Venice (20 page)

Modern Venetians, conditioned by this grisly heritage, often have a taste for the macabre. They like it to be authentic, though, and have little time for idle superstitions, however gruesome. It is true that Alfred de Musset, when he paid a catastrophic visit to Venice with George Sand, who promptly ran off with a handsome young doctor – it is quite true that de Musset occupied Room 13 at the Hotel Danieli (‘Alfred was a sad flirt', said Swinburne, ‘and George was no gentleman'): but in Venice nobody much cares about spilling salt or walking under ladders – which indeed, propped across the narrow alley-ways of the place, often give you no choice. There are few Venetian ghost stories. The Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, near Byron's palace on the Grand Canal, is said to be haunted. In the fifteenth century it belonged to an irrepressible squanderer, who married a beautiful heiress and successively gambled away first her lands, then her palace, and finally the heiress herself: today, so it is said, it is plagued by queer knockings and opening of doors, as of phantom brokers' men. Another story is attached to the church of San Marcuola, whose vicar, having foolishly announced from the pulpit his utter disbelief in ghosts, was promptly taken in hand by the corpses of his own churchyard, who dragged him from his bed and soundly beat him.

The most famous such tale used to concern a house known as the Casino degli Spiriti, which stands beside a rectangular inlet of water in the northern part of the city, and was until recently a lonely and desolate place. This house has had a chequered past. It was once owned, so they say, by a
bon viveur
of intellectual tastes, who made it
a centre of artistic and literary society, and gave gay parties in its gardens: but it stands on the route of the funeral processions to San Michele, and is said to have been used also as a theatre for autopsies – corpses lay the night there before passing to their graves in the morning. Other rumours say that it was once a mart for contraband, and that the smugglers deliberately surrounded it with ominous legends, to keep the curious away. Whatever the truth of its history, it has a creepy reputation, and its ghost story, a long and rather tedious one, concerns a love-triangle, a dead coquette and a possessive phantom.

Even today, though no longer isolated, the Casino degli Spiriti can still feel spooky. Some people claim to hear disconcerting echoes there. Others say the very look of it, alone on its promontory, slightly curdles the blood. The legend of the ghosts has faded, and only the name survives: but a few years ago two evil gondoliers, perhaps still languishing in prison, robbed a woman of her money, murdered her, dismembered her body, bundled it into a sack, and dropped it into the water only a few yards from the terrace of this weird and ill-omened house.

Venice scarcely needs fables to strengthen her strain of the ghastly. There is macabre enough for most tastes in the pictures and sculptures of the city – the vivid torture-scenes of its holy paintings, the corpses, severed ligaments, shrivelled limbs and metallic death-masks of its countless relics, the lolling head of Goliath in the church of San Rocco, the writhing ghosts of Tintoretto's
Last Judgement
in Madonna dell' Orto (‘rattling and adhering', as Ruskin saw it with relish, ‘into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds'). There is the Palazzo Erizzo, near the Maddalena church, which was decorated by a conscientious member of the Erizzo family with pictures showing one of his illustrious ancestors being sawn in half, while still alive, by the Turks. There is the stark and curdling figure of the Crucifixion that suddenly confronts you in a little glass cabinet, if you climb the winding staircase inside the church of the Gesuiti. There are the blackened, mutilated statues that stand in the burnt chapel of the Rosary, in San Zanipolo.

The streets of Venice, too, are alive with ancient horrors. In the streets around San Zaccaria three Doges have been, at one time or another, assassinated – Pietro Tradonico in 864, Vitale Michiele I in 1102, Vitale Michiele II in 1172. In the Campo San Polo Lorenzino de' Medici, himself a practised murderer, was fallen upon by two hired ruffians as he came out of the church: they cut his head in half with one sword-blow. Near the church of Santa Fosca, Paolo Sarpi was stabbed by hired assassins of the Pope (one of whom is said to have been a Scot). He was left for dead with a dagger embedded in his cheek-bone, but recovered miraculously and hung the dagger as an
ex voto
in his monastery church, after his doctors had tried it on a dog and a chicken, to make sure it was not poisoned. There was once a murder in the Palazzo Vendramin, the Municipal Casino. During the Revolution of 1848 a mob chased an Austrian naval officer up and up the spiral staircase of one of the Arsenal towers, driving him ever higher until, trapped at the top, he was killed with an iron bar and allowed to tumble bloodily down the stone steps again. In the church of the Misericordia a seventeenth-century Venetian author was murdered by a priest who poisoned the Host. The innumerable wayside shrines of the city, usually in obscure street corners, were originally set up at places notoriously haunted by footpads – partly because their candles would illuminate the place at night, partly as a call to the criminal conscience. In the twelfth century false beards were prohibited in Venice, because so many assassins wore them in disguise. There is even a Calle degli Assassini, near Santo Stefano – a church which was consecrated on six separate occasions, because of repeated bloodshed within its walls.

