Venice (8 page)

There are, however, some gorgeous artificial horses. The equestrian statue of the
condottiere
Sforza, which figures in Dürer's
The Knight and the Death
, has long since vanished from Venice. There remain the excellent horseback figure of King Victor Emmanuel, on the Riva degli Schiavoni; the incomparable Colleoni statue at San Zanipolo; and, tucked away in a museum room within the Basilica, the four bronze horses which stood for 700 years upon its façade, and which so impressed Goethe that he wanted to get the opinion of ‘a good judge of horseflesh' on them. No pampered thoroughbred, no scarred war-horse has enjoyed so romantic a career as these. Their origins are lost – some say they are Greek, some Roman: but we know that they were taken from Trajan's Arch in Rome to Constantinople, where they were mounted on the tower of the Hippodrome. There Enrico Dandolo found them, and shipped them home to Venice: a hoof of one was broken on the way, and the ship's captain, named
Morosini, kept it as a souvenir, later mounting it above the door of his house in Campo Sant' Agostin. The horses were repaired in Venice, and mounted at first outside the Arsenal: but presently they were elevated to their grand eminence upon St Mark's, and became so symbolic of Venetian pride and glory that the Genoese, when they were at war with Venice, used to boast that they were going to ‘bridle the horses of St Mark' – as much as to say that they intended, before very long, to hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line. Napoleon's engineers removed them laboriously from the Basilica (they weigh 1,700 lb each) and took them to Paris, where they stood for thirteen years in the Place du Carrousel. The Austrians removed them again, after Waterloo, and restored them to St Mark's in a grand ceremony which, owing to the political fevers of the time, the Venetians themselves silently boycotted. In the First World War they were shipped away in a barge for safety: through the lagoon and down the dismal tributaries of the Po, watched all along the route by sad groups of villagers, and eventually to the garden of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, once the seat of Venetian Ambassadors (where they were joined by the Colleoni, and by Donatello's great Gattame-lata from Padua). In the Second World War they were taken down from their gallery again, and packed away safely in a warehouse.

Now they have left their belvedere for good, victims of conser-vationism – they were alleged to be suffering from the pollution of the air – to be replaced above the Piazza by dull replicas. I am not alone in thinking they would have been better left where they were, as the grandest of all trophies and the noblest symbols of Venetian independence. I can hardly bear to think of them shut away out of the sunshine, because they always seemed to me, as to generations of Venetians, truly living creatures, animated by the genius of their unknown creators. For all their wanderings, they used to seem, up there on their proud pedestals, ageless and untired. I often saw them paw the stonework, at starlit Venetian midnights, and once I heard a whinny from the second horse on the right, so old, brave and metallic that St Theodore's crocodile, raising its head from beneath the saintly buskins, answered with a kind of grunt.
There are many dogs in Venice. You will often meet examples of the fluffy white breed, all wispy tail and alertness, immortalized in the paintings of Carpaccio (the most famous of them all gazes, with an appealing mixture of impatience and affection, at the preoccupied St Jerome in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni). There are many poodles, and many rather nasty Alsatians, whose muzzling, compulsory under Italian law, makes them figures of impotent fun to the more impertinent cats of the place. There is a pair of Tibetan terriers in a palace on the Grand Canal, and I once saw a young business man, sitting on his haunches in the Via 22 Marzo, fanning an exhausted bull terrier with his briefcase. Best of all, there are countless dogs of indeterminate breed, tough, black, self-reliant animals, who guard the boats and boatyards of Venice, and are often to be seen riding down the Grand Canal on the prows of barges, tails streaming, heads held high, in attitudes marvellously virile and conceited.

Thousands of crabs scuttle about the water-lines of Venice. Millions of ants exude from its paving-stones. Mice proliferate, and their beastly black silhouettes often scurry away from your feet down the crumbling corridors of a palace, dart from the stagnant water of a gutter, or disappear beneath the refrigerator. More than once, according to the records of St Mark's, the nibblings of mice have silenced the great organ of the Basilica. I once found a mouse on my pillow in the middle of the night, and another was once fool enough to immure itself in my bath. The Venetians seal up mouse-holes with cement, hopelessly moving from room to room, like Dame Parting-ton with her mop: and they call mice by their diminutive,
topolini
, as if to demonstrate that
they
aren't scared; but the mice of Venice are a scourge and a horror, all the same, and are no doubt one reason why Shylock, who hardly sounds an animal-lover, tolerated the cats. There are also rats, as in every port. They sometimes eat the breadcrumbs we put out for the pigeons, on the balcony of our third-floor apartment: but generally they keep to the edges of the canals, or slink, grim and emaciated, from one stinking cavity to another, or end their ghastly lives floating pink-bellied down the Grand Canal.

At one time people kept lions as pets in Venice; fifty years ago a
well-known hawker used to tow a floundering dolphin up and down the Grand Canal, while people threw coins from their windows; and in 1819 an elephant, escaping from a visiting menagerie, took refuge in the church of Sant' Antonin, and was ‘only despatched', so contemporary records inform us respectfully, ‘by a shot from a piece of ordnance'.

Most people, though, will remember Venice as a city of birds. Birds are inextricably entangled in her legend, as they are pictured everywhere in her art. It was a flight of birds, so we are told, that inspired the people of Altinum to move into the lagoon; and birds played a picturesque part in the series of visions that inspired the founding fathers to build the first churches in the city – one must be built where they should find ‘a number of birds together', another ‘where twelve cranes should be in company'. Birds are still conspicuous in Venetian lore, from the swallows which arrive with a flourish in the middle of June (and which used to be, before the new antidotes, the principal destroyers of mosquitoes) to the big white seagulls of the lagoon (which are often driven into the city canals by bad weather, and are even to be seen, humiliatingly plucked, hung up for sale in the Rialto market – excellent boiled, I am told, but only in the winter season). Sometimes you see a homely sparrow looking lost among the rooftops, or pecking among the green water-growths at low tide. In a few secluded gardens of the city a vivid goose struts exotically, or a bright tame pheasant preens itself. Thousands of canaries sing in the houses of Venice, their massed cages sometimes blocking entire windows: and there is a shop near the Frari church, a dark and cavernous place, through the shuttered doors of which you can always hear, even in the depth of the night, the rustle of small caged wings and the clicking of beaks. Sometimes a wild swan flies over, with an imperial rhythm, towards the fastnesses of the lagoon or the marshes of Ravenna – and in a fifteenth-century miniature from
The Book of Marco Polo
lordly white swans are swimming past St Mark's itself.

Finally there are the pigeons, most celebrated of the Venetian fauna. They are, by tradition, honoured and protected, and to have a
roast pigeon lunch you must go down the road to Padua, or better still find yourself a musty trattoria among the Euganean Hills. Some say this is because Dandolo, when he stormed Constantinople, sent back the news of victory by carrier pigeon. Others believe that it arises from an old Palm Sunday custom, when a flock of pigeons was released in the Piazza, those that were caught by the populace being promptly eaten, those that escaped guaranteed permanent immunity – a ceremony that led in the long run, one pigeon looking very like another, to a safe conduct for them all. Whatever the truth, the pigeons have prospered. They survived some violent epidemics of pigeon-plague, picked up from carrion crows in the Levant, and nowadays never actually die, but merely go out into the lagoon and sink themselves.

They are mostly a drab grey colour, only occasionally relieved by a semi-albino with a white head, and they seem to me to have a verminous flavour to them. Their headquarters is the Piazza. There the stones of the Basilica are thick with generations of their droppings, and near the porphyry lions of the northern Piazetta stands their private bird-bath, beside an antique well-head. There, at the right time of day, they assemble in their shiftless thousands, gobbling and regurgitating on the pavement, a heaving mass of grey, riding on each others' backs, pushing and swelling and rustling in an obscene frenzy to get at the maize and breadcrumbs: and only a few old world-weary doves, wedged among the pillars, or propped cynically beside a chimney-pot, prefer to watch this gluttony from a fastidious distance.

The Venetians grew rich on silks, spices and other exotics conveyed by their merchant ships from eastern bazaars: and just as they love fineries, so they have an Oriental taste for pageantry and display. This was encouraged by the wise men of the Republic, on the old assumption about bread and circuses. The Venetian calendar was lavish with feasts, shows and exhibitions, from the grand ceremony
of the Doge Wedding the Adriatic to the manifestations of St Mark's Day, when every husband gave his wife a red rose of undying loyalty. Brilliant were the pageant-fleets that used to escort the Doge on his ceremonial duties, and the Carnival which became, in the end, the prime fact of Venetian life was one long gaudy night.

Until 1802 there used to be bull-baitings in the Venetian squares, in which snarling dogs were pitted against tethered bulls: they were astonishingly ill-organized, if we are to go by one seventeenth-century painting, which depicts the entire square of San Polo in a condition of chaos, bulls charging in all directions, women scattering, hats flying, dogs barking, and only a few masked beauties, in virginal satins, stalking through the turmoil disdainfully serene. There were hilarious public fist fights, sublimating the old vendettas between factions, and degenerating into glorious free-for-alls: you can still see on the Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), or on the bridge beside the church of Santa Fosca, the footprints, cemented in the pavement, that formed the touchline of the game. There were magnificent regattas, and gymnastic competitions, and religious processions, and even, in earlier times, knightly jousts. There were ceremonial gun salutes in the Piazza, until it was found that their vibrations were loosening the precious mosaics of the Basilica. Sometimes the Republic mounted an official display of whole-hog extravagance, to celebrate some distant and often illusory victory, forestall an incipient subversion, or impress a visiting dignitary: and it was these chimerical affairs that gave Venice her legendary aura of gold and grotesquerie.

The most memorable of all such galas was arranged for the visit of Henry IIΙ of France, in 1574 – an event which, though it had no particular political consequences, so engraved itself upon the Venetian memory that it is included in most lists of significant Venetian dates. Triumphal arches of welcome were designed by Palladio and decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese, and Henry (aged twenty-three) was conveyed to the city in a ship rowed by 400 Slav oarsmen, with an escort of fourteen galleys. As this fleet sailed across the lagoon, glass-blowers on a huge accompanying raft blew objects for the King's amusement, their furnace a gigantic marine monster that
belched flame from its jaws and nostrils: and presently it was met by a second armada of curiously decorated boats, fanciful or symbolic, elaborate with dolphins and sea gods, or draped in rich tapestries. At Venice the palace called Ca' Foscari, on the Grand Canal, had been especially prepared for the visitor. It was embellished with cloth of gold, carpets from the East, rare marbles, silks, velvets and porphyry. The bed-sheets were embroidered in crimson silk. The pictures, specially acquired or commissioned, were by Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Paris Bordone, Tintoretto and Veronese. For the principal banquet, in the gigantic Great Council Chamber of the Doge's Palace, the sumptuary laws were temporarily suspended, and the most beautiful women of Venice appeared all in dazzling white, ‘adorned', as one historian tells us, ‘with jewels and pearls of great size, not only in strings on their necks, but covering their headdresses and the cloaks on their shoulders'. There were 1,200 dishes on the bill of fare, the 3,000 guests all ate off silver plate, and the tables were decorated with sugar figures of Popes, Doges, Gods, Virtues, animals and trees, all designed by an eminent architect and fashioned by a pharmacist of talent. When Henry picked up his elaborately folded napkin, he found that it was made of sugar, too. Three hundred different kinds of
bonbon
were distributed, as the meal sank to a conclusion, and after dinner the King saw the first opera ever performed in Italy. When at last he went out into the night, he found that a galley, shown to him earlier in the evening in its component parts, had been put together during the banquet on the quay outside: it was launched into the lagoon as he emerged from the palace, complete with a 16,000 lb cannon that had been cast between the soup and the soufflé.

According to some historians the poor young King, who dressed very simply himself, and liked to wander around cities incognito, was never quite the same again, and lived the rest of his life in a perpetual daze. Many other visitors were similarly staggered by the colour and luxury of Venice. Thomas Coryat from Somerset wrote wildly in 1610 that he would deny himself four of the richest manors in his county, rather than go through life without seeing the city. A fifteenth-century Milanese priest was shown the bedroom of an
eminent Venetian lady, decorated with blue and gold to the value of 11,000 ducats, and attended by twenty-five maids, loaded with jewellery: but when he was asked what he thought of it, ‘I knew not how to answer' (says he convincingly) ‘save by the raising of my shoulders.' ‘I have oftentimes observed many strangers', wrote one old Englishman, ‘men wise and learned, who arriving newly at
Venice
, and beholding the beautie and magnificence thereof were stricken with so great an admiration and amazement, that they woulde, and that with open mouth, confesse, never any thing which before time they had seene, to be thereunto comparable.'

Venice is not quite so sumptuous nowadays, but she still enjoys her round of pageants, her almanac of festivals. Some are natural and popular, some blatantly touristic, but none are without fun or beauty. There is the great feast of the Redentore, when a bridge is thrown across the wide canal of the Giudecca to the church of the Redemption on the other side, and the night is loud and bright with fireworks. There are starlight concerts in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace, and band performances in the Piazza. There are regattas still, and candle-lit sacred processions, and the great art festival of the Biennale. There is the annual Film Festival, a thing of minks and speedboats, to which the world's exhibitionists flock as dazzled moths to lamplight. Every night in summer there are serenades on the Grand Canal, when tremulous sopranos and chesty tenors, enthroned in fairy-lit barges, lurch uncomfortably down the waterway among the
vaporetti
, introduced over a loud-speaker in unctuous American English, and sometimes closely pursued, in a dissonance of arias, by a rival fleet of troubadours.

The municipal department of tourism, which pleasantly defines one of its activities as Organizing traditional festivals', diligently maintains the old celebrations and sometimes launches new ones: and there seems scarcely a day in the Venetian summer without its own ceremonial, a procession of clergy around St Mark's, a Festival of Lights, a Traditional Custom or An Old Venetian Fête, the Century Regatta (for elderly gondoliers), an Artistic Floodlighting of the Palaces, a Romantic Moonlight Serenade. When the image of Our
Lady of Fatima was brought to Venice in 1959, it was landed at St Mark's by helicopter. Modern Venetian ceremonies usually begin half an hour late, and there is a strong taste of the travel agency to their arrangements (‘and this, you see, is the very same traditional festival followed by the ancient Doges, from time immemorial, according to old-hallowed custom'): but somewhere among their sham and tinsel glitter you can still sometimes fancy a glow of old glory, and imagine King Henry watching, with his guard of sixty silk-dressed halberdiers, through the taffeta hangings of his palace.

The Venetians still love a show, and do not care about its stage management – they used to be enthusiastic followers of that most frankly artificial art, puppetry. When that ghastly serenade floats by each evening, there are always Venetians leaning tenderly from their balconies to hear the music, and watch the undeniably romantic bobbing of the gondola prows in the half-light. Given half a chance, they would climb aboard the barge and join in the chorus themselves. I once helped to make a television film in Venice, and it was wonderful with what ease and pleasure the Venetians in the street performed before our cameras (except those who, following an irrepressible instinct, asked us how much we were planning to pay them). Beside the Riva degli Schiavoni, away from the hotels, there are two long tunnel-like tenements, strung with washing, which run away from the sea into a huddle of houses. Here our Roman cameraman deployed the local inhabitants for the scene we wanted, poised beside their washing-boards, frozen in gossip, precariously balanced on doorsteps, immobilized in archways, static in windows. There they stood for two or three minutes, patiently waiting. The exposure was estimated; the producer approved the arrangements; the script-writer had a look through the viewfinder; the sun shifted satisfactorily; the steamer in the background was nicely framed through the washing; and suddenly the cameraman, pressing his key, bawled ‘
Via
!' In an instant that tenement was plunged in frantic activity, the housewives scrubbing furiously, the gossips jabbering, the passers-by vigorously passing, the old ladies leaning energetically from their windows, and a multitude of unsuspected extras, never seen before, precipitately emerging from back-doors and alley
ways – an old man in a black hat, sudden coveys of youths, and a clown of a boy who, abruptly appearing out of a passage, shambled across our field of vision like a camel, till the tears ran down the script-writer's face, and the whole community dissolved in laughter. The Venetians are not an exuberant people, but they have a long comical tradition, and they love acting. Eleanora Duse herself was born in a third-class railway carriage as her father's Venetian dialect troupe puffed from one performance to the next, and Harlequin, like Pantaloon, was invented in Venice. The very word ‘
zany
', as the cameraman reminded me that morning, comes from a Venetian theatrical character – his name was Giovanni, and he acted crazy.

Now and then the Venetians still arrange a grand spectacle outside the usual tourist round, and recapture some of the old spontaneity. In 1959 there was returned to the city, to lie in state for one month, the body of Pope Pius X, one of the few canonized pontiffs of recent times. This holy man had been Patriarch of Venice for seven years, until his elevation to the papacy in 1903, and he is still venerated in the city. Scores of churches contain his effigy, and many an elderly lady will teil you, with a look of respectful affection in her eye, tales of his simplicity and goodness. He was a man of poverty – he wore his predecessor's robes, to save buying new ones, and towards the end of the month he sometimes had to make a visit to the Monte di Pieta, the pawnshop of Venice. He scorned convention, pretence and stuffiness, and was thus more popular among the common people than among the aristocrats. He once demonstrated to a lady, in private audience at the Vatican, the steps of a Venetian dance. When a nun asked for a pair of his old stockings, as a remedy for her rheumatism, and later pronounced herself entirely cured, the Pope declared it very odd – ‘I wore them myself far longer than she did, and they never did me any good!'

All Venice mourned when this good person left the city for the consistory that was to elect him Pope. There is a moving photograph that shows him stepping into his gondola for the last time, to go to the railway station. In the foreground an elderly gondolier stands solemn and bareheaded, holding his oar; a bald man kneels to kiss the old priest's hand; a small boy, clutching a pillar, stares pale-faced
from the background; and the scene is framed with groups of anxious, silent, sad women. It was almost certain that he would be the next Pope: but he cheerfully bought a return ticket to Rome, and he said to the crowds, in a phrase that has become famous: ‘Never fear, I shall come back. Dead or alive, I shall return to Venice!' –
‘O
vivo ο morto ritornerò!
'

Half a century later another Patriarch of Venice became Pope: and one of the first acts of Giovanni ΧΧIIΙ, a man of much the same kind, was to fulfil his predecessor's promise, and return to the city the embalmed body of Saint Pius X. A marvellous procession conveyed it down the Grand Canal to the Basilica. First came the countless gondolas of the clergy, each rowed by a white-clad gondolier: a melange of crosses, surplices, purple cassocks, stout bishops and stooping monks, Armenians with bushy beards, Dominicans in white, rosy country parsons, foxy-faced thinkers, tremulous old saints and pallid novices, all smiling and cushioned deep in their seats. Then came the dream-like barges of the Venetian tradition, their crews in vivid medieval liveries, silver or blue castles at their prows and sterns, heavy draperies trailing in the water behind (supported by corks, to keep them ponderously afloat). The bells of Venice rang. Plainchant issued from a hundred loudspeakers. Flags, bunting and an occasional carpet flapped from the windows of the canal-side palaces. Thousands of school children, massed upon the quays and bridges, threw rose petals into the water. Police boats scurried everywhere, and by the Accademia Bridge a reporter in a speedboat spoke a purple commentary into his walkie-talkie.

Thus, in a blaze of gold, there appeared beneath the Rialto bridge the barge called the
Bucintoro
, successor to the magnificent State vessels of the Doges (the last of which was turned into a prison hulk at the fall of the Republic, and later broken up for firewood). A crew of young sailors rowed it, in a slow funereal rhythm, each stroke of the oar summoned by a single drum-beat from a ferocious major-domo in the well of the ship – a man who, glaring angrily from oarsman to oarsman, and striking his drum with ritual dedication, looked like an old slave-driver between decks on a galley. Slowly, heavily, eerily this barge approached us along the canal, its gold
gleaming, a vast crimson textile streaming from its high stern into the water, until at last, peering down from our balcony, we could see beneath its carved gilded canopy into the ceremonial chamber beneath. There lay the corpse of the great Pope, embalmed in a crystal coffin, in a splendour of vestments, rings and satin, riding calm and silently towards St Mark's.