Venice (26 page)

No collection of sacred pictures is more overwhelming of impact than the immense series of Tintorettos in the Scuola di San Rocco – often dark, often grandiose, often incomprehensible, but culminating in the huge masterpiece of the Crucifixion, which Velazquez humbly copied, and before which, to this day, you may still see strong men moved to tears. (And around the walls of this great school are the impudent satirical carvings of Francesco Pianta, wonderfully witty and original: there is a mock miniature library all of wood, an explanatory catalogue in microscopic writing, and an enormous blaze-eyed Hercules at the end of the hall.)

Nothing is cooler, and whiter, and more austerely reverent than Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore, standing with such worldly aplomb among its peasantry of convent buildings. Somebody once defined this group of structures as ‘on the whole, a great success': and it does have a feeling of high accomplishment, as of a piece of machinery that clicks silently into its appointed grooves, or an aircraft of unimpeachable line. The proportions are perfect, the setting supreme, and from the top of the campanile you get the best view in Venice (a smooth Swiss lift will take you there, and the Benedictine monk who operates it is almost as proud of its plastic buttons as he is of his historic monastery).

No two churches are starker, pinker, loftier, nobler than the two Friars' churches of Venice – the Frari on one side of the Grand Canal, San Zanipolo on the other. The Frari is like a stooping high-browed monk, intellectual and meditative, with its two great Titians, its lovely altar-pieces by Giovanni Bellini, the Vivarinis, Basaiti, its tall
tombs of artists, rulers, statesmen, generals, its carved choir stalls and its air of imperturbable calm. San Zanipolo has more of a flourish to it, a more florid style, suave but curled: its tombs are myriad and illustrious – forty-six Doges are buried there – its roof is high-vaulted, and outside its walls stands the unrivalled equestrian statue of Colleoni, the most famous horseback figure in the world. If you stand upon the campanile of one of these churches, you can see the campanile of the other: but they carefully ignore each other, like rival dogmatists at an ecclesiastical congress.

Nothing is more stimulating, on a gleaming spring day, than the kaleidoscopic Basin of St Mark, the pool that lies directly before the Piazzetta, bounded by the incomparable curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni. It reminds me often of Hong Kong, without the junks, so incessant is its traffic and so limpid its colouring. In the day-time the basin is never calm, however still the weather, because of the constant churning of ships and propellers: but at night, if you take your boat out there through the lamplight, it is as still and dark and luscious as a great lake of plum-juice, through which your bows seep thickly, and into whose sickly viscous liquid the dim shape of the Doge's Palace seems to be slowly sinking, like a pastry pavilion.

Nothing on this earth is grander than the Grand Canal, in its great doubling sweep through the city, jostling with boats, lined by the high old palaces that form its guard of honour: secretive buildings like the Granary of the Republic, and dazzling ones like the Ca' d'Oro, and pompous piles like the Prefecture, and enchanting unconventional structures like the little Palazzo Dario, loaded with marble and inset with verd-antique. They look almost stagy, like the Victorian sham-façades of one-horse Western towns, but they are rich with the realities of history. There is a church with a green dome at the station end of the canal, and Desdemona's villa at the other, and there are Byzantine arches, and Gothic windows, and Renaissance flowerings, and the whole is plastered with a thick increment of romance and literature. As your boat churns its way towards the lagoon, all these improbable palaces fall away from your prow like so many fantasies, as though they had been erected for some forgotten
exhibition, the Crystal Palace or the Brussels World Fair, and had been left to rot away in splendour until the next display.

