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VENETIAN LIFE
VENETIAN LIFE
In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical persons, incidents, and places mentioned. Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I actually saw and knew of Venice, I ha
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CHAPTER I. VENICE IN VENICE.
CHAPTER I. VENICE IN VENICE.
One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and
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CHAPTER II. ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
CHAPTER II. ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o’clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ra
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CHAPTER III. THE WINTER IN VENICE
CHAPTER III. THE WINTER IN VENICE
It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of the season’s clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a little out of humor. The Germans
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CHAPTER IV. COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
CHAPTER IV. COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to an
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CHAPTER V. OPERA AND THEATRES.
CHAPTER V. OPERA AND THEATRES.
With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful the
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CHAPTER VI. VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
CHAPTER VI. VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants are very dirty—if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before u
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CHAPTER VII. HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
CHAPTER VII. HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I had found most books of travel very slow to tell,—as much as possible of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only fro
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CHAPTER VIII. THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
CHAPTER VIII. THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer, and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pilla
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CHAPTER IX. A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
CHAPTER IX. A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city. This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a feeli
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CHAPTER X. THE MOUSE.
CHAPTER X. THE MOUSE.
Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I explain at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked visage. He first appeared to us on the driver’s seat of that carriage in which we posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro. But though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did n
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CHAPTER XI. CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
CHAPTER XI. CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were kind enough to pause before Titian’s John the Baptist. It was attention that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the Baptist,—one
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CHAPTER XII. SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
CHAPTER XII. SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these “summer isles of Eden” lying all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes, with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the east and w
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CHAPTER XIII. THE ARMENIANS.
CHAPTER XIII. THE ARMENIANS.
Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon, upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk “Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers” is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a garden-court, filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable trees of the East; while another garden encompasses the monastery itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables whic
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CHAPTER XIV. THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
CHAPTER XIV. THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that he would far rather call out to him, “ Ció Shylock! Bon dí! Go piaser vederla; ”
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CHAPTER XV. SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
CHAPTER XV. SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce for
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CHAPTER XVI. COMMERCE.
CHAPTER XVI. COMMERCE.
To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations ann
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CHAPTER XVII. VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
CHAPTER XVII. VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration, nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken) be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular libe
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CHAPTER XVIII. CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
CHAPTER XVIII. CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in Venice, that the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow Indian-summer weather has possession of the first weeks of December. There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 to remind us Northerners that Christmas was coming. The skies were as blue as those of June, the sun was warm, and the air was bland, with only now and then a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from loveliness unwilling t
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CHAPTER XIX. LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
CHAPTER XIX. LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony. Herodotus r
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CHAPTER XX. VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
CHAPTER XX. VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers show you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of a knight, occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in the annals of the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled Shakespeare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this is possibly the fact, or whether there is any tradition of a tragic incident in t
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CHAPTER XXI. SOCIETY.
CHAPTER XXI. SOCIETY.
It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders of the Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient, should be influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli records that in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and observances in common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon, which formed a very prominent part of the service of worship. At this time, also, when the rupture of the Lombard League had left other Italian cit
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CHAPTER XXII. OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
CHAPTER XXII. OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
(As it seems Seven Years after.) The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went, as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the
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