Venice (15 page)

He utters a series of warning cries when he makes a manoeuvre of this sort, throaty and distraught, like the call of an elderly and world-weary sea-bird. These cries so affected Wagner, during his stay in Venice, that they may have suggested to him (so he himself thought) the wail of the shepherd's pipe at the opening of the third act of
Tristan
: and they are so truly the
cri de coeur
of Venice that during the black-outs of the two world wars, pedestrians adopted them too, and sang them out as warnings at awkward street corners. The basic words of the admonition are
premi
and
stali
– ‘left' and ‘right': but it is difficult to discover precisely how they are used. Ruskin, for example, observes obscurely that ‘if two gondoliers meet under any circumstances which render it a matter of question on which side they should pass each other, the gondolier who has at the moment least power over his boat cries to the other “
Premi!
” if he wishes the boats to pass with their right-hand sides to each other, and “
Stali!
” if with their left.' Other writers are more easily satisfied, and believe that when a gondolier is going left he cries ‘
Premi!
' and when he is going right he cries ‘
Stali!
' Baedeker, frankly defeated by the whole system, merely records the unpronounceable exclamation ‘
A-Oel!
' – which means, he says bathetically, ‘Look out!' The poet Monkton Milne, in some verses on the problem, says of the gondoliers' cries:

Nowadays the gondoliers seem to vary their cry. I have often heard the old calls, but generally, it seems to me, the modern gondolier merely shouts ‘
Oi!
' (for which Herr Baedeker's translation remains adequate) and I know one modernist, who, swinging off the Grand Canal into the Rio San Trovaso, habitually raises his fingers to his teeth for a raucous but effective whistle.

It is not at all easy to row a gondola. The reverse stroke of the oar is almost as laborious as the forward stroke, because the blade must be kept below water to keep the bows straight; and skilful manipulation, especially in emergencies, depends upon instant movement of the oar in and out of the complicated row-lock (which looks like a forked stump from a petrified forest). To see this skill at its most advanced, spend ten minutes at one of the Grand Canal
traghetto
stations, and watch the ferry-men at work. They move in a marvellous unity, two to a gondola, disciplined by some extra-sensory bond, and they bring their boats to the landing-stage with a fine flamboyant flourish, whipping their oars neatly out of the row-locks to act as brakes, and coming alongside with a surge of water and an endearing showmen's glance towards the audience on the bank.

Boats, boatmanship and boatlore are half the fascination of Venice. Do not suppose, though, that the Venetians never set eyes on a car. You can see them any day, of course, at the Piazzale Roma, or on the resort-island of the Lido, but they sometimes get far nearer St Mark's. At the Maritime docks, near the Zattere, you may often see cars running about behind the barricades, and sometimes observe a great diesel lorry that has hauled its trailer direct from Munich to the inner fringe of the sea-city. When there is an especially important celebration, the authorities land television and loudspeaker trucks in the Piazza itself, where they sit around in corners, skulking beneath the colonnades and looking distinctly embarrassed. The British took amphibious vehicles to the Riva degli Schiavoni, when they arrived in Venice at the end of the Second World War. Cargoes of cars (and railway wagons, too) often chug across the inner lagoon on ferryboats. And I once looked out of my window to see a big removal truck outside my neighbour's front door, on the Grand Canal itself: it had been floated there on barges, and its driver was sitting at the steering-wheel, eating a sandwich.

There are many houses in Venice that do not stand upon canals, and are inaccessible by boat: but there is nowhere in the city that you cannot reach on foot, if you have a good map, a stout pair of shoes and a cheerful disposition. The canals govern the shape and pattern of Venice. The streets fill the gaps, like a filigree. Venice is a maze of alleys, secluded courtyards, bridges, archways, tortuous passages, dead ends, quaysides, dark overhung back streets and sudden sunlit squares. It is a cramped, crowded, cluttered place, and if its waterways are often sparkling, and its views across the lagoon brilliantly spacious, its streets often remind me of corridors in some antique mouldy prison, florid but unreformed. It is a very stony city. A few weeks in Venice, and you begin to long for mountains or meadows or open sea (though it is extraordinary, when once you have tied your sheets together and jumped over the wall, how soon you pine for the gaol again).

There are several different grades of street and square in Venice. The
fondamenta
is a quayside, usually wide and airy. The
calle
is a lane. The
salizzada
is a paved alley, once so rare as to be worth distinguishing. The
ruga
is a street lined with shops. The
riva
is a water-side promenade. The
rio terra
is a filled-in canal, and the
piscina
a former pond. Then there is something called a
crosera
, and something called a
ramo
, and a
sotto-portico
, and a
corte
, and a
campo
, and a
campiello
, and a
campazzo
. There is a Piazzale in Venice (the Piazzale Roma, by the car park). There are two Piazzettas (one on each side of the Basilica). But there is only one Piazza, the stupendous central square of the city, which Napoleon called the finest drawing-room in Europe.

Each section of the city, as we saw from the Campanile, clusters about its own square, usually called a
campo
because it used to be, in the virginal days of Venice, a soggy kind of field. The most interesting
campi
in Venice are those of San Polo, Santa Maria Formosa, San Giacomo dellʼ Orio, Santo Stefano, and Santa Margherita – the first rather dashing, the second rather buxom, the third
rather rough, the fourth rather elegant, the fifth pleasantly easygoing. In such a
campo
there is usually no glimpse of water, the canals being hidden away behind the houses, and all feels hard, old and urban. It is, as the guides would say, ‘very characteristical'.

In the middle of Campo Santa Margherita (for example) there stands an inconsequential little square building, rather like an old English town hall, which was once the Guild of the Fur-Makers, and it is the local office of a political party. At one end of the square is an antique tower, once a church, now a cinema, and at the other is the tall red campanile of the Carmini church, with an illuminated Madonna on its summit. Between these three landmarks all the spiced activities of Venice flourish, making the
campo
a little city of its own, within whose narrow confines you can find almost anything you need for sensible living. There is a bank, in a fine old timbered house; and three or four cafés, their radios stridently blaring; and a swarthy wineshop, frequented by tough old ladies and dominated by a an enormous television set; and a second-hand clothes dealer; and a dairy, and a couple of well-stocked groceries, and a delightful old-school pharmacy, all pink bottles and panelling. At the brightly coloured newspaper kiosk the proprietor peers at his customers through a small cavity among the film stars, as though he has nibbled a way between the magazines, like a dormouse. The draper's shop is warm with woollies and thick stockings; the tobacconist sells everything from safety-pins to postage stamps; and each morning they set up a market in the square, beneath gay awnings, squirming with fish and burgeoning with vegetables.

Like many another Venetian
campo
, Santa Margherita is an unsophisticated place. No elegant socialites sit at its cafés. No actresses cross their legs revealingly on the steps of its war memorial. The passing tourists hurry by anxiously consulting their street plans, on their way to grander places. But there is no better way to taste the temper of Venice than to sit for an hour or two in such a setting, drinking a cheap white wine from the Veneto, and watching this particular small world go by.

*

Extending from the squares, like tenuous roots, run the alleyways of Venice, of which there are said to be more than 3,000. Their total length is more than ninety miles, but some are so small as to be almost impassable. Browning was delighted to find one so narrow that he could not open his umbrella. The narrowest of all is said to be the Ramo Salizzada Zusto, near San Giacomo dellʼ Orio, which is 2½ feet wide, and can only be traversed by the portly if they are not ashamed to try sideways. The lanes of Venice often have lovely names – the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the First Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley, both commemorating seventeenth-century fires; the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind. Not long ago, before peoples' skins grew thinner, there was even a Calle Sporca – Dirty Lane.