And so at last we come, like an army of pilgrims before us, into the central complex of St Mark's, which many a proud Venetian, dead and living, has fondly regarded as the heart of the world. We are among the prodigies. We take a cup of coffee in the music-laden, pigeon-busy Piazza, beside the bronze flag-poles and the great kindly Campanile, where the sun is brighter than anywhere else on earth, the light clearer, the crowds more animated, and where more people congregate on a Sunday morning in July than in all the other piazzas of the world put together. We labour through the gigantic halls of the Doge's Palace, beneath the battles, the fleshy nymphs and the panoramic parables – Venice Triumphant, Venice Holding A Sceptre, Venice Conferring Honours, Venice Accepting Neptune's Trident, Venice Breaking her Chains, Venice Receiving Gifts from Juno, Venice Ruling the World, The Conquered Cities Offering Gifts to Venice, Venice Receiving the Crown in Token of her Power, The Apotheosis of Venice, The Victories of Venice over Franks, and Greeks, and Sicilians, and Turks, and Albanians, and Genoese, and Paduans – and on to the Bridge of Sighs, Titian's bewitching St Christopher, the gleaming armoury, the dreadful dungeons – a swollen, beringed, nightmare palace, pink outside, ominous within.

We watch the Moors of the Clock Tower clanging their big bell; we inspect the two squat little lions near the tomb of Manin; and thus we pass into the old cavern of the Basilica, golden with mosaics, its pavement heaving in elaborate patterns, its dim-lit spaces pierced with figures, gleaming with treasure, dusty and drab and opaque with centuries of incense, cluttered with chapels and galleries and unsuspected altars, with the legendary Pala d'Oro a golden sheet of jewels behind the high altar, and the great organ reverberating above us, mingled with the thumping of the café drums outside, and an endless movement of priests, sight-seers, vergers, groups of country folk, children, nuns, and a haze of dust sliding across the open doors, and a solitary proud pigeon strutting angrily away across the crooked floor towards the sunshine of the Piazza.

‘We are not' (swore d'Annunzio) ‘and will not be a museum, a hostelry … a sky painted Prussian blue for honeymoon couples.' You may conclude, as you wander intoxicated among these spectacles, that Venice has happily found her modern
métier
as the greatest of all museums; but you may sometimes have the feeling, as I do, that this is in some sense a prostitution of a great city, a degradation, a shame. Venice has always been an exhibitionist, and has always welcomed her lucrative sight-seers, but she was built for trade, power, and empire. She is still the seat of a prefecture, the capital of a province, the headquarters of many business enterprises: but it is a far cry, all the same, from a Quarter and A Half-Quarter of the Roman Empire.

Nobody will deny that tourism is part of the Venetian mystique. The Piazza is better, livelier, lovelier for its garish summer crowds. Venice handles her visitors, if not exactly kindly, or even delicately, at least efficiently: her methods have been tried and tested over many generations. Her output of pleasure-per-customer-per-month is high, and I think it probable that all in all you can have a better holiday in Venice than anywhere else on earth – especially if you hire yourself a boat, and see the place in its prime and original perspective. Venice devotes herself diligently and understandably to a very profitable monopoly: Venice.

Nor is she as fossilized as her detractors claim, and as a certain kind of devotee, often foreign and elderly, would like her to be. She has probably changed less in the last three centuries than any other city in Europe, even resisting the triumphant town-planners of the Napoleonic age: but she has changed more than you might suppose. Several new artificial islands have radically altered her outline – in the area of Sant' Elena, at the western end of Giudecca, around the docks – and more are constantly being prepared (the mud-banks are staked, reinforced with concrete, and stacked with rubbish). Within living memory whole new housing areas have arisen at Sant' Elena, on Giudecca, and north of the Ghetto. The vast new railway station has
been completed since the Second World War. There is a big new hotel near the station, and a plain but desperately exclusive one on Giudecca, and a large ugly extension has been built to the Danieli on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Quaysides have been repeatedly widened, as you can confirm by examining the structure of the Riva, upon which little plaques record its limits before it was widened in 1780. Since the eighteenth century scores of canals and ponds have been filled in to make streets: every Rio Terra, every Piscina is such a place, and very pleasant they are to walk in, with space to swing your shopping bag about, or play with your balloon. Two big new streets have been cut through the buildings, one leading to the station, one on the edge of he Public Gardens. Above all, the building of the motor causeway has brought a bridgehead of the machine age to the fringe of Venice, and has made the region of the Piazzale Roma a raucous portent of the future: for shattering is the transition that separates the ineffable small squares of Dorsoduro from the diesel fumes, blinding lights, myriad cars and petrol pumps of the Piazzale, one of the nastiest places I know.

