Venice (18 page)

The experts say, indeed, that Venice is unusually healthy. ‘The barometric pressure', says one official pamphlet in its best bed-side manner, ‘is maintained at a uniform level because of the evenness of its oscillations.' ‘Bacterioscopical laboratory tests', says another, ‘have proved that the water of the lagoon possesses auto-purifying powers.' It is odd, all the same, how often foreign consuls and ministers have died in Venice in the course of their duties, to leave their high-flown honorifics mouldering on island tombstones: and many a visiting lion has roared his last in Venice. Wagner died in the palace that is now the winter casino. Browning died in the Ca'
Rezzonico, on which the municipality has inscribed his famous couplet of gratitude to Italy. Diaghilev died here, and Baron Corvo, and so did Shelley's little daughter Clara, after a journey from the Euganean Hills complicated by the fact that Shelley had left their passports behind.

A fourteenth-century Duke of Norfolk, banished from England after a quarrel with the future Henry IV, was buried in the Basilica, until he was exhumed and taken home by his descendants – he had retired himself to Italy, so Shakespeare wrote of him,

In San Zanipolo you may still see the grandiose tomb of ‘Odoardo Windsor, Barone Inglese', who died in 1574. The Scotsman John Law, perpetrator of the Mississippi Bubble, died in Venice in poverty, and is buried in San Moise. Even Dante died of a fever contracted during a journey to Venice. The angry Venetian modernists like to say that this has become a city ‘where people come to expire'. The gentle last-ditchers, inspired by so many distinguished predecessors, only wait for the day.

There is nothing more characteristically Venetian than one of the funeral cortèges that plough with such startling frequency down the Grand Canal, on their way to the island cemetery of San Michele (to which Napoleon decreed that all the city's dead should be carried). Today there is only one model of hearse, a plain blue motor launch with an open cockpit for the coffin and the undertaker's men, a curtained cabin for the mourners. Not so long ago a saturnine variety of craft offered far more opportunities for
grand guignol
. The most expensive was a straight-prowed, old-school motor boat, heavily draped in brown, black and gold, and steered by an unshakeably lugubrious chauffeur. The next was a kind of lighter, huge, forbidding and encrusted with gold, like a floating four-poster. Then came an elaborately gilded barge, rowed by three or four elderly boatmen in black tam-oʼ-shanters, at the bows a lion crying into a handkerchief, at the stern that prodigy of paradise, a bearded angel. And
cheapest of all was a mere gondola in disguise, a little blacker and heavier than usual, mournfully draped, and rowed by two men in threadbare but unmistakably funereal livery. Photographs of the various vehicles used to be displayed in the undertakers' windows: and once I overheard a small boy, looking at these pictures with his sister, remarking in a phrase that I found hauntingly ambiguous: ‘There! That's Daddy's boat!'

Marvellously evocative is a winter funeral in Venice. A kind of trolley, like a hospital carriage, brings the coffin to the quayside, the priest shivering in his wind-ruffled surplice, the bereaved relatives desperately muffled; and presently the death-boat chugs away through the mist down the Grand Canal, with a glimpse of flowers and a little train of mourning gondolas. They keep close to the bank, in the shade of the tall tottering palaces (themselves like grey symbols of the grave), and thus disappear slowly into the distance, across the last canal.

The procession is not always so decorous when it arrives at San Michele, for this cemetery still serves the whole of Venice, and often there are two or three such cortèges arriving at the landing-stage simultaneously. Then there is a frightful conglomeration of brass impediments, a tangle of plumes, motor boats backing and roaring, gondoliers writhing at their row-locks, hookers straining on the quay, mourners embarrassingly intermingled. It is a funeral jam. I once saw such a
mélange
, one bright summer morning, into which a funeral gondola of racy instincts was projected forcibly by an accomplice motor boat, slipping the tow neatly as it passed the San Michele landing-stage: never were mourners more mute with astonishment than when this flower-decked bier came rocketing past their gondolas, to sweep beside the quay with a jovial flourish.

