Venice (16 page)

The Grand Canal, as Gautier once said, was the register of the Venetian nobility – ‘every family has inscribed its own name on one of these monumental façades'. The Palazzo Vendramin, where Wagner died, was built by the Loredan clan, and passed in aristocratic succession to the Duke of Brunswick, the Duke of Mantua, the Calerghi family, the Grimani family, the Vendramin family, the
Duchesse de Berri (mother of Henri V) and the Duca della Grazia. Countless and often fabulous were the festivities mounted in such houses, in the days of the Venetian decline. They used to have bull-baitings in the courtyard of the Caʼ Foscari, and sometimes people erected floating platforms on the canal outside their front doors, and had dances on them.

Only a few years ago a ball of legendary luxury and splendour was held in the Palazzo Labia, beside San Geremia, and the grandest parties of the Grand Canal are still among the greatest events of the international season. Few of the larger palaces, though, are still private houses, and if they are, their proprietors are not usually Venetians. One or two patrician families maintain their old homes, usually keeping well out of the social limelight: but their palaces are likely to be divided among different members of the family, floor by floor, with a chaperone or housekeeper to give a respectable unity to the
ménage
.

Many other palaces are now institutions – the Municipality, which occupies two, the Museum of Modern Art, the winter casino, the Franchetti Museum, the Ca' Rezzonico Museum, the International Centre of Art and Costume, the headquarters of the Biennale, the Museum of Natural History, the Prefecture, the municipal pawnshop. Some of the finest are hotels. Some are offices, some are antique shops, one is a mosaic workshop, two are showrooms of Venetian glass. Many more are apartments, mostly expensive (especially at the southern end of the Grand Canal), some magnificent. The ownership of these structures can be involved, for they are often divided by floors, so that one landlord owns the top of the house, and quite another the middle, and a third the garden and the water-gate, and a fourth the path that leads you into the common land of the back-alley. Sometimes ownership extends to part of the pavement outside. Near the Rialto there is a house whose garden gate juts abruptly into the passing lane. Across the angle thus made with the wall of the alley a stone has been set in the pavement, enclosing an area of about two square feet between the gateway and the wall, and upon it is engraved the inscription: ‘
Private Property
'. I once put my foot across this mystic barrier, into the forbidden inches
beyond: and sure enough, such is the strength of Venetian tradition, a queer tingle ran up my leg, like a psychic admonition.

Do not judge the prosperity of a Venetian house by the opulence of its doorway, especially if it stands well away from the Grand Canal. There are, of course, many poor houses in Venice, drab uniform tenements, dreary cottages, even the remnants of rock-bottom slums. The apparent squalor of many homes, though, is merely a veneer. Downstairs the house may be dank, messy, derelict or even sinister: but once you are inside, and past the musty obscurity of the hall, and up the rickety stairs, and through the big black door of the principal apartment, and along a gloomy echoing corridor or two, and up a few shaky staircases – then suddenly, passing through a heavy curtain, you may find yourself in the brightest and most elegant of rooms, locked away in that dark exterior like a pearl in a knobbly oyster. (Venetians have always liked to live out of doors, anyway, as you may see from the countless cheerful citizens who take their knitting and their newspapers each summer evening to the cafés of the Riva or the quaysides and trattorias near the docks.)

Do not think, either, that Venice has no gardens. In the winter, when all this maze of buildings is cold, shuttered and depressed, it can feel the most barren of cities, starved of green, sap and juices. This is misleading. Hundreds of gardens lie hidden among the stones of Venice, protected by iron gates and old brick ramparts, so that you only catch a quick passing glimpse of wistaria, or a transient breath of honeysuckle. The Venetians love flowers. Florists abound, and there are shops where you can buy edible essence of rose-petal, or bunches of orange marrow-blossom to fry in flour. There are trees in Venice, too – hundreds of pines, regimentally paraded, in Napoleon's Public Gardens; handsome plane trees in several squares: myrtles, laurels, oleanders, pomegranates, tamarisks and palms in many a private garden. There is even, a learned man once assured me, ‘a genuine lodogno tree,' in the Campo San Zaccaria – information I could only accept in respectful silence.

