On the Shores of the Mediterranean

Three sides of it are occupied by what appears to be one enormous, soot-blackened palace of what are, to all but the most pernickety, irreproachable dimensions. The fourth side is occupied by what is arguably the most fantastic basilica in Christendom, San Marco, a building surmounted by Islamic domes, embellished with cupolas and gilded crosses on top of them, that look more like extra-terrestrial vehicles sent to bear the building away to another world than the work of an architect.

To the right of the Basilica, facing the square, is the smallest of the two squares that lead into the Piazza, the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, furnished with a fountain and red marble lions. At the far end of this little piazza is what was once the splendid banqueting hall which used to be linked with the Ducal Palace by a corridor; and at the point where it ceases to be the Piazzetta and becomes the Piazza, an archway leads out of it into the street of shops called the Merceria dell’Orologio under the Torre dell’Orologio, a very pretty building with two bronze giants on top of it, who together strike the hours for the clock below on a great bell. Hidden within the tower are the Magi who, in Ascension week, emerge from a little side door, preceded by an angel, and pass before the Virgin in her niche above the gilt and blue enamelled clock face to vanish through a similar door on the far side, a procession they make every hour.

To the left of St Mark’s Basilica the new Campanile, surmounted by a pyramidical steeple panelled in green copper and a gilded figure of the Archangel Gabriel, soars 322 feet into the air, far above anything else in the city, even the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore. On 14 July 1902, the 113th anniversary of the sacking of the Bastille, at ten in the morning and with scarcely any warning, the original Campanile telescoped into itself and fell into the Piazza, having previously successfully withstood being struck by lightning, shaken by earthquakes, and being insidiously undermined by the acque alte. In doing so it damaged the corner of the Libreria Sansoviniana, initiated by Jacopo Sansovino, completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi and described by Palladio, in the sixteenth century, as ‘the richest and most decorated building ever perhaps created from ancient times until now’. It also completely destroyed Sansovino’s Loggetta, which was used as a guardroom when it was built; missed his magnificent bronze statues of Minerva, Apollo, Mercury and Peace, but smashed his terracotta group of The Virgin and Child (later repaired) and the Child John the Baptist. It also wrenched from its position at the south-east corner of the Basilica the Pietra del Bando, the stump of porphyry column brought by the Venetians from Acre in 1256 and set up here at the place from which the laws of Venice were promulgated, but sparing the fabric from damage. In falling, four of its five bells were broken, but the biggest, the Marangona, so called because one of its functions was to tell the craftsmen of the Marangoni, the guilds of the city, when to begin and stop work, was undamaged and was found protruding from the mountain of rubble which filled the eastern end of the Piazza. Also shattered was the beaten copper figure of the Archangel Gabriel which came plummeting down from above.

And behind the Campanile in the Piazzetta di San Marco, but visible from the Piazza, part of the west front of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen, luminously beautiful, its body clad with pink and white marble in the form of Gothic arcades one above the other, a wonder of lightness and beauty. Altogether the finest enclosed spaces to be found anywhere in all the Mediterranean lands, finer than St Peter’s Square in Rome. Perhaps, as Napoleon said, the finest in all the world.

All that was visible of this wonder of the world on this particular night in January were the enfilades of lights which hang in elegant glass globes under the arches of the long arcades of the procuratie, once the offices and residences of the Procurators of Venice, who were the most important dignitaries after the Doge, vanishing away into the fog towards the far western end of the Piazza where the wing known as the Ala Napoleonica, built to replace a church torn down by his orders, was completely invisible. Beneath the arcades there were some amorphous, will-o’-the-wispish smudges of light, which emanated from the windows of expensive shops and cafés. There were also some blurs of light from the elegant lamp standards in the Piazzetta di San Marco, where the fog was even thicker. All that could be seen of the Basilica were the outlines of a couple of bronze doors, one of them sixth-century Byzantine work: nothing at all of the great quadriga of bronze horses overhead in front of the magnificent west window, copies of those looted from the Hippodrome at Constantinople by Doge Dandolo after he had taken the city, plunging ever onwards, stripped of their bridles by the Venetians as a symbol of liberty, on their endless journey from their first known setting-off place, the Island of Chios, through what were now the ruins of the world in which they had been created.

Now the giants on top of the Torre dell’Orologio began banging away with their hammers on the big bell, as they had done ever since they were cast by a man named Ambrosio dalle Anchore in 1494, some 489 years ago, the year Columbus discovered Jamaica, a slice of the action the Venetians would like to have been in on, the year Savonarola restored popular government in Florence, something they themselves were already badly in need of. They made things to last in those days. No question of replacing the unit if something went wrong.

It was five o’clock. Soon, if it was not raining, or snowing, or there was no acqua alta to turn it into a paddling pool, and there was none of this damn fog, the better-off inhabitants, those who wanted to be thought better-off and those who really were badly-off but looked almost as well-dressed as the rest, which is what you aim at if you are a Venetian, having changed out of their working clothes would begin that ritual of the Christian Mediterranean lands, something that you will not see in a devout, Muslim one, the passeggiata, the evening promenade, in Piazza San Marco and in the Piazzetta, in pairs and groups, young and old, the old usually in pairs, the young ones often giving up promenading after a bit and congregating on the shallow steps that lead up from the Piazza into the arcades, the ones that in summer have long drapes hanging in them to keep off the sun, which gives them a dim, pleasantly mysterious air. So the Venetians add themselves to the visitors who swarm in the Piazza at every season of the year, costing one another’s clothes, casting beady, impassive eyes on the often unsuitable clothes of the visitors, as their predecessors must have done on various stray Lombards and other barbarians down on a visit, and on the uncouth Slavs and Albanians who came ashore at the Riva degli Schiavoni. Those on whom they had not looked so impassively had been the Austrians who filled the Piazza in the years between 1815 and 1866, the period when, apart from a few months of brave but abortive revolution in the winter of 1848–49, the Venetian States were under the domination of Austria, to whom they had originally been sold by Napoleon in 1797. (He got them back again in 1805, only to lose them when Austria received them yet again at the Congress of Vienna, a couple of months before Waterloo.) In those years the Austrian flag flew in the Piazza in place of what had been that of the Republic of St Mark, an Austrian band played, which it is said no true Venetians opened their ears to, let alone applauded, and one of the two fashionable cafés that still face one another across its width, the one which was frequented by Austrians, was left to them.

Meanwhile other, less elegant but equally ritualistic passeggiate would be taking place in the principal calli, campi and salizzadi, in other parts of the city, and there the younger ones would probably flock to some monument and drape themselves around the base of it. There would also be crowds in the Merceria dell’Orologio, merceria being a haberdashery, which is still, as it always was, filled with rich stuffs which the Veneziani love, a narrow street which leads from the clock tower into Merceria di San Giuliano and from that into Merceria di San Salvatore, once the shortest route from San Marco to the other most important centre of the city, the Rialto. This was the way the Procurators and other important officials used to follow on their way in procession to enter the Basilica, and the one followed by persons on their way from the Rialto to be publicly flogged.

Then, quite suddenly, after an hour or so, except at weekends or on days of festa, old and young suddenly disappear indoors, many of them having to get up what is in winter horribly early in order to get to work on the terra firma, leaving the Piazza and other places of passeggio to visitors and to those making a living by catering to their needs.

Tonight the passeggiata was definitely off. The pigeons had long since given up and gone to bed – that is if they had ever bothered to get up in the first place, and the only other people on view were a few dark figures with mufflers wrapped round their mouths, hurrying presumably homewards, some of them coughing as they went. The only people, besides ourselves, who were not on the move were a lunatic who was sitting at the feet of the Campanile gabbling away happily to himself, and a pretty young girl, dressed in a smart, bright red skiing outfit, to which even the Venetians could not have taken exception, and those après-ski boots with the hair on the outside, that make the occupants look as if they have forgotten to shave their legs. She was leaning against a pile of the duckboards the municipality puts down in various parts of the city when an acqua alta is expected, listening in on her earphones and reading Fodor’s Guide with the aid of a pocket torch.

‘Hi!’ she said, removing her earphones and switching off, at the same time displaying a mouthful of pearly white teeth that had not been near a capper’s. ‘Would you mind repeating that? I didn’t get it.’

‘We said, “Good evening, it’s a rotten night”.’

‘Yes, it certainly is a lousy night. This is my first time in Venice. What an introductory offer! My sister and I came down this afternoon from Cortina. The son of the guy who runs our hotel there gave us a lift but once we got out of the mountains we couldn’t see a thing, not even Treviso. It was like being out in the boondocks. It’s brilliant in Cortina. My sister’s back where we’re staying, not feeling so good. I guess we should have checked out on the weather. We’ve got to go back tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow. I haven’t even seen a gondola yet.’

‘There are some over there,’ I said, ‘moored by the Molo. But you have to watch your step. We nearly fell in.’

‘I’ll check on the gondolas on the way back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘I was just boning up on the Piazza San Marco, about it being beautiful at all times of day and night and all seasons of the year, one of the only great squares which retains a feeling of animation when there are very few people in it. Personally, I don’t think this Fodor person was ever here in a fog. He says bring plenty of color films. What a laugh! Personally, I think it’s kinda spooky, what with that poor old guy over there hollering away to himself and that bell going on all the time. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old Doge.’

It wouldn’t have surprised me either, standing where we were in the heart of Doge-land in freezing fog listening to a bell on a buoy making a melancholy noise somewhere out in St Mark’s Basin.

What is strange, if not spooky, about Venice is the feeling of impermanence brought on by the thought that not only are the waters constantly rising in it because of the general increase in the levels of the oceans brought about by the melting of the polar ice, but that the city is at the same time sinking because the re-routing of rivers has deprived it of alluvium and because of the enormous amount of water and methane gas that until recently was being drawn out of the subsoil in the Industrial Zones. So that one day, quite suddenly, without warning, just as the Campanile collapsed, so too will the wooden piles that support the buildings of the city, of which there are said to be more than a million beneath Santa Maria della Salute alone, suddenly give up supporting them and allow the city to disappear for ever.

Much of the city is crumbling as well as sinking. Everywhere leprous walls and rotting brickwork proclaim the fact. Much of it is also abandoned, empty. Great palazzi on the Grand Canal – many of them built as warehouses in which the merchants lived, as it were over the shop, some of them big enough, now that there is no merchandise, to house a hundred persons – have watergates through which the merchandise used to pass which look as if they have not been opened for a hundred years. The steps leading up to them are covered with long green weed which sways in the wash of motor boats and water buses. Inside, the vast room on the piano nobile is lit, if at all, by a 40-watt bulb. Sometimes another, equally feeble light in a room high up under the eaves proclaims that there is a resident caretaker. This feeling of emptiness extends far beyond the confines of the Grand Canal. You can feel it up in the Quartiere Grimani, in the territory around the Arsenale, in the Ghetto with its enclave of the Venetian equivalent to skyscrapers hemmed in on all sides by water, and in the alleys of San Tomà where the cats of Venice reign supreme and there is scarcely a dog to be seen.

But then, just when you begin to experience a sense of horror at being alone in this dead city, you are treated to a series of glimpses – through windows that are invariably barred – of a family sitting around a table to eat risotto alle vongole, risotto with clams, which is being brought to it in a cloud of steam, of children doing their homework, of someone working late in an archive, of a man and a girl kissing, of an old couple watching television, like a series of realistic pictures hung in the open air on walls of crumbling brick and flaking stone.

Deciding that we needed a drink, we walked to Florian, which is under the arcade of the Procuratie Nuove on the south side of the square.

Florian is the oldest café in Venice, opened by someone called Floriano Francesconi in 1720, and it has a faded and beautiful elegance all of its own which if once destroyed one feels could never be repeated, but perhaps it has been restored: Venetian craftsmen are wonderfully adept at making copies of the antique and then ‘distressing’ them, which is the expression used in the trade for making things look older than they are.

Tonight, the rooms in Florian overlooking the Piazza, with the innumerable mirrors, the painted panelling and the alcoves barely large enough to contain one of the little cast iron tables, were empty. The Venetian dowagers, ample or emaciated and certainly rheumaticky, rheumatism being an endemic Venetian disease among the aged, who would normally be here at this hour sipping tea or hot chocolate and talking about death and money, sometimes with equally ancient male contemporaries, were all at home, being cosseted by equally ancient maids, fearing if they went out prendere un raffredore, to catch a cold, or worse. The majority of visitors who come to Venice in the hot weather rarely enter these rooms, preferring to sit outside in the Piazza, where there is more action.

Tonight, what action there was was in the bar, which is about as comfortable as most bars have become in Italy, which means that there is hardly anything to sit on. In it three men and three girls were standing at the bar drinking Louis Roederer, which is a terrible price in a shop in Italy and an unimaginable price in such a place as Florian, where anything, even a beer, costs at least twice as much as it would in a more modest establishment.

The men were dressed in tweed and grey flannel. Two of them had camel-hair coats draped over their shoulders and the third wore a double-breasted herring-bone coat. All three of them wore Rolex watches and beautifully polished black or brown moccasins with tassels, one of the badges of the well-off, or those who want to be thought well-off, everywhere. All were over forty, possibly nearer fifty, with dark hair so uniformly and stylishly grizzled that I was tempted to ask them if they had barbers who grizzled it for them. They had typical Venetian faces: prominent, rather Semitic noses, the calculating eyes of shopkeepers, which in fact was probably what they were, shopkeepers who looked as if they might be involved in slightly questionable activities but nothing that would normally lead to actual prosecution, and if it did, and was successful, would only involve a fine which they could afford. Hard faces, softened for the drinks with the girls; the faces of men not easily amused, or much given to laughter, unless in the form of some carefully controlled internal convulsion; the faces of men who were by nature slightly condescending, omniscient – to put it bluntly – know-alls, courteous, suspicious, contemptuous of outsiders, enjoying being in the position of being able to observe others, but not enjoying being scrutinized themselves.

The girls were in their middle twenties. All three wore wedding rings, in addition to other loot, on their fingers. What were they, we both wondered. These men’s mistresses, other men’s wives? They might, just conceivably, be their daughters, or their nieces. No one was giving anything away, not even the barman whom they all called by his first name. Uniformly well-formed, longhaired, long-legged, the sort of girls who can wear flat heels and still look as if they are wearing high heels, not particularly beautiful but so well-groomed that most men would not notice the fact, the product of female emancipation in post-war Italy where, until well into the sixties, girls stayed at home with their mothers in the evening, were chaperoned if they went out, and it was exceptional to find one who could drive a car. These girls looked not only as if they drove cars, but drove fast ones.

They did not look like typical Venetians, although, like the men, they interpolated whole paragraphs in Venetian dialect into their conversation, that strange amalgam which has strains of French, Arabic and Greek overlaying the Italian, blurring and contracting it. Perhaps girls do not become typical Venetians until they become older. Their mothers would look as Venetian as the men they were drinking with; their grandmothers would be the dies from which typical Venetians are pressed. These girls just looked like girls. Whether they were well-off or not, they were giving a convincing display of being so. It was difficult to imagine a band of such overtly conspicuous consumers, dressed like this and loaded with expensive ephemera, sallying out into the fog from some drinking place in SW1 and walking home without being mugged, for this is what they were going to have to do when they did leave, in a city without motor cars, that is unless they slept over the premises or had bodyguards waiting for them.

One of the girls, who was wearing a Loden cape, announced that she had just inherited an eighteenth-century villa, in the country somewhere west of Treviso, destroying, in her case, the theory that she might be either daughter or mistress – perhaps they were assistants to the shopkeepers. Apparently it was in a very bad condition, having been used as a farmhouse for more than fifty years.

‘What should I do with it?’ she asked. ‘It could be very beautiful.’

‘I would insure it for a lot of money,’ one of the men said. ‘Say four hundred and fifty milioni [about £190,000 or $266,000]. And then I would pay someone to burn it down.’ It was difficult to know if he was joking.

The villa she was talking about was one of the country houses to which rich Venetians, Trevisans, Paduans and Vicenzans used to escape from the heat and stench of their cities in summer and in the autumn. They began building them in earnest in the sixteenth century, although some date from as early as the fourteenth century, and they built them in the plain between the foothills of the Alps and the lagoons. They continued to build them far into the eighteenth century, by which time they had become almost symbolic of the frivolity and lack of energy for commerce which characterized the last years of the Republic. They lined the banks of the Brenta Canal between Mestre and Padua with them, making of it a watery triumphal way. The best known is the mysterious and withdrawn Villa Malcontenta, one of the masterpieces of Palladio – together with the Villa Capra at Vicenza, the most famous Palladian villas – which stands on its right bank near Mestre under what is now almost invariably a sulphurous sky, with the plants and factories of the Industrial Zone creeping closer to it every year. They built them on the banks of the Sile, which emerges as a pond full of vegetation in the plain west of Treviso and bubbles and seethes its way through this charming little city, apparently unpolluted. And they built them along the Terraglio, now a nightmare road, Strada Statale 13, between Mestre and Treviso, where villas with the sonorous names of past and present owners – Villa Gatterburg ora Volpi, Villa Duodo Malice ora Zoppolate (shades of Villa Newby), some in vast parks full of planes and cedars, with statues on the cornices looming against the sky – are today hemmed in by filling stations and windowless factories painted in bilious colours. And they built them in the depths of the country, miles from anywhere.

The Venetians went to their villas by gondola, or in the large rowing barges called burchielli, which had a sort of miniature villa on top of them in which the passengers could shield themselves from the elements and from the vulgar gaze. When there was no waterway leading to their villas, they travelled by ox-cart, which must have been pretty uncomfortable.

Their movements were as regular as those of migrant birds. The exodus from the city began on the eve of St Anthony’s Day in June and they stayed in the country until the end of July, after which they went back to the city. On October the first they went to the country again and in November, at the end of St Martin’s Summer, the time when the last grapes are picked which were not ripe at the vendemmia in October, they returned to Venice for a round of theatres and masked routs. As Venice declined, so the diversions increased in extravagance.

At night in their villas they gambled until dawn, unless there was some other diversion. They rose late, to watch other people cultivating their gardens and their vines, to visit their labyrinths, contemplate great nature, ponder further improvements and, as time went on, contemplate and ponder their diminished bank balances. For the Venetians were seldom content with one villa. It was not uncommon for a single family to own a dozen. At one time the Pisani owned fifty. More than two thousand villas are still in existence in the Veneto.

Of the great Venetian villas the grandest is the Pisani family’s villa at Stra1 on the Brenta Canal east of Padua, which has huge stables, a labyrinth, a fantastic gateway-cum-belvedere flanked by columns encircled by spiral staircases and crowned with statuary; and on the ceiling of the ballroom frescoes of angels blowing trumpets, putti, eighteenth-century gentry, one of them well placed between the thighs of a naked lady who has temporarily landed on a cloud, and what look like Red Indians, all by Giambattista Tiepolo, forever whirling across a pale blue sky. Another huge villa is the Villa Manin, at Passariano, south-west of Udine, which is so large that its outlines actually show up on the 1:200,000 Touring Club Italiano map. This was the villa built for the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, and with its immense all-embracing arcaded wings it resembles a small town rather than a habitation. The smallest of the villas is the exquisite Casa Quaglia – the Quail House – built in the fourteenth century at Paese, west of Treviso, now a shamefully neglected farmhouse, which has Venetian Gothic windows and a facade painted in the form of a tapestry with fabulous animals.