Venice (7 page)

The second consequence, a corollary, is that the Venetians have a habit of minding other people's business. Many a fussy citizen loves to interfere, if you let your children wander down the water-steps. Many a know-all will give you the benefit of his advice, if you carry more passengers in your boat than the law allows. The Venetians have an insatiable interest in your movements and purposes, and can never resist telling you how mistaken you are, or advising you how to do it better. If the luggage is stolen from your car, as it stands in the Piazzale Roma, the first reaction of Venetians is not to find the missing suitcase, or apprehend the thief, but to give you a short lecture on the evils of carelessness – and the next is to say, with a judicious raising of the eyes, ‘Ah, these Italians, they'll do anything!' as if to make it absolutely clear that no proper Venetian ever stole a hat-box.

For all the blank doors of its apartments (distorted television voices seeping through their hinges, as you toil up the echoing stairs) Venice is a gossipy provincial city, where your movements are eagerly observed and your visitors adroitly analysed. If you take a picnic lunch to a far corner of the lagoon, somebody is sure to have seen your boat steal out, and when you come home at night through the empty garden a surreptitious chink of light, momentarily appearing in the shuttered mass of the palace, testifies to the alertness of the second floor. Somebody once told me that Venice used to be an important clearing-station for the British Secret Service. Certainly its ear-to-the-ground propensities are catching, and nobody is a better Venetian than I am myself, when it comes to curiosity.

The women of Venice are very handsome, and very vain. They are tall, they walk beautifully, and they are often fair (in the sixteenth century Venetian ladies used to bleach their hair in the sunshine, training
it through crownless hats like vines through a trellis). Their eyes are sometimes a heavy-lidded greenish-blue, like the eyes of rather despondent armadillos. Rare indeed is a dishevelled Venetian woman, and even the Madonnas and female saints of the old masters are usually elegantly dressed. The most slovenly people to be seen in the city are nearly always tourists – cranks and water-colour artists apart.

The Venetians are not, by and large, rich: but they have always spent a large proportion of their money on clothes and ornaments, and you will hardly ever see a girl dressed for pottering, in a sloppy sweater and a patched skirt, or in that unpressed dishabille that marks the utter emancipation of the Englishwoman. The girls at the University, who are either studying languages, or learning about Economics and Industrial Practices, look more like models than academics: and the housemaids, when they walk off in scented couples for their weekend pleasures, would hardly seem out of place at Ascot, or at a gala convention of the Women Lawyers' Association.

This love of dress is deep-rooted in the Venetian nature. The men are very dapper, too, and until quite recently used to cool themselves with little fans and parasols in the Public Gardens – ‘curious', as Augustus Hare observed austerely in 1896, ‘to English eyes'. As early as 1299 the Republic introduced laws restricting ostentation, and later the famous sumptuary laws were decreed, strictly governing what people might wear, with a special magistracy to enforce them. They were never a success. When the Patriarch of Venice forbade the use of ‘excessive ornaments', a group of women appealed directly to the Pope, who promptly restored them their jewellery. When the Republic prohibited long gowns, the Venetian women caught up their trains in intricate and delicious folds, fastened with sumptuous clasps. When it was announced that only a single row of pearls might be worn, with a maximum value of 200 ducats, the evasions of the law were so universal, so ingenious and so brazen that the magistracy gave up, and turned its disapproving eyes elsewhere. In the eighteenth century Venetian women were the most richly dressed in Europe, and it took an Englishwoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to observe that since everybody wore masks at the opera anyway, there was consequently ‘no trouble in dressing'.

Among the patrician ladies of old Venice, as among the women of Arabian harems, there was nothing much to think about but clothes and babies. Venetian
mores
were bred out of Byzantium, and respectable women were closely guarded and carefully circumscribed. Clamped in their houses out of harm's way, they were little more than tools or playthings, western odalisques: even the Doge's wife had no official position. No item of dress was more popular among Venetian aristocrats than the absurd towering clogs, sometimes twenty inches high, which obliged their wives to totter about with the help of two servants (and which, since they made great height socially desirable, have perhaps left a legacy in the unshakeable determination of modern Venetian women to wear the highest possible heels in all circumstances).

Only two women have played parts of any prominence in Venetian history. The first was Caterina Cornaro, who married the King of Cyprus in 1472 and was officially adopted as a ‘daughter of the Republic' in order to ensure Venetian control of the island: her husband died a year after their marriage, the Venetians took over, and poor Caterina languished away in gilded exile at Asolo, signing herself to the last as ‘Queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia, Lady of Asolo'. The second was Bianca Cappello, daughter of a noble house, who ran away with a Florentine clerk in 1564: she was condemned to death
in
absentia
, such was the disgrace of it all, but presently rose in the world to become Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and was promptly reclasped to the Venetian bosom as another ‘daughter of the Republic'. She died of poisoning in 1587, but the Republic did not go into mourning, just in case it was the Grand Duke who had poisoned her.

It was only in the eighteenth century that the upper-class Venetian woman came into her own, and even now a cloistered feeling of anachronism often surrounds her. Sometimes a beautiful young blonde is to be seen in Venice, gracefully rowing her own boat: but the gondoliers do not even consider the possibility that she might be Venetian, and airily point her out as English, American or German, according to the nationality of their passengers. With her maids, her always exquisite clothes, her waiting gondolier, and the almost
insuperable difficulty she has in getting out of one cushioned gondola and into another, the Venetian lady is scarcely the kind to go messing about in boats. She is often rich and often influential (‘the flat downstairs', I was once told by a house agent, ‘is occupied by a lady, with her husband'): but there are few professional women in the city, and one sometimes pines, in an ambience so perfumed and cosseted, for a hard-boiled New York career woman, with her heart – or part of it, anyway – deep in the propagation of soap flakes.

Other classes of Venetian women were not so sheltered under the Republic. Burghers' wives and daughters were always freer and often better educated. Poor women lived a life of rugged equality, and Venetian working women today are often jolly gregarious characters, like figures from a Goldoni comedy, throwing hilarious ribaldries across the post-office counter, or sitting plumply at their knitting on the quaysides. Courtesans, in sixteenth-century Venice, were not only celebrated and honoured, but often people of cultivation, with a taste for art and poetry (though the law at one time decreed that each such girl must carry a red light at the prow of her gondola). In earlier centuries there was a celebrated brothel, the Casteletto, at the end of the Rialto bridge, famous throughout Europe for the beauty and skill of its girls. Later, when Venice was beginning her decline, the prostitutes became courtesans, increased in wealth and respectability, burst the confines of the bordels, and gave the city its lasting reputation for lascivious charm. At the end of the sixteenth century there are said to have been 2,889 patrician ladies in Venice, and 2,508 nuns, and 1,936 burgher women: but there were 11,654 courtesans, of whom 210 were carefully registered in a catalogue by a public-spirited citizen of the day, together with their addresses and prices – or, as the compiler delicately put it, ‘the amount of money to be paid by noblemen and others desirous of entering their good graces'. The cheapest charged one
scudo
, the most expensive thirty, and the catalogue reckons that the enjoyment of them all would cost the intemperate visitor 1,200 gold
scudi
.

A scholarly Venetian once remarked that his city had fostered three bad practices hitherto unknown in Italy – adulation, Lutheranism and debauchery: but he did not sound altogether censorious. Venice
in her heyday, despite a streak of salty puritanism in her character, was tolerant about sex. A favourite subject of the Venetian masters, it has been observed, was Christ Defending the Woman Taken in Adultery, and even the established church was fairly easy-going with libertines: it was only with reluctance and after long delay that the administration of the Basilica, in the seventeenth century, closed the chapel of San Clemente because of the scandalous things that were known to go on behind the altar. Gay young nuns were seen on visiting days in habits distinctly
décolletés
, and with clusters of pearls in their virginal hair. In the wildest days of carnival even the Papal Nuncio used to wear a domino. Family chaplains looked benignly upon the Venetian institution of the
cicisbeo
, the handsome young man who, in the dying years of the Republic, used to stand in constant attendance upon each great lady of Venice, even sometimes helping her maids to dress her. ‘The only honest woman in Venice', a wry husband remarked to a friend one day, ‘is that one there' – and he pointed to a little stone figure carved on a wall above a bridge: Venice took his point, and to this day the bridge, near the Frari church, is called The Bridge of the Honest Woman.

Today all is changed. Except at the more sophisticated levels of hotel society, sin is hard to come by in modern Venice. Brothels – ‘houses of toleration' – are no longer permitted by Italian law, and the police deal severely with harlots. When some modest bordel is uncovered, the newspapers make a great fuss about it – ‘an operation brilliant, delicate and complete', glowed the
Gazzettino
when the police recently pounced upon a backstairs stew in Dorsoduro. One distinguished foreign diplomat, it is true, discovered not long ago that his cook had been running a small but profitable brothel on the third floor of his consulate; but there is no red-light district in Venice. The sailors who wander through the city from their ships often look uncharacteristically lost and ill at ease, and you sometimes overhear disgruntled American business men trying to obtain guidance from reticent barmen (‘My score so far is precisely zero, and I don't like it that way, see?
Comprenez
,
amico
? Hey?').

Venice nowadays is a regenerate city, free of public vice and aberrations, where a politic eye is still winked at the idiosyncrasies of
foreigners, but where men are generally men, and women usually marry. The convent of the Penitents, reserved for remorseful harlots, has long since closed its doors – it stands on the Cannaregio, nearly opposite the slaughter-house, and offered a five-year reform course for its inmates. So has the home for fallen women, near San Sebastiano, that was founded by the most famous and cultured of all the courtesans, the prostitute-poetess Veronica Franco. This is not one of your smoky, hole-in-corner, juke-box cities, and here the Italo-American culture, that garish cross-breed, is kept at bay by water and tradition. A notice appeared on the walls of the city one recent summer day, sponsored by the Society for the Protection of Youth in Venice, begging citizens and visitors to wear garments ‘in accordance with the propriety of our city, which, being proud of its traditional standard of high morality, cannot approve of scanty or unbecoming clothes'. I thought of the whoopee days of carnival as I read this sober appeal, of the masked Nuncio and the simpering cicisbei, the harlots and the hedonists, and ‘
O Tempora
,' I breathed as I hitched my trousers up, ‘
O Mores
!'

But for all its reformation, Venice remains a sexy city still, as many a ravished alien has discovered. It is a city of seduction. There is sex and susceptibility in the very air of the place, in the mellow sunshine stones of its pavements, the shadows of its courtyards, the discretion of its silent black gondolas (which sometimes, as Byron remarked, ‘contain a deal of fun, like mourning coaches when the funeral's done'). In the summer evenings symmetrical pairs of lovers, neatly balanced, occupy each water-side seat of the Public Gardens: and the steps that lead down to the Grand Canal from the Courtyard of the Duke Sforza are worn with moonlight ecstasies.

The Venetians love their children, sometimes with a sickly intensity. Venetian fathers carry their babies with unashamed delight, and Venetian mothers show signs of instant cardiac crisis if little Giorgio ventures within six feet of the water. Venetian children are
exquisitely, if sometimes rather ludicrously dressed: the minutest little baby girls have pocket handkerchiefs tied under their chins, as head-scarves, and even the waxen Christ-children of the churches, lapped in tinsel tawdry, sometimes wear lace-embroidered drawers.

It is not altogether an easy city for children to live in. It has no dangerous traffic and few unspeakable rascals; but Venice is inescapably urban, and only lucky children with gardens, or with parents indulgent enough to take them to the distant park, have somewhere green to play. Blithe but pathetic are the groups of urchins to be found entertaining themselves, in hot dry squares or dripping alleyways, with their inexplicable Venetian games – the most popular is governed by the accuracy with which a child can thrown the old rubber heel of a shoe, but is so hedged about with subtleties and qualifications that for the life of me I have never been able to master the rules. The State schools of Venice are excellent and lavishly staffed, but they generally occupy tall, dark, overheated buildings, heavily decorated with potted plants. There are no playing fields or yards, and even the mid-morning break (or so my own children lugubriously assure me) is celebrated indoors, with a biscuit or an orange at a blank brown desk.

And in the afternoons, when school is over – children under ten only go in the mornings – and their mothers take them for a breath of air along the quayside, dauntingly spotless are those infants' clothes, unscuffled their polished shoes, neat their gloves and impeccable their hair, as they stroll sedately along the quay, beside the dancing lagoon. In the winter months there is a fair on the Riva degli Schiavoni, near St Mark's, with the usual assembly of roundabouts, bumper-cars, swings and candy-floss men, revolving colourfully against a background of ships' funnels and riggings. All the apparatus of gaiety is there, with a tang of the sea as well, but I have never wandered through that fairground without being struck by the pathos of it all, so restrained do the children seem to be, so ardently delighted by every bump of the merry-go-round. Many Venetians seem to work their children very hard, loading them with homework, foreign languages and mathematics, to sustain the family honour, or get them into universities, and keeping them up late at
night. Little Venetians often seem old beyond their years, and frighteningly well-informed. When the Doge's Palace was burnt in 1479, the only record left of Petrarch's inscriptions upon the walls was the notebook of Marin Sanudo, who had taken the trouble to copy them down when inspecting the palace at the age of eight. (He went on to write a history of the world in fifty-five volumes.)

But not all Venetian children are solemn or scholastic, and many are unusually attractive. Venetian working-class women often raise their children with a bluff common sense: a single open-handed smack on the face from a benevolent washer-woman instantly and permanently cured my elder son of the unpleasant habit of spitting. In the summer dog-days a stream of mudlarks, as in an old-fashioned Hollywood musical, throw themselves contrapuntally across your path into the canals, and some beguiling tomboys can be seen most afternoons up to their thighs in the mud-flats of the inner lagoon. Rumbustious gangs of boys parade the Zattere, fighting each other with great wooden bludgeons or rapiers, or racing about on roller-skates; and I remember with affection a group of children who climbed one afternoon to the canvas roof of a water-bus stop on the Grand Canal, and who were tumbling about in the sunshine on its taut elastic surface like so many small acrobats, to the bewilderment and consternation of the passengers waiting underneath. The little girls of Venice are over-dressed but often adorable; and the more bedraggled the urchin, the more familiar he will be to the English visitor, for as you clamber down the social ladder, away from the grand palaces towards the tenements, so the children get scruffier, and more at ease, and less subdued, and more rough-and-tumble, until at last, among the shabby homes of the poor districts, you find boys and girls so blue-eyed, fair-haired, cocky, friendly and unkempt that you may imagine yourself home in your own garden, hopelessly summoning Henry to wash his hands for tea, or disengaging Mark from his collection of earthworms.

Even more, I sometimes think, do the Venetians love their animals. I have never seen one ill-treated in Venice. Even in Roman days the people of the Veneto were so kindly to their beasts that they were
repelled by the bloody circus spectacles of their day, and preferred chariot races. There are very few mortal children in the pictures of the Venetian masters, but nearly every painter has portrayed birds and beasts, from the budgerigars of Carpaccio's
Two Courtesans
to the fine big retriever who stands in the foreground of Veronese's
Feast in the
House of Levi
. A multitude of little dogs prances through Venetian art, a menagerie of lions, camels, dragons, peacocks, horses and rare reptiles. I once went to an exhibition in Venice that consisted of some fifty portraits, all by the same artist, all meticulously executed, all very expensive, and all of the same cat.

Venice is one of the world's supreme cat-cities, comparable in my experience only with London and Aleppo. It is a metropolis of cats. Now and again the sanitary authorities have conducted a cat-hunt, to sweep away vagrants and scavengers: but so fond are the Venetians of their cats, even the mangiest and scabbiest of them, that these drives have always ended in ignominious failure, and the animals, spitting and scratching, have been hidden away in back yards and boxes until the hygiene men have gone. The population of cats thus increases each year. Some lead an eerily sheltered existence, and are rarely allowed out of doors, only appearing occasionally, like nuns, upon confined and inaccessible balconies. Many more are only half-domesticated, and live on charity, in old drain-pipes from which sympathetic citizens have removed the grilles, under the seats of laid-up gondolas, or in the tangled recesses of overgrown gardens. You may see them any morning wolfing the indigestible entrails, fish-tails and
pasta
, wrapped in newspapers, which householders have laid down for them: and on most winter afternoons an old lady arrives to feed the cats of the Royal Gardens, near St Mark's, while a man in a sweeping overcoat so manipulates the flow of a nearby drinking fountain that a jet of water is projected into a declivity among the paving-stones, forming a cat's basin or bath.

They are odd and sometimes eccentric animals. Although they are constantly eating, and often turn up their whiskers fastidiously at a mess of spaghetti lying on a doorstep, they seldom grow fat: the only fat cats in Venice (except at Christmas, when they all seasonably swell) are the rat-catchers of the churches. They are never harshly
treated, and are often positively molly-coddled, but they are usually very timid. They hardly ever climb trees. They do not answer to ‘puss, puss', but if you go to the statue of Giuliano Oberdan, at the end of the Public Gardens, and make a noise something like ‘chwirk, chwirk', there will be a threshing of tails among the shrubbery, as of fishes flailing in a net, and a small multitude of cats will bound out of the bushes to greet you. At a
trattoria
on the Rio del Ponte Lungo, on Giudecca, there used to be a small white cat with one yellow eye, and one blue: this may remind otologists, so I learnt from a letter in
The
Lancet
, of the white forelock and heterochromia of Wardenburg's syndrome, and the cat was probably deaf, and a reluctant hunter. It was very probably of Saracen descent, born of a Crusader's booty, for such asymmetrical cats are particularly common in the Levant.

Venetian cats often lead a kind of communal life, uncharacteristic of the species, lazing about in each other's company, and sometimes dashing down a back-alley with four or five companions, like soft grey wolves, or greyhounds. Sometimes a brave nonconformist, swept off his feet by such a pack, dares to express the opinion that the hygiene men were right – there are too many cats in Venice. In 1947 Daniele Varè, ‘the laughing diplomat', put a complaint about them into one of the old denunciation boxes. ‘There Are' (so said his deposition) ‘Too Many Cats In The
Sestiere
Of Dorsoduro': but there the paper remains, for nowadays those old receptacles are not emptied from one century to another.

One Venetian cat became an international celebrity. He lived in the 1890s at a coffee shop opposite the main door of the Frari church, and until recently, if you had a cup of coffee among the frescoes of its front room, you would find that he was still not forgotten. Nini was a white torn who was so skilfully exploited by his owner, partly in the interests of trade, partly of charity, that it became the smart thing for visitors to Venice to call upon him: and if you asked the barman nicely he would bring out a big album from beneath his espresso machine, dust it reverently down, and let you look at Nini's visitors' book. Among his callers were Pope Leo ΧΙII, the Tsar Alexander ΙII, the King and Queen of Italy, Prince Paul Metternich, the Negus Menelik Salamen, and Verdi, who scribbled a few notes from Act III
of
La Traviata
(first performed, disastrously, at the Fenice). When Nini died, in 1894, poets, musicians and artists all offered their fulsome condolences, now stuck in the book, and a sculptor did a figure of the animal, which used to stand on the wall beside the shop. ‘
Nini
!
' said one obituary tribute. ‘A rare gem, most honest of creatures!' Another spoke of ‘an infinite necessity for tears'. He was ‘a gentleman, white of fur,' said a third, ‘affable with great and small'. There was a gloomy funeral march in the book, and a long Ode On The Death of Nini: and Horatio Brown, the English historian of Venice, who spent much of his time in the State Archives of the Frari, around the corner, ended a poem with the lines:

It was all done in a spirit of dead-pan satirism that was essentially Venetian, and you had to look very hard in the eye of the barman, as he wrapped the book in brown paper and put it carefully away, to detect a distant thin flicker of amusement.

For myself, I love the cats of Venice, peering from their pedestals, sunning themselves on the feet of statues, crouching on dark staircases to escape the rain, or gingerly emerging into the daylight from their fetid subterranean lairs. Shylock defined them as ‘necessary and harmless', and Francesco Morosini, one of the great fighting Doges, thought so highly of them that he took one with him on his victorious campaigns in the Peloponnese. There are few more soothing places of refuge than a Venetian garden on a blazing summer morning, when the trees are thick with green, the air is heavy with honeysuckle, and the tremulous water-reflections of the canals are thrown mysteriously upon the walls. The rear façade of the palace before you, with its confusion of windows, is alive with gentle activity. On the top floor an elderly housekeeper lowers her basket on a string, in preparation for the morning mail. From a lower window there issues the harsh melody of a housemaid's song as she scrubs the bathroom floor. In the door of the ground-floor flat a girl
sits sewing, in a black dress and a demure white apron, with a shine of polished pans from the kitchen lighting her hair like a halo. From the canal outside comes a pleasant buzz of boats, and sometimes the throaty warning cry of a bargee. On a neighbouring roof-garden an artist stands before his easel, brush in one hand, coffee cup in the other.

And dotted all about you in the grass, in attitudes statuesque and contented, with their tails tucked around them and their eyes narrowed in the sunshine, one licking his haunches, one biting a blade of grass, one intermittently growling, one twitching his whiskers – all around you sit the cats of the garden, black, grey or obscurely tabby, like bland but scrawny guardians.

There used to be many horses and mules in Venice – so many in the fourteenth century that they were compelled by law to wear warning bells. In the fifteenth century Michel Steno, a rip-roaring playboy Doge, had 400 horses, their coats all dyed yellow: it is said that one ingenious foreign diplomat asked him from what region of Italy this distinctive breed sprang. One of the bells of St Mark's Campanile was called the
Trottoria
, because when it sounded the patricians used to trot to the Council Chamber on their mules. According to some theorists the Bridge of Straw, beside the Doge's Palace, is where they used to tether their mounts with a comforting nosebag during legislative sessions. Later there was a celebrated riding-school near the church of San Zanipolo, with stabling for seventy-five horses: and beside the Frari there was a successful coach-builder, whose firm went on building carriages so long after the disappearance of the Venetian horse, shipping them to customers on the mainland, that most eighteenth-century pictures of the Campo dei Frari show a specimen outside the workshop.

The advent of the arched bridge in Venice turned the canals into highways, and ousted the horse. The last man to ride along the Merceria is said to have been a convicted procurer, condemned to be dressed up in yellow clothes and driven through the streets on a donkey, with a huge pair of horns on his head. By the eighteenth century a horse was such a rarity that Mrs Thrale reported seeing a
queue of poor people paying to examine a stuffed carcase in a sideshow. The horselessness of Venice became an international joke, and the Venetians became notorious as appalling horsemen, just as they have a reputation for atrocious driving today. One old tale tells of a Venetian who kept his spurs in his pocket, instead of on his heels, and who was once heard murmuring to his mare: ‘Ah, if you only knew what I had in my pocket, you would soon change your step!' Another Venetian, having trouble with a cantankerous horse, is said to have produced his handkerchief and spread it in the wind. ‘So
that's
why he goes so slowly,' he exclaimed. ‘He's got the wind against him!' A century ago, though you could still go riding in the Public Gardens, a contemporary observer noted the curious fact that the only people who did so seemed to be ‘young persons of the Hebrew persuasion'. Fifty years ago one old horse still spent the summer months in the gardens, pulling a rake and a lawn-mower: and I am told that when, each autumn, he was floated away in a scow to Mestre the children jeered him on his way, the gondoliers reviled him, and even the passengers on the passing ferries threw their catcalls and cigar-butts in his wake. Today there is not a single live horse left in the city of Venice, and if you feel like a canter you must go to the resort island of the Lido, and take a turn along the sands.