Venice (27 page)

Sometimes in a brutal winter night you may hear the distant roar of the Adriatic, pounding against the foreshore: and as you huddle beneath your bedclothes it may strike you suddenly how lonely a city Venice remains, how isolated among her waters, how forbiddingly surrounded by mud-banks, shallows and unfrequented reedy places. She is no longer a true island, and the comfortable mainland is only a couple of miles from your back door: but she still stands alone among the seaweed, as she did when the first Byzantine envoys wondered at her gimcrack settlements, fourteen centuries ago. Time and again in Venice you will glance along some narrow slatternly canal, down a canyon of cramped houses, or through the pillars of a grey arcade, and see before you beneath a bridge a tossing green square of open water: it is the lagoon, which stands at the end of every Venetian thoroughfare like a slab of queer wet countryside.

Several sheltered spaces of water, part sea, part lake, part estuary, line the north-western shores of the Adriatic: in one Aquileia was built, in another Ravenna, in a third Comacchio, in a fourth Venice herself. They were known to the ancients as the Seven Seas, and they were created in the first place by the slow action of rivers. Into this cranny of the Mediterranean flows the River Po, most generous of rivers, which rises on the borders of France, marches across the breadth of Italy, and enters the sea in a web of rivulets and marshes. Other famous streams tumble down from the Alpine escarpment, losing pace and fury as they come, until at last they sprawl sluggishly towards the sea in wide stone beds: the Brenta, which rolls elegantly through Padua out of the Tyrol; the Piave, which rises on the borders of Austria, and meanders down through Cadore and the delectable Belluno country; the Sile, which is the river of Treviso; the Adige, which is the river of Verona; the Ticino, the Oglio, the Adda, the Mincio, the Livenza, the Isonzo and the Tagliamento. This congregation of waters, sliding towards the sea, has made the coastline a series of estuaries, interlinked or overlapping: and three rivers in particular, the Piave, the Brenta and the Sile, created the Venetian
lagoon. If you look very hard to the north, to the high Alpine valleys in the far distance, lost among the ridges and snow peaks, then you will be looking towards the ultimate origins of Venice.

When a river pours out of a mountain, or crosses its own alluvial plain, it brings with it an unseen cargo of rubble: sand, mud, silt, stones and all the miscellaneous bric-à-brac of nature, from broken tree-trunks to the infinitesimal shells of water-creatures. If the geological conditions are right, when its water eventually meets the seas, some of this material, buffeted between fresh water flowing one way and salt water pushing the other, gives up the struggle and settles on the bottom, forming a bar. The river forces its way past these exhausted sediments, the sea swirls around them, more silt is added to them, and presently they become islands of the estuary, such as litter the delta of the Nile, and lie sun-baked and turtle-haunted around that other Venice, the southernmost village of the Mississippi.

Such barriers were erected, aeons ago, by the Brenta, the Piave and the Sile, when they met the currents of the Adriatic (which, as it happens, sweep in a circular motion around this northern gulf). They were long lonely strips of sand and gravel, which presently sprouted grass, sea-anemones and pine trees, and became proper islands. Behind them, over the centuries, a great pond settled, chequered with currents and counter-currents, a mixture of salt and fresh, an equilibrium of floods: and among the water other islands appeared, either high ground that had not been swamped, or accumulations of silt. This damp expanse, speckled with islets, clogged with mud-banks and half-drowned fields, protected from the sea by its narrow strands – this place of beautiful desolation is the Venetian lagoon. It is thirty-five miles long and never more than seven miles wide, and it covers an area, so the most confident experts decree, of 210 square miles. It is roughly crescent-shaped, and forms the rounded north-western corner of the Adriatic, where Italy swings eastward towards Trieste and Croatia. Its peers among the Seven Seas have long since lost their eminence – the lagoon of Ravenna silted up, the lagoon of Aquileia forgotten: but the lagoon of Venice grows livelier every year.

Very early in their history, soon after they had settled on their islands and established their infant State, the Venetians began to improve upon their bleak environment. It was a precarious refuge for them. The sea was always threatening to break in, especially when they had weakened the barrier islands by chopping down the pine forests. The silt was always threatening to clog the entire lagoon, turning it into a vulnerable stretch of land. The Venetians therefore buttressed their mud-banks, first with palisades of wood and rubble, later with tremendous stone walls: and more fundamentally, they deliberately altered the geography of the lagoon. Until historical times seven openings between the bars – now called
lidi
– connected it with the open sea, allowing the river water to leave, and the Adriatic tides to ebb and flow inside. The Venetians eliminated some of these gaps, leaving only three entrances or
porti
through which the various waters could leave or enter. This strengthened the line of the
lidi
, deepened the remaining breaches, and increased the scouring force of the tide.

