Venice (21 page)

All these things – buildings, memories, manners – bind Venice to the East, and make the exotic seem common-place. In the 1920s there returned to Venice a grandee who had been governor of an Italian colony in East Africa. He brought with him a stalwart African servant, and dressing him flamboyantly, as his forebears had dressed their slaves, in a red turban and a green sash, taught him to drive the family motor boat. The Venetians, I am assured, scarcely looked twice at this spectacular figure, so immemorial have been their associations with the East, just as they hardly seemed to notice the
grande dame
whose handsome Indian leopard habitually occupied the front seat of her gondola.

The noises of Venice are often Oriental, too, not least the blaring radios and television sets that hurl their melodies after you down the back-streets, and the din of porters, whistles and importunate guides that greets you at the railway station. Many long years ago the city lost its silver reputation for silence. The steamboats did not entirely shatter it, for they used to ease their way down the Grand Canal with the gentle chugging, thumping and hissing that went with polished brass and oiled pistons: but once the petrol engine arrived in Venice, the peace of the city was doomed.

Today Venice is at least as noisy as any mainland city. The throbbing of engines, the blowing of horns, the thudding of steam-hammers, the shouting of irate boatmen, the girl next door laboriously practising her Chopin, the warning cries of the gondoliers, the communal singing of students, the inanities of louts, the jollities of drunks – all are hideously magnified and distorted by the surface of the water and the high walls that surround it, and reverberate around the houses as from a taut drum-skin. (It is disconcerting to hear a snatch of your own conversation, as you meander home from a midnight party, and realize in a moment of clarity how far and how loudly it carries down the canals.) I used to be woken every morning by a terrible racket of engines, klaxons and voices outside my window – as an infatuated Victorian poet put it, ‘From the calm transparent waters Float some thrilling sounds of Amphionic music'. You might have thought, from the babel of it all, that the Goths were in the lagoon at last: but in fact it was only the dustbin convoy streaming into the city, foam at the prow, helmsmen high and threatening in the stern.

There are other, more evocative noises. The streets of Venice have their own sound, the quick tap of heels upon stone flagstones. From a thousand houses comes the chirping of a myriad canaries. At the backs of trattorias skittle balls clatter against wood. The postman's call rings richly through the streets, and sometimes a bargee announces his eruption into the Grand Canal with a magnificent
bellow from the pit of his stomach. The rattle of shutters is a familiar sound, for this is a resolutely closeted city, and is always opening and closing its windows.

The boom of a ship's siren is a Venetian noise, and the trumpeting of tugs; and in the foggy winter nights, when the city is blanketed in gloom and damp, you can hear the far-away tinkling of the bell-buoys out in the lagoon, and the distant rumble of the Adriatic beyond. The great Piazza of St Mark, on a high summer day, is a rich medley of sounds: the chatter of innumerable tourists, the laughter of children, the deep bass-notes of the Basilica organ, the thin strains of the café orchestras, the clink of coffee cups, the rattling of maize in paper bags by the sellers of bird food, the shouts of newspapermen, bells, clocks, pigeons, and all the sounds of the sea that seep into the square from the quayside around the corner. It is a heady, Alexandrian mixture. Fielding's blind man said that he had always imagined the colour red as being ‘much like a sound of a trumpet': and if you want a visual equivalent for the symphony of the Piazza, think of a sheet of vermilion, shot with gold and dyed at the edges with sea-green.

Venice is no longer the supreme city of music, as she was in the eighteenth century, when four celebrated conservatoires flourished there, when her choirs and instrumentalists were unrivalled, and when the abbé Vivaldi, suddenly inspired with a melody in the middle of celebrating Mass, instantly rushed off to the Sacristy to scribble it down. Music, nevertheless, often sounds in the city. The strains of great symphonies rise, in the summer season, from breathless floodlit courtyards; twelve-tone scales and electronic cadences ring from the International Festival of Contemporary Music, which frequently brought Stravinsky himself to conduct his own works in the Fenice; the noble choir of St Mark's, once trained by Monteverdi, sings seraphically from its eyrie among the high mosaics of the Basilica. The gondoliers no longer quote Tasso to one another, or sing old Venetian love songs (most of the popular tunes nowadays are from Naples, London or New York): but sometimes an ebullient young man will open his heart and his lungs together, and float down the canal on the wings of a throaty aria.

