiliation, and saw in the downfall of the Republic either a vindication of their own political system, or an awful portent of things to come.

Today it is too old a story. The world has forgotten the mighty fleets of Venice, her formidable commanders and her pitiless inquisitions. The dungeons of the Doge's Palace have lost their horror, to the generation of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; and even power itself seems too frail and fickle a commodity to waste our lyrics on. The Venetians may still half-mourn their vanished empire, but to the foreigner the sadness of Venice is a much more nebulous abstraction, a wistful sense of wasted purpose and lost nobility, a suspicion of degradation, a whiff of hollow snobbery, the clang of the turnstile and the sing-song banalities of the guides, knit together with crumbling masonries, suffused in winter twilight.

For a time this people constituted the first Power of the western world. Such a tremendous experience in the life of a community can never be expunged, except by physical destruction, and everywhere in Venice there are still reminders of her political prime, like India Offices in Whitehall, or the great Imperial Square of Isfahan.

The Republic sent its ambassadors to the capitals of the earth, and in return the Powers maintained missions of high importance in Venice, with elaborate fleets of diplomatic gondolas, and splendid crested palaces. The ghosts of these establishments have not yet been
thoroughly exorcized. The old Austrian Embassy, on the Grand Canal, is still called the Palace of the Ambassadors. The Spanish Embassy is remembered in the Lista di Spagna, near the station (I have been told that any Venetian street called a
lista
has old diplomatic connotations). The palace of the Papal Legates, near San Francesco della Vigna, has given its name, agreeably corrupted, to the Salizzada delle Gatte – the Paved Alley of the Female Cats. The English Embassy; in Wotton's time, was in a palace near Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The Russian Embassy was in a house at the junction of Rio San Trovaso and the Grand Canal, around which there still hangs (at least to the imaginative) a faint evocation of sables and sledges. Rousseau was once secretary to the French Ambasssador; Wotton kept an ape in his palace, and collected lutes and Titians; the Venetians just had time, before their downfall, to exchange letters with the infant United States. (One of the earliest American Consulates was opened in the city soon afterwards, and wonderfully authentic have been the names of its various consuls – Sparks, Flagg, Corrigan, Gerrity, Ferdinand L. Sarmento and John Q. Wood.) In the great days of the Republic appointment to an embassy in Venice was one of the most coveted of diplomatic promotions.

All these splendours died with the Republic. The decline of Venice had been protracted and painful. It began with Vasco da Gama's great voyage, which broke her eastern monopolies: but for three more centuries the Serenissima retained her independence, sinking, through infinite declensions of emasculation, from power to luxury, from luxury to flippancy, from flippancy to impotence. Her wide Mediterranean Empire was lost in bits and pieces – Negroponte, Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, the Ionian islands, the Peloponnese, all to the rampant Turks. By the eighteenth century Venice was the most unwarlike State in Europe. The English use their powder for their cannon,' said a contemporary Italian observer, ‘the French for their mortars. In Venice it is usually damp, and if it is dry they use it for fireworks.' Venetian soldiers were ‘without honour, without discipline, without clothes – it is impossible to name one honourable action they have performed'. Addison described the purposes of Venetian domestic policy as being ‘to encourage idleness and luxury
in the nobility, to cherish ignorance and licentiousness in the clergy, to keep alive a continual faction in the common people, to connive at viciousness and debauchery in the convents'. Eighteenth-century Venice was a paradigm of degradation. Her population had declined from 170,000 in her great days to 96,000 in 1797 (though the Venetian Association of Hairdressers still had 852 members). Her trade had vanished, her aristocracy was hopelessly effete, and she depended for her existence upon the tenuous good faith of her neighbours.

No wonder Napoleon swept her aside. The Venetians, temporizing and vacillating, offered him no real resistance, and he ended their Republic with a brusque gesture of dismissal: ‘
Io, non voglio più In
-
quisitori, non voglio più Senato;
sarò
un Attila per lo state Veneto
' – ‘I want no more Inquisitors, no more Senate: I will be an Attila for the Venetian State.' The last of the Doges, limply abdicating, handed his ducal hat to his servant with the febrile comment: ‘Take it away, we shan't be needing it again.' (The servant did what he was told, and kept it as a souvenir.) The golden horses of the Basilica, the lion from his pedestal in the Piazzetta, many of the treasures of St Mark's, many of the pictures of the Doge's Palace, many precious books and documents – all were taken away to Paris, rather as so many of them had been stolen from Constantinople in the first place. Some diamonds from St Mark's Treasury were set in Josephine's crown, and a large statue of Napoleon was erected on Sansovino's library building, opposite the Doge's Palace. The last ships of the Venetian Navy were seized to take part in an invasion of Ireland: but when this was cancelled they were sent instead to be sunk by Nelson at Aboukir.

The Great Council itself ended the aristocratic Government of Venice, by a vote of 512 yeas to 30 nays and 5 blanks, and for the words ‘
Pax Tibi Marce
', inscribed on the Venetian lion's open book, there was substituted the slogan ‘Rights and Duties of Men and Citizens'. ‘At last,' observed a gondolier in a phrase that has become proverbial – ‘at last he's turned over a new leaf.' The dungeons of the Doge's Palace were thrown open: but according to Shelley only one old man was found inside them, and he was dumb. Even the poisons of the Council of Three had gone stale, and could hardly kill a fly.