They also, in a series of tremendous engineering works, diverted the Brenta, the Sile, the Piave and the most northerly stream of the Po, driving them through canals outside the confines of the lagoon, and allowing only a trickle of the Brenta to continue its normal flow. The lagoon became predominantly salt water, greatly reducing (so the contemporary savants thought) the ever-present menace of malaria. The entry of silt with the rivers was virtually stopped: and this was opportune, for already half the lagoon townships were congealed in mud, and some had been entirely obliterated.

Thus the lagoon is partly an artificial phenomenon; but although it often looks colourless and monotonous, a doleful mud-infested mere, it is rich in all kinds of marine life. Its infusions of salt and fresh water breed organisms luxuriantly, so that the bottoms of boats are quickly fouled with tiny weeds and limpets, and the underneaths of palaces sprout water-foliage. The lagoon is also remarkable for its biological variety. Each
porto
governs its own small junction of rivulets, with its own watershed: and wherever the tides meet, flowing through their respective entrances, there is a recognizable bump in the floor of the lagoon, dividing it into three distinct regions.

It is also split into two parts, traditionally called the Dead and the Live Lagoon, by the limit of the tides. In all these separate sections the fauna and flora vary, making this a kind of Kew Gardens among waters; it used to be said that even the colour of the currents varied, ranging from yellow in the north by way of azure, red and green to purple in the extreme south.

In the seaward part, where the tides run powerfully and the water is almost entirely salt, all the sea-things live and flourish, the mud-banks are bare and glutinous and the channels rich in Adriatic fish. Farther from the sea, or tucked away from its flow, other organisms thrive: beings of the marshes, sea-lavenders, grasses and tamarisks, swamp-creatures in semi-stagnant pools, duck and other birds of the reeds. There are innumerable oysters in these waters, and crustaceans of many and obscure varieties, from the sea-locust to the thumb-nail shrimp; and sometimes a poor flying-fish, leaping in exaltation across the surf, enters the lagoon in error and is trapped, like a spent sunbeam, in some muddy recess among the fens.

A special race of men, too, has been evolved to live in this place: descended partly from the pre-Venetian fishing communities, and partly from Venetians who lingered in the wastes when the centre of national momentum had moved to the Rialto. They are the fittest who have survived, for this has often been a sick lagoon, plagued with malaria, thick and unwholesome vapours, periodically swept by epidemics of cholera and eastern disease, like the rest of the fauna, the people vary greatly from part to part, according to their way of life, their past, their degree of sophistication, their parochial environment. Inshore they are marsh-people, who tend salt-pans, fish among grasses, and do some peripheral agriculture. Farther out they can still be farmers or horticulturists, if they live in the right kind of island; but they are more likely to be salt-water fishermen, either taking their big boats to sea, or hunting crabs, molluscs and sardines among the mud-banks of the outer lagoon.

Their dialect varies, from island to island. Their manners instantly reflect their background, harsh or gentle. They even look different, the men of Burano (for instance) tousled and knobbly, the men of Chioggia traditionally Giorgionesque. The lagoon islands were much
more independent in the days before steam and motors, with their own thriving local governments, their own proud piazzas, their own marble columns and lions of St Mark: and each retains some of its old pride still, and is distinctly annoyed if you confuse it with any neighbouring islet. ‘Burano!' the man from Murano will exclaim. ‘It's an island of savages!' – but only two miles of shallow water separates the one from the other.

The lagoon is never complacent. Not only do the tides scour it twice a day, the ships navigate it, the winds sweep it coldly and the speed-boats of the Venetian playboys scud across its surface in clouds of showy spray: it also needs incessant engineering, to keep its bulwarks from collapsing or its channels silting up. The Magistracy of the Waters is never idle in the lagoon. Its surveyors, engineers and watermen are always on the watch, perennially patching sea-walls and replacing palisades. Its dredgers clank the months away in the big shipping channels, looming through the morning mist like aged and arthritic elephants. The survival of Venice depends upon two contradictory precautions, forming themselves an allegory of the lagoon: one keeps the sea out; the other, the land. If the barrier of the outer islands were broken, Venice would be drowned. If the lagoon were silted up, her canals would be dammed with mud and ooze, her port would die, her drains would fester and stink from Trieste to Turin (it is no accident that the romantic fatalists, foreseeing a variety of dramatic ends for the Serenissima, have never had the heart to suggest this one).

