Venice (28 page)

But though nobody much cares nowadays, the lagoon is still a formidable military barrier. Napoleon himself apparently thought that if the Venetians decided to defend it, he would need as many men to beat them as he had at Austerlitz in the greatest battle of his career; but the Austrians were perhaps the last to survey it with a serious strategic eye. It was the main base for their imperial fleet,
which was largely Italian-manned, and partly built in the old Arsenal of Venice. They made the lagoon a mesh-work of strong-points – in 1848 there were sixty forts (though visiting British officers were, as usual, not greatly impressed by their design). In the First World War it was a naval base, an armoury, and the launching site for d'Annunzio's dashing air raids against the Austrians. In the second it was a refuge for many a hunted partisan and prisoner-of-war, lurking in remote and vaporous fastnesses where the Germans never penetrated: and many Venetians hid there too, escaping conscription into Nazi labour forces. The German Army made a short last stand, until blasted out by the guns of the New Zealand armour, on the north-eastern edge of the lagoon, and they used barges to withdraw some of their troops along its water-ways. Before the rot set in they had prepared a defence system along the line of the Adige river, from Chioggia in the east to Lake Garda in the west: and some strategists believe that this line, embedded at its left flank in the impassable mud-flats of the lagoon, might have been the toughest of all the successive barriers that delayed the Allied advance through Italy.

The warlike propensities of the Venetian lagoon are still inescapable. If you come by train, almost the first thing you see is the big mainland fort of Marghera, a star-shaped earthwork outside Mestre, now covered in a stubble of grass and weed, like a downland barrow. Half-way up the causeway there stands the exposed gun platform beside the railway which was, for a few perilous weeks, the outermost Venetian stronghold in the 1848 revolution; and near by is the odd little island called San Secondo, shaped like a Pacific atoll, which is now a municipal stores depot, but was once an important fort and magazine. To the south of the causeway, near the docks, you may see the minute Isola Tresse: this is crowned by a concrete bunker, and on its wall there still stands a black swastika – painted, whether in irony or ignorance, the wrong way round.

All about the city there stand such relics of a military past – shuttered little islands and abandoned barracks, fine old forts and aircraft hangars. The distant Sant' Angelo della Polvere – St Angelo of the Gunpowder – looks like a fairy island, crowned with towers, but turns out to be, when you approach it in disillusionment, only an old
powder factory, clamped and padlocked. San Lazzaretto, on the other side of the city, was once the quarantine station of Venice, then a military detention depot. In the seventeenth century, when Venice was threatened by Spanish ambitions, a division of Dutch soldiers, hired direct from Holland and brought to the lagoon in Dutch ships, was quartered on this island: they got so bored that they mutinied, and to this day the sentries still pace the grim square ramparts of its barracks with an air of unutterable ennui, waiting for an enemy that has never in all the 1,500 years of Venetian history chosen to come this way.

From the windows of San Giacomo in Palude – St James in the Marshes – to the north of Venice, cheerful soldiers in their shirtsleeves, doing the washing-up, still grin at you as your boat chugs by, and a notice sternly forbids your presence within fifty yards of this vital outpost. Half a mile away, on the islet of Madonna del Monte, stands a huge derelict ammunition building, littered with rubble but still bound about with iron cables, to keep it standing in case of an explosion: it is a sun-soaked but eerie place –I once found six dead lizards lying side by side on a stone there, with a swarm of locusts performing their obsequies round about, and in the winter the dried pods of its little trees jingle metallically in the wind like the medals of long-dead corporals. Another barred and abandoned powder-island is Santo Spirito, away beyond Giudecca. From here Pisani's engineers built their protective wall to the
lidi
, but it later became a famous monastery, with pictures by Titian and Palma Vecchio, and a church by Sansovino. The church was despoiled when its monastic order was suppressed, in 1656, but as they were at that moment building the great new church of the Salute, the pictures were opportunely taken there, and they hang still in the Sacristy.

Out beside the great sea-gates, you may see the Adriatic defences of the lagoon. At the southern
porto
there stands behind high grass banks, still flying its flag, the fortress of La Lupa – the She-Wolf – medieval in masonry, eighteenth century in embellishment: and near by a little stony settlement by the water, now inhabited by a few fisher-families, is the remains of the powerful Fort Caromani, itself named for a much older strong-hold still, Ca' Romani – the House of
the Romans. Two big octagonal fortresses, rising sheer from the water, guard the central
porto
of Malamocco. They are overgrown and deserted nowadays, and look rather like the stilt-forts that the British built in 1940 to protect their sea-approaches; but not long ago a passing fisherman, observing me raise my camera towards these dilapidated defences, told me gently but firmly that photography of military works was, as I surely ought to know, strictly forbidden.

At the northern end of the lagoon, near Punta Sabbione, there stands Fort Treporti, a comical towering construction, all knobs and tessellation, that looks like a chess-board castle. Not far away is the old seaplane base of Vignole, now a helicopter station, and the Italian Air Force still occupies the rambling slipways, hangars and repair shops of the amphibians, haunted by D'Annunzio's flamboyant shade. If you are ever silly enough to charter an aeroplane at the Lido airfield, you will learn (during your long and fruitless hours of waiting) how often the airspace of the lagoon is monopolized by military manoeuvres. And four-square before the Porto di Lido, the principal gateway of the lagoon, glowers the magnificent castle of Sant' Andrea, on the islet of Certosa; from its mighty ramparts they used to stretch the iron chain that blocked the channel to enemy ships, and it still stands there undefeated, the senior sentinel of Venice.

So the old lagoon still bristles. Its forts may be, as those visiting officers reported, ‘not up to British standards'; its great navies have vanished; its guns are mostly spiked; its prickles are blunted; the jets that whistle overhead have come here in the twinkling of an eye from airfields on the Lombardy flat-lands. But sometimes, as your boat potters down the Canale San Marco, you may hear an ear-splitting roar behind your stern; and suddenly there will spring from the walls of the Arsenal a lean grey torpedo-boat, with a noble plume of spray streaming from her stern, and a shattering bellow of diesels; and she will disappear thrillingly towards the open sea, the rumble of her engines echoing among the old towers and ramparts of the place, the fishing boats bobbing and rolling in her wash.

The lagoon is a trap for enemies, a work-ground and thoroughfare for friends. The Venetians first appeared in history when Narses the Eunuch, satrap of the Byzantine Emperors, asked them with flattery and circumspection to transport his troops across its wastes; and they began their satisfactory career as middle-men by carrying cargoes across it from Aquileia to Ravenna. Its presence gave the Venetians the best natural port in Italy, spacious and sheltered. Its tides kept them healthy, its fish fed them. Its nearer waters have always served them as a pleasure-park – ‘we will go', wrote the deposed Doge Foscari to a friend, after his removal from office,' – we will go and amuse ourselves in a boat, rowing to the monasteries'.

It has always been, though, an atrocious place to navigate. Its tides are fierce, its storms blow up suddenly and dangerously, and most of it is treacherously shallow. Sometimes the
bora
sweeps devastatingly across its mud-banks – in 1613 it blew down two of the bronze flagpoles in the Piazza. (Two of the
valli
– vales, or reaches – into which the fishermen have divided their lagoon are called the Small Vale of Above the Wind and the Small Vale of Below the Wind.) The lagoon is full of secret currents, shoals, clinging water-weeds. Over most of its expanse, if you lie in the bows of your boat in the sunshine, with a hamper beside you and an arm around your waist, you can see the slithery foliage of its bottom scudding obliquely beneath your keel: until, rashly taking a short cut, you find yourselves soggily aground, your propeller churning the mud around you and your idylls indefinitely postponed.

The lagoon can be an uncommonly lonely place. Its water, as the Venetians would say, is very wet. Its mud is horribly sticky. On many evenings, even in summer, a chill unfriendly wind blows up, making the water grey and choppy, and the horizons infinitely distant. Often, as you push your crippled boat laboriously across the flats, the mud gurgling around your legs, there is nothing to be seen but a solitary silent islet, a far-away rickety shack, or the long dim line of the mainland. It is no use shouting. There are monasteries and forts
in this wide lagoon, fishing villages and shooting lodges, fleets of boats and companies of stalwart fishing people; but the empty spaces are so wide, the high arch of the sky is so deadening, the wind is so gusty, the tide so swift, that nowhere on earth could feel much lonelier, when you are stuck in the ooze of the Venetian lagoon.

The Venetians have always been terrified of going aground. Storms, demons, pirates, monsters – all figure in the folklore of Venetian seamanship: but low water more dreadfully than any of them. The St Christophers of Venice, as often as not, are depicted conveying the infant Christ across the shallow hazards of the lagoon, and many a sacred legend secretes a mud-bank among its pieties – even the ship carrying the body of St Mark, hastening home from Alexandria, went ashore in the middle of the Mediterranean, and had to be miraculously refloated. ‘I should not see the sandy hourglass run', says Salarino to Antonio in the very first dialogue of
The
Merchant of Venice
, ‘But I should think of shallows and of flats, And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand.'

Very early in their history, urged by these apprehensions, the Venetians surveyed and charted their lagoon, marking its safe passages with wooden poles. Today its entire expanse is crisscrossed with these
bricole
, a multititude of stakes driven into the mud, from Chioggia in the south to the marshy morasses of the extreme north. Some are elaborately prepared, with tripod piles and lamps; at night the channels around the big mud-flat in the Basin of St Mark are brilliantly illuminated with orange lamps, like the perimeters of a fairground. Other channels demand more of your waterman's instincts, for they rely upon a few sporadic and sometimes rickety poles, offering no very clear indication which side you are supposed to pass, and often confused by bits of tree and bramble which fishermen have stuck in the mud to mark their fish-traps or demarcate some private shoal.

If you keep very close to the
bricole
, you are usually safe: but not always, for sometimes their positioning is disconcertingly precise, and if you are a few inches on the wrong side – splosh, there you are again, up to your knees in mud, and pushing from the stern. There are said to be 20,000
bricole
in the Venetian lagoon. Some are
precariously rotting, and look as though generations of water-rats have nibbled their woodwork. One or two have little shrines upon them, dear to the artists and poets of the nineteenth century (‘
Around
her shrine no earthly blossoms blow, No footsteps fret the pathway to and
fro
'). Many are used by lovers, anglers and bathing boys as mooring piles for their boats: and one of the most curious sights of the lagoon is offered by those gondoliers who, to while away a blazing holiday, run their gondolas upon a convenient mud-bank and take their families paddling, leaving their queer-prowed craft gasping and stranded upon the mud, fenced by the gaunt stockade of the
bricole
.

Like the canals of the city, the navigational channels of the lagoon are mostly based upon natural runnels and rivulets, sometimes dredged and deepened. There are entrance channels through each of the three surviving
porti
. There are transverse channels along the outer edge of the lagoon, close to the inside shore of the
lidi
. There are innumerable channels meandering through the shallows to the inner recesses of the lagoon, sometimes unmarked and known only to local fishermen, sometimes haphazardly signposted with old poles. Some such water-ways link Venice with the canals and rivers that lead into the Lombardy plain: you can sail directly from the lagoon to Treviso, to Padua, to Mantua and Cremona, and even up the Po and its affluents to Turin. Some are the delivery routes of the city, linking the Rialto markets with the vegetable gardens and orchards of the lagoon: at the turn of the century, when there were still civic levies on vegetable produce, floating customs houses commanded each approach to Venice, and armed excise-men patrolled the mud-banks at night. The greatest channel of all ushers the big ships through the Porto di Lido and, striding in majesty past St Mark's, runs away bathetically as the Canale Ex-Vittorio Emmanuele III to the workaday quays of Mestre.

These channels have played their immemorial parts in Venetian history. The broad Canale Orfano, which you will see to your right as your ferry-boat approaches the Lido, owes its name – the Orphan Canal – to its sanguinary past. In the first days of Venetian settlement, when the various lagoon colonies were still fighting each other, two factions squabbled so violently that the Canale Orfano ran
‘red with blood' (and according to some chroniclers, this particular dispute was the origin of the Nicolotti-Castellani feud). Later the bulk of poor Pepin's army was hacked to pieces on the shoals beside this canal, only a mile or two from its objectives on the Rialto islands: some Franks were drowned, some suffocated in the mud, some had their throats cut, and only the most agile managed to flounder away across the flats.