To hear the bells of Venice it is best to come at Christmas, when the air is mist-muffled, and the noises of the city are deepened and richened, like plum-duff. A marvellous dash of bells rings in Christmas morning, noble bells and frenzied bells, spinsterish bells and pompous bells, cracked bells and genial bells and cross reproving bells. The bells of San Trovaso sound exactly like Alpine cowbells. The bells of the Carmini sing the first few notes of the Lourdes hymn. The bells of Santa Maria Zobenigo are rung ‘with such persistency', so one Victorian visitor recorded, ‘that the whole neighbourhood must be driven almost to distraction'. The bells of the Oratory of the Virgin, near San Giobbe, so annoyed the monks of the neighbouring convent that in 1515 they went out one night and razed its little campanile to the ground: they had to rebuild it at their own expense.

The great Marangona bell, rescued from the ruins of the old Campanile of St Mark, no longer sounds, but hangs there in the belfry looking frail and venerable: but the big new bell of St Mark's is alone permitted to sound at midnight, and also rings, to an erratic timetable, at odd intervals during the day. There is a little bell that strikes the hours on the north-western corner of the Basilica, beneath a small stone canopy; and this seems to act as a kind of trigger or stimulus to the two old Moors on the Clock Tower, who promptly raise their hammers for the strike. All these bells, and a hundred others, welcome Christmas with a midnight flourish, and for long echoing minutes after the hour you can hear them ringing down again, softer and softer across the lagoon, like talkative old gentlemen subsiding into sleep.

And there is one more sound that evokes the old Venice, defying the motor boats and the cacophony of radios. Sometimes, early in the morning, as you lie in bed in the half-light, you may hear the soft fastidious splash of oars outside, the swish of a light boat moving fast, the ripple of the waves against the bulwarks of the canal, and the swift breathing of the oarsman, easy and assured.

A sense of Islamic denial seems to govern the Venetian attitude to pleasure. This is no longer a city of boisterous and extrovert enjoyment, and the Venetians have long lost the harum-scarum
gaiety that characterized the place during the last decade of its decline. The modern Venetian is a deliberate kind of man, bred to scepticism. He looks an indulgence firmly in the eye, and examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider. Venice is still a fine place for dawdling or frivolity: but like the cities of the Muslim world, it is not ideal for orgies.

It is not, for example, a gourmet's city. Once upon a time the
cucina
Veneziana
was considered the finest in the world, specializing in wild boar, peacock, venison, elaborate salads and architectural pastries. Even then, though, some perfectionists thought it was spoiled by an excessive use of Oriental spices: Aretino, the poet-wastrel, used to say that the Venetians ‘did not know how to eat or drink', and another commentator reported caustically that the pride of Venetian cookery was the hard biscuit, which was particularly resistant to the nibblings of weevils (some left in Crete in 1669 were still edible in 1821). Certainly by now the victuals of Venice have lost any traces of antique glory, and generally conform tamely enough to the Italian cuisine.

There is no drink that feels organic to Venice, as beer seems to spring from the fields of Germany, and
arak
from the very sap of the Baghdad date trees. The wines of the Venetian hinterland are mostly ordinary, and limited indeed are the foreign varieties stocked by the vintners. Most Venetian restaurants merely offer you red or white (if it is one of the simpler trattorias, they call it
nero
and
bianco
.) The most famous bar of the city is excellent, but always feels contrived: Harry's Bar is Venetian-owned and Venetian-staffed, and loves to talk about its visiting celebrities – Hemingway, spectacularly slung with bandoliers and dead birds, striding in from Torcello; Orson Welles propped beside the toasted sandwiches; duchesses (with and without dukes); presidents (in and out of office); film stars (contracted, resting, or in predatory attendance at the Film Festival); a bishop or two, Truman Capote, a few Nobel prizewinners, and Winston Churchill himself, the last of the nabobs, hugging a paint-box.

Here the Italian aristocracy, heavily made up about the eyes, loves
to sit in smoky silence, looking terribly distinguished or fearfully scandalous, and here the barman will offer you a Bellini or a Tiziano, two of his cocktail specialities. At Harry's Bar the jet set assembles in summer, and Venetians speak of it with a certain pride, for since its foundation in the 1920s it has been a fairy-tale success: but it feels harshly at odds with the mouldering spirit of Venice, her lofty monuments and her reflective soul.

The pleasures of sex, of chance, of intrigue, of display – all are drawn largely in the Venetian chronicles, and reflected in the voluptuous canvases of the Venetian artists: but the pleasures of wine seldom appear, and it has been said that Carnival itself was a means of escaping into unreality without getting drunk. Everyday hospitality in Venice has always been abstemious – a glass of Marsala, a sickly nip from a ready-mixed cocktail bottle, a box of biscuits, and everyone is satisfied. If the old palaces of Venice could drink today, they would probably stick to the most expensive kind of coffee, especially imported from the western shores of Arabia, and served in chipped gold cups at the card-table.

And they would eat with lofty frugality. One restaurant in the city advertises its merits in an appealing jingle:

Not every Gent or Dame, though, will relish the meals of Venice. Even the Venetians have their doubts. I once saw a party of Venetian restaurateurs assembling at the Patriarchate for a convention: most of them looked sallow and pimply, and some seemed actually undernourished. You can eat expensively and quite well at two or three of the grander hotels, but a cruel monotony informs the menus of the
average restaurant. In the first years of this century E. V. Lucas spent a month eating in every Venetian restaurant in turn, and decided that there was only one he wanted to visit a second time. I have tried about thirty, and shall not feel intolerably misused if denied re-entry to any of them (though I shall cherish an affectionate nostalgia for the innumerable modest eating-houses which put up your dinner in a bag for you and send you steaming homewards through the streets, reeking of prawns and lasagna).

The service in Venetian restuarants is usually rough and ready, sometimes off-hand, and occasionally downright rude, and the food, after the first dozen meals, begins to acquire a soporific sameness. The meat revolves sluggishly around a gristly core of veal. The salads are unimaginative, and are redeemed chiefly, if you insist, by the liberal use of fennel. It is only when you come to the fish, the native food of the Venetians, that you may feel a spark of enthusiasm. Venetian
scampi
are magnificent. There is a dish called
mista mare
, a fried pot-pourri of sea-foods, that can be delicious, at least for the first twenty or thirty times. Various kinds of eel are splendid, and so are innumerable small shellfish and minor molluscs. If the season is right, and the restaurant not too pretentious, you may be given some delicious soft-shelled crabs, which are a great delicacy in America, but considered coarse fare in Venice.

Indeed to my mind the lower you slither in the hierarchy of the Venetian kitchen, the more you are likely to enjoy yourself, until at last, turning your back on the
crêpe suzette
of the hotels and the avaricious gentility of the big restaurants, you find yourself in some water-front trattoria eating a fine but nameless fish from the lagoon, garnished with small crabs, washed down with a flagon of rasping white wine, and fortified by a glistening slab of
polenta
, the warm maize bread of the Venetians, which, eaten in tandem with an eel, a trout or a haunch of tunny, is food fit for Doges.

To live in Venice is one of the supreme pleasures that this world can offer. But though I have often been indescribably happy there, and often dazed with admiration, and often surfeited with the interest and enchantment and variety of it all, yet I have never felt in the least Bacchanalian. The Levantine attitudes of the Venetians are
catching. More than once, watching a gay party of visitors float down the Grand Canal, singing to an accordion, exchanging holiday badinage, and toasting each other's fortunes in beakers of red wine, I have examined my reactions meticulously, and caught myself estimating how much they would get back on the bottles.