There are many Venetian burial-places of morbid and sinister import. Resting on iron brackets in the Frari, high on a wall beside the right transept, you will see a wooden coffin of the crudest kind. This was intended, so it is said, for the unfortunate
condottiere
Carmag-nola, who led a Venetian army to defeat in 1431, was enticed back to Venice, accused of treason, tortured and beheaded: but his body now lies in Milan, and this grim box, so high among the dust and shadows, contains, as a mordant but still inadequate substitute, the
ashes of a murdered Venetian nobleman. Somewhere in Santo Stefano is buried another enemy of Venice, Novello Carrara of Padua, who was captured in battle in 1406 and secretly murdered with his two sons in the Doge's Palace: he was buried in the church with hypocritical pomp, the very day after his strangulation, but nobody now knows the position of his grave – though for centuries people thought that the initials carved on the tomb of a harmless merchant called Paolo Nicolò Tinti really stood for
Pro Norma
Tyrannorum
, and showed where the old grandee lay.

On San Michele is buried the French painter Léopold Robert, who killed himself in 1835, ten years to the day after his brother had done the same thing: his epitaph was written by Lamartine, and observes loftlily, describing the suicide as ‘
un accès de défaillance
', that ‘whereas Michelangelo would have vanquished it, Léopold Robert succumbed'. In the church of San Francesco della Vigna there is a tomb of the Barbaro family, surmounted by the ancestral device of a red circle on a field argent: this emblem was granted to the Barbaros in gratitude to Admiral Marco Barbaro, who cut off the hand of a Moor during a twelfth-century battle, whipped the turban from the poor infidel's head, traced a triumphant red circle upon it with the bleeding stump of his arm, and flew it from his mast-head as an ensign of triumph.

Among a series of sarcophagi on the portico of the Museum of Natural History, in the Fondaco dei Turchi, there is one without decoration or inscription. This once belonged to the Faliero family, one of the greatest Venetian houses. In 1355 Marin Faliero, then the Doge of Venice, was convicted of treason and decapitated on the steps of his palace (‘You are condemned', so the court messenger brusquely informed him, ‘to have your head cut off within the hour'). His body, with its head between its feet, was displayed to the public for twenty-four hours, and then taken quietly by boat to San Zanipolo, where the Faliero sarcophagus then lay. The centuries passed, and in 1812 the vault was opened, disclosing the body of the disgraced Doge, with its skull still between its leg-bones. The sarcophagus was emptied, removed from the church, and used for years as a reservoir by the apothecary of the civic hospital, around the
corner. Then it was taken into the country and used as a cattle trough. Now it stands, vast and brooding, all disregarded beside the water-steps of the museum,
sans
skulls,
sans
crest,
sans
inscription, but instinct with sad memory: and what has happened to the poor Doge's skeleton, nobody seems to know.

Most horrific of all in its associations is the memorial to the Venetian admiral Marcantonio Bragadino that stands in the right-hand aisle of San Zanipolo. Bragadino was a distinguished Venetian commander who defended Famagusta during the sixteenth-century wars against the Turks. His resistance was brave and competent, but after many months of siege he was forced to surrender. The Turkish commander offered him honourable terms, and Bragadino left the fortress to sign the surrender, dressed in the purple robes of his office, attended by the officers of his staff, and shaded from the sun by a red ceremonial umbrella. The Pasha at first received him courteously: but suddenly, in the course of the ceremony, the Turk sprang from his seat, accused Bragadino of atrocities against his prisoners, and ordered the officers of the Venetian staff to be instantly hacked into pieces.

Bragadino's fate was worse. Three times he was just about to be beheaded when, as a refinement of suspense, the executioner was told to stop. His nose and ears were cut off, his body was mutilated, and every morning for ten days he was loaded with baskets of earth and driven to the Turkish fortifications, pausing before the Pasha's pavilion to kiss the ground before it. He was hoisted to the yardarm of a ship and left for hours to dangle there. He was subjected to all kinds of degrading and sadistic mockery. Finally he was taken to the main square of the city, stripped, chained to a stake, and slowly skinned alive in the presence of the Pasha. His skin was stuffed with straw and paraded through the streets on a cow, its red umbrella held above it in irony: and when at last the Pasha sailed home in triumph to the Golden Horn, this grim trophy swayed from the bowsprit of his flagship.