*
It was the end of an era: for Venice, for Europe, for the world. There was, however, one final resurgence of national fire before Venice, united at last with the mainland, became just another Italian provincial capital. She was passed by the French to the Austrians; by the Austrians back to the French; after Waterloo, to the Austrians again: and in 1848, when half Europe rebelled against Vienna, the Venetians rose to arms too, proclaimed themselves a Republic again, expelled their Austrian occupiers, and defied the might of the Empire.

Times had drastically changed since 1797, and her leaders this time were men of the middle classes – professional men, lawyers, academics, soldiers. The difference in morale was astonishing. The president of the revolutionary republic was Daniele Manin, a half-Jewish lawyer who bore the same surname as the last of the Doges, and was determined to restore its honour. The Government he established was able, honest and popular. It was no mere nationalist protest body, but a fully organized administration, running Venice as a aty-State. The revolutionaries published their own Official Gazette; opened correspondence with the British and French Governments, without getting any support from them; and printed their own paper money, which was widely accepted. The London
Times
said of them: ‘Venice has again found within her walls men capable of governing, and people always worthy to be free.' The citizenry, in a last surge of the old spirit, made great personal sacrifices to sustain this brave campaign. One man gave a palace on the Grand Canal, another an estate on the mainland, a third a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Some of the remaining treasure of St Mark's was sold to raise war funds, and more was melted down for bullion. Except for Venetian elements of the Austrian Navy, which had long since been demoralized, all sections of the population seem to have behaved, by and large, with honour: and at one period Manin himself was recognized, a bespectacled private in the Civic Guard, on sentry-go in the Piazza.

But the cause was hopeless. The revolution began in March 1848 – Via Marzo 22, the main western approach to the Piazza, is named for the day – and for a full year Venice was invested by the Austrians.
The lagoon was vigilantly blockaded. Austrian shells, lobbed from the mainland, fell in many parts of the city, and are still to be seen, stuck together like glutinous candies, decorating war memorials or embedded in the façades of churches. Provisions ran desperately short, cholera broke out. Without foreign help, the Venetians had hardly a chance, and in August 1849 the Austrian General Gorzkowsky accepted Manin's surrender and reoccupied the city. Manin was exiled, with thirty-nine of his colleagues, to Paris, where he survived for the rest of his days by giving Italian lessons to young ladies: only to return to the vast, dark, awful tomb that lies beneath the northern flank of St Mark's.

Venice subsided into sullen thraldom, boycotting everything Austrian, even the military band in the Piazza. Long after the triumph of the Risorgimento, when all the rest of Italy (bar Rome) was free, she remained subject to Vienna: until in 1866, after the Prusso-Austrian war, Bismarck rewarded the new Italy for her support by handing her the Serenissima. Venice became part of the Italian Kingdom, and was an entity no more.

Since then she has been a port, an art centre, something of a factory: but above all a showplace. In the First World War she was a base for the Italian operations against the Austrians: two-thirds of her people were removed elsewhere, and from the Campanile you could see the observation balloons above the front-line trenches. During Mussolini's regime she was an obediently Fascist city, her inhabitants soon discovering that jobs were easier to get and keep if you toed the party line. In the Second World War, though there was sporadic and sometimes heroic partisan activity in the city, the Venetians only offered serious resistance to the Germans in 1945, when the result was a foregone conclusion anyway. As for the British, when they took Venice in the last days before the Armistice, they found only two classes of opposition: one from gondoliers, who demanded a higher tariff; the other from motor-boat owners who, reluctant to see their pampered craft requisitioned yet again by the rough soldiery, did their best to smuggle them away to Como or Lake Garda.

The Venetians are no longer lordly. They were great a long time
ago, and nobody expects them to be great again. No patriotic diehards writhe in impotence, to see their great Republic prostituted. The enormous Archives of the State have become no more than a scholar's curiosity. The Doge's Palace, the most splendid assembly hall on earth, is a museum. The Venetians have long since settled in their groove of resignation, and there remains only an old essence of power, a pomade of consequence, an echo of trumpet-calls (provided by the string orchestra at the Quadri, stringing away irrepressibly, its rigid smiles tinged with despair, at the rhythms of
Colonel Bogey
).

Gone are the great diplomats, the sealed crimson despatch-boxes, the secret liaisons, the Austrian Envoy in his box at the opera, His Excellency the Ambassador of The Most Christian Kingdom presenting his credentials to the Illustrious Signory of The Most Serene Republic. There are only Consulates in Venice nowadays. The Americans, the Argentinians, the Brazilians, the British, the French, the Greeks, the Panamanians and the Swiss all maintain ‘career consuls': the rest are represented by Italians. The Americans own a house near San Gregorio. The British rent an apartment beside the Accademia (three-quarters of their work is concerned with the Commonwealth, rather than the United Kingdom). The Argentinians and the Danes live on the Grand Canal. The French live elegantly on the Zattere. The Panamanians have a villa on the Lido. The Monagesques occupy an uncharacteristically tumble-down house behind San Barnaba. The others are scattered here and there across the city, in back-alleys and culs-de-sac, or high on second floors.

Only three Consulates – the American, the British and the French – can afford to run their own motor boats, and when a number of Latin American consuls devised a scheme for sharing one, obvious difficulties of temperament and economy killed it. Only the Argentinians, the French and the Panamanians maintain Consuls-General in Venice, and the Russians maintain nobody at all, their old Embassy being converted into an unusually comfortable
pension
. Some of the consulates have wider responsibilities on the mainland: but there is an inescapably vacuous, faded flavour to the diplomatic corps of Venice today, and the consuls are largely occupied in comforting
disconsolate tourists, pacifying the Italian authorities after sordid dock-side brawls, anxiously living it up with the socialites, or helping with cocktail invitations for visiting warships.