So when you hear that beating of the surf, whipped up by the edges of a
bora
, go to sleep again by all means, but remember that Venice still lives like a diver in his suit, dependent upon the man with the pump above, and pressed all about, from goggles to lead-weighted boots, by the jealous swirl of the waters.

The Venetians first filtered into the lagoon because it offered an obvious place of refuge, safe from landlubber barbarians and
demoralizing heresies. They fortified it from the start, building tall watch-towers, throwing defensive chains across its waterways, erecting high protective walls along its quays. As early as the sixth century the people of Padua were complaining that the Venetians had militarized the mouth of the Brenta, to prevent alien shipping entering the lagoon. Nine centuries later the traveller Pero Tafur vividly described the war-readiness of the Venetian Navy. As soon as the alarm sounded, he records, the first warship emerged from the gate of the Arsenal, under tow: and from a succession of windows its supplies were handed out – cordage from one window, food from another, small arms from a third, mortars from a fourth, oars from a fifth – until at the end of the canal the crew leapt on board, and the galley sailed away, fully armed and ready for action, into the Canale San Marco. For many centuries the lagoon served the Venetians admirably in the office of a moat, and it stands there still, in the nuclear age, as a wide watery redoubt, studded with antique forts and gun-sites.

No enemy has ever succeeded in taking Venice by storm. The first assault upon it was made by Pepin, son of Charlemagne, in 809; and the legend of his rebuff symbolizes the Venetians' canny sense of self-defence. When they first came into this waste, established their tribunes in its various islands, and painfully coalesced into a single State, their original capital was the now-vanished island of Malamocco, half a mile off the reef. They were afraid of enemies from the mainland, not from the Adriatic, and so set up their Government as deep in the sea as possible. Pepin, though, in pursuance of his father's imperial ambitions, determined to humble the Venetians, and attacked the settlements from the seaward side. His forces seized the southern villages one by one, and finally stood before Malamocco itself. The Government then abandoned its exposed headquarters, and withdrew across the mud-flats, through intricate shallow channels that only the Venetians understood, to a group of islands in the very centre of the lagoon, called Rivo Alto – Rialto.

Pepin seized Malamocco triumphantly, and prepared to cross the lagoon in pursuit. Only one old woman, so the story goes, had stayed behind in Malamocco, determined to do or die, and this patriotic crone was summoned to the royal presence. ‘Which is the way to
Rivo Alto?' demanded Pepin, and the old lady knew her moment had come. Quavering was her finger as she pointed across the treacherous flats, where the tide swirled deceitfully, and the mud oozed, and the seaweed swayed in turbulence. Tremulous was her voice as she answered the prince. ‘
Sempre diritto!
' she said: and Pepin's fleet, instantly running aground, was ambushed by the Venetians and utterly humiliated.

The next major enemies to enter the lagoon were the Genoese, the prime rivals of Venetian supremacy throughout the fourteenth century: but they too were kept at arm's length by its muddy presence. At the most threatening moment of their protracted campaigns against the Venetians, in 1379, they captured Chioggia, the southern key to Venice, and settled down to starve the Serenissima. Their warships burnt a Venetian galley within sight of the city, watched by hundreds of awestruck citizens, and some of their raiders may even have crossed the reef and entered the lagoon proper. The Venetians were hard-pressed. Half their fleet, under the dashing Carlo Zeno, was away in distant waters. The other half was demoralized by past setbacks, and its commander, Vettor Pisani, was actually released from prison to assume his duties. Cannon were mounted in the belfry of St Mark's Campanile, just in case, and the Doge himself volunteered to go into action, a desperate step indeed.

Pisani thus sailed out to battle with a scratch fleet of warships, a ramshackle army, most of the male population of Venice in patriotic tumult between decks, and this hell-for-leather potentate beside him on the poop. Yet in a few weeks he had so exploited the tactical advantages of the lagoon that the Genoese were placed critically on the defensive. They dared not station their ships outside the
lidi
, to face the buffeting of the winter sea and the possible return of Zeno, so they withdrew inside the Porto di Chioggia, the southernmost entrance to the lagoon: and there Pisani, swiftly deploying his vessels, promptly bottled them up. He closed the main Porto di Lido, to the north, with an iron chain, guarded by fortress guns. He closed the Porto di Malamocco, the central gate, by sinking two old ships, filled with stone. Four more blockships closed the entrance to
Chioggia itself, and two others blocked the main channel from the town towards Venice. A wall was built across the mud-flats at the approaches to the city, in case these successive obstacles were overcome, and for miles around every signpost and marker stake was removed, making the entire lagoon a slimy trap for alien navigators.