If you want to consider the modern purposes of Venice, have a Cinzano at a café by the car park, and do your meditating there.

‘Venice has to fight', says a handbook published by the Tourist Department, ‘against the pressing threat of the rhythm of modern life'; and this gnomic statement, if scarcely disinterested, puts the Venetian problem in a nutshell. Venice poses an insoluable dilemma. If they compromise with modernity, fill in her canals and take cars to the Piazza, then they wreck her absolutely. If they leave her alone, she potters down the years as a honeymoon city, part art gallery, part burlesque, her mighty monuments mere spectacles, her wide suzerainties reduced for ever to the cheap banalities of the guides.

Two schools of thought grapple with this conundrum. (I do not count the rigid advocates of the
status quo
.) One believes that Venice proper should be regarded purely as a lovely backwater, preserved in artistic inutility, while commerce and industry should be confined to the mainland suburb of Mestre, technically part of the Municipality.
The other school wishes Venice herself, her city and her lagoon, to be given new meaning by an infusion of modern activities. Fierce newspaper controversies rage around these opposing conceptions; personal enmities are cherished; plan is pitted against plan, statistic against statistic; and Venice herself stands waiting, half-stultified, half-modernized, part a relic, part a revival.

The first school does not object to tourism, so long as the city is not further vulgarized, but its proponents cherish their Venice chiefly as a centre of art and scholarship. They enthusiastically support the Biennale, the International Music Festival, the Film Festival, the great periodical exhibitions of Venetian art. They think the future of the Serenissima is well represented by Peggy Guggenheim's collection of modern paintings in the Palazzo Venier, which is gauntly but spectacularly contemporary, and softened only by the youthful indiscretions of masters who adopted the principles of the Dada Movement or the Suprematists relatively late in their careers. They send visitors helter-skelter to the Fondazione Cini which has recently been established on San Giorgio, and which is partly a sea school, partly a technical college, but chiefly a magnificently equipped centre of scholarship, ablaze with purpose and idealism. They are earnest, devoted, anxious people: and as they shake their heads over the rhythm of modern life, and analyse the threats to their beloved Venice, it sometimes feels as though they are dissecting, with infinite care and the latest possible instruments of surgery, an absolutely rock-bottom dead cadaver.

The other school points out impatiently that the population of the city proper, tourists or no tourists, Klees or no Klees, has long been declining. Many Venetians have moved to Mestre altogether and work in its shipyards and factories. Many more (including several gondoliers) live on the mainland, where houses are more plentiful and conditions less cramping, and commute to Venice each day down the causeway. Others again have moved to villas and apartments on the Lido, and pour off the steamers each morning at St Mark's precisely as the Guildford stockbrokers flood into Waterloo. This trend (say the advocates of city development) will continue, unless Venice is herself modernized. Business houses will move to
the mainland, leaving the social life of the city stagnant and its palaces neglected. Venice will become ever more artificial, ever more degraded, until the tourists themselves, sensing the shamness of her heart, will take their holiday allowances elsewhere. Such men want to revive the industries of the lagoon – lace, glass, shipbuilding, mosaics. They want to establish new industrial communities on the bigger islands, with underground roads to the mainland. They want to extend the Piazzale Roma complex further into the city, filling in canals for motor traffic, and taking cars directly to the quays of the Zattere. They would like to build a metro. They once proposed a world fair in Venice to celebrate the arrival of the twenty-first century. They talk of Venice in tones of bouncing angry gusto, as you might discuss converting some dreamy country house into flats (paying proper attention, of course, to its undoubted architectural merits).

Do we not know them well, whenever we live, the aesthetic conservers on the one hand, the men of change on the other? Which of their two philosophies is the more romantic, I have never been able to decide.

The prime advantages of Venice lie, as both sides agree, in her position upon the frontiers of east and west. This is handy for tourists, stimulating to art and scholarship, and good for business. In particular, it sustains the importance of Venice (and her subsidiary, Mestre) as a world port. If you are attacked by pangs of distaste in Venice, look along the side canals, and you can nearly always see a ship.

Venice is still the third largest port in Italy. Crippled by Vasco da Gama's discoveries, she revived a little when de Lesseps cut the Suez Canal – a project she had herself vainly proposed to the Sultan of Egypt several centuries before. Since then the port has been, with fluctuations, steadily expanding. Today big ships are always on the move in Venice, and at the quays of Giudecca there are usually vessels tied up for painting and repairs, their power cables wound casually round the antique Jerusalem buttresses that support the waterside structures. There are active repair yards behind the
Arsenal, and even within the ramparts of that old fortress you sometimes see the glare of welding upon a tanker's hull. (The envious Trevisans used to call the Arsenal a ‘gondola factory': the Venetians retorted that whatever its functions, it was big enough to contain the whole of Treviso within its walls.)

Most ships sail clean through the city down the broad dredged canal to Mestre and the oil terminals of Porto Marghera and Sant' Ilario. Still, many do use the docks of Venice proper, either to discharge passengers, or to unload cargoes that will later be taken by train or truck to the awkwardly limited hinterland served by the port – not too far to the west, because of Genoa, not too far to the south, because of a vigorously expanding Rimini, not too far to the east, because of poor old Trieste. The big docks at the western edge of the city, whose derricks welcome you grimly as you drive along the causeway, are entirely modern. Their great grain elevator has become, from any mainland viewpoint, the principal landmark of the city, and the freighters of the world have painted their names and slogans upon their quaysides.

More spectacularly noticeable, though, are the cruise ships which day after day sweep with such beautiful panache into the city, sometimes to tie up at the Zattere, where the old transatlantic liners used to embark their passengers, sometimes to lie beside the Riva degli Schiavoni. They fly many flags – Greek, Russian, Turkish, British – and after a couple of days in port, having unleashed their passengers upon the tourist sights, they steal away again like fugitives on the tide, often before the city is awake: away through the sea-gates to Istanbul, or the Black Sea, or Egypt, or to slip from island to island, from temple to temple, from lecture to lecture of the blue Aegean.

The Venetians have also built themselves an international airport, administered by the port authorities, on the northern shore of the lagoon. They used to rely upon a small and inconvenient field on the Lido, and on the airport at Treviso, an hour away by bus, and unsuitable for big jets. The present airfield can handle the very biggest. Its runways lie parallel with the lagoon, rather as those at Nice run beside the Mediterranean, and it is linked with Venice by a
deep-water canal, and a road connecting it with the causeway. Its runways are almost as long as the city of Venice itself, and it is called (for it cost several million pounds) the Aeroporto Marco Polo.

Do not suppose, then, that the mummy has twitched its last. Argue they may about the purposes of Venice, the dangers that threaten her, the opportunities that are hers: but there are many Venetians who see her future clear, and who, looking well ahead into the twenty-first century, envisage her as the south-eastern gateway of united Europe.

For myself, I think she deserves even more. I admire the rampaging go-getters of Venice, and I sympathize with the gentle conservatives: but I believe the true purpose of Venice lies somewhere between, or perhaps beyond, their two extremes. For if you shut your eyes very hard, and forget the price of coffee, you may see a vision of another Venice. She became great as a market city, poised between East and West, between Crusader and Saracen, between white and brown: and if you try very hard, allowing a glimmer of gold from the Basilica to seep beneath your eyelids, and a fragrance of cream to enter your nostrils, and the distant melody of a café pianist to orchestrate your thoughts – if you really try, you can imagine her a noble market-place again. In these incomparable palaces, East and West might meet once more, to fuse their philosophies at last, and settle their squalid bickerings. In these mighty halls the senate of the world might deliberate, and in the cavernous recesses of the Basilica, glimmering and aromatic, all the divinities might sit in reconciliation. Venice is made for greatness, a God-built city, and her obvious destiny is mediation. She only awaits a summons.

But if you are not the visionary kind – well, pay the man, don't argue, take a gondola into the lagoon and watch her magical silhouette sink into the sunset: still, after a thousand years, one of the supreme sights of civilization.