



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