Venice is a seasonal city, dependent more than most upon weather and temperature. She lives for the summer, when her great tourist industry leaps into action, and though each year nowadays the season grows longer, and visitors pour in throughout the calendar, still on a winter day she can be a curiously simple, homely place, instinct with melancholy, her Piazza deserted, her canals choppy and dismal. The winter climate of Venice is notorious. A harsh, raw, damp miasma overcomes the city for weeks at a time, only occasionally dispersed by days of cold sunny brilliance. The rain teems down with a particular wetness, like unto like, stirring the mud in the bottom of the Grand Canal, and streaming magnificently off the marbles of the Basilica. The fog marches in frowardly from the sea, so thick that you cannot see across the Piazza, and the
vaporetto
labours towards the Rialto with an anxious look-out in the bows. Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles. Sometimes the fringe of a
bora
sweeps the water in fierce waves up the narrower canals, and throws the moored boats viciously against the quays. The nights are vaporous and tomb-like, and the days dawn monotonously grey.

So Venice sits huddled over her inadequate stoves, or hugger-mugger in her cafés. The palaces of the Grand Canal are heavily clamped and boarded, with only a handful of dim lights burning from ugly tinkling chandeliers through fusty dark brown curtains. The boatmen crouch at their tillers, shrouded in sacks and old overcoats, and sometimes clutching umbrellas. The alley-cats squat emaciated behind their grilles, and the pigeons cluster dejectedly in
sheltered crannies of the Piazza. All Venice snivels with influenza, colds in the nose and throat infections (when the Republic secretly did away with three of its political enemies in the fifteenth century, the cause of death was blandly announced as catarrh, and everyone was satisfied). Not a fiddle plays in the Piazza. Not a tout hangs around the arcades. Scarcely a tourist complains about the price of hot chocolate. It is a very private city.

Its celebrations have a club-like feeling, free of prying outsiders. A Venetian Christmas is a staunchly family festival. The trains are full of returning migrants, waiters and labourers from Paris, mothers' helps from the Home Counties, and there is a great deal of handshaking in the streets, and many a delighted reunion at the steamboat station. Suddenly everyone in Venice seems to know everyone else. An endless stream of shoppers, dressed in their elegant best, pushes so thickly through the narrow Merceria that sometimes the policemen, stationing themselves at intersections, impose a system of one-way traffic. The windows burgeon with Christmas trees. Every passing barge seems full of bottles, or parcels, or little firs from the mountains, and every child in Venice seems to trail a red balloon.

In the plushy cafés of St Mark's (Regency stripes and spindly chairs) spruce infants listen with deference to the interminable reminiscences of immaculate uncles: and in the cafés on Christmas Eve 20,000 families giggle before the television sets, drinking Cinzano and eating sticky cakes, while the favourite melody of the day is passed from shop to shop, from square to square, down one dark alley to another, like a cheerful watchword in the night. The Christmas services are warm, bright and glistening; the cribs are crude but touching; the choirs sing lustily; and Venice feels less like a grand duchess than a buxom landlady, enjoying a glass of stout when the customers have gone (except for the mysterious permutations of clergy, gold and crimson and misty with incense, that you may glimpse passing and repassing the open doors of the Basilica).

To see the Serenissima without her make-up on, try getting up at three in the morning one foggy February day, and watch the old lady reluctantly awakening. As you stand on your terrace above the canal, it is as though you are deposited plumb in the middle of an almost
disused nowhere, so deathly silent is the place, so gagged and pinioned with mist. There are sombre pools of lamplight on the shrouded Grand Canal, and the only person in sight is a solitary eccentric in a fur hat, reading the Rules and Regulations at the steamboat pontoon with a cold and unnatural intensity. And when you have plastered your sweaters on, and crept down the scrubbed echoing staircase of your palace (past the sleeping advocate on the second floor, the Slav Baronessa on the first, the one-eyed ginger torn in his niche, the mighty padlocked coal-cellar doors, the pigeon-streaked bust of an unknown hero by the entrance, the little neglected Madonna on the wood shed, the arid tangle of a lawn and the stiff squeaking iron gates) – when you are out at last, you will find the whole great city damp and padded in sleep. In London or New York the night is never absolute: in Venice, at three on a foggy winter morning, it feels as though the day will never come.