Once ashore, though, and there will be no such contretemps, for San Michele is run with professional efficiency, and the director stands as proudly in his great graveyard as any masterful cruiser captain, god-like on his bridge. The church at the corner of the island is beautifully cool, austere and pallid, and is tended by soft-footed Franciscans: Paolo Sarpi is buried at its entrance, and the Austrians used its convent as a political prison. The cemetery itself is wide and
calm, a series of huge gardens, studded with cypress trees and awful monuments. Until quite recently it consisted of two separate islands, San Michele and San Cristoforo, but now they have been artificially joined, and the whole area is cluttered with hundreds of thousands of tombs – some lavishly monumental, with domes and sculptures and wrought-iron gates, some stacked in high modern terraces, like filing systems. There is a pathetic little row of children's graves, and around the cloister at the entrance many an old Venetian worthy is buried, with elaborate inscriptions on big stone plaques (many of which have been unaccountably defaced, by scribbled signatures and lewdities).

The cult of death is still powerful among the Venetians, and a constant flow of visitors moves silently among the graves, or meditates among the pleasant flower-beds of the place. Many of the grander tombs, already inscribed and shuttered, are not yet occupied, but await a death in the family. Others are so spacious, well built and frequented that they are more like nightmare summerhouses than tombs, and remind me of the hospitable mausoleums in Cairo's City of the Dead. Inside others again there hang, in the Italian manner, portraits of the departed, giving them rather the feeling of well-polished marble board-rooms, awaiting a quorum. There is an annual pilgrimage of ballet-lovers to the modest tomb of Diaghilev; and an increasing trickle of visitors finds its way to the obscure burial-place, high in a tomb-terrace, of Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo'. He died, according to British Consulate records, in October 1913, in the Palazzo Marcello, at the age of 53: his life in Venice had sunk from eccentricity to outrage to depravity, but he refused ever to leave the city, wrote some incomparable descriptions of it, died in poverty and obloquy, and was buried (characteristically) at his brother's expense. Silently this multitude of shades lies there beneath the dark trees of San Michele; and at night-time, I am told, a galaxy of little votive lamps flutters and twinkles on ten thousand tombstones, like so many small spirits.

At the eastern corner of San Michele is an old Protestant graveyard of very different temper. It is like a Carolina churchyard, lush, untended and overgrown, shaded by rich gnarled trees, with grassy
walks and generations of dead leaves. Most of its graves are obscured by weeds, earth and foliage, and it is instructive to wander through all this seductive desolation, clearing a gravestone here and there, or peering through the thickets at a worn inscription. There are many Swiss and Germans in these graves; and many British seamen who died on their ships in the port of Venice. There is an English lady, with her daughter, who perished in a ferry disaster off the Lido in the early 1900s; and several Americans with names such as Horace, Lucy or Harriet; and one or two diplomats, among whose flowery but almost illegible epitaphs you may discern a plethora of adjectives like ‘noble-minded', ‘lofty', ‘much-respected', ‘eminent'. There is a long-forgotten English novelist, G. P. R. James, whose merits as a writer, we are ironically assured, ‘are known wherever the English language is spoken'; and there is an unfortunate Mr Frank Stanier, of Staffordshire, whose mourners wrote of him in a phrase that might be kindlier put, that he ‘Left Us In Peace, Febry 2nd, 1910'.

The marble-workers who erect the fancy mausoleums of San Michele are understandably cynical about the expenses of death in Venice, and say that only the rich lie easy in their graves. Certainly the Venetians have sometimes paid heavily for immortality. One sixteenth-century patrician directed in his will that his body should be washed in aromatic vinegar by three celebrated physicians, wrapped in linens soaked in essence of aloes, and placed in a lead coffin enclosed in cypress wood: upon the surrounding monument the virtues of the deceased were to be engraved in Latin hexameters, in letters large enough to be easily read at a distance of twenty-five feet, and the history of the family was to be added in a series of 800 verses, specially commissioned from some expensive poet. Seven commemorative psalms were also to be composed, and twenty monks were to chant them beside the tomb on the first Sunday in every month for ever. (But if you want to see how Pietro Bernardo's executors honoured this will, go and look at the bourgeois memorial they in fact erected to him in the Frari, and ask how often the monks sing those psalms these days.)

