Venice (22 page)

With a thud, a babble of voices and a crinkle of travellers' cheques, summer falls upon Venice. The pleasure factory works at full blast, and the city's ingrained sadness is swamped in an effulgence of money-making. This is not quite so unpleasant as it sounds. Venice in her hey-day has been described as ‘one vast joint-stock company for the exploitation of the east'. Today her money is in tourism. Her chief function in the world is to be a kind of residential museum, a Tintoretto holiday camp, just as Coventry makes cars and Cedar Rapids corn flakes: and though the city in summer can be hideously crowded and sweaty, and the mobs of tourists unsightly, and the Venetians disagreeably predatory, nevertheless there is a functional feeling to it all, as of an instrument accurately recording revolutions per minute, or a water-pump efficiently irrigating.

There is nothing new in this. ‘The word
Venetia
', wrote one old chronicler, ‘is interpreted by some to mean
Veni Etiam
, which is to say, “Come again and again”.' The Venetians have always exploited the holiday assets of their city. Even in the fourteenth century it was a city of hotels – the Hat, the Wild Savage, the Little Horse, the
Lobster, the Cock, the Duck, the Melon and the Queen of Hungary. (It was a city of rapacious monopolists, too – one man owned nine of these hostelries.) One inn, on the site of the modern prison, was kept by an Englishman, and was much patronized by English tourists because of its excellent stables. Another, which still exists, was temporarily closed in 1397 when its landlord was condemned for giving short measure. As early as the thirteenth century the Venetians had their Tourist Police, to inspect hotels for cleanliness and comfort, and speed the lost visitor (in any of several languages) towards the more expensive shops.

‘The piazza of St Mark's', wrote a medieval Venetian monk, with a fastidious sigh, ‘seems perpetually filled with Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea.' One hundred thousand visitors came in a good year to the great fair of the Ascension, the first international trade festival, when the Piazza was covered with a great marquee, and there were booths and stalls all down the Riva. Tourists from all over Europe flocked to see the annual ceremony in which the Doge, riding in a barge of dream-like elaboration, threw a ring into the Adriatic in token of perpetual domination. The carnivals of the eighteenth century, when the city was peopled with masked gamblers, courtesans, adventurers and wild hedonists – those delightful but decadent jamborees were purposely fostered by the State, partly to keep the powerless population happy, but partly to attract the tourists. Venice is perhaps the supreme tourist attraction of the world. She lives for flattery, and peers back at her admirers with an opal but heavy-lidded eye. When summer sets the city humming, the turnstiles creaking, the cash registers ringing, it feels only proper: the machine is back at work, the factory hooters blow, Sheffield is making knives again, a pit-wheel turns in Rhondda.

Well over a million foreigners came to Venice in a normal recent year. Confessions in most western languages are heard regularly in the Basilica. Americans are the most numerous visitors, followed by Germans, the French, Britons, Austrians, Swiss, Danes, Belgians, the Dutch, Canadians and (as one reference table discreetly puts it) Miscellanians. Ten thousand cars sometimes cross the causeway in a single summer day, and the buses are often so many that
when they have disgorged their passengers at the Piazzale Roma they retreat to the mainland again, and you may see them parked hugger-mugger in the sunshine beneath a fly-over of the great bridge, like country coaches behind the cricket pavilion. There are 170 well-known hotels and
pensions
in Venice, and at the height of a good season they are all full. I have been outside the Basilica at three o'clock on a summer morning, and found earnest tourists consulting their guide books in the moonlight. There is an attendant at one of the garages who claims that long before he can see the registration plate on the back of the car, he can tell the occupant's nationality by the look in the driver's eye.

Thus through the loose gilded mesh of the city there passes a cross-section of the world's spawn, and it is one of the pleasures of summer Venice to watch the sea-monsters streaming by. Germans appear to predominate, for they move in regiments, talk rather loud, push rather hard, and seem to have no particular faces, merging heavily into a jolly sunburnt Volkswagen mass. The Americans are either flamboyant to the point of repulsion, in crimson silk, or gently unobtrusive in drip-dry cotton: the one kind sitting studiously in a trattoria with its intelligent children and its large-scale map; the other vigorously
décolletée
, violently made up and slightly drunk, at a corner table in Harry's Bar.