All is dank, swirling, desolate. If you stand still for a sudden moment, allowing the echo of your steps to retreat around a corner, you will hear only the sad slapping of the water on a tethered boat, the distant clanging of a fog bell, or the deep boom of a steamer at sea. Perhaps there will be, far away across the rooftops, a distant sporadic splutter of men's voices. Perhaps a pale faithful light will flicker before a tinsel
ex voto
. The white cat who lives beneath the seat of a gondola in the Rio della Toletta may spring like a demon from his lair; or there may even scurry by, wrapped in worn wool, with a scarf over her nose and mouth and a string shopping-bag in her hand, some solitary poor conscientious soul off to clean a heartless office or buy the first cabbage of the dawn. For the rest, it is wet, dismal, mist-muffled silence. Water pours miserably from an antique pump. Lamplight shines sullenly among the alleys, and sometimes picks out, with a gleam of wet masonry, half a sculptured saintly nose, the tail end of a carved peacock, a crown, a crest, or a crab in a medallion.

In winter Venice wakes up at her edges. Down beyond the empty car park life begins early. Outside the church of Santa Chiara, where a burly watchman walks heavy-shouldered up and down the quay, light shines from the hatches of a dozen barges, throwing the huge moving shadows of their engineers on the wall across the water. At
the end of the causeway the daily parade of trucks and trailers waits to be unloaded, hung about with diesel fumes. Harsh voices and the banging of crates emerge from the big warehouses by the docks, and there is a smell of eels, apples, onions and cheap tobacco. There are lights about, and policemen, a few bright steamy coffee shops, a chatter and clutter of life beside the wharves.

Slowly, hesitantly, as you range the streets, this animation of morning spreads across Venice. The fringes of the city curl, and colour, and burst into wintry flame. When you walk back across Dorsoduro, shafts of light from opening doors punctuate the fog. The myriad cafés are raising their shutters, and their bottles, coffee-machines and sugar containers stand sleepily shining in the mist. In San Polo a butcher and his assistant are laboriously heaving a carcass into their window. By the Bridge of Fists, around the corner from the Alley of Haste, a fruit-seller, yawning and grunting, climbs blearily from the hold of his barge. A boat-load of wild fishermen from the lagoon is sluicing itself in water under a bridge. Beneath the high arch of the Accademia two hulking cement barges labour up the Grand Canal, their crews shouting to one another, grand, slow and heavy in the gloom, like ancient galleys. Outside the church of San Maurizio two pale novice-nuns are scrubbing the marble steps. Inside Santa Maria Zobenigo the twisted baroque angels of the altar look down compassionately upon an early Mass (a priest, an acolyte, three nuns, and a sad-faced woman in grey). By Harry's Bar a sailor steps off the
vaporetto
carrying his rifle wrapped up in newspaper, and along the intersecting alley-ways platoons of litter-men swish their brushes energetically in the cold.

So the day comes up again, pinkish and subdued, a Turnerish, vaporous, moist, sea-birds' day. ‘Nasty morning', you say to the waiter, as you order your café breakfast: but he only shrugs his shoulders and smiles a separate, melancholy smile, as a Doge might smile at an importunate emperor, or a great sea-captain patronize a Turk.

And then one morning the spring arrives. Not any old morning, but specifically 15 May, for the Venetians believe in the infallibility of the
calendar, and regard the beginning of each season as a strictly immovable feast. Eccentric indeed is the foreigner who bathes before 1 June, when the bathing season opens, and it really does seem to be true that on 25 July each year (St James's Day) the swallows vanish from the city, and leave the field clear for the mosquitoes.