Thus the Genoese were caught. Venetian troops were landed near Chioggia, and the Genoese tried helplessly to get out to sea, even cutting a channel through the sand-bank that separated their ships from the Adriatic: but it was hopeless. Their supply routes were cut, and they were presently reduced, so their chroniclers say, to eating ‘rats, mice and other unclean things'. They were doomed already when, in a day famous in Venetian history, the topmasts of Zeno's hurrying squadrons appeared over the horizon, and the victory was clinched. As a last straw for the poor Genoese, a campanile in Chioggia, hit by a stray shell when all was almost over, collapsed in a heap of rubble and killed their commander, Pietro Doria.

No other battles have been fought within the lagoon. Four hostile forces have, at one time or another, penetrated to the city of Venice, but they have never had to force their way across these waters. The first was a vagabond pirate commando, scum from Dalmatia, who decided one day in the tenth century to raid Venice at a moment when a mass wedding was to take place in the church of San Pietro di Castello. They sidled into the city at night, pounced upon the ceremony, kidnapped the brides with their handsome dowries, ran to their ships (‘their accursed barks', the poet Rogers called them), and sailed exultantly away. The infuriated Venetians, led by the men of the Cabinet Makers' Guild, followed in furious chase: and presently skilfully using their knowledge of the lagoon, close-hauled and black with anger, they overtook the pirates, killed them every one, returned with the fainting brides to Venice, married them hastily and lived happily ever after.

It was eight centuries before the next enemy set foot in Venice, and by that time simpler citizens believed their lagoon to be divinely impregnable, so securely had it protected their city through all the switchbacks of Italian history. The mainland of the Veneto had long been a cockpit of European rivalries, and in 1796 Napoleon entered it
with his heady slogans, his battle-stained infantry, and his volunteer legion of Italian liberals (some of whom, so Trevelyan tells us, had re-entered their native country by sliding down the Alpine slopes on their stomachs, their horses glissading behind them). Venice carefully looked the other way – by then she was the weakest State in Europe, besotted with hedonism. Even when it became clear that Napoleon was not going to spare her, and that war was inevitable, the emergency orders given by the Republic to her Proveditor General merely enjoined him to ‘maintain intact the tranquillity of the State, and give ease and happiness to its subjects'. One hundred and thirty six casinos still flourished in the city. Five thousand families, we are told, received company every evening. The Venetians were no longer men of war: when the last Doge heard the news of his election, in 1789, he burst into tears and fainted.

This enervated and gangrenous organism Bonaparte had already promised to the Austrians, under the secret agreement of Leoben: and presently he picked his quarrel with the Serenissima. One day in April 1797 a French frigate,
Libérateur d'Italie
, sailed through the Porto di Lido without permission, an appalling affront to Venetian privilege. Such a thing had not happened for five centuries. The fort of Sant' Andrea opened fire, the ship was boarded and looted, the French commander was killed. This was Napoleon's
casus belli
. He refused to treat with the Venetian envoys sent to plead for peace, and blamed the Republic for a massacre of French troops that had occurred in Verona. The Venetians were, he said, ‘dripping with French blood'. ‘I have 80,000 men and twenty gunboats …
io sarò un
Attila per lo Stato Veneto
.'

On 1 May 1797 he declared war. The Venetians were too disorganized, too frightened, too leaderless, too riddled with doubts, too far gone to offer any resistance: and two weeks later forty of their own boats conveyed 3,231 French soldiers from the mainland to the Piazza of St Mark – ‘lean forms', as a French historian has described them, ‘shaped for vigorous action, grimy with powder, their hats decked only with the cockade', ‘
J'ai occupé ce matin
,' the French general reported prosaically to Napoleon, ‘
la ville de Venise, avec la 5e
demi-brigade de bataille, et les ties et forts adjacents
.' He was the first
commander ever to report the capture of Venice, and as he sealed this matter-of-fact dispatch he ended an epoch.

The Austrians were the next to take Venice. In the vagaries of their relationship with France, they had first been given the city, then lost it after Austerlitz, then regained it after Waterloo: until in 1848 the Venetians themselves, rising under Daniele Manin, expelled them and restored the Republic. This time the citizens, hardened by ignominy and suffering, defended their lagoon with tenacity against imperial blockade. They garrisoned its innumerable forts, breached its newly-completed railway bridge, and even made some successful sorties on the mainland. The Austrians invested the city fiercely. They floated explosives over Venice on balloons, like the balloon-bombs flown over California by the Japanese; and when these operations proved a laughable fiasco, they dismounted their field-guns, to give them more elevation, and shelled the city heavily. Everything west of the Piazza was within their range.

Battered, starving, short of ammunition, ravaged by cholera, without allies, Venice resisted longer than any of the other rebellious Italian cities, but in August 1849 Manin surrendered. The Austrians entered the lagoon without fighting. Their commander, that indomitable old autocrat Marshal Radetzky, whose last illegitimate child was born in his eighty-first year, rode up the Grand Canal in triumphant panoply: but not a soul was there to greet him, scarcely a maidservant peered from the windows of the palaces, and when he reached the Piazza he found it empty but for his own soldiers. Only one obsequious priest, so we are told, ran from the atrium of the Basilica and, throwing himself before the conqueror, fervently kissed his hand.

The last invading force to enter Venice was British. In 1945, when the world war was clearly ending and the German armies were retreating through Italy in a demoralized rout, the partisans of Venice seized the city from the last of the Germans, gave them a safe conduct to the mainland, shot a few of their own particular enemies, and awaited the arrival of the Allies, then storming across the Po. Two New Zealand tanks were the first to arrive: they raced each other down the causeway neck and neck, and one New Zealander reported
that as his vehicles clattered pell-mell over a fly-over near Mestre, he looked down and saw the Germans racing helter-skelter in the opposite direction underneath.

The New Zealanders had specific orders from their commander, General Freyberg, to capture the Danieli Hotel – he had stayed there before the war, and wanted to reserve it as a New Zealand officers' club, even sending a special reconnaissance party to undertake the mission. They were received enthusiastically by the Venetians, and presently the British infantry arrived too, every boat in the place was requisitioned, the Danieli, the Excelsior, the Luna were turned into officers' clubs, and so many soldiers' canteens were established that you can still see the blue and yellow NAAFI signs mouldering upon Venetian walls among the other graffiti of history. Three days later the armistice was signed, and the war in Italy was over.

Thus the city has been spared the worst of war, and there have never been bazookas in the Piazza, or tommy-gun bursts across the Grand Canal. No bomb has ever fallen upon the Basilica of St Mark. In none of the several assaults was much damage done to Venice. In the 1848 revolution, though several thousand Austrian shells fell in the city, it is said that only one house was completely destroyed. In the First World War, when Venice was an active military base, she was repeatedly bombed – the bronze horses were removed for safety, the Basilica was heavily reinforced with bags full of seaweed, and night watchmen shouted throughout the night: ‘
Pace in aeria!
' – ‘All quiet in the sky!' In several churches you may see unexploded missiles hung as
ex votos
upon the walls: but among all the treasures of the city, only the roof of the Scalzi church, near the station, was destroyed. In the Second World War Mestre was heavily bombed, but Venice never. The tower of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli was struck by a stray shell during the German withdrawal, and the Tiepolo frescoes in the Palazzo Labia were damaged when a German ammunition ship blew up in the harbour: but apart from broken windows, nothing was destroyed. Venice was, I am told, the very first city on both the German and the Allied lists of places that must not be harmed. Not everybody has welcomed this immunity. In 1914, when a bomb almost hit the Basilica, the crazy Futurist Marinetti,
who wanted to pull down all the Italian masterpieces and begin again, flew over the city in an aeroplane dropping leaflets. ‘Italians, awake!' they said. ‘The enemy is attempting to destroy the monuments which it is our own patriotic privilege to demolish!'

The lagoon has saved Venice. She has stood aside from the main currents of war, and has fought her battles, like England, chiefly in distant places. She stands upon no vital cross-roads, controls no crucial bridge, overlooks no strategic position, commands no damaging field of fire. You could, if you happened to be another Napoleon, take the whole of Italy without much feeling the exclusion of Venice: and the innumerable wars of the Italian mainland, though they have often involved Venetian troops, have always passed the city by. Even the ferocious Turks, whose armies were so near in 1471 that the fires of their carnage could be seen from the top of St Mark's Campanile – even those implacable hordes never entered the lagoon. No city on earth is easier to spot from the air, framed by her silver waters, and no city has fewer cellars to use as air-raid shelters: yet almost the only civilian casualties of the two world wars were the 200 citizens who walked into canals in the black-out and were drowned. In the official histories of the Italian campaigns of the Second World War, Venice is scarcely mentioned as a military objective: and one British regimental diary, recording the hard slog up the peninsula, observed in reviewing the battles to come that all ranks were ‘eager to get to grips with Jerry again, and looking forward, too, to some sightseeing in Venice'. In war as in peace, Venice stands alone, subject to none of the usual rules and conventions: like the fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby.