Venice (32 page)

But if you look through the window of the trattoria, shifting your eye past the red Coca-Cola sticker, you will see a small square house across the canal that still retains some distant suggestion of grandeur. It has Gothic windows and a solid square doorway. A rotting wall protects it from the water, and a
sandolo
is tied up beside its landing-stage. In the garden, among some stunted fruit trees, one or two defaced statues moulder the decades away. This is a house out of the past, like a coelacanth among fishes. Today it is all alone. Once it stood bravely among a line of peers, gleaming with life and luxury, padded boats at its steps and pampered courtesans in its salons. It is the Ca' d'Oro – the House of Gold, a last defiant relic of Mazzorbo's forgotten hey-day.

And far off in the northern lagoon there lies the loneliest and saddest of all the Venetian islets, Sant' Ariano. It was originally a suburb-island of Torcello, forming with the neighbouring Constanziaca yet another famous and flourishing community. Now it is inhabited only by the dead, for in the seventeenth century, when its living glories had long vanished, it became the bone-house of Venice, and thus it is coldly marked on the map:
Osseria
, with a small black cross. They no longer take the bones there from Venice, preferring to tip them into a common grave upon San Michele: but it is only a few years since the monthly bone-barge ploughed its slow way to Sant' Ariano, freighted with anonymous remains, and a guide book to the lagoon published
in 1904 observes darkly that ‘modern industry makes use of its unnamed skeletons, without scruple, for the refining of sugar'.

They do not, I think, make sugar from its bones nowadays, but it remains a queer and curdling place. I went there once from Mazzorbo, threading my boat through the treacherous channels behind Torcello, in a landscape that seemed uneasily deserted. A few sea-birds flew furtively above me. Far, far away across the marshes I could see a solitary fishing-boat. Torcello looked lifeless, and beyond it the swamps stretched away in dejection towards Altino. The channel to Sant' Ariano twists and winds incessantly through the flats, so that for half an hour or more you can see the distant white rectangular wall of the bone-yard, all alone among the grass: and when at last I reached it the sun was high, the wind had dropped, the lagoon was deathly calm, and all was sunk in heat and silence. There were lizards on the water-steps of the island. As I disembarked a rat jumped from the mud and dived into the water with a splash. The white gate of the
osseria
shone cruelly in the sunlight, and looking through its grille I could see in the shadows of the porch a stark staring head of Christ, unsmiling and emaciated.

The gate was locked, but walking around the corner I jumped up to the top of the wall, and peered into the enclosure. There was nothing to be seen but a mass of tangled bushes, entirely filling the place, and growing thickly to the very walls. Not a memorial was there, not a bunch of flowers, not a touch of humanity, only this dense green jungle of shrubbery. I scrambled down the wall into the enclosure, slithering through the spiky foliage, and pushing aside the brambles I looked down at my feet to see what I was standing on.

Beneath those bushes, I discovered, the ground was made of bones. These were bone-bushes. There was not a square foot of soil to be seen, only bones: thigh-bones and finger bones, crumpled bones and solid bones, and a few tilted skulls shining like phosphorescence in the shade of the undergrowth. I leapt over that wall like a steeplechaser, and was home, believe me, well before dark.

A sixteenth-century Venetian decree speaks of the lagoon, its waters and its islands, as ‘
sanctos muros patriae
' – the ‘sacred bulwarks of the fatherland'. Now as then, the outermost rampart of all is formed by the islands of the
lidi
, whose fragile and sometimes shifting strand is all that shields Venice from the sea. Not so long ago poets and people of that kind used to go to the Lido to ride horses, meditate, and ponder the ‘peaked isles' of the Euganean Hills in the sunset. Doges went a-hawking there. The 30,000 soldiers of the 4th Crusade were quartered there while their leaders haggled over costs and payments. In the fourteenth century every able-bodied Venetian male between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five had to practise cross-bow shooting there. Byron wanted to be buried there, beneath the inscription
Implora Pace
, in the days when the sands were empty and washed in delicious melancholy.