In spring the swallows are still arriving, and bring a new element of delicate frenzy to the place – ‘
There goes a swallow to Venice, the stout
seafarer! Seeing those birds fly, makes one wish for wings
.' Generally Venice is not a dancing city, like New York on a frosty morning, or London in early summer, when every man feels like Fred Astaire, and every girl like Cleopatra. Here the whistle is inclined to fade from your lips, as the pensive Venetian faces go by, or a mob of raggle-taggle tourists advances upon you with grimaces, mistaking you for the man who is going to show them round the glass factory. In spring, though, the city has it moments of brilliant exhilaration, when you can happily echo the parodist's verses:

These are the halcyon days of the Venetian year. The city is not too crowded, the sun is not too hot, the fogs have gone, there is a sense of discomforts survived and prosperity to come. The coal man knocks on your door with an eager smile, to say that he is perfectly willing to buy back your unused stocks of anthracite (at a slightly reduced price, of course). The vegetable man plucks a carnation from the vase behind him and offers it to you with a truly Neapolitan flourish. Streaks and flecks of green appear in the city at last, softening its urban stoniness. The female cats, one and all, fatten with kittens: the toms disappear into the shrubbery. As the days brighten, and the warm winds blow up from the south, the very pavements of the city seem to be cherished and revived, not to speak of its dank and frigid drawing-rooms. Spring floods into Venice like a tingling elixir or a dry Martini, or perhaps a dose of Teriaca.

Now the massive tourist machine of Venice greases its cogs and
paints its upper works for the summer. Wherever you go in the city, bits and pieces of gondolas hang fresh-painted on its walls, totems of May – shiny seats, velvet cushions, a brass sea-horse dangling from a window-knob, a black walnut panel propped against a door. The boat-yards are full of holiday craft, having the weed scraped from their bottoms. The Grand Canal, which spent the winter as a plain market highway, a bus route, a business street, now becomes the supply route of tourism, as all the curtains, paint pots, upholsteries, cutlery, bedspreads, furniture and chromium fittings of the new season flood towards St Mark's. The first cruise ship of the year anchors tantalizingly in the lagoon, bright with awnings, with a scent of the Aegean to her funnel vapours, or a thin flicker of rust from the Hudson river. The first spring tourists parade the Piazza, wearing tarbooshes, Maltese slippers, Spanish skirts or burnouses, according to their earlier itinerary. The first visiting warship moors at the Dogana, and its officers of the watch strut on deck in red sashes and swords. The first British seaman of the season retires to the municipal hospital after a jolly brawl on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Now the hotels and the
pensions
and the restaurants spring into full life again. Their brass-work is polished, their landing-stages are bright with blue and gold. If you want to book a room the receptionist no longer greets you with cheerful informality, as he did a month ago, but cocks a sophisticated seasonal eyebrow, turns a supercilious page, and informs you kindly that luckily, owing to a late cancellation from Venezuela, he
is
able to let you have one small but pleasant room, not unfortunately over the Grand Canal, but overlooking the very characteristic, if a trifle noisy, alley-way at the back – without bathroom, alas, though there is one at the end of the corridor, beyond the maids' pantry – on the sixth floor, but with lift service, of course, to the fourth – and all this, he nearly forgets to add, at a special price which, expressed in Italian lire, seems very little more than you would pay for the royal suite at the Ritz. With a distant smile he adds your name to the register: for it is spring, and the Venetian instincts are reviving.

Up and down the waterways, too, the ponderous mansions are burgeoning with flower-pots, canary-cages and varnish. There is a
stir of impending arrival among the servants of the peripatetic rich. In many a winter-shuttered apartment the maids and house-men are at work, in a cloud of dust and a flash of aprons, and not a few astute householders are packing their own bags in expectation of lucrative summer tenants. ‘On their first evening', a Venetian nobleman once told me, ‘my American tenants will find everything prepared for them, from butler to candlesticks – within an hour of their arrival they will be able to entertain a dozen guests to a succulent dinner: but if this high standard of service falls off a little during their occupancy of my apartment, well, it is a difficult world, is it not, and heavy with disillusionment?'

And sometimes, in the Venetian spring, you awake to a Canaletto day, when the whole city is alive with sparkle and sunshine, and the sky is an ineffable baby-blue. An air of flags and freedom pervades Venice on such a morning, and all feels light, spacious, carefree, crystalline, as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender.