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                   [Illustration: CALLE DEL PISTOR]




                          LITERARY LANDMARKS

                                  OF

                                VENICE


                                  BY

                            LAURENCE HUTTON

               AUTHOR OF “LITERARY LANDMARKS OF LONDON”
                   “LITERARY LANDMARKS OF EDINBURGH”
                   “LITERARY LANDMARKS OF JERUSALEM”


                              ILLUSTRATED


                       [Illustration: colophon]


                               NEW YORK
                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                                 1896

                Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._




                                  TO
                         WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
                          WHOSE VENETIAN LIFE
                              MADE HAPPY
                           MY LIFE IN VENICE




ILLUSTRATIONS


CALLE DEL PISTOR                              _Frontispiece_

ORNAMENTAL HALF-TITLE                   _Facing page_   xii

THE COUNCIL CHAMBER OF THE DOGES.
IN OTHELLO’S TIME                           “      “      6

THE OTHELLO HOUSE                          “      “      10

PETRARCH AND LAURA                             _Page_    16

THE HOUSE OF PETRARCH                   _Facing page_    20

A CHARACTERISTIC CANAL                     “      “      26

BYRON’S PALACE                             “      “      30

THE RIALTO BRIDGE. AS SHYLOCK KNEW IT      “      “      32

ENTRANCE TO THE MERCERIA                   “      “      34

CASA FALIER, WHERE MR. HOWELLS LIVED       “      “      40

GOLDONI’S STAIRCASE                        “      “      42

GOLDONI’S STATUE                           “      “      44

BYRON’S STUDY IN THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY    “      “      48

THE “NOAH CORNER” OF THE DOGE’S PALACE     “      “      56

THE HOUSE IN WHICH BROWNING DIED           “      “      60




INTRODUCTION


In a chapter upon “Literary Residences,” among _The Curiosities of
Literature_, Isaac D’Israeli said: “No foreigners, men of letters,
lovers of the arts, or even princes, would pass through Antwerp without
visiting the House of Rubens, to witness the animated residence of
genius, and the great man who conceived the idea.” This volume is
intended to be a record of the Animated Residences of Genius which are
still existing in Venice; and it is written for the foreigners, for the
Men of Letters, for the lovers of art, and even for the princes who pass
through the town, and who care to make such houses a visit.

It is the result of many weeks of patient but pleasant study of Venice
itself. Everything here set down has been verified by personal
observation, and is based upon the reading of scores of works of travel
and biography. It is the Venice I know in the real life of the present
and in the literature of the past; and to me it is Venice from its best
and most interesting side.

The Queen of the Adriatic is peculiarly poor in local guide-books and in
local maps. In the former are to be found but slight reference to that
part of Venice which is most dear to the lovers of bookmen and to the
lovers of books; and the latter contain the names of none but the larger
of the squares, streets, and canals, leaving, in many instances, the
searcher after the smaller thoroughfares entirely afloat in the
Adriatic, with no compass by which to steer.

The stranger in Venice, accustomed to the nomenclature of the streets
and the avenues, the alleys and the courts, of the cities and towns with
which he is familiar in other parts of the world, may be interested to
learn that here a large canal is called a _Rio_, or a _Canale_; that a
_Calle_ is a street open at both ends; that a _Rio Terrà_ is a street
which was once a canal; that a _Ramo_ is a small, narrow street,
branching out of a larger one; that a _Salizzada_ is a wide, paved
street; that a _Ruga_ is just a street; that a _Rughetta_, or a
_Piscina_, is a little street; that a _Riva_ is a narrow footway along
the bank of a canal; that a _Fondamenta_ is a longer and a broader
passage-way, a quay, or an embankment; that a _Corte_ is a court-yard;
that a _Sottoportico_ is an entrance into a court, through, or under, a
house--that which in Edinburgh is called a _Pend_, and in Paris a
_Cité_; that a large square is a _Piazza_; that a small square is a
_Piazzetta_, or a _Campo_; that a small campo is a _Campiello_; that a
plain, commonplace house is a _Casa_; that a mansion is a _Palazzo_;
that an island is an _Isola_; that a bridge is a _Ponte_; that a tower
is a _Campanile_; that a ferry is a _Traghetto_; that a parish is a
_Parrochia_; and that a district is a _Contrada_, or a _Sistiere_.

Armed with this information, the readers must do the rest for
themselves.

To Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement, to Miss Henrietta Macy, to Mrs. Walter F.
Brown, to Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, to Dr. Alexander Robertson, to Mr.
William Logsdail, I owe my thanks for much valuable information given me
while I was enlarging, elaborating, and revising the article, printed in
_Harper’s Magazine_ for July, 1896, upon which this volume is based.

                                              LAURENCE HUTTON.

Casa Frolo,

   50 Giudecca.




LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE

[Illustration: Title page, LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE]




LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE


It is almost impossible for any one who is at all familiar with the
voluminous amount of literature relating to the history and to the art
of Venice, to refrain from quoting, voluntarily or involuntarily, what
he has read and absorbed concerning “the dangerous and sweet-charmed
town,” which Ruskin calls a golden city paved with emerald, and which
Goethe said is a city which can only be compared with itself.
Comparisons in Venice are certainly as odorous as are some of its
canals, while many of its streets are not only paved with emerald, but
are frescoed now with glaring End-of-the-Nineteenth-Century
advertisements of dentifrice and sewing-machines.

That which first strikes the observant stranger in Venice, to-day, is
the fact that the Venetians have absolutely and entirely lost their grip
upon the beautiful. Nothing on earth can be finer than the art of its
glory; nothing in the world can be viler than the so-called art of its
decadence. That the descendants of the men who decorated the palaces of
five or six hundred years ago could have conceived, or endured, the
wall-papers, the stair-carpets, and the hat-racks in the Venetian hotels
of the present, is beyond belief. Whatever is old is magnificent, from
the madonnas of Gian Bellini to the window of the Cicogna Palace on the
Fondamenta Briati. Whatever is new is ugly, from the railway-station at
one end of the Grand Canal to the gas-house at the other. And the iron
bridges, and the steamboats, and the drop-curtain in the Malibran
Theatre are the worst of all.

When the English-speaking and the English-reading visitors in Venice,
for whom this volume is written, overcome the feeling that they are
predestined to fall into one of the canals before they leave the city;
when they become accustomed to being driven about in a hearse-shaped,
one-manned row-boat; when they have been shown all the traditional
sights, have bought the regulation old brass and old glass, have learned
to draw smoke out of the long, thin, black, rat-tailed straw-covering
things the Venetians call cigars--when they have seen and have done all
these, they will find themselves much more interested in the house in
which Byron lived, and in the perfectly restored palace in which
Browning died, than in the half-ruined, wholly decayed mansions of all
the Doges who were ever Lord Mayors of Venice. The guide-books tell us
where Faliero plotted and where Foscari fell, where Desdemona suffered
and where Shylock traded; but they give us no hint as to where Sir
Walter Scott lodged or where Rogers breakfasted, or what was done here
by the many English-speaking Men of Letters who have made Venice known
to us, and properly understood. Upon these chiefly it is my purpose here
to dwell.

Venice, with all her literature, has brought forth but few literary men
of her own. There are but few poets among her legitimate sons, and few
were the poets she adopted. The early annalists and the later historians
were almost the only writers of importance who were entitled to call her
mother; and to most of these she has been, though kindly, little more
than a step-mother or a mother-in-law.

Shakspere, who wrote much about Venice, and who probably never saw it,
remarked once that all the world’s a stage. Venice,