Venice (29 page)

It is ninety miles around the perimeters of the lagoon, but it is still all Venice: tempered, watered, vulgarized, often neglected, but always tinged with the magic of the place – ‘a breath of Venice on the wind'. Only fifty years ago most of the lagoon shore was untouched by progress, sparsely inhabited, scarcely visited by tourists from one decade to the next. The old guide books speak tantalizingly of unspoilt strands and virgin beaches, and make it sound as though a
trip to the villages on the rim of the lagoon required a sleeping-bag and a bag of beads.

Today Herr Baedeker would find it much more suitable for delicate constitutions, and could safely advise that stomach pills, portable wash-basins and topees will not be required. Wherever the car can go, modernity has followed. Of the perimeter of the Venetian lagoon, only the
lidi
, the central bulwarks against the Adriatic, are inaccessible by road – and you may even take your Lancia there, if you load it on a car ferry. The other seaward barriers, the Littorale di Cavallino and the Lido di Sottomarina, are in effect protrusions of the mainland, and you can drive all the way along them – on Cavallino, indeed, to a point within three miles of the Piazza itself. There are still places on the mainland shore that are remote and unfrequented, if only because nobody much wants to live there, but they are disappearing fast. In the middle of the lagoon you can still feel uncomfortably isolated: on its edge you are seldom very far from a telephone, a parish priest or a Coca-Cola.

The
enfant terrible
of the lagoon, and some would say its new master, is Mestre. Until the First World War it was no more than a castle-village, surrounded by forts and scratchy farmland. Today it is a hideous industrial city, straggling, unkempt, dirty, shapeless and nearly always (or so it seems) blurred in drizzle. Its docks at Porto Marghera are, in hard commercial terms, the new Venice. When people speak of Venice as the oil port of Europe, they really mean Mestre. Its shipyards are among the most important in Italy, and the half-built ships on their slipways loom patronizingly over the Venice causeway. Its factories employ 30,000 men, producing chemicals, aluminium, zinc, coke, plate-glass, paint, canned foods, instruments, and millions of gallons of refined oil. In Mestre the roads and railways converge upon Venice: and the place is spreading so fast and frowardly that before long we may expect to see its drab tentacles extending along half the mainland shore of the lagoon, from the new oil port in the south to the new airport in the north. Administratively, Mestre is part of Venice, and many of the guide books list its hotels together with those of the Serenissima. There are no sadder people on earth than those unfortunates who inadvertently book rooms
there, or accept some claptrap advice about its advantages, and are to be seen emerging from their hotel lobbies, spruced and primped for an evening's gaiety, into the hubbub, traffic jams, half-completed streets and dowdy villas of this dismal conurbation.

This particular stretch of shore, nevertheless, has always been the classic point of embarkation for Venice. Nearby the remains of the diverted Brenta enter the lagoon, and it was at Fusina, the little port at its mouth, that generations of travellers boarded their gondolas and were slowly paddled, as in a dream, towards the distant pile of the city. From Fusina, by ‘the common ferry which trades to Venice', Portia travelled from Belmont to her seat of judgement: Shakespeare called it ‘the tranect', a word that has baffled generations of commentators, and may perhaps be a corruption of
traghetto
. From here, too, the heavy-laden barges used to take fresh river water to the city. In Montaigne's time it was also a portage: barges were lifted from the Brenta by a horse-powered pulley, wheeled across a spit of land, and lowered into the canal that crossed the lagoon to Venice. Later a little railway line was built to Fusina, and today the buses come down there from Padua to connect with the Venice ferry boats.