Humbler Venetians, too, have always hankered after a comfortable oblivion in the tomb. ‘Here we poor Venetians become landowners at
last,' said a Venetian woman to W. D. Howells, as they approached the cemetery just a century ago: but it is not strictly true. For twelve years they lie at peace in their graves: but then, unless their relatives are prepared to pay a substantial retaining fee, their bones are briskly exhumed and dumped in a common grave, and their pitiful little headstones, inscriptions and memorial photographs are left cracked and mouldering on a rubbish dump. Until a few years ago their bones were shipped away to a distant island of the lagoon. Nowadays they remain upon San Michele, and extra land is being reclaimed on the eastern side of the island, to make room for more.

This anonymous destiny has long coloured the Venetian's attitude to death. Nothing is more wryly comical to him than the whole paraphernalia of San Michele. Nothing excites his cynical instincts more bitterly than the cost of serenity after death. ‘Here we all stop in the end', says the gondolier in a Venetian epigram, as he passes San Michele, ‘rich and poor alike' – but his employer's reply is typically astringent. ‘Perfectly true', he says. ‘We all stop here in the end – but in the meantime, my friend, keep rowing.' To understand how strongly the Venetians feel about graves, coffins and urn-burials, try suggesting the advantages of burial at sea. ‘In the water!' the Venetians will exclaim, those old sea-wanderers, ‘where all the fishes and crabs will nibble your corpse!' And they throw up their hands in disbelieving horror, as though you had suggested being buried alive, or roasted, like many of the city's favourite martyrs.

Death and Venice go together, as Thomas Mann demonstrated: but it is a curious truth that while nearly everybody remembers a Venetian funeral, and fits it easily into the mould of the city's life, Venetian weddings go unnoticed. This was not always so. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Venetian brides were celebrated throughout Europe for the magnificence of their clothes and the display of their weddings. They wore their hair long to the altar, cascading down their backs interwoven with threads of gold. On their heads were exquisite jewelled coronets. Their shoulders were bare, and their gorgeous full-skirted dresses were made of silk damask and gold brocade (unless they happened to be widows, who had to be veiled
and dressed in unrelieved black, and must be married on the stroke of midnight).

Sometimes even today, if a princess marries in Venice, or a millionaire's daughter, there are spectacular celebrations, and frothy pictures in the illustrated magazines: but generally the wedding, unlike the honeymoon, is not regarded as a Venetian institution, and seldom graces the folk-lore of the guide books. This is not at heart a blithe city. A gondola wedding can be a charming function, though, with the bride's lace veil streaming over her velvet cushions, the gondoliers in yellow or red or blush-pink, the flowers hermetically sealed in cellophane, the bridegroom indescribably formal in his morning suit, and the wedding guests chugging along in their motor boats behind.

I saw one such wedding party emerging, on a crisp spring day, from the church of Santa Maria Formosa. The bride was very pretty; the husband was elegant; the guests were grand; the boats were immaculate; the priest, advancing paternally from the church, looked at once gay and godly; the bystanders, loitering with their shopping-bags upon the bridge, were properly pleased. But moored directly behind the bridal gondola was a lumpish grey dustbin boat, and its captain stood there four-square among his garbage, arms akimbo. The expression on his face, as the lily-perfume reached him, was a salty mixture of the caustic and the benign, and when the bridal party glided away down the canal, in a flutter of satin and pink ribbon, he started his engines with an oily rumble, and merrily set off towards the reception.

The buildings of Venice are mostly very old, and sometimes very decrepit, and for centuries it has been a popular supposition that Venice will one day disappear altogether beneath the waters of her lagoon. She sprang from the sea fifteen centuries ago, and to round her story off aesthetically, so many a writer and artist has felt, she only needs to sink into the salt again, with a gurgle and a moan.
Tintoretto, in a famous painting, portrayed the city finally overwhelmed by a tidal wave. Rose Macaulay, when she died, was planning a novel about the last submergence of the place. ‘Noiseless and watchful', is how Dickens saw the water of Venice, ‘coiled round and round … in many folds like an old serpent: waiting for the time when people should look down into its depths for any stone of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress.'

Certainly the disappearance of Venice would give her history a wonderful symmetry of form – born out of the water, and returned at last into the womb; and you have only to take a trip in a gondola, observe the crumbled façades about you and watch the thickened lapping of the canals, to realize how precariously aged Venice is. Many a palace seems to bulge and totter, like an arthritic duke in threadbare ermine, and many a tower looks disconcertingly aslant. The old prison building on the Riva stands noticeably out of true, and sometimes I think, in the pink of a summer sunset, that the Doge's Palace itself is subsiding at its south-western corner. Venice depends for her longevity upon the long line of islands, artificially buttressed, which separate the lagoon from the Adriatic, and keep the sea-storms away from her delicate fabrics. She lives like a proud parchment dowager, guarded by the servants at the door.

She is built upon soggy mud-banks (though the Doge's Palace, as it happens, stands upon clay, on the stiffest portion of the Venetian under-soil). She rests upon an inverted forest of stakes –1,156,672, so they say, support the Salute – so nobody can wonder if she wobbles a bit now and then. Over the centuries her wooden supports have been repeatedly weakened, partly by natural corrosion, partly by the wash of powered boats, partly by the deepening of canals, which has taken their waters to a depth unforeseen by the old engineers. Every now and then some ancient structure, tired of the fight against age, wind and corrosion, dies on its feet and disintegrates into rubble. The Venetian chroniclers are full of such collapses, and old historians often record, with enviable sang-froid, the spontaneous disintegration of a church or a celebrated bridge.

In particular the Venetian campaniles have a long tradition of subsidence, and several of them look doomed today. Santo Stefano,
San Giorgio dei Greci, San Pietro di Castello – they all lean violently, and if you stand at their feet with an imaginative ear you may almost hear them creaking. Even the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, which was completed only in 1790, is no longer upright, as you can see if you take a boat into the lagoon and line it up against the campanile of St Mark. The campaniles were among the first Venetian structures, serving originally as look-outs as well as bell-towers, and sometimes as lighthouses too. Since fashions in towers change sluggishly, they often survived when their accompanying churches were rebuilt, and thus remained as memorials to earlier styles of architecture. In the sixteenth century there were more than 200 of them – old prints of Venice sometimes depict the city as one immense forest of bell-towers. Today there are about 170; the rest have fallen down.

When the tower of the Church of La Carità, now part of the Accademia, fell into the Grand Canal in the eighteenth century it caused such a wave that a fleet of gondolas was left high and dry in a neighbouring square. When the old tower of San Giorgio Maggiore collapsed in 1774 it killed a monk and left, as one observer recorded, ‘a dismal vacancy among the marvels'. The campanile of Sant' Angelo fell three times before they finally demolished it. The campanile of Santa Ternita survived its demolished church and was used for half a century as a house; but it collapsed in 1882, temporarily burying its tenant in the ruins. The tower of San Giorgio dei Greci leaned from the moment it was built, and has been causing intense anxiety at least since 1816, when an urgent plan was prepared for its restoration. The campanile of Santo Stefano was so unsafe after an earthquake in 1902 that they built a small subsidiary bell-tower, still to be seen above the rooftops of Campo Santo Stefano. When the campanile of the Carmini was shaken by lightning in 1756, the monks were actually ringing its bells, but abandoned their peal in such haste that one man ran his head against a wall and was killed. At least seven campaniles have, at one time or another, been demolished just in time, as they staggered towards their fall. Outside the church of Santa Maria Zobenigo you may see a rectangular brick travel agency that is the stump of an unfinished campanile, intended to replace an unsafe predecessor, but stifled at an early age owing to a dissipation
of funds. Earthquakes, lightnings and violent winds have all humiliated Venetian campaniles; muddy ground, vegetation among the masonry, subterranean water, inadequate foundations, inferior bricks all threaten their assurance. This is dangerous country for bell-towers.

When the most famous of them all fell down, the whole world mourned. There is a
traghetto
station on the Grand Canal, near San Marcuola, whose members have long had the fancy of recording events in large irregular writing upon the wall. Changes of fare are written there, and hours of service, and among several almost illegible inscriptions one stands out boldly. ‘
14 Luglio 1902
' (it says, in the dialect) ‘
Ore
9.55 Cadeva La Torre di S. Marco
' – ‘On 14 July 1902, at five to ten in the morning, the tower of St Mark fell down.' Nothing in the whole of their history seems to have affected the Venetians more deeply, and you will still hear as much about the eclipse of the old Campanile, the prime symbol and landmark of Venice, as you will about the fall of the Republic.

The building was begun, so we are told, on St Mark's Day, 25 April 912. Its summit was once sheathed in brass, to act as a perpetual day-time beacon, and its flashing could be seen twenty-five miles away. Warning cressets were also lit in its bell-chamber, and during the wars against the Genoese five cannon were mounted up there. Countless great expeditions were welcomed home by the bells of the Campanile. Scores of criminals died to the slow beat of the
Maleficio
, the bell of evil omen. In the belfry Galileo demonstrated to the Doge his latest invention, the telescope, and from the platform below it Goethe caught his first sight of the sea. Since the seventeenth century the revolving gilded angel on the summit had been the master weather-vane of Venice.

Nothing on earth seemed stronger and stabler than the Campanile of St Mark's. It had, so one eighteenth-century guide book observed, ‘never given the slightest sign of leaning, shaking or giving way'. It was so much a part of Venice, had supervised so many years of changing fortune, that it seemed eternal, and the people regarded it with an almost patronizing affection, and called it ‘the Landlord'. According to popular rumour, the foundations of the tower ran deep
beneath the pavement of the Piazza, extending star-wise in all directions; and every visitor to Venice made the ascent of the Campanile, whether he was an emperor inspecting the lagoon defences, or a renegade priest from the mainland, hung from the belfry in his wooden cage. All through the years, though, like a game but rocky old uncle, the Campanile was secretly weakening. It had been repeatedly struck by lightning, its gilded summit positively inviting calamity – as early as 1793 it was fitted with a lightning conductor, one of the earliest in Europe. It had been injudiciously restored and enlarged, and some rash structural alterations had been made inside the tower. Its bricks had been half-pulverized by centuries of salt wind and air. Its foundations, though strong, were not nearly as invulnerable as legend made them: though the tower was 320 feet high, the piles that supported it were driven less than sixty feet deep.

Thus, early that July morning, this famous tower gave a gentle shudder, shook itself, and slowly, gently, almost silently collapsed. The catastrophe had been foreseen a few days before: the firing of the midday cannon had been cancelled, in case it shook the structure, and even the bands in the Piazza were forbidden to play. Soon after dawn on the 14th the Piazza had been closed, and the anxious Venetians gathered around the perimeter of the square, waiting for the end. When it came, ‘
Il
Campanile
', it was said, ‘
se stato galantuomo
' – ‘the Campanile has shown himself a gentleman'. Not a soul was hurt. A hillock of rubble filled the corner of the Piazza, and a cloud of dust rose high above the city, like a pillar of guidance, or a shroud: but the only casualty was a tabby cat, said to have been called Mélampyge after Casanova's dog, which had been removed to safety from the custodian's lodge, but imprudently returned to finish its victuals. The weather-vane angel, pitched into the Piazza, landed at the door of the Basilica, and this was regarded as a miraculous token that the great church would not be damaged: nor was it, much of the debris being kept from its fabric by the stumpy pillar in the south Piazzetta from which the laws of the Republic used to be proclaimed. When the dust had cleared, and the loose masonry had subsided, there was seen to be lying unbroken on the debris the Marangona,
the senior bell of Venice, which had called the people to their duties for six centuries. Even half a dozen shirts, which the custodian's wife had been ironing the day before, were found as good as new under the wreckage.

In a matter of moments it was all over, and only a pyramid of bricks and broken stones was left like an eruption in the square. (The remains were later taken away in barges and dumped, with a mourning wreath of laurel, in the Adriatic.) I once met a man who was present at this melancholy occasion, and who still seemed a little numbed by the shock of it. ‘Weren't you astonished that such a thing could happen?' I asked him. ‘Well,' he replied heavily, ‘yes, it
was
a surprise. I had known the Campanile all my life, like a friend, and I never really expected it to fall down.'

The news of this old great-heart's death rang sadly around the world. The silhouette of Venice, one of the most universally familiar scenes on earth, was dramatically altered, and the skyline was left looking oddly flat and featureless, like a ship without masts. The city council met the same evening under the chairmanship of an old Venetian patrician, Count Grimani, who was mayor of the city for more than thirty years: and grandly aristocratic was its decision. There were some Venetians who thought the rebuilding of the tower would cost more than it was worth. There were many others who thought the Piazza looked better without it. The council, however, did not agree. The Campanile would be rebuilt, they decided, ‘as it was and where it was', and the phrase has become famous in Venetian lore – ‘
Com' era, dov' era
'.

Money poured in from many countries; the greatest experts came from Rome; in nine years the Campanile was built again, modernized in structural design, 600 tons lighter, but looking almost identical. The shattered bells were recast at a foundry on the island of Santʼ Elena, and paid for by the Pope himself – that same Pius X whom we saw returning so triumphantly to Venice half a century later. The foundations were reinforced with 1,000 extra piles. The broken little loggia at the foot of the tower was put together again, piece by piece, and so were the lions and figures at the top. The angel's cracked wings were splinted. On 25 April 1912, a millennium to the day after
the foundation of the old Campanile, the new one was inaugurated. Thousands of pigeons were released to carry the news to every city in Italy: and at the celebratory banquet six of the guests wore those rescued shirts, whose ironing had been so abruptly interrupted nine years before.

For all these sad precedents, Venice is not going to collapse altogether from sheer senility. Her palaces were stoutly built in the first place, by engineers of great vision, her foundations in the mud at least have the advantage of a certain elasticity, and it is said that her sub-aqueous pilings are petrified by the saltiness of the water (the salinity of the Adriatic here is the highest in Europe). It is extraordinary how few of her antique buildings are uninhabitable, and how successfully the old place can be patched and buttressed, as a wrinkled beauty is repeatedly rejuvenated by surgery, cosmetics and the alchemy of love.

The engineers have no exact precedents to follow: in this respect, as in many others, Venice is all on her own. Her methods have always been bold and sometimes startling. As long ago as 1688 an ingenious engineer succeeded in straightening the toppling tower of the Carmini church. He did it by boring holes into the brickwork on three sides of the tower, driving wedges of wood into them, and dissolving the wood with a powerful acid. The tower settled into the cavities thus created, and the engineer is gratefully buried inside the building, underneath a seat. Even earlier, in 1445, a Bolognese named Aristotle guaranteed to straighten the tower of Santʼ Angelo by a method secret to himself (it entailed excavating ground beneath the base of the campanile). The work was elaborate, the tower was in fact straightened, but the very next day after the removal of the scaffolding the building collapsed altogether, and Aristotle fled ignominiously to Moscow, where he built part of the Kremlin. In the nineteenth century the Doge's Palace itself was restored in a brilliant engineering work, in the course of which some of the vital columns of the arcade were removed altogether and replaced with stronger pillars.

Today many a campanile is supported with hidden stanchions and
supports, and some buildings (like the former church of San Vitale) are visibly held together with strips of iron. The palaces of Venice, when they need support, are strengthened by the injection of concrete into their foundations, as a dentist squeezes a filling into a rotting but still useful tooth. The Basilica is constantly attended by its own private consultant, the resident engineer, successor to a long line of Architects to St Mark's. This learned and devoted man knows every inch of his church, and spends his life devising ways of strengthening it without spoiling its antique irregularities. He has a staff of nearly forty men working all the year round, and a mosaic workshop manned by twelve skilled craftsmen. He is always experimenting, and has in particular perfected a means of replacing broken chips of mosaic in the ceiling by cutting through the masonry above, and inserting the precious fragments from behind. No Venetian experience is more satisfying than to wander round the dark Basilica with Professor Forlati, and absorb the meticulous but daring care with which he keeps that almost mythical building from falling apart. The engineers of Venice, like most of her professional men, are impressive people: and we need not doubt that they will at least keep the city on its feet for many a long century to come.