Venice (4 page)

Venice itself, compact though the city is, remains criss-crossed with local flavours and loyalties. Each district, each clamorous market square has it own recognizable atmosphere – here harsh, here kindly, here simple, here sophisticated. Even more than London, Venice remains a collection of villages. In one you may be sure of kindly treatment, courteous shopmen and friendly women: in another, experience will teach you to be hard-skinned, for its manners may be gruff and its prices unyielding. Even the dialect varies from quarter to quarter, though only half a mile may separate them, and there are words in use at one end of Venice that are quite unfamiliar at the other. Street names appear over and over again, so independent is each section of the city: there are a dozen lanes called
Forno
in Venice, and thirteen named for the Madonna.

Until modern times the city was divided into two implacably rival factions, the Nicolotti and the Castellani, based upon long-forgotten animosities in the early days of settlement; and so riotous were the
brawls between the two parties that the old Rialto bridge had a drawbridge in the middle, enabling the authorities to separate the mobs, by a swift tug of a rope, leaving them glaring at each other impotently across the void. This deep-rooted hostility gradually lost its venom, and degenerated into mock combats, regattas and athletic competitions, until in 1848 the old rivals were reconciled in a secret dawn ceremony at the Salute, as a gesture of unity against Austrian rule. Today the factions are dead and almost forgotten (though you might not think so from the more imaginative guide books); but there remains an element of prickly parochial pride, based upon a parish or a square, and sometimes boisterously expressed.

None of this is surprising. Venice is a maze of waterways and alleys, crooked and unpredictable, following the courses of antique channels in the mud, and unimproved by town planners. Until the last century only one bridge, the Rialto, spanned the Grand Canal. In the days before motor boats and tarred pavements it must have been a fearfully tiresome process to move about Venice, let alone take ship to the mainland: and who can wonder if the people of Santa Margherita, satisfied with their own shops and taverns, rarely bothered to trudge all the way to Santa Maria Formosa? Sometimes a Venetian housewife announces conclusively that there are no cabbages in the city today: but what she means is that the greengrocer at the corner of Campo San Barnaba, with whom her family custom has been traditionally associated since the days of the early Crusades, has sold out of the vegetable this morning.

From this small city, though, from this very people sprang the glories of the Serenissima. It is said that at the time of the Fourth Crusade, in which Venice played a prominent and quite unprincipled part, the population of the city was only 40,000. In all the thirteen centuries of the Republic it was probably never more than 170,000. Venice was therefore a State of severely specialized talents. She produced fine administrators, seamen, merchants, bankers, artists, architects,
musicians, printers, diplomatists. She produced virtually no poets, only one great dramatist, hardly a novelist, scarcely a philosopher. Her only eminent thinker was Paolo Sarpi, the monk who conducted the Venetian case in the worst of the Republic's quarrels with the Papacy, and who discovered the contraction of the iris. Her boldest generals were
condottieri
. She was pre-eminently an adapter rather than an innovator. Her vocation was commerce; her countryside was the sea; her tastes were voluptuous; her function was that of a bridge between east and west; her obsession was political stability; her consolation, when she needed it, was self-indulgence; and it is remarkable how closely her talents fitted her needs. For many centuries Venice was never short of the leaders, craftsmen, entertainers and business men she required, from astute ambassadors to diligent shipwrights, from financiers to architects, from Marco Polo to Titian to Goldoni, the merriest of minor geniuses.

The Venetians always had an eager eye for a monopoly or a quick return, and enjoyed the reputation of being willing to sell anything they possessed, if offered enough for it (though in the sixteenth century a Duke of Mantua, coveting Rizzo's famous statue of Eve in the Doge's Palace, unsuccessfully offered its own weight in gold for it). They first ventured out of the lagoon as carriers, conveying other people's produce from source to consumer, and throughout the period of the Crusades they shamelessly milched both sides. When the Fourth Crusade was launched in 1202, the Venetians were asked to ship the Frankish armies to Palestine. ‘We come in the name of the noblest barons of France,' said the emissaries to the Doge Enrico Dandolo. ‘No other power on earth can aid us as you can; therefore they implore you, in God's name, to have compassion on the Holy Land, and to join them in avenging the contempt of Jesus Christ by furnishing them with the ships and other necessaries, so that they may pass the seas.' The Doge returned a classic Venetian reply. ‘On what terms?' he asked.

Nor did he allow any soft Christian scruples to affect the conduct of the campaign. The agreed fee for the job was 85,000 silver marks, payable in four instalments, plus a half of all booty: and for this the
Venetians were to ship 33,500 men to the Holy Land, with their horses, keep them in provisions for nine months, and contribute their own quota of soldiers and warships to the war. The Frankish army duly arrived in Venice, and was encamped upon the island of the Lido. The ships and supplies were ready as promised. The Venetians, who had some doubts about actually taking part in the holy enterprise, were encouraged in their enthusiasms by a round of liturgy and pageantry. The imperturbable old Dandolo, practically blind and almost ninety, declared his intention of leading the fleet in person. But when it came to the crucial point, the Crusaders had not the money to pay.

Old hands at unfulfilled contracts, the Venetians were undismayed. They first set a watch upon all the approaches to the Lido, to ensure that the knights-at-arms did not slip away, and they then made a proposition of their own. The Crusaders could still be shipped to the Holy Land, they said, if they would agree to stop on the way and subdue one or two rebellious Venetian colonies on the Dalmatian coast, thus securing the Republic's trade routes through the Adriatic. The Franks accepted these unorthodox terms, the great fleet sailed at last, and the Dalmatian ports were subdued one by one: but the Venetians still had further profits to exact. Dandolo next agreed with the adaptable Crusaders to make another diversion, postpone the humiliation of the infidel, and capture the Greek Christian bastion of Constantinople, with whose Emperor the Venetians were, for one reason and another, angrily at odds. Led by the old blind Doge himself, they stormed the 400 towers of the city, deposed the Emperor, loaded their ships with booty, and divided the Empire among themselves. The Crusade never did reach the Holy Land, and the temporary fall of Byzantium only strengthened the cause of Islam. But from a simple breach of contract, brilliantly exploited, the Venetians became ‘Lords and Masters of a Quarter and a Half-quarter of the Roman Empire'; they acquired sovereignty over Lacedaemon, Durazzo, the Cyclades, the Sporades and Crete; they sailed home with cargoes of treasure, gold, precious gems, sacred relics, that were to make their city an enduring marvel; and they consolidated the commercial supremacy in the Levant that was to
keep them comfortably in their palaces for many a long century to come.

They are sharp business men still. Venetian merchants, contractors and shippers retain a reputation for hard-headedness, if not cussed-ness. (‘A stiff-necked and rebellious people' is how one administrator from Rome recently described the Venetians.) The Bourse of Venice, near the Piazza of St Mark, is conducted with grave and Doge-like precision: not a breath of wild speculation ruffles its notice-boards, but a strong sense of opportunism leaks from the doors of its telephone booths. The Venetian banks, whose offices still cluster evocatively about the Rialto, that old hub of fortune, are impeccably organized. The holiday industry sucks its last dollar, pound, franc, pfennig from the visiting crowds with exquisite impartiality.

The Venetians remain hard but wise bargainers. When their forebears undertook to transport an army or equip a fleet, their prices were high and their terms inflexible, but they did it in style. Their ships were the best, their trappings the most gorgeous, they fulfilled their agreements scrupulously. ‘
Noi
siamo
calculatori
', the Venetians have always cheerfully admitted – ‘We are a
calculating
people.' So it is today. The Venetians will always let you pay another time, will seldom cheat you over the odd lira, are never disgruntled if you break off a negotiation. They are business men of finesse. Nor is the old high-vaulted enterprise altogether dead. There is at least one hotelier in the city who would undoubtedly storm the walls of Byzantium, or navigate a galley around the meridian, if guaranteed a suitable commission. The Venetians believe in self-dependence. On the Accademia bridge one day a boy was hawking horoscopes, wrapped up in little yellow paper packages. A passing business man of my acquaintance paused to ask what they were, gave a toss of his head to me, and slapped his right arm (genteelly draped, as it happened, in a nice herring-bone tweed). ‘
That's
my horoscope!' he said grandly, and stalked off towards the bank.

Such Venetian men of action, martial or commercial, have always been supported by a class of devoted administrators and functionaries, in the old days mostly patricians. The prestige of the civil
servants declined with the rot of the Republic, and their morality weakened, so that at the end the administration of Venice was rancid with corruption: but the best of the aristocrats, adapting themselves to changing times, maintained the old traditions of thoughtful integrity, and became merged with the professional classes. Their successors, the lawyers, doctors and engineers of today, are still formidable: handsome and serious people, long-boned and soberly dressed, with a cool look of Rome to their features, and scarcely a trace of southern passion. The fuddy-duddy bureaucracy of Italy has long since invaded Venice: but the true Venetian servants of the State still serenely circumvent it, and conduct their affairs with all the logic, lucidity and unflustered sense of the old Republic.

To see such people at their best, you should visit the criminal law courts of Venice, in an old palace beside the Rialto bridge, overlooking the markets. Outside the windows there is a clamour of market-men and shrill-voiced women; a housemaid singing adenoidally at her chores; a roar of boat-engines on the Grand Canal; sometimes the wet thud of a steam-hammer driving a pile into the mud. The building is crumbling a little, but is still sombrely dignified, with high shaded passages, and heavy dark doors, and a smell of wax, age and documents. At the back of the panelled court-room a few spectators stand respectfully, holding their hats and whispering. Beside the door the usher, in a dark grey suit, meditatively toys with a pencil at his desk, as the clerk to the council might have played ominously with a quill, before the grimmer tribunals of the Republic. And high at the dark mahogany dais, beneath a carved slogan of justice –
La
Legge
Ε
Uguale
Per Tutti
– sit the Venetian magistrates. Their robes are gloomy and the tabs of their collars very white. Their faces are clever and cryptic. They sit there at the bench in attitudes of indolent but potentially menacing attention, sprawling a little like parliamentarians, some young, some middle aged; and as they examine the next witness, a cross-eyed laundry-woman who sits crookedly on the edge of her chair, squirming mendaciously, every inch a liar, from Paisley head-scarf to grubby high heels – as they put their points, in turn, with a cold piercing courtesy, they seem the very essence of the old Venice, a hard but brilliant organism, whose disciplines were
known to all, and applied without favouritism. (And you can see plausible portraits of all those jurists, painted 300 years before their time, in the pictures of the Magistrates and Supervisors of the Mint that hang in the Ca' d'Oro.)

The Republic was sustained, too, by a stout company of artisans, denied all political responsibility, but never without self-respect. The rulers of Venice, though they held the working classes well under control, did their cunning best to keep them contented, partly by feeding them upon a diet of ceremonial, partly by fostering their sense of craft and guild. When the fishermen of the Nicolotti faction elected their leader each year, the Doge himself was represented at the ceremony – first by a mere doorkeeper of the Doge's Palace, later by a more senior official. So important to the State were the sixteenth-century glass-blowers, masters of one of the Venetian monopolies, that they were given a patrician status of their own, and excused all kinds of impositions. (As a cold corollary, it was publicly announced that if any glass-blower emigrated with his secrets, emissaries of the State would instantly be dispatched to murder him: legend has it that the two men who made the famous clock in the Piazza of St Mark, with its intricate zodiacal devices, were later officially blinded, to prevent them making another for somebody else.) The great Venetian artists and architects were nearly all of the craftsmen class, rich and celebrated though they became, and the painters usually subscribed to the Guild of House Painters. Hale old characters they were, living robustly and dying late – Venice was a State of Grand Old Men: Tintoretto died at 76, Guardi at 81, Longhi and Vittoria at 83, Longhena at 84, Giovanni Bellini at 86, Titian and da Ponte at 88, Sansovino at 91. Above all, Venice depended upon her men of the sea. The city Venetians soon gave up crewing their own ships, relying upon Dalmatians and people of the outer lagoon: but the Republic was always well supplied with sea captains, fishermen, boatbuilders, and artisans at the great naval base of the Arsenal, the first dockyard of the world.

By and large it is still true. Modern Venice is rich in conscientious craftsmen, people of strong and loyal simplicity, such as one
imagines in the sea-ports of early Victorian England. The specialist workmen of Venice are still impressive, from the men at the garage at the Piazzale Roma, who skilfully steer cars by manipulating the two front wheels, to the myriad picture-framers of the city, whose hearts must sink at the very thought of another sunset Rialto. Splendid horny craftsmen work in the sawdust shambles of the boat-yards – in Venetian,
squeri
– where the tar cauldrons bubble and stink, and they caulk the boats with flaming faggots. Crusty old men like London cabbies, holding antique hooks, stand beside the canals in long flapping greatcoats looking rheumily for gondolas to help alongside. Even the drivers of grand motor boats sometimes hide an agreeable heart behind a pompous exterior: and there are few kindlier policemen than those who patrol the canals in their little speedboats, or solemnly potter about, buttoned in blue greatcoats, in flat-bottomed skiffs (an activity dramatically described in one guide book as ‘controlling the water-ways from swiftly moving punts').

And among them all, the very image of Venice, straight-descended from Carpaccio, moves the gondolier. He is not a popular figure among the tourists, who think his prices high and his manner sometimes overbearing: and indeed he is frequently a Communist, and no respecter of persons, and he often shamelessly pumps the innocent foreigner with inaccurate information, and sometimes unfairly induces him to disregard the tariff (‘Ah, but today is the feast of San Marcuola,
signor
, and it is
traditional
to charge double fares on this holy day'). I have grown to like and admire him, though, and I can forgive a few peccadillos among men who live on a four-months' tourist season, and scrape the winter through as part-time fishermen and odd-job workers. The gondoliers are usually highly intelligent: they are also tolerant, sardonic, and, with some grumpy and usually elderly exceptions, humorous. They are often very good-looking, too, fair and loose-limbed – many of their forebears came from the Slav coast of Istria and Dalmatia – and they sometimes have a cultivated, worldly look to them, like undergraduates punting on the Cherwell, naval officers amusing themselves, or perhaps fashionable ski instructors.

The gondoliers still have a strong sense of guild unity. Their
co-operative is a powerful force in Venice, and in the past they even had their own communal banks, run on a system of mutual risk. Not long ago each
traghetto
, or gondola ferry-station, was organized in its own assertive guild (they still maintain the protocol, though the officials are now municipally appointed). Nowadays, though nearly every gondolier is soil affiliated to a
traghetto
, they are all members of one co-operative. Each gondola is privately owned – your gondolier is not necessarily the owner, possession often running in families – and profits go to the proprietor, the co-operative being merely a negotiating agency, a system of social security, and a common convenience – and sometimes a political organ too. Competition between gondoliers is, nevertheless, strictly governed, and the celebrated gondoliers' quarrels, dear to generations of travel writers, often have a distinctly stagy air to them. Nor are other classes of watermen welcomed at their stands. Only fifty
sandoli
, the smaller passenger boats of Venice, are officially licensed: all the others you see, blandly stealing custom from the gondolas, are darkly described as being ‘outside the law'.