Venice (3 page)

You can tell a Venetian by his face. Thousands of other Italians now live in Venice, but the true-born Venetian is often instantly recognizable. He probably has Slav blood in him, perhaps Austrian, possibly oriental tinctures from the distant past, and he is very far indeed from the stock music-hall Latin. Morose but calculating is the look in his limpid eye, and his mouth is enigmatical. His nose is very prominent, like the nose of a Renaissance grandee, and there is to his manner an air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes. He is often bow-legged (but not from too much riding) and often pale (but not from lack of sunshine). Occasionally his glance contains a glint of sly contempt, and his smile is distant: usually he is a man of gentle reserve, courteous, ceremonious, his jacket neatly buttoned and his itchy palm discreetly gloved. The Venetians often remind me of Welshmen, and often of Jews, and sometimes of Icelanders, and occasionally of Afrikaners, for they have the introspective melancholy pride of people on their own, excluded from the fold of ordinary nations. They feel at once aloof, suspicious and kind. They are seldom boisterous or swashbuckling, and when you hear a Venetian say ‘
Buona sera,
bellissima
. Signorina
!' he says it without flourish or flattery, with a casual inclination of the head. The Venetian in the street can be uncompromising, and cheerfully butts you in the stomach with the tip of her loaf, or drops her laundry-basket agonizingly on your toe. The Venetian in the shop has a special muffled politesse, a restrained but regretful decorum that is part of the ambience of the city.

Observe a pair of Venetian housewives meeting, and you will see reflected in all their gestures the pungent character of Venice. They approach each other hard-faced and intent, for they are doing their shopping, and carry in their baskets the morning's modest purchases (this evidently not being their day for the weekly supermarket expedition): but as they catch sight of each other, a sudden soft gleam of commiseration crosses their faces, as though they are about to barter sympathies over some irreparable loss, or share an unusually tender confidence. Their expressions instantly relax, and they welcome each other with a protracted exchange of greetings, rather like the benign grace-notes and benedictions with which old-school Arabs encounter their friends. Their tone of voice is surprised but intimate, falling and rising with penetration through the din of the market: and they sound as though they are simultaneously sympathetic about something, and mournful about something, and a little peevish, and resigned, and reluctantly amused. (‘Poor Venice!' the housewife sometimes sighs, leaning from her balcony window: but it is little more than a wry slogan, like a commuter's exorcism upon the weather, or one of those general complaints, common to us all, about the universal decline of everything.)

They talk for five or ten minutes, sometimes shaking their heads anxiously or shifting their weight from one foot to another, and when they part they wave good-bye to each other in a manner all their own, holding their right hands vertically beside their shoulders, and slightly wagging the tips of all five fingers. In a flash their expressions are earnestly mercantile again, and they are disputing the price of beans with a spry but knowing greengrocer.

The modern Venetians are not a stately people. They are homely, provincial, fond, complacent. At heart this is a very bourgeois city. The Venetians have lost the unassertive confidence of power, and love to be thought well of. There was a time when kings and pontiffs bowed before the Doge of Venice, and Titian, the most lordly of the Venetian painters, once graciously allowed the Emperor Charles V of Spain and Austria to pick up the paint brush he had accidentally dropped. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Venetians
were already becoming testy of criticism, like Americans before their time of power, or Englishmen after theirs. Parochial to a Middle-Western degree was the reply sent by Giustina Renier Michiel, the last great lady of the Republic, when Chateaubriand dared to write an article unflattering to Venice (‘a city against nature – one cannot take a step without being obliged to get into a boat!'). Frigid is the disapproval of the contemporary Venetian
grande dame
, if you venture to suggest that some of the city's gardens might be the better for a pair of shears.

The Venetian way is the right way, and the Venetian nearly always knows best. In the church of San Salvatore there is an Annunciation by Titian which, being a little unconventional in style, so surprised its monastic sponsors that they flatly declared it to be unfinished, or perhaps not really by Titian at all; the old artist was understandably annoyed, and wrote on the bottom of the picture, where you may see it still, the irritated double inscription
Titianus
Fecit. Fecit
. I have often sympathized with him, faced with the know-all Venetians, for the true son of Venice (and even more, the daughter) is convinced that the skills, arts and sciences of the world ripple outwards, in ever-weakening circles, from the Piazza of St Mark. If you want to write a book, consult a Venetian professor. If you want to tie a knot in a rope, ask a Venetian how. If you want to know how a bridge is built, look at the Rialto. To learn how to make a cup of coffee, frame a picture, stuff a peacock, phrase a treaty, clean your shoes, sew a button on a blouse, consult the appropriate Venetian authority.

‘The Venetian custom' is the criterion of good sense and propriety. Pitying, lofty but condescending is the smile on the Venetian face, when you suggest frying the fish in breadcrumbs, instead of in flour. Paternal is the man in the camera shop, as he demonstrates to you the only correct way to focus your Leica. ‘It is our custom' – by which the Venetian means not merely that Venetian things are best, but that they are probably unique. Often and again you will be kindly told, as you step from-the quayside into your boat, that Venetian seaweed is slippery: and I have even heard it said that Venetian water is inclined to be wet.

These are the harmless conceits of the parish pump. Foreigners
who have lived in Venice for years have told me how detached they have grown to feel from the affairs of the world at large, as though they are mere onlookers: and this sense of separateness, which once contributed to the invincibility of the Republic, now bolsters Venetian complacencies. Like poor relations or provincial bigwigs, the Venetians love to ponder the glories of their pedigree, tracing their splendours ever further back, beyond the great Doges and the Tribunes to Rome herself (the Giustinian family claims descent from the Emperor Justinian) and even into the mists of pre-history, when the original Venetians are variously supposed to have come from Paphlagonia, from the Baltic, from Babylon, from Illyria, from the coast of Brittany, or directly, like nymphs, out of the morning dew. Venetians love to tell you about ‘my grandfather, a man of much cultural and intellectual distinction'; or invite you to share the assumption that the opera at the Fenice is, on the whole, the best and most cultural on earth; or point out the Venetian artist Vedova as the greatest of his generation (‘But perhaps you're not, shall we say,
au
fait
with the tendencies of contemporary art, such as are demonstrated here in Venice at our Biennale?'). Every Venetian is a connoisseur, with a strong bias towards the local product. The guides at the Doge's Palace rarely bother to mention the startling paintings by Hieronymus Bosch that hang near the Bridge of Sighs – he was not, after all, a Venetian. The Venetian libraries concern themselves assiduously with Venice. The pictures that hang in Venetian houses are nearly always of Venetian scenes. Venice is a shamelessly self-centred place, in a constant glow of elderly narcissism.

There is nothing offensive to this local pride, for the Venetians are not exactly boastful, only convinced. Indeed, there is sometimes real pathos to it. Modern Venice is not so pre-eminent, by a half, as they like to suppose. Its glitter and sparkle nearly all comes with the summer visitors, and its private intellectual life is sluggish. Its opera audiences (except in the galleries) are coarse and inattentive, and few indeed are the fairy motor boats that arrive, in the dismal winter evenings, at the once brilliant water-gate of the Fenice. Concerts, except in the tourist season, are generally second-rate and expensive.
The celebrated printing houses of Venice, once the finest in Europe, have nearly all gone. Venetian cooking is undistinguished, Venetian workmanship is variable. The old robust seafaring habits have long been dissipated, so that the average Venetian never goes too near the water, and makes a terrible fuss if a storm blows up. In many ways Venice is a backwater. Some people say she is dead on her feet. Memphis, Leeds and Leopoldville are all bigger, and all livelier. Genoa handles twice as much shipping. There is a better orchestra in Liverpool, a better newspaper in Milwaukee, a better university in Capetown; and any weekend yachtswoman, sailing her dinghy at Chichester or Newport, will tie you as practical a knot as a gondolier.

But there, love is blind, especially if there is sadness in the family. The Venetians love and admire their Venice with a curious fervency. ‘Where are you off to?' you may ask an acquaintance. ‘To the Piazza', he replies: but he can give you no reason, if you ask him why. He goes to St Mark's for no definite purpose, to meet nobody specific, to admire no particular spectacle. He simply likes to button his coat, and sleek his hair a little, assume an air of rather portentous melancholy and stroll for an hour or two among the sumptuous trophies of his heritage. Hardly a true Venetian crosses the Grand Canal without the hint of a pause, however vestigial, to breathe its beauties. Our housekeeper grumbles sometimes about the narrowness of Venice, its cramped and difficult nature; but never was a lover more subtly devoted to her protector, or an idealist to his flaming cause. Venice is a sensual city, and there is something physiological about the devotion she inspires, as though the very fact of her presence can stimulate the bloodstream.

I was once in Venice on the day of the Festival of the Salute, in November, when the Venetians, to celebrate the ending of a seventeenth-century plague, erect a temporary bridge across the Grand Canal and process to the great church of Santa Maria della Salute. In the evening I posted myself at the end of the bridge, a rickety structure of barges and timber. (It was designed, so I was reassuringly told, ‘according to an immemorial pattern', but one November in the 1930s it collapsed, just as-Sir Osbert Sitwell was crossing it.) There, turning up my collar against the bitter sea wind, I watched the
Venetians walking to evening Mass, in twos or threes or youth groups, cosily wrapped. There was a curiously proprietorial feeling to their progress: and as each little group of people turned the corner to the bridge, and saw the lights of the quay before them, and the huge dome of the Salute floodlit in the dusk, ‘Ah!' they said, clicking their tongues with affection, ‘how beautiful she looks tonight!' – for all the world as though some frail but favourite aunt were wearing her best lacy bed-jacket for visitors.

This self-esteem makes for narrow horizons and short focuses. In the 1960s many poor Venetians had never been to the mainland of Italy. Even now thousands have never visited the outer islands of the lagoon. You sometimes hear stories of people who have never crossed the Grand Canal or set eyes on the Piazza of St Mark. Simple Venetians are often extraordinarily ignorant about geography and world affairs, and even educated citizens (like most islanders) are frequently poor linguists.

The Venetians indeed have a language of their own, a rich and original dialect, only now beginning to lose its vigour under the impact of cinema and television. It is a slurred but breezy affair, lively enough for Goldoni to write some of his best plays in it, formal enough to be the official language of the Venetian Republic. Byron called it ‘a sweet bastard Latin'. Dazed are the faces of visiting linguists, confronted by this hairy hybrid, for its derivation is partly French, and partly Greek, and partly Arabic, and partly German, and probably partly Paphlagonian too – the whole given a fine extra blur by a queer helter-skelter, sing-song manner of delivery. Often the Venetian seems to be mouthing no particular words, only a buttery succession of half-enunciated consonants. The Venetian language is very fond of Xs and Zs, and as far as possible ignores the letter L altogether, so that the Italian
bello
, for example, comes out
beo
. There are at least four Italian-Venetian dictionaries, and from these you can see that sometimes the Venetian word bears no resemblance to the Italian. A fork is
forchetta
in Italian, but
piron
in Venetian. The Venetian baker is pistor, not fornaio. A watch is
relozo
, not
orologio
. The Venetian pronouns are
mi, ti, lu, nu, vu, lori
. When we say ‘thou art',
and the Italians ‘
tu sei
', the Venetians say ‘
ti ti xe
'. The Venetian word
lovo
means first a wolf, and secondly a stock-fish.

This distinctive and attractive language also specializes in queer contractions and distortions, and the street signs of the city, still often expressed in the vernacular, can be very confusing. You may look, consulting your guide book, for the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; but the street sign will call it San Zanipolo. The church of Sant' Alvise was originally dedicated to St Louis. What the Venetians call San Stae is really Sant' Eustacchio. San Stin is Santo Stefano. Sant' Aponal is Sant' Apollinare. The convent of Santa Maria di Nazareth, used as a leper colony, was so long ago blurred into San Lazzaretto that it has given its corruption to almost all the languages of the earth. What holy man is commemorated by the Fondamenta Sangiantoffetti I have never been able to discover, and it took me some time to realize that the titular saint of San Zan Degola was San Giovanni Decollato, St John the Beheaded. Most inexplicable of all, the church of the Saints Ermagora and Fortunato is known to the Venetians as San Marcuola, a usage which they toss at you with every appearance of casual logic, but never a word of explanation. It is, as they would say, their custom.