It is only two or three miles from the centre of Mestre, but it is still suggestively calm and ruminative, like a place on the edge of great mysteries. Herds of sheep wander about its grassy river-banks, guarded by laconic shepherds in cloaks and floppy tall-crowned hats. There is a quaint little landing-place, with a stuffy café, and the remains of the old railway rot away beside the river levee. The road wanders through wide water meadows, and ends abruptly at the edge of the lagoon; and there, sitting lazily upon a bollard, you will often find a grey-clad sentry with a rifle, gazing absently across the water. ‘The object which first catches the eye', wrote Ruskin at the climax of a magnificent descriptive passage, ‘is a sullen cloud of black smoke … which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice.' Today, if you catch your first glimpse of the city from this classic foreshore, the first thing you will see is the big grain elevator, and the second is the untidy iron silhouette of the port. It may remind you of Cardiff docks or Jersey City: but it is Venice.

North-east of Mestre the line of the lagoon shore curves, through
marshy and once malarious flat-lands, past salt-pans and water-meadows and duck-flown swamps, to the promontory of Cavallino, a long sandy spit which doubles back upon itself, and reaches almost to Venice. It has seen some bumpy fluctuations of fortune. Its towns have risen, fallen, risen again. Its pine forests were destroyed, and are now growing again. It was once intersected by two important gateways into the Adriatic: one where the Piave entered the sea, now a mere creek, the other the Porto di Treporti, now closed altogether. For centuries Cavallino remained neglected, inhabited only by poor farmers and fishermen, visited only by a few adventurous sportsmen: and there are still sections of this narrow shore that remain infinitely bucolic, rich in birds and earthy vegetables, with frogs croaking in miasmic ditches and pleasant country inns. The ancient village of Treporti still gazes in whitewashed simplicity across the marshes, and some of the creeks of the place are so like the Cherwell that you almost expect to encounter punt-loads of undergraduates, with parasols and gramophones, or hear the distant stroke of Tom.

Progress, though, has recently struck Cavallino with a jazzy vengeance: for not long ago the speculators, eyeing this long line of sandy beaches, built there the brand-new town of Iesolo. Its sands are immensely long and exquisitely fine, flecked with grass and scented with pine-cones. Its hundreds of new buildings are instantly reminiscent of Tel Aviv. It has a race-course, two roller-skating rinks and a psammato-therapic establishment (if you know what that is). It is a big, booming, rip-roaring, highly successful holiday resort, one of the most popular on the Adriatic, and you may see its gaudy posters beckoning you to the lagoon everywhere from Milan to Vienna. Gradations of activity ripple away from it into nearly every part of Cavallino. There are petrol stations, and garages, and excellent bus services. Bulldozers rumble and rip the days away. If you penetrate to the very tip of the promontory, Punta Sabbione, where you may look across the water to the half-hidden pinnacles of Venice, a notice in German will tell you where to park your bicycle, a fizzy drink is awaiting you in its little red ice-box, and presently the car ferry will arrive impatiently from the Lido to ship you away to the Film Festival. If you want a taste of the old Cavallino, a sniff of its
dank fragrances, a stroll along its empty sand-dunes, you must make haste: it cannot last much longer.

There is a resort, too, at the other extremity of the lagoon, where the multi-coloured sunshades stand in mathematical patterns on the sands of Sottomarina, and the young bloods ride their motor scooters helter-skelter along the foreshore. The guardian of the southern lagoon, though, and the traditional key to Venice, is still a place of horny and homely instincts. There is a stumpy winged lion on a pillar at Chioggia which has long been a joke among the Venetians – they like to call it the Cat of St Mark: and a streak of pathos, an echo of ridicule, seems to infuse the life of this ancient fishing town, which still feels palsied, scabrous and tumble-down, and sunk in morbid superstition.

A rabble of touts, car-park men, beggar boys and assorted obsequious attendants greet you as you step upon the quayside at Chioggia, or open the door of your car: and the wide central street of the place always seems to be either totally deserted, or thick with fustian youths and flouncy groups of girls. Chioggia is a place of stubborn, sullen character. Its people have a cast of feature all their own, broad-nosed and big-eyed, and their incomprehensible dialect is said to be the language of the early Venetian settlers, with Greek overtones. Their town is rigidly symmetrical, without the endearing higgledy-piggledy intricacies of Venice. Two unwavering causeways connect it with the neighbouring mainland, and it consists of one main street and three canals, all running in parallel, with nine bridges in rectangular intersection.