Today the name of the place is synonymous with trendy glamour. All the myriad Lidos of the world, from Jamaica to the Serpentine, a million ice-cream parlours, a thousand gimcrack pin-table saloons, are named for this ancient place. This is a dual paradox. It is paradoxical first because
lido
is merely the Italian word for a shore or beach, and the
lidi
of Venice was a generic title for all the thin islands, part mud, part sand, on the seaward perimeter of the lagoon. There are two such reefs today, for the semi-promontory of Sottomarina is now virtually part of the mainland. The southern island is called the Littorale di Pellestrina. The other, and especially the northern end of it, is called by common custom the Lido.

The second paradox is this: that though the world thinks of the Lido as a place of expensive pleasure-making, the cultural guide books dismiss it with a grimace, the loftier tourists claim never to have set foot there, nevertheless these reefs are places of drama and romance, soaked in history as well as sun-tan lotion, and still the sacred bulwarks of the Serenissima.

They begin with a bang at the Porto di Lido, the principal gateway of
Venice, which was formed by the union of three smaller breaches in the
lidi
, but later fell into such neglect that under the Austrian régime only small ships could use it. It was revived when the Italian Kingdom took over Venice, sheltered by the two long moles which now stretch out to sea, and restored to all its old splendours. Few of the world's sea-gates have such noble memories. Generations of argosies sailed for the East through this passage, and here for eight centuries the Doges of Venice, in a celebrated ceremonial, married the Adriatic.

The custom began when the Doge Pietro Orseolo, in the year 997, took a fleet this way to defeat the first sea-enemies of the Republic, the Dalmatians (unfailingly described by the Venetian historians as ‘pirates'). For decades the Venetians had paid them tribute, but in that year the Doge announced that he ‘did not care to send a messenger this time, but would come to Dalmatia himself. He annihilated them, and over the years the ceremony at the
porto
, which had begun as a libation before battle, came to be symbolic of Venetian naval power. A vast cavalcade of ornamental barges sailed to the Lido each Ascension Day, with the Doge supreme in the stern of his
bucintoro
, and a cluster of tourist craft milling about behind. The great fleet hove-to at the sea-gate, and there was handed to the Doge a glittering diamond ring, blessed by the Patriarch. Holy water was poured into the sea, and the Doge, standing in his poop, cried in a loud voice: ‘O sea, we wed thee in sign of our true and everlasting dominion!' – and to the singing of choirs, the prayers of priests, the acclaim of the people, the rumble of guns, the back-paddling of oars, the slapping of sails, the roaring of the tide, he threw the ring ceremoniously into the water. For twenty generations this ritual was one of the great sights of Europe. Several hundred rings were thrown into the sea (though their value, we may assume, progressively declined as the mercenary instincts of the Venetians developed). One was found later inside a fish, and is now in the treasury of the Basilica, looking grand but corroded in a glass case. The others are somewhere below you in the mud, souvenirs of divorce: for when, that fatal April day in 1797, the guns of Sant' Andrea opened fire upon the
Libérateurd' Italie
, Venice's wedlock with the sea collapsed in bitter tears.

Beside the
portο
, and visible far out to sea, stands the magnificent old church of San Nicolò di Lido, an ancient weather-station, lighthouse, watch-tower and sailors' talisman. It is named for a lie, for the body of Santa Claus does not, as the old Venetians claimed, in fact lie inside it. In the eleventh century Bari, then under Norman domination, set itself up in rivalry to Venice as a mart between East and West, and wished to emulate the Serenissima in the possession of some awe-inspiring relic. Its citizens acccordingly acquired the corpse of St Nicolas of Myra, patron saint of pawnbrokers, slaves, virgins, sailors, robbers, prisoners, owners of property and children. This saint was particularly revered by the Venetians, if only because at the Council of Nicaea he had soundly boxed the ears of the theologian Arius, from whose very heresy, adopted by the Lombards, some of the earliest of the Venetians had fled into the lagoon. Since he was also the patron of seafarers, they much resented his adoption by Bari, especially as it occurred during the years when their own great St Mark was lost inside his pillar of the Basilica.

They therefore invented the fiction that a party of Venetian adventurers had raided Bari and stolen the corpse, and the church on the Lido was renamed as its shrine. Great ceremonies were held there on the saint's feast day, and even in the last years of the Republic it was still claimed that his body lay there, ‘together with another St Nicholas, uncle of the first'. The uncle, indeed, may really be there: but Bari has long re-established itself as the undoubted resting-place of Santa Claus, for the silver reliquary of St Nicholas there is one of the principal miracle shrines of Italy, and has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the clearest spring water. San Nicolò di Lido thus has an abashed, hang-dog air to it, and the more houseproud of the guide books prudently circumvent its history, and linger with unbalanced emphasis among its fine carved choir stalls.

Down the road is the tree-shaded cemetery of the Venetian Jews, once a place of mockery and contumely, now munificently restored. Near it is a Catholic burial-ground, and in an overgrown corner of the latter, locked away among rickety walls, are the remains of the
celebrated Protestant burial-ground of the Lido. In the old days
acattolici
who died in Venice were denied burial in consecrated ground, and were instead dismissed to a field on this lonely island. The penultimate British Ambassador to Venice was buried there, and so, I believe, was Shelley's Clara: but when the airport was built at the end of the island, their graves were engulfed, and their remains were bundled together and placed in one aristocratic sarcophagus. Today this memorial stands in the corner of the cemetery, and on it you may just discern, like a gentlemanly whisper from the past, the lordly name of Sackville.

All around it, weedy and decayed, lie the other uprooted tombstones, some flat, some upside down, some piled like paving-stones. The little garden is difficult to find, and hardly anyone visits it. When I was there, guided through the maze of Catholic tombs by an obliging gardener, I idly brushed away the dust and pine-needles from a slab that lay beside my hand, and found it to be the tombstone of Joseph Smith, the British Consul who first recognized the talent of Canaletto and founded the splendid royal collection of his pictures now at Windsor Castle. ‘This man', said I to my companion, ‘was once much honoured in England.' The gardener smiled sympathetically, groping for words that would be at once honest and undepre-cating, for he had never heard of Joseph Smith, but did not want to hurt my feelings. ‘I imagine so,' he said at last, ‘I imagine so.'

Among these old and mellowed things, the new world of the Lido coruscates. Vast, glittering and costly is this famous beach resort, and only a prig or a recluse could call it altogether dull. Its hotels range from the orchid to the aspidistra; its shops are full of outrageous clothes and gorgeously sticky cakes; its streets are lined with wistaria and bougainvillea; its Casino is lavish, its discotheques well frequented; its strings of fairy-lights, in loops and gaudy cascades, provide a piquant and sometimes comforting contrast to the dim medieval outline of Venice across the water. You can travel about the Lido by bus, by car or barouche. You can gamble there, or spot celebrities, or ride, or eat over-priced ill-cooked ostentatious moonlit meals. You can even, if it is the depth of winter, or if you are a person
of forcible temperament, sometimes push your way down the bathing beaches for a mediocre swim (assuming you have a ticket, of course, for that particular stretch of foreshore).

There are some lovely villas on the lagoon side of the Lido – long white creeper-covered houses, such as might stand above Carthage in Tunisia, or recline among the blossoms in Marakesh. There are also many modest houses and blocks of flats, for an increasing number of Venetians prefer to live in the easy space of this modern town, and commute each morning to the crooked Serenissima. The Lido is a well-planned, well-kept, comfortable place, and even in the winter, when its promenades are deserted and its restaurants closed, it still feels fairly cosy. Its seaside is second rate – ‘after our English seas', says Mr Edward Hutton bravely, ‘the sluggish Adriatic might seem but a poor substitute': but its indescribable views across the lagoon, to the
Isole del Dolore
and the dim Euganean Hills, and the high façades of Venice herself – this consummate prospect makes the resort uniquely privileged among the holiday places of the earth.

