



Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team







VENETIAN LIFE

By William Dean Howells




ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

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 have not attempted to follow
speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most
to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but
at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.

W. D. H.

Cambridge, January 1, 1867.




CONTENTS.

   I. Venice in Venice
   II. Arrival and first Days in Venice
   III. The Winter in Venice
   IV. Comincia far Caldo
   V. Opera and Theatres
   VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners
   VII. Housekeeping in Venice
   VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal
   IX. A Day-Break Ramble
   X. The Mouse
   XI. Churches and Pictures
   XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons
   XIII. The Armenians
   XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice
   XV. Some Memorable Places
   XVI. Commerce
   XVII. Venetian Holidays
   XVIII. Christmas Holidays
   XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials
   XX. Venetian Traits and Characters
   XXI. Society
   XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
   Index




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 desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold
the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the
scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to
us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the
properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its
charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable
clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth
and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes
and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion
which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out
to be a condition of small importance.

It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box
at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this
VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the
theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that
melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place
without learning to know it differently from those writers who have
described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help
seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which
Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the
same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise
and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless
picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the
streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the
city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once
fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough
in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a
charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if
these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us
believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend.
And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret
vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping
depths of the Canalazzo!

Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?

Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation
for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a
government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience
of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old
Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those
for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to
understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and
despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and
sorrow for its fall.

So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the
Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
prejudices--the merciless Venice of Daru, and of the historians who
follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
removed; and--to take leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to
fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may
go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no
annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
get from travelers' beds into their books.

Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves
hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one's
associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that
pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will
hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the
taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the
Serenest Republic's policy. When I entered it the first time I was at
the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its
corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent
tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward
that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the
melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely
of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious
excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don
Quixote,--who might even have been very picturesque,--but who were not
at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal.
The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century,
and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except
that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that
period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment
from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication
between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the
Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse
knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places
which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose
Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic
sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge
was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables
the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties. [Footnote: The
reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much
better than I have said in many, the same thing of sentimental errors
about Venice:--

"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering,
or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs,
which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant
of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with
breathless interest;