For all its sense of degeneracy, it is the greatest fishing port in Italy, its fleets ranging the whole Adriatic, and its catch travelling each day in refrigerated trucks as far as Milan, Rome and Innsbruck. Its narrow canals are crammed and chock-a-block with shipping, thickets of masts and sails, packed so tightly hull to hull that you can often walk from one quay to another, and getting a boat out must be at least as difficult as putting one in a bottle. The wharfs and alley-ways of Chioggia are always crowded with fishermen's wives, wearing black shawls and faded flowered pinafores, sitting at trestle tables, chattering raucously, and doing obviously traditional things with needles,
pieces of wood, nets and pestles. The musty churches of Chioggia are hung with the votive offerings of fishermen – crude and touching storm scenes, with half-swamped boats agonizingly in the foreground, and benignant helpful Madonnas leaning elaborately out of the clouds.

Chioggia lives, dreams, talks, and eats fish. Its streets are littered with fish scales. Its fish market is startlingly polychromatic. Its principal restaurant offers an incomparable variety of fish-foods. (A surprising number of tourists come to Chioggia nowadays, and a Swiss visitor to the town once told me, munching a particularly succulent polypus, that he was not even bothering to go on to Venice.) At the hotel boys will come to your breakfast table selling you sponges fresh from the sea-bed, and from your window you may watch the sturdy snub-nosed fishing-boats steaming away to work. Chioggia faces the Adriatic, where the big fish swim, and has its back to the lagoon: and though it is often a disappointment to visitors, I have grown to like the place and its rude people, and feel there is something deep-sea and salt-swept to its manners (even the touts on the quayside are a genial kind of riff-raff, once you have tipped them, or bought one of their desiccated sea-horses). Its reserve is really less surly than phlegmatic, and its people have a local reputation for positively English stolidity. ‘Help! I'm drowning!' says one Chioggian in a beloved Venetian anecdote. ‘Hang on a minute,' says the other, ‘I'm just lighting my pipe.' In the lagoon one day I gave a tow to a boat-load of tattered Chioggian sardine-fishers, and I remember the encounter with a midsummer pleasure: for when they left me in the approaches to Chioggia, they waved good-bye with such dazzling smiles and such indolent, graceful, airy gestures that I felt as though a crew of Tritons were slipping the tow.

Such are the towns of the lagoon shore, from the blatant Mestre to the decadent Chioggia. For the rest, the perimeter is flat, monotonous and often dreary; and to be honest, though there are some interesting places upon it, and some haunting relics of old glories, it is astonishing to me how so drab a frame can contain so glittering a masterpiece: for wherever you stand upon this coast, whether the juke-boxes are screaming beside you at Iesolo, or the fisher-children
intoning their shrill catechism in the cathedral at Chioggia, the trolley-buses spitting sparks at Mestre, the oil tanks stinking at Porto Marghera, the flocks of sheep and donkeys trailing absent-mindedly towards Fusina – wherever you are, you are never more than ten miles from Venice herself.

But it is not always Venice that you first see from the mainland, for the old Venetians built many island towns before they moved to the Rialto archipelago. There is a hamlet called Altino, east of Mestre, that is the site of the Roman Altinum. It has a little museum beside its church, and a vague air of lost distinction. If you walk from the village across the Trieste road, to the marshy edge of the lagoon, you will see across the fens and puddles (part sea, part land, part salt-bog) a solitary tall campanile. You cannot quite make out what lies around it, for the light of the lagoon is delusive, and is sometimes crystal clear, but sometimes veiled in shimmer: all you can see among that muddle of marshland is the single red-brick tower, a talisman in the waste. It looks very old, and very proud, and very lonely, and abandoned. It is the campanile of Torcello.

When the frightened ancients left the mainland, they had not very far to go – though in those days the lagoon seems to have been, if dryer, rather wider than it is now. In the course of their successive emigrations, spread over many decades, some went to the Adriatic shore, but many stayed within a few miles of the mainland, within sight of their enemies. In all twelve major settlements were established, from Clugies Major (Chioggia) in the south to Grado, which lies in the next lagoon to the north, and has long since lost all connection with Venice. The people of Altinum, a proud and prosperous city, walked to the edge of the lagoon, as we have done, and chose the island that is now Torcello; or, in another version of events, they were divinely ordered to climb the city watch-tower, and from its eminence, seeing a vision of boats, ships and islands, deduced that they were intended to move into the corner of the
lagoon. They took everything they could with them, even to building stone, and around Torcello they built five townships, each named pathetically after a gateway of their lost city. This became the richest and most advanced of the lagoon colonies, in the days when the islets of Rivo Alto were still rude fishing hamlets. ‘Mother and daughter,' cries Ruskin from the top of Torcello campanile, ‘you behold them both in their widowhood – Torcello and Venice.'

The weeds of Torcello are much the more poignant. The city flourished and grew for some centuries, and by the 1500s is said to have had 20,000 inhabitants, a score of splendid churches, paved streets and many bridges. Torcello contributed three completely equipped galleys to the Chioggia wars, and sent 100 bowmen for service in the fifteenth-century Dalmatian campaigns. The two pious merchants who stole the body of St Mark from the Egyptians were both citizens of Torcello. Torcello had her own gateway to the sea, through Cavallino, and was a flourishing mart and shipping centre in her own right, even after the move from Malamocco to Rialto. In the oldest woodcuts and maps of Venice she usually appears formidably in the background, a mound of turrets and towers in the water. In the twelfth century one commentator wrote respectfully of the ‘
Magnum
Emporium Torcellanorum
'.

She then entered a disastrous decline. Her canals were clogged up with silt from the rivers, not yet diverted from the lagoon, and her people were decimated by malaria and pestilent fevers. Her trade was killed at last by the rising energy of the Rialto islands, better placed in the centre of the lagoon, near the mouth of the Brenta. Torcello fell into lethargy and despondence. Her most vigorous citizens moved to Venice, her merchant houses folded and were forgotten. Presently the island was so deserted and disused that the Venetian builders, when they were short of materials, used to come to Torcello and load the remains of palaces into their barges, scrabbling among the rubble for the right size of staircase or a suitably sculptured cornice. Through the centuries poor Torcello rotted, crumbling and subsiding and declining into marshland again. When Napoleon overthrew the Republic she proclaimed herself, in a moment of frantic virility, an autonomous State: but by the middle of
the nineteenth century a visit to Torcello was, for every romantic visitor, a positive ecstasy of melancholia.

Today about a hundred people live there: but Torcello is that fortunate phenomenon, a ghost with a private income, like the dead mining towns of the American West, or even Pompeii. It is still an island of exquisite nostalgia. A sad stone Madonna greets you when you land there, behind a tangle of old barbed wire, and a narrow muddy canal leads you through green fields to the decayed Piazza, once the centre of city life, now no more than a village green. Nowhere in the lagoon can you feel the meaning of Venice more pungently, for this place has an inescapable air of hunted determination, and it is all too easy, as you gaze across its empty water-ways, to imagine the fires of terrible enemies burning on the mainland shore, or hear the frightened Te Deums of exiles.

The island is green, and is planted with fields of artichokes and scrubby orchards. Small farmhouses stand here and there, with boat-houses made of thatched wattle, and skinny barking dogs. A wide sluggish canal, more like a great river than a creek, separates Torcello from the patchy mud-islands that run away to the mainland: on this listless channel I once saw a tall white yacht that had sailed from Norway, and was slipping away to Venice in the first dim light of dawn, like a spirit-ship among the marshes. The city of Torcello has utterly vanished: but the little lanes of the place, last vestiges of the Fondamenta Bobizo, the Campo San Giovanni, the Fondamenta dei Borgogni, and many another lost thoroughfare – all these dusty small paths lead, as if by habit, towards the Piazza. It is only a little grassy square, but it still has a suggestion of pomposity, passed down from the days when the Tribune met there, and the patrician palaces stood all about. It stands beside a canal, and around it are grouped a trattoria, a little museum in a Gothic palace, two or three cottages, the octagonal Byzantine church of Santa Fosca, and the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, which a learned man once described as the most moving church in Christendom.

Certainly it is a building of symbolic significance, for at this spot, with the founding of Venice, the tides of Rome and Byzantium met. Torcello marks a watershed. To the west there extends the ribbed and
vaulted architecture we call Gothic-Rome, Chartres, Cambridge and the monasteries of Ireland. To the east stand the domes: Mount Athos, Istanbul, the bulbous churches of Russia and the noble mosques of Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan and India. On one side of Torcello is the Palace of Westminster, on the other the Taj Mahal.

It is a spiritual watershed, too. At Torcello the theologies overlap, and the rival ideals of Christianity met here, half-way between the old Rome and the New. The cathedral of Torcello is part Byzantine, part Gothic, partly eastern, partly western. It was built badly, by scared men in a hurry – some say in a panic, because they thought that the end of the world would occur in the year 1000. It is simple and sophisticated at the same time, bold and tremulous too. Its campanile is grandly defiant (and was grander still, before lightning lopped off its top in 1640); but enormous stone shutters, swinging on stone pegs, protect its windows from the furies of elements and enemies. Tall and aloof it stands there, with nothing warm or welcoming to its spirit, and it still feels almost makeshift, barn-like, as if it is uncompleted, or only temporary.

At one end of the nave is a vast mosaic, covering the entire west wall, and illustrating in profuse and often grotesque detail the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of the Dead and the imminent Day of Judgement – an illustrated manual of dogma, from St Michael conscientiously weighing the souls, like an apothecary, to the poor damned sinners far below. At the other end of the church, above the stalls of the rounded apse, there stands something infinitely more magnificent: for there against a dim gold background, tall, slender and terribly sad, is the Teotoca Madonna – the God-Bearer. There are tears on her mosaic cheeks, and she gazes down the church with an expression of timeless reproach, cherishing the Child in her arms as though she has foreseen all the years that are to come, and holds each one of us responsible. This is the noblest memorial of the lagoon. Greek craftsmen made it, so we are told: and there are some who think that the Venetians, through all their epochs of splendour and success, never created anything quite so beautiful.

Beneath that sad and seer-like scrutiny, a host of tourists mills about the church: popping into Santa Fosca if they have a moment to
spare; buying postcards from the women who have set up their stalls on the grass outside, like village ladies at a fête; posing for photographs in the great stone chair, called obscurely the Throne of Attila, that stands in the middle of the Piazza (even the soul-struck Victorians, on their shaky progressions through the remains, allowed themselves this moment of tourist levity, and many a faded snapshot shows them, in their flowered hats and mutton-chop sleeves, posing as to the manner born in this imperial seat).

Some of these people, but not many, have come on the regular ferry service from Venice, and are going to have a picnic beside a muddy rivulet somewhere behind the cathedral, while their children catch crabs and prawns among the pools and their wine grows steadily hotter in the sun. Most of them, though, have come to Torcello primarily for lunch at the trattoria: for this simple-looking inn, with its rustic tables beside the door, its complement of picturesque pedlars – this unpretentious hostelry is one of the most famous restaurants in Italy, where you can eat splendidly, drink from tall frosted glasses, and bask the afternoon away among flower gardens in the shadow of the campanile.

Harry's Bar owns and runs this inn, and provides comfortable motor boats to take you there, and spares you half an hour or so before lunch to look at the cathedral: and it has all the pretensions of its celebrated progenitor (mock-modesty, mementoes of the great, fancy cocktails) and all the considerable attractions (admirable food, excellent service, and a certain simplicity of spirit that is not all spurious).

I have eaten many a delicious dish there, and have enjoyed my ham and eggs among the sighing of the laurels, the creaking of old timbers, the splashing of small ducks and amphibious dogs, and the early-morning chatter of the island women, washing their smalls upon the quay. And by a swift adjustment of the imagination, I find it easy still, when I stand upon the mainland shore, and see that distant campanile in the mud, to fancy Torcello as deserted, desolate and abandoned as she used to be, when the wind blew through empty ruins, and only a dim rustic lamp burnt in the bar-room of the inn. I dismiss the gin-fizzes and the
filet mignon
from my mind: and I think
of the haunted water-ways of the island, that silent white ship among the marshes, the great stone shutters of the cathedral, the soft rustle of trees in the night, and the lanky image of the Teotoca Madonna, tear-stained and accusing, which a child once gravely described to me as ‘a thin young lady, holding God'.

Many other islands of the lagoon have had their eras of urban glory, before fading, like Torcello, into bleached obscurity, for the life of a lagoon town is beset with inconstancy. It is always rising or waning, sinking or abruptly reviving: either being slowly sucked into the subsoil, or converted at great expense into a little Coney Island. Two islands only have survived as living townships from times immemorial, and both lie in the melancholy expanse of the northern lagoon, on the water-route between Torcello and Venice.

Burano you will see first, and remember longest, as a sheer splash of colour. A wide brackish waste surrounds it, exuding dankness. A mile or two away is the solemn tower of Torcello; to the east a small island is clad in cypress trees; to the north the marshes trail away in desolation. It is a muted scene, slate-grey, pale blue and muddy green: but in the middle of it there bursts a sudden splurge of rather childish colour, its reflections spilling into the water, and staining these lugubrious channels like an overturned paint-pot. This is the island town of Burano. Its campanile leans at a comical angle, and it is packed tightly with hundreds of bright little houses, like a vivid adobe village in a dismal desert: red and blue houses, yellow and orange and blazing white, a jumble of primary colours shining in the mud.

It lives by fishing and by lace-making, an old Venetian craft which was revived in the nineteenth century. In its hey-day Venetian lace was the best in the world, sometimes so delicate that a collar ordered for Louis XIV was made of white human hair, no spun thread being fine enough for the design. Later the industry languished so disastrously that when they came to resuscitate it, only one very old lady survived who knew how to make Venetian point: they muffled her in woollies, stuffed her with pills, and gently filched, her secrets before she died.

The lace industry is now conducted with an air of profound charitable purpose, but at a pleasant profit for its sponsors. There is a school of lace-making near the church, where tourists are more than welcome, and may even be allowed, if they press hard enough, to make some trifling purchase; and every Burano cottage doorway has its demure lace-maker, stitching away in the sunshine, eyes screwed up and fingers flickering (if the tourist season is bad, she may have abandoned lace, and be devoting her talents to the production of coarse net curtains). Only a hint of tragedy sours the spectacle: for no occupation looks more damaging to the eye-sight, except perhaps writing fugues by candle-light.

While the women stitch, the men go fishing, as in an allegory, or an opera. Wild-eyed fishermen stalk the streets of Burano, carrying cork floats and enormous shoes, and there are nets hanging up to dry on the wall of the church. The fishermen sail their boats to the very doors of their houses, to be greeted with soups and fond embraces: and this suggestion of ideal domesticity, the quintessential femininity of the women, the shaggy masculinity of the men, the gaudy little houses, the soups and the nets and the flashing needles – all this makes Burano feel like one protracted amateur theatrical. Until recently the island was very poor indeed, and you will still find Hammers and Sickles upon its walls, until the tidy housewives wash them off: but the place does not seem real enough to be hungry. It is an island of absurd diminutives: tiny canals, toy-like homes, miniature bridges, infinitesimal stitches. Nothing very much has ever happened in Burano (though there can scarcely be a town on earth that has more memorial plaques to the square mile) and life there feels flaky and insubstantial. The lace-makers bend over their frames, the fishermen paddle out to the mud-banks, the tourists take a quick look round on their way to Torcello, and the hours pass like the first act of an obvious play, or a rousing opera chorus.