There is a beguiling secrecy and seclusion to these green places of Venice, and they are often littered with quaint statues and carvings, and haunted by cats, and dignified by old overgrown well-heads. On
Giudecca, once the garden-island of Venice, there are still one or two rich flower gardens running down to the lagoon, their heavy fragrance hanging like a cloud above the water; and even in the very centre of the city, where you should take nothing for granted, solemn forbidding buildings often secrete small bowers of delights. Behind the old convent of the Servites, enclosed by high walls, there is a vegetable garden (tended by nuns in cowls and gum-boots), so wide and richly cultivated that it feels like a transplanted patch of Tuscany, snatched from the farmlands: and above the low roof of the Palazzo Venier you may see the tall luxuriant trees of its garden, a place of deep evocative melancholy, like a plantation garden in the American South.

Such places are not often public. Most of the Venetian gardens are jealously locked, and impenetrable to strangers. On the entire southern shore of Giudecca there is now only one spot where ordinary people may wander down to the water. To see the gum-booted nuns at work you must persuade some friendly local housewife to give you access to her roof, and look at them over the wall. Few benches stand among the Venetian greeneries as encouragements to dalliance, and the ones in the big Public Gardens, at the end of the Riva, are nearly always occupied.

Venetians, indeed, do not always have much feeling for gardens. Many a private paradise is cruelly neglected, while others are laid out with crude display. Some neighbours of mine, in a spasm of enthusiasm, recently engaged a landscape gardener to rearrange their entire garden, hitherto a tangled wilderness. They ordered it all by the book, complete with a lawn, a garden path, a flower-border, a handful of small trees and a garden gate with brass insignia. The gardeners worked hard and skilfully, and within a month they had created a spanking new garden, as neat, correct and orderly as a ledger: and some time later, when the flowers came out, I observed the mistress of the house wandering among the roses with a catalogue in her hand, making sure she had got what she ordered. Where an alley meets a water-way, there you have a Venetian bridge. The bridges, as Evelyn observed, ‘tack the city together'. There are more to the square mile in Venice than anywhere else on
earth – more that 450 of them, ranging from the gigantic twin spans of the causeway to the dainty little private bridge on Giudecca which, if you open its wicket gate and cross its planks, deposits you prudently in the garden of the Queen of Greece. There is the Bridge of Fists and the Bridge of Straw and the Bridge of the Honest Woman and the Bridge of Courtesy and the Bridge of Humility and the Little Bridge and the Long Bridge and the Bridge of Paradise and the Bridge of the Angel and the Bridge of Sighs, where Byron stood, lost in sentimental but misinformed reverie.

The arched bridge turned the canals into highways: but to this day many of the Venetian bridges are so low, so dark and so narrow that the gondolier has to crouch low on his poop to get through them, while his passengers clutch their new straw hats and laugh at their own echoes (and if it is one of those bridges whose undersides are flecked with moving water-reflections, going beneath it is like gliding behind a silent waterfall). The ubiquity of bridges has given the Venetians their peculiar clipped gait, and contributes heavily to the swollen ankles and unsteady heels with which unaccustomed visitors, swearing inexpressible enjoyment, stagger back to a restorative bath after an afternoon of sightseeing.

The early Venetian bridges were used by horses and mules as well as humans, and therefore had ramps instead of steps. They had no parapets, and were made of tarred wood, as you can see from Carpaccio's famous
Miracle of the True Cross at the Rialto
. Today the ramps have all disappeared, but there is still one example of a bridge without parapets, on the Rio San Felice near the Misericordia. Most of the minor bridges nowadays are single-spanned, high-arched, and built of stone. There are still a few flat wooden bridges, approached by steps from the pavement, like an English railway bridge. There is a three-arched bridge over the canal called Cannaregio. There is an eccentric junction of bridges near the Piazzale Roma, where five separate structures meet in a baffling confrontation of steps and directions. There are some private bridges, ending abruptly and haughtily at the great wooden doors of palaces. There are a few iron bridges, some of English genesis. At certain times of the year there are even pontoon bridges, erected by Italian Army engineers from
the Po Valley garrisons. In November one is thrown across the Grand Canal to the Salute. In July they build one across the wide Giudecca Canal to the church of the Redentore, for the commemoration of another plague delivery (for thirty hours no ship can enter or leave the inner port of Venice). They used also to build one, on All Soul's Day, to the cemetery of San Michele: but today a water-bus will take you to the graveside anyway, in a matter of mournful moments. For the rest, the little bridges of Venice are so numerous, and so unobtrusive, and so alike, that you may cross ten or twenty in the course of half an hour's stroll, and hardly even notice them.

Three bigger bridges span the Grand Canal. Until the last century there was only one, the Rialto – which all Venetians meticulously call Ponte di Rialto, the Rialto being, in their long memories, not a bridge but a district. There have been several bridges on this site. The first was a bridge of boats. The second was broken during the Tiepolo revolution in 1310, when the rebels fled across the canal. The third collapsed in 1444 during the Marchioness of Ferrara's wedding procession. The fifth, portrayed in Carpaccio's picture, had a drawbridge in the middle. It was temporarily removed in 1452 to let the King of Hungary pass by in suitable state with the Duke of Austria; and it became so rickety over the years that one chronicler described it as ‘all gnawed, and suspended in the air as if by a miracle'.

The sixth was the subject of a famous sixteenth-century architectural competition. Sansovino, Palladio, Scamozzi, Fra Giocondo and even Michelangelo all submitted designs (you may see Michelangelo's, I am told, at the Casa Buonarotti in Florence). Most of the competitors suggested multi-arched bridges, but one, Antonio da Ponte, boldly proposed a single high arch, based upon 12,000 stakes, with a span of more than 90 feet, a height of 24, and a width of 72. This was a daring gesture. Da Ponte was official architect to the Republic, and the Signory was hardly lenient with employees' errors – Sansovino himself was presently to be imprisoned when his new library building unfortunately fell down. Nevertheless, da Ponte's design was accepted, and the bridge was built in two years. It has been a subject of controversy ever since. Many Venetians disliked it at the time, or mocked it as an unreliable white elephant; many others
objected when its clean arch was loaded with the present picturesque superstructure of shops; and it has been, until recently, fashionable to decry it as lumpish and unworthy (though several great painters have fondly pictured it, including Turner in a lost canvas).

Structurally, it was a complete success – during rioting in 1797 they even fired cannon from its steps, to dispel the mobs: and for myself, I would not change a stone of it. I love the quaint old figures of St Mark and St Theodore, on the station side of the bridge. I love the Annunciation on the other side, angel at one end, Virgin at the other, Holy Ghost serenely aloft in the middle. I love the queer whale-back of the bridge, humped above the markets, and its cramped little shops, facing resolutely inwards. I think one of the great moments of the Grand Canal occurs when you swing around the bend beside the fish market and see the Rialto there before you, precisely as you have imagined it all your life, one of the household images of the world, and one of the few Venetian monuments to possess the quality of geniality.

For another three centuries it remained the only bridge over the Grand Canal. As late as 1848 the Austrian soldiers could prevent subversive foot passage across the city simply by closing the Rialto bridge. Then two iron structures were thrown across the water-way – one by the railway station, one near the Accademia gallery. They were flat, heavy and very ugly, and the Accademia bridge was sometimes known, in mixed irony and affection, as
Ponte Inglese
. Both lasted until the 1930s, when they had to be replaced because of the increased size of the
vaporetti
. The new station bridge was a handsome stone structure, far higher than the Rialto. The new Accademia bridge was of precisely the same proportions, but because money was short it was built (just for the time being, so they cheerfully said) of tarred wood – a return to the original materials of Venetian bridge-building.

And here is an extraordinary thing. There are only these two modern bridges across the Grand Canal, the world's most resplendent water-way; but one day not long ago I took a
vaporetto
to Santa Maria del Giglio, and walked across to the Fenice Theatre, and crossed Campo San Fantin, and took the first turning on the left, and
the third on the right, and followed the alley to the left again, and knocked on the door of third house on the right, and when the face of a jolly housekeeper had inspected me from an upstairs floor, and the door had clicked open, I found myself shaking hands with the architect who designed and built them both – one of the most remarkable monuments any man of our time has erected to himself.