The British seem to me to provide the best of the men (often distinguished, frequently spare, sometimes agreeably individualist) and the worst of the women (ill tempered, hair unwashed, clothes ill fitting, snobby or embarrassingly flirtatious). The French are nearly all delightful, whether they are scholarly elderly gentlemen with multi-volumed guide books, or students of existentialist sympathies with purple eyelids and no lipstick. The Japanese are almost obliterated by their mountainous festoons of photographic equipment. The Indians are marvellously fragile, exquisite and aloof. The Yugoslavs seem a little dazed (and are said by gondoliers to be the meanest visitors of all). The Australians are unmistakable. The Canadians are indistinguishable. The Russians no longer come. The Chinese have not arrived yet.

Confronted by these multitudes, in summer the character of
Venice abruptly coarsens. The cost of a coffee leaps, if you are anywhere near St Mark's, and is gradually reduced, in topographical gradations, as you take your custom farther from that avaricious fulcrum. The waiters of the Piazza brush up their brusquest manners, in preparation for the several hundred people each day who understandably believe that there must be some mistake in the bill. Souvenir stalls spring up like garish fungi, and the market is suddenly flooded with straw hats, gondoliers' shirts, maps printed on headscarves, lead gondolas, spurious antiques –‘
originalissimi
', as the old dealers used to say – a million water-colours and a thousand paperweights in the shape of St Mark's Campanile.

The unsuspecting visitor, stepping from the steamboat, is accosted by a pair of ferocious porters, who carry his bags the fifteen-odd feet into his hotel lobby and demand, as their compulsory payment for this service, the price of a substantial meal, with wine. The withered sacristans of the famous churches, brushing the dust from their cassocks, emerge eagerly from the shadows to drag you to the very last dismal pseudo-Titian of the vestry. Pampered young men pester you to visit their showrooms. The cry of ‘Gondola! Gondola!' follows you like an improper suggestion down the quays. There is a queue for the lift to the top of the bell-tower. Enough people peer into the horrors of the dungeons each morning to make Casanova's head reel. There is a shop near St Mark's so well adapted to every possible shift in the balance of power that the homesick tourist may buy himself the flag of Yemen, the Ukraine, Bolivia, or even the United Nations.

And chanting a sing-song melody of triumph, the guides of Venice come into their own again. ‘
Guides
', wrote Augustus Hare in the 1890s, ‘are usually ignorant, vulgar and stupid in Venice, and all but the most hopelessly imbecile visitors will find them an intolerable nuisance' (though in later editions of his book he dropped the bit about the imbeciles). Nevertheless the guides of Venice flourish, the directors of itineraries boom, and many a poor holiday-maker staggers home at the end of a day's pleasure as though she has been grinding corn on a treadmill, or attending some crucial and excruciating viva voce. There are 107 churches in Venice, and nearly every tourist feels he has seen at least 200 of them: for the guides and guide
books presuppose an unflagging whip-lash energy in their victims, an utter disregard for regular meals, and an insatiable appetite for art of all periods, standards and purposes.

One itinerary, for example, suggests that the unhappy visitor spends his first morning looking at the Basilica of St Mark (
the mosaics,
the Treasury, the horses' gallery, the museum, the eight side-chapels, the
celebrated floor, the Baptistery, the Atrium, the Nicopoeia Madonna, the
Pala d'Oro, the Rood Screen and the Sacristy
); and the Piazza outside (
the
Campanile, the Clock Tower, the Library, the Archaeological Museum, the
columns of St Mark and St Theodore, the two Piazzettas, the Correr
Museum, Florian's and
Quadri's
); and the Doge's Palace (
the exterior
arcades, the Giants' Staircase, the State Chambers,
Tintoretto's Paradise, the
Armoury, the Bridge of Sighs, the Dungeons, the
Bocche di Leone
). He should move on that afternoon to the Accademia Gallery (
all twenty
-
four rooms
); the Scuola di San Rocco (
all sixty-two
Tintorettos
); the Frari church (
the Bellini Madonna, Titian's Assumption, the tombs of Titian and
Canova, the Pesaro altar piece, the Memorials and the very fine choir stalls
); the markets (
fish and vegetables
); and the small church of San Giacomo di Rialto, which well repays the trouble of a short but attentive inspection. And he should end the day with ‘a quiet moment or two' upon the Rialto bridge, before returning to his hotel, so the book thoughtfully suggests, restfully by gondola. Haggard are the faces of tourists I have seen, desperately following such a course, and inexorable, unwavering, unrelenting are the voices of the lecturers so often to be heard, dogmatic but unscholarly, riding above the silences of San Giorgio or the Salute.

Alas, the truth is that most visitors to Venice, in any case, move among her wonders mindlessly, pumped briskly through the machine and spewed out along the causeway as soon as they are properly processed. An old-fashioned Englishman, once invited to produce a tourist slogan for a Middle Eastern country, suggested the cruel backhander ‘
Where Every Prospect Pleases
': and there are moments in the high Venetian summer when even the lily liberal, surveying the harum-scarum harlequinade of tourism that swirls around him, must stifle some such expression of intolerance. Seen against so superb a setting, art and nature exquisitely blended, Man can seem pretty vile.

But though crowds do not suit some parts of the city – the grey districts of the north-west, the quiet canals behind the Zattere, the reaches of the inner lagoon – nevertheless the great Piazza of St Mark's is at its very best on a hot day early in summer, when visitors from the four corners of the earth are inspecting its marvels, and Venice is one great itchy palm. During Ascension week, by an old and obscure tradition, images of the three Magi, preceded by an angel-herald, emerge each hour from the face of the Clock Tower and rotate in homage around the Virgin (in any other week of the year you can see them packed away, rigid and bulge-eyed, in a glass cupboard inside the tower, near the big revolving drums that carry the figures of the clock). This is the time to inspect the Piazza. As the huge cosmopolitan crowd waits around the clock for the appearance of those quaint old sages, you can capture to perfection the summer flavour of Venice.

The great square is dressed for entertaining. The two celebrated cafés, Florian's and the Quadri – one on the south side of the square, one on the north – have arranged their chairs and tables symmetrically upon the pavement, and their orchestras string away in blithe disharmony (Florian's specializes in the sicklier musical comedy melodies, now and then graced with a popular classic, but at the Quadri you sometimes hear the drummer indulging in something precariously approaching jazz). The flags of Italy and Venice fly from the three bronze flagstaffs before the Basilica – symbolic of lost Venetian dominions, Crete, Cyprus and the Morea. Down the Piazzetta there is a glimpse of sparkling water, a flicker of gondoliers' straw hats, a shifting web of moored boats: and the shadowy Merceria, with its glittering shops, falls away out of the sunshine like a corridor of treasure.

The patterned floor of the Piazza is thick with pigeons, and two or three women at little trestle stalls are invitingly rattling their packets of maize. Round and round the arcades, cool and shaded, mills a multitude of tourists, looking for lace and picture postcards, and almost every table has its holiday couple – he reading the
Daily Mail
, she writing laboriously home. A girl in a tartan cap lounges beside her ice-cream box beneath the colonnade. The professional photo
grapher in the middle of the square stands in an Edwardian attitude beside his old tripod camera (which stays in the Piazza all night, like a shrouded owl on a pedestal); and the fourteen licensed postcard hawkers wander ingratiatingly from group to group, their trays siting around their shoulders upon frayed and well-rubbed leather straps. On every step or balustrade, on the ledges around the base of the Campanile, on the supports of the two columns of the Piazzetta, around the flagstaffs, beside the little porphyry lions – wherever there is a square foot of free sitting space, hundreds of young people have settled like birds, spreading their skirts and books around them.

There are faces everywhere, faces bronzed and flushed in the cafés, faces peering back from shop windows (framed in lace napkins and Canaletto prints), faces high in the obscurity of the Campanile belfry, faces looking down from the dock Tower itself, a tide of faces, wondering, irritated, delighted, amorous, exhausted, pouring constantly from the funnel of the Merceria. And all around you before the clock stands the core of this great daily crowd, chattering and expectant, a turmoil of cottons, dark glasses, conical hats, guide books, thonged sandals; a clutch of honeymooners, a twitching of children, a clash of tongues – ‘all the languages of Christendom', as Coryat said, ‘besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Eth-nicks'; here a stiff Englishman, trying not to gape, here a jolly soul from Iowa, every ounce a tourist, from the enamelled ear-rings dangling beneath her bluish hair to the tips of her pink-varnished toe-nails. All is shifting, colourful and a little sticky, as it must have been in the hey-day of the Venetian carnival, when this city was ‘the revel of the earth, the Masque of Italy', a boast, a marvel and a show.