Its influence, like Iesolo's, is creeping inexorably southwards, and the southern tip of the island is already occupied by Alberoni, a kind of embryo Lido, with a fashionable golf course, a couple of hotels, and numbers of hospitals, rest camps and sanatoria strewn among its sands like blockhouses. These two outposts of sophistication, though, are not yet united, and between them there are still reaches of the Lido shore that are silent and simple, meshed in weeds, tree-trunks and creepers, and littered with sea-shells (among which, on summer evenings, you may sometimes see eccentric enthusiasts, in baggy trousers or gypsy skirts, energetically scrabbling). The lagoon shore is lined with vegetable gardens and obscure rustic outhouses, and the little creeks that sidle into the island are so rich and steamy, so thickly fringed with reeds and coarse grass, that they might be brown backwaters of the Mississippi, in Huck Finn's country.

Amidst all this, with its face towards Venice, stands the fishing town of Malamocco, one of the friendliest places in the lagoon. The original Malamocco, the first capital of the united Venetians, has entirely vanished: scholars believe that it stood off-shore, on an island in the sea, and that it was overwhelmed by a twelfth-century
cataclysm – every now and then an expedition puts on its goggles and flippers, and dives in search of its ruins. Modem Malamocco, all the same, feels very old indeed. It has its own miniature piazza, three churches, and an old gubernatorial palace. A canal runs behind the town, between the lagoon and the sea, and here the vegetable barges set up shop each morning, announcing their arrival with ancient wailing hawking cries, apparently in Arabic. The women meander back to their houses carrying their potatoes in outstretched aprons, and the small boys stand on the quayside licking ice-creams. Green wet water-meadows stretch away to the sea-wall, and the streets of Malamocco are (so a notice kindly tells us) paved with sea-shells.

There is a trattoria near the waterfront at Malamocco where you may eat your
scampi
and female crabs in a garden, and survey the translucent lagoon before you as from a napkinned terrace. Helpful loafers will look after your boat for you, and from the neighbouring bowling-alley you may sometimes hear guttural cries of triumph or despair, and the thudding of wooden balls. Away to the right, over a parade of little islands, you can see the towers of Venice. To the left there stands the disused lighthouse of Spania, surrounded by thickets of fishermen's poles. Near by old ships sometimes lie in pathetic dignity, high and rusty in the water: in Evelyn's day Malamocco was the ‘chiefe port and ankerage' for English merchantmen, but now it is only a haven for unwanted vessels. Now and then the trolleybus from the Lido slithers to a stop beside the quay, and occasionally a trim little Fiat scurries by: but there is an air of sun-soaked, slap-happy repose to Malamocco. The excitements of the
plage
have not yet reached it, and the exertions of old Venice have long been forgotten. You may bask here in the sunshine undisturbed and unembarrassed, and even the small female crabs, fried in fat and garnished with oily segments of octopus, have a tranquil, soothing flavour to their shrivelled pincers.

The gusto of the Lido fades as you sail southwards down the reef, and this easy-going feeling withers. The northern stretch of the
lidi
is prosperous and hospitable; the southern is threadbare and penurious. A slow serene ripple from the sea sways your progress as you
pass Alberoni and cross the Porto di Malamocco, the second of the Venetian sea-gates, where the Austrian fleet used to lie at anchor, and the super-tankers pound down to Sant' Ilario; but on the other side the Littorale di Pellestrina lies harshly, a poor, cluttered, ramshackle litter of villages, straggling along the ever-narrowing line of the reef.

By now it is hardly an island, and the villages huddle together as though they spring directly from the water – the sea at their back doors, the lagoon lapping at the front. Where San Pietro in Volta ends, Porto Secco begins, and Sant' Antonio merges into Pellestrina, so that as you pass by their successive unkempt quaysides the reef beside you is like one long water-side street. There are churches now and again, and a
piazzetta
or two beside the water, and a café with tables outside its door, and sometimes a poor arid garden. The cottages are gaily painted but peeling, and are intermingled with tattered sheds, warehouses, boatyards, wood-piles. There are great oil barges, high and dry on piles, having their bottoms scraped; there are fleets of fishing boats in endless lines along the quays. At Porto Secco you may see the desiccated creek that is a dried-up
porto
to the sea, at Pellestrina there is a medieval fortress-tower: but mostly the villages dissolve before your eyes into a muddle of tumbled structures, and look as though they have been not merely swept and bleached by the elements, but positively scraped.