The lanes are often beguilingly unpredictable, ending abruptly in dark deep canals, plunging into arcades, or emerging without warning upon some breathtaking vista. They can also be misleading, for you will frequently find that the palace looming at the end of an alley-way is separated from you by a wide waterway, and can only be reached by an immense detour. This means that though Venetian houses may be close to one another, they are not necessarily neighbours, and it has led to the evolution of a complicated sign language, enabling housemaids to converse with each other at long range, or conduct gentle flirtations across the chasm: I once saw a young man in the very act of blowing a kiss to a girl across such a canal when his window-pane fell down with a busybody thump, fatally weakening his aplomb. The mystery, secrecy and romance of the lanes is always a fascination, especially if you learn, as the Venetians do, to
andare per le fodere
– ‘move among the linings', or poke your way through the little subsidiary passages that creep padded and muffled among the houses, like the runs of city weasels.

They used to have running-races in the crook-back, zigzag streets of Venice, and you can make good speed along them if you develop the right techniques of side-step and assault. The best way to move about Venice, through, is by a combination of methods, based upon
careful analysis. You can walk from the Rial to to the church of Ognissanti in half an hour: but if you know the place, you will catch the express
vaporetto
to San Samuele – take the
traghetto
across to the Caʼ Rezzonico – follow the linings through the Calle Traghetto, the Calle Lunga San Barnaba, the Calle delle Turchette, the Fondamenta di Borgo, the Fondamenta delle Eremite, the Calle dei Frari, the Rio Terra degli Ognissanti – and in a dazed minute or two, emerging panting upon the Campo Ognissanti, you are there.

‘Turn up on your right hand,' said Launcelot to Gobbo, when that old gentleman was looking for Shylock's house – ‘turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but at the next turning of all, on your left: marry, at the very next turning, turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew's house.'

‘By God's sonties,' the old boy replied, ‘'twill be a hard way to find' – and O Heavens! he was right.

Long centuries ago the Venetians, looking around them at these peculiar circumstances, and examining the best Greek, Roman and Byzantine models, devised their own kind of house. Many an ephemeral taste has embellished their architecture since then, and many fluctuations of fortune have affected their style, so that today Venice is a gallimaufry of domestic architecture, so tightly packed and heavily loaded with buildings that sometimes it feels like one massive jagged stone hillock, projecting irregularly from the waters of the lagoon.

The classic Venetian house remains the palace of the old aristocracy. It is found all over the city, in innumerable back-alleys and little-frequented courtyards – in the best modern guide to Venice 334 such houses are thought worthy of mention. Many a modest old doorway masks a lovely house, and often a butcher's shop or a grocer's has been built into the side of an exquisite small fifteenth-century mansion. You can see the greater houses at their best and grandest, though, along the banks of the Grand Canal, where their architecture springs from three distinct periods – the Byzantine, the Gothic, the Renaissance – which are instantly recognizable to writers of guide books, but often indistinguishable to me. Some of these
houses are appealingly decrepit. Some have been ruthlessly restored. Some are charming, some (to my mind) perfectly hideous. Some are simple and demure, some massively ostentatious, with immense heavy doorways and ugly obelisks on their cornices. They are, at least those of the Gothic pattern, unique to Venice: but when Mr Tiffany and his associates wanted to erect a jeweller's mansion on Fifth Avenue, and when the committee of the Army and Navy Club were planning their new premises in Pall Mall, all those gentlemen cast their eyes admiringly towards the Grand Canal, and built their own Venetian palaces at home.

Their basic design is lofty but practical, and clearly derived from Rome and Byzantium. A typical house is roughly rectangular, but with its façade (on the canal) rather broader than its back (on an alley). It has four, five or six stories. The front door opens spaciously upon the water, where the boats are moored at huge painted posts – unless there is a boathouse at the side, like a garage. The back door opens discreetly into a lane, or into a high-walled and often disregarded garden. If the house is venerable enough, there may be a flagged courtyard with a well-head, from which a wide staircase marches upwards, as in the houses of Damascus and Baghdad.

The ground floor of the palace is the entrance hall and boatyard, where the family gondola used to be laid up, high, dry and mysterious, in the winter months, and where the old merchant aristocrats stored their bales of silk, their bundles of ivory, their tapestries, their perfumes and even their shivering apes – ‘from Tripolis, from Mexico, and England', as Shakespeare once imaginatively put it, ‘From Lisbon, Barbary and India'. The first floor is the
mezzanino
, the business quarter of the house, where the merchants did their accounts, concluded their agreements and dismissed their dishonest servants. The second is the
piano nobile
, the most elegant of the apartments, designed for the pleasure of his honour the proprietor. It has a long, dark, imposing central room, often running the whole length of the house, with a large balcony over the canal, and an alcove each side with windows over the water. From this central
sala
bedrooms lead off on either side, trailing away in a warren of bathrooms, dressing-rooms and miscellaneous offices.

Above the
piano nobile
the house loses some of its grandeur, each floor becoming successively pokier until at last, above the ultimate attic, you emerge upon the higgledy-piggledy roof, and find there the wooden platform, called the
altana
, which was originally designed to allow Venetian ladies privacy while they bleached their hair in the sun, but which nowadays generally flutters with washing. The house may once have been covered with frescoes and vivid ornamentation, sometimes vaguely visible to this day, when the sun is right: now it is probably reddish, brownish, or stone-coloured, and enlivened chiefly by its gay mooring-posts, like barbers' poles, its striped awnings, and the delectable flower-boxes, bird-cages and odd domestic foliage with which elderly Venetian ladies like to freshen their windows.

Plastered and stuccoed on the façades of these houses are the mementoes of progress: bits and pieces of decoration left behind by successive restorers, like sea-shells in a grotto. Angels, cherubs, scrolls and lions abound on every window-sill, and sometimes there are huge pyramidal spikes on the roof, like the rock-temples of Petra. The side façade of a Venetian palace, in particular, can be immensely complicated by these accretions. I once examined the side elevation of a house near mine, and found that beneath its domed tower and its copper weather-vane it was embellished with four chimney-pots, of three different designs; fifty-three windows, of eight different shapes and sizes, two of them blocked and three grilled; the casement of a spiral staircase; twelve iron staples; eight inlaid pieces of white masonry; a defaced memorial slab; a carved rectangular ornament of obscure significance; four buttresses; five external chimney flues; scattered examples of bare brick, cement, piping, stonework and embedded arches; various bits of isolated tiling; a heavy concrete reinforcement at the water's edge; a carpet hung out to air; a quizzical housemaid at a third-floor window; and an inscription recording the fact that a celebrated French actress had lived there.

The greatest of these strange houses, though much smaller than the country palaces of the English patricians, are very large indeed. (Their owners often had mansions on the mainland, too: the Pisani family had fifty such villas, and at one house in the Veneto 150 guests
could be entertained at a go, together with their servants – it contained two chapels, five organs, a concert hall, a printing press and a couple of theatres.) In the early days of Venice, the citizens all lived in virtually identical houses, ‘to show their unity and equality in all things': later the palaces became symbolic of wealth and success, the most gloriously ostentatious way of keeping up with the Contarinis.

Many stories testify to the pride of the old Venetian householders, as they erected these grandiose homes. One tells of the aristocrat Nicolo Balbi, who was so anxious to move into the new Palazzo Balbi that he lived for some months in a boat opposite the building site: alas, he caught cold, and before he could take up residence in the mansion, poor old Balbi died. Another concerns a determined suitor who, refused a lady's hand because he did not possess a palace on the Grand Canal, promptly built one so large that, as he pointed out, any one of its principal windows was bigger than his father-in-law's main portal: the young man's house is the Palazzo Grimani, now the Court of Appeal, and the old man's the Coccina-Tiepolo, almost opposite. A third story says that the truncated Palazzo Flangini, near San Geremia, was once twice its present size, but that when two brothers jointly inherited it, one of them demolished his half in a fit of jealous dudgeon. The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni remains unfinished, so it is said, because the owner of the immense Palazzo Corner, directly opposite, objected so strongly to the impertinence of its completion: it was certainly going to be enormous, as you may see from a model in the Correr Museum. The palace of the Duke of Sforza, near the Accademia, was apparently intended by that ambitious
condottiere
to be more of a fortress than a mere house, and that is why it remains at half-cock, with a princely set of stairs but a modest elevation.