The skin was placed, a memento of victory, in the Turkish arsenal at Constantinople: but years later the Venetians acquired it, some say by purchase, some by theft. It was, so we are told, still as soft as silk,
and it was cleaned, blessed, and placed inside an urn. Today a bust of Bragadino (after whom a
vaporetto
is named, if nothing else) gazes serenely from his great monument in San Zanipolo. Above him is a detailed fresco of his flaying, mercifully obscured by age and shadow. Beside him two lions stare numbly into the nave. And directly above his head, if you look closely, you will see the small stone urn in which his yellowing scarred skin lies peacefully folded, like a pocket handkerchief in a linen drawer.

In the Strada Nuova, on the way to the station, there stands a small outdoor market in which I sometimes like to pause, and close my eyes, and lean against a pillar. There is a sweet market smell there, tinged with fish, pepper and a suggestion of cloves; there is a clatter of wooden-soled shoes and a hubbub of high-pitched voices; there is a swish of dresses, a clashing of pans, a clamour of pedlars and stallholders, a creaking of old wood, a flapping of canvas awnings; and sometimes a dog barks, and sometimes a harridan screams. As I lean bemused against my pillar in this place, and let my mind wander, I find that Venice fades around me, west turns to east, Christian to Muslim, Italian to Arabic, and I am back in some dust-ridden, fly-blown, golden market of the Middle East, the tumbledown
suk
at Amman, or the bazaars beside the Great Mosque of the Ummayads, in the distant sunshine of Damascus. I can all but hear the soft suck of a hubble-bubble in the café next door, and if I half-open my eyes and look at the tower of the Apostoli, along the street, I swear I can see the muezzin up there in the belfry, taking a deep dogmatic breath before summoning us to prayer.

In Venice, as any gilded cockatrice will tell you, the East begins. When Marco Polo returned with his father and uncle from his travels, so we are told, he went straight to his house near the Rialto and knocked upon the door. Nobody recognized him (he had been away for nearly twenty years, and had grown a bushy beard) and nobody believed the wild tales he told of Chinese splendour – tales so
interspersed with superlatives and rodomontades that they nicknamed him
Il Milione
. He soon convinced them, though, by a sudden display of fabulous wealth, sacks of rubies, emeralds and carbuncles, velvet cloaks and damask robes such as no man in Europe had seen before: and from that day to this the Venetians have been hopelessly enthralled by the spell of the East. They love to think of their city as a bridge between Occident and Orient, and periodically have noble dreams of mediation between the colours and religions and aspirations of East and West.

Colour, intrigue, formality, pageantry, ritual – all these eastern enthusiasms have long been reflected in the daily life of Venice, just as her buildings are cluttered with Oriental treasures, and her legends reek of frankincense. Her history has been inextricably interwoven with the East, since the first Venetians entered into an ambivalent communion with the Byzantine emperors. The wealth and strength of Venice was built upon the eastern trade, and she obtained a monopoly of commerce with the legendary lands that lay beyond the Levant. Booty of diverse kinds poured into Venice from the Orient, to be piled in shining heaps upon the Riva, and sometimes these stolen valuables suffered curious sea changes – pagan basilisk into Venetian lion, or wicked emperor into Doge. The Pala d'Oro in the Basilica, which epitomizes the riches brought to Venice from Constantinople, contained (until its partial despoliation under Napoleon) 1,300 large pearls, 400 garnets, 90 amethysts, 300 sapphires, 300 emeralds, 15 rubies, 75 balas rubies, 4 topazes, 2 cameos, and unmeasured glitters of gold, silver, gilt and precious enamel. The jewels were polished but only cut
en cabochon
, and the screen was divided into 86 layers and sections, all equally astonishing.

Many Oriental ideas, too, have helped Venice, from geographical theories to the system of ventilation which cools some of her hotels, and is directly related to the wind-towers of the Persian Gulf. Even the Oriental peoples themselves were familiar to the city. In 1402 an embassy arrived in Venice from Prester John, the legendary Emperor of Ethiopia, whose robes were woven by salamanders and laundered only in fire, who was attended by 7 kings, 60 dukes, 360
viscounts, 30 archbishops and 20 bishops, who was descended from Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar, and around whose hospitable table 30,000 guests could eat at a sitting. Few visitors have been more honoured than the Japanese Christian envoys who arrived in 1585, and were fêted gorgeously as possible allies against the pretensions of the Papacy. One of the most popular figures of eighteenth-century Venice was a dear old Moorish eccentric who used to wander the streets in turban and sandals, ringing a big bell and calling upon everybody to be happy; and as late as the 1820s the Piazza was full of Arabs, Turks, Greeks and Armenians, drinking sherbet, nibbling ices, or plunged in opium dreams.