In the Middle Ages the Canale Orfano became the scene of judicial drownings, a watery Tyburn. Criminals were not generally drowned in Venice, and an awful secrecy surrounded such occasions. The unhappy prisoner, languishing in his dark cell beneath the Doge's Palace, was paid a last visit by the duty monk, and a first visit by the duty executioner – ‘bountifully hired by the Senate', so Coryat tells us. The terms of the sentence were read to him – that he should be ‘conducted to the Canale Orfano, with his hands tied behind his back and weights tied to his body, and there drowned, and let him die'. Then at dead of night, bound and muffled, he was led into a barge beside the Bridge of Straw and softly rowed across the lagoon, past the sleeping San Giorgio Maggiore, to the Orphan Canal: and there, with a grunt and a splash, they threw him overboard. His death was never publicly announced. Only the State registers of deaths and judgements have since revealed that, for instance, between 1551 and 1604 there were 203 punitive drownings. The last criminal was tossed into the water early in the eighteenth century: but until the end of the Republic a grim old statute forbade any kind of fishing in the ominous Canale Orfano, on pain (obviously) of death. For myself, when I go bathing there to this day I sometimes still fancy ancient skeletons tickling my toes in the mud, and see the masked faces of the executioners peering at me darkly from the passing
vaporetti
.

New channels are still being cut through the lagoon. One leads direct to the new oil port of Sant' Ilario, south of Mestre, avoiding the city of Venice altogether. It enters the lagoon by the Porto di Malamocco, which was the chief Venetian port of entry in the days of Austrian rule; and slashing through a web of minor channels, islets and swamps, ends among the oil-tanks in what used to be one of the
queerest and loneliest reaches of the lagoon – where centuries ago the powerful abbey of Sant' Ilario, suzerain of the surrounding flat-lands, maintained its private port of entry at the mouth of the River Lama. The new canal is deep enough (as no other channel is) to take ships of 100,000 tons and the passage of its super-tankers from Kuwait or Tripoli, has profoundly altered the hushed and dejected character of the south-western lagoon.

Another new canal, to the north of Venice, links the city with the Marco Polo airport, and conveys arrivals theatrically, in scudding high-powered motor boats, directly from the customs sheds to the Piazza of St Mark, by way of the municipal cemetery. Like Venice herself, the lagoon is changing: fight though the conservatives may to ensure that its peculiar aureole, as one Victorian poet expressed it

– struggle manfully though they may, the world is overtaking these solitary but dramatic places.

I am only half-sad about it, because for me the excitement of the lagoon lies less in its pale or lurid silences than in its sense of age-old activity. One of the best places I know to watch the ships go by is the wide free channel of the Porto di Lido, where the Canale San Marco sweeps out to sea. Bulbous black buoys mark this tremendous water-way, and two long stone moles protect it, extending to the twin lighthouses that mark the extremity of Venice. On the Lido shore stands the old tower of San Nicolò, from which the first of all weather-cones was hoisted five centuries ago. To the east, a wide, calm, empty water-way leads to Treporti, and you can just see, far away among the haze, one lonely white house on a distant promontory. At the junction of the waters, scowling and vigilant, the castle of Sant' Andrea awaits another impudent frigate, or peers through its gun-slits towards the ruffians of Dalmatia.

Here you switch off your engine, allow your boat to rock with the sea-swell, and let the traffic of the lagoon stream past you. A
squadron of fishing boats lies idle and becalmed upon a sand-bank, waiting for the tide or the shell-fish. A dredger thumps away behind you, surrounded by dirty lighters, like acolytes. The ferry-steamer for Treporti, steering dear of the big Sant' Erasmo mud-bank, sweeps in a spacious curve around the marker buoy and swings away towards the shore. Over the mole you can see the riggings of fishing smacks, meandering to and fro off the Lido sands; and sometimes a tangled crabman's boat, a riddle of nets, ropes and buckets, slides swiftly past you with an air of intense and urgent preoccupation. A dapper little speedboat hurries towards some unfrequented bathing beach; a languid yacht tacks between the lighthouses; eight jolly men, seven portly women, twelve children, three dogs and a picnic basket lollop hilariously by in a motor boat with a cotton canopy, keeping close inshore and all talking at once.

And through them all the big ships sail, as they have for a thousand years: the cruising liners, the elegant white tankers from the Persian Gulf; a submarine from Malta, spouting jets of water from the base of its streamlined conning-tower; a succession of limping old freighters, rust-streaked and beery; and sometimes, if you are lucky, a great white cruise ship, proud and beautiful, pounding by in the misty sunshine like another old argosy, its passengers crowding the sun-decks and clustered on the forecastle, its crew bustling about the companion-ways, and its captain just to be seen upon his bridge, gazing grandly through his binoculars, as though he is awaiting a signal flag from St Mark's to welcome him home from Cathay.