All this you will still feel in Venice, for there is a mandarin quality to the city's spirit. The wooden Accademia bridge, for example, curves gracefully across the Grand Canal in a distinct willow-pattern, and sometimes a column of bobbing umbrellas trails across it in the rain, precisely as in a Hokusai print. The boatmen of the lagoon, standing in the poops of their dragonfly craft, often seem to be rowing across a sea of rice-paper: and when, one magic spring morning, you see the distant white line of the Alps from the Fondamenta Nuove, you almost expect to find Fujiyama itself reflected among its pine-trees in the water. Real Japanese fishing-boats sometimes arrive in Venice, from their grounds in the Atlantic, and their small black-eyed sailors, in well-worn blue denims, fit easily enough into the texture of the city. I sometimes encounter a Chinese man-servant in the lanes behind San Stae: I have never discovered where he works, but he always seems to be carrying a dish with a white coverlet, deliciously steaming – Peking Duck, no doubt, or roast pheasant with chestnuts.

More often, though, the allusions of Venice are arabesque, for once they had discovered China, the Venetians dealt chiefly with the peoples of the Middle East. The great trade routes which kept the Serenissima rich and powerful converged, out of Turkestan and Persia, Afghanistan and Arabia, upon the seaports of the Levant, where the Venetians maintained their own great
khans
and warehouses (you can still see one of the most important, among the bazaars of Aleppo); and the wars in which she was almost incessantly
engaged took her fighting men repeatedly to Muslim seas and shores, whether they were cynically supporting a Crusade, defending Europe single-handed against the Turks, or suppressing, in the last Republican exploit of all, the eighteenth-century Barbary pirates of North Africa – those pestilent Moors who took their ships as far as the Bristol Channel, and whose reputation was so black among the English that even poor Welshmen were called Morris after them.

Arab ways and thoughts strongly influenced the Venetians. The great Bishop's throne in San Pietro di Castello, traditionally used by St Peter at Antioch, has a quotation from the Koran carved upon it, and you can see Arabic letters, if you look very hard, on a column on the façade of the Basilica itself. A few Venetian dialect words have Arabic derivations, and some Arabic words have come through the Venetian entrepôt to us:
dar es
sinaa
(house of art) =
arzena
=
arsenale
= arsenal:
sikka
(a die) =
zecca
(a mint) =
zecchino
(a coin) = sequin. The Venetians learnt much from the Arabs in the art of navigation, and their architects shared with the great Islamic builders a common heritage of Byzantium, so that St Mark's and the Dome of the Rock are, if not precisely brothers, at least distant cousins, estranged by circumstance.

For all these affinities, when the Venetians spoke of pagans they usually meant Muslims: and most strange foreigners were characterized as Moors, dark, heathen, muscular people, to be exploited as slaves or victimized as villains. Nobody knows the identity of the four little porphyry knights who stand, affectionately embracing each other, outside the main entrance to the Doge's Palace: but Venetian popular legend long ago determined them to represent a band of despicable Moors caught trying to ransack the Treasury of St Mark's. Four enchantingly enigmatical figures in a
campo
near Madonna dell' Orto have been known as Moors for so long that the square itself is named for them (though the one on the corner with the iron nose is Signor Antonio Rioba, once a sinister, later a comical figure, and it used to be a great joke to direct ignorant errand boys with messages to that gentleman).

Two marvellous Moors, twenty feet high and glistening with sweat, support the monument of the Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the
Frari, their white eyes bulging and their backs bent double with toil. Two others strike the hours, with surprising delicacy, on the top of the clock-tower in the Piazza: it is true they once inadvertently hit a workman, precipitating him into the square and breaking his neck, but after all their centuries of hammering they have made only a modest indentation in the surface of the bell. The quaintest of sculptured Moors, twisted and one-legged, urges a reluctant camel on the wall of the Palazzo Mastelli. It used to be the custom, if a small child was destined to be a gondolier, for his godfather to screw into his ear an amethyst carved in the shape of a Moor's head, and to this day half the grander front doors of Venice seem to have thick-lipped Negroes as door-knobs. The classic Venetian souvenir, in the heyday of the Grand Tour, was one of those little black wooden pages, sashed and turbaned, which you sometimes see beside the doors of the more self-conscious English antique shops, like Indians outside American tobacconists: these were reminders of the days when the Venetians had live black slaves at their disposal, only replacing them with wooden substitutes when the slave-traffic petered out.

The Venetians always seem a little offended at Shakespeare's conception of Othello, and like to suggest that it was all a misunderstanding, and that the prince was not a Moor at all, but a Venetian gentleman named Moro who originated from the Morea – and whose effigy still stands, they add, in shining and very Christian armour, on the corner of his palace in the Campo dei Carmini. But despite a few imperial prejudices, there is no colour bar among the Venetians. The Turks, when they were allowed to establish their national warehouse on the Grand Canal (the Fondaco dei Turchi), were so severely circumscribed that no woman or child was allowed to enter the building at all: but even in the fifteenth century a youth of noblest birth was thrown into the
Pozzi
for a year for violating the honour of a black slave-girl.

Many and delectable are the suggestions of Islam in Venice – though sometimes, to be sure, they are older than Islam itself, and came direct from old Constantinople in the days before the Arab armies had burst out of their deserts. There are the old iron window-
grilles and the cool shaded courtyards of the city; and the Arab schooners you sometimes see, slim and romantic, in the boat-yards of Giudecca; the cobblers, their spectacles on the tips of their noses, and the brawny bare-armed coppersmiths among their lions and sea-horses; the dark little workroom near San Polo where the girls sit cross-legged darning eiderdowns; the small sockets in the walls of houses that act as refrigerated larders; the Bedouin-like mats, all gay stripes, that hang in the windows of the poorer drapers; the little tenement houses of Giudecca, like seaside cottages in Beirut, and the big modern blocks of Sant' Elena that might be in Heliopolis; the fountains and sudden gardens of the place, like ravishing glimpses of Syria; the images of camels, turbaned merchants, forgotten eastern emperors, that stand sentinel in many a disregarded courtyard; the nasal murmured songs of the girls, such as sometimes emerge from behind the black veils of Arab women; the ladies who peer, like wives in purdah, from the closed windows of lofty palaces; the languid sense of
dolce far niente
that pervades the Venetian summer; the carved studded doors of Venice, and the coffee-trays that stand upon its official tables, and the jasmine-scented evenings of Giudecca, and the burnous-like cloaks of the policemen. The white fringes of the gondola covers are like camel-trappings, and the star-speckled blue of the Clock Tower is like a tomb at Karnak, and the great Basilica itself, which Mark Twain saw as a ‘vast warty bug taking a meditative walk', strikes most people as an eastern treasure-house, a Saracen war-tent or a tasselled Shah's pavilion.

In Venice you can enjoy the pleasures of the Orient without suffering its torments. Flies are few, mosquitoes are decreasing, beggars are unpersistent, water is wholesome, nationalism is restrained, nobody is going to knife you, or talk about Zionism, or blame you for Kashmir, or make you drink brick tea and eat sheep's eyes. But in Venice, as in the Arab countries, you have the comforting feeling that if you let things drift, and treat life undemandingly, your objectives will eventually be achieved. Do not be alarmed, if you lose sight of your friend on a disappearing steamboat: hang about the Piazza for a while, and she will turn up, miraculously, without surprise or reproach. Do not be despondent if the hull of your boat is
splintered by a passing barge: it may look irreparable, but somehow or other, if you do not make a fuss, the boatyard will be able to mend it, and the money will arrive unexpectedly from New York, and you will find the craft more elegant and seaworthy than ever.

Nothing is more reminiscent of the Middle East than one of the gondoliers' quarrels that have given so much picturesque pleasure to visitors down the centuries. They start in some niggling disagreement about a mooring or a rope, and they proceed in a series of abrupt crescendoes and deflations, as the protagonists flex their muscles. Sometimes, when their rancour has flared to one of its successive apexes, one gondolier suddenly walks off into the Piazza, turning his back on the whole affair, as if he is suddenly wearied of it all; but after a few moments of utter silence, such as precedes a thunderstorm or a caterwaul, he swivels violently around again and advances upon his rival with a fresh torrent of abuse. The quarrel thus proceeds sporadically, in fits and starts, gradually increasing in warmth and invective, getting louder and shriller and more sustained and more ferocious, the eyes flashing, the voices trembling, the feet stamping, until at last the ultimate exchange seems upon us, the flow of insult is almost uninterrupted, the outbreak of actual physical assault seems inescapable – and suddenly all evaporates, the gondoliers are inexplicably reconciled, the expectant crowd laughingly disperses, and the disagreement trails away in a murmur of mingled self-justification and understanding. I have seen the same process a hundred times in the streets of Egypt, when one man has often been on the very point of cutting his opponent's throat, and then lost interest.