The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLiterary Landmarks of Venice

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLiterary Landmarks of VeniceThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Literary Landmarks of VeniceAuthor: Laurence HuttonRelease date: February 9, 2018 [eBook #56530]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif, deaurider and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Literary Landmarks of VeniceAuthor: Laurence HuttonRelease date: February 9, 2018 [eBook #56530]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif, deaurider and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: Literary Landmarks of Venice

Author: Laurence Hutton

Author: Laurence Hutton

Release date: February 9, 2018 [eBook #56530]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, deaurider and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE ***

CALLE DEL PISTOR

CALLE DEL PISTOR

CALLE DEL PISTOR

BYLAURENCE HUTTONAUTHOR OF “LITERARY LANDMARKS OF LONDON”“LITERARY LANDMARKS OF EDINBURGH”“LITERARY LANDMARKS OF JERUSALEM”ILLUSTRATEDNEW YORKHARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS1896Copyright, 1896, byHarper & Brothers.———All rights reserved.TOWILLIAM DEAN HOWELLSWHOSE VENETIAN LIFEMADE HAPPYMY LIFE IN VENICE

Ina chapter upon “Literary Residences,” amongThe 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 personalobservation, 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 aRio, or aCanale; that aCalleis a street open at both ends; that aRio Terràis a street whichwas once a canal; that aRamois a small, narrow street, branching out of a larger one; that aSalizzadais a wide, paved street; that aRugais just a street; that aRughetta, or aPiscina, is a little street; that aRivais a narrow footway along the bank of a canal; that aFondamentais a longer and a broader passage-way, a quay, or an embankment; that aCorteis a court-yard; that aSottoporticois an entrance into a court, through, or under, a house—that which in Edinburgh is called aPend, and in Paris aCité; that a large square is aPiazza; that a small square is aPiazzetta, or aCampo; that a small campo is aCampiello; that a plain, commonplace house is aCasa; that a mansion is aPalazzo; that an island is anIsola; that a bridge is aPonte; that a tower is aCampanile; that a ferry is aTraghetto; that a parish is aParrochia; and that a district is aContrada, or aSistiere.

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. AlexanderRobertson, to Mr. William Logsdail, I owe my thanks for much valuable information given me while I was enlarging, elaborating, and revising the article, printed inHarper’s Magazinefor July, 1896, upon which this volume is based.

Laurence Hutton.

Casa Frolo,50 Giudecca.

Itis 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 observantstranger 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 theybecome 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. Thereare 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, even now, is a grand spectacular show; and no drama ever written is more dramatic than is Venice itself. Mr. Howells prefaces hisVenetian Lifeby an account of the play, and the by-play, which he once saw from a stage-box in the little theatre in Padua, when the prompters, and the scene-shifters, and the actors in the wings, were as prominent to him as were the tragedians and comedians who strutted, and mouthed, and sawed the air with their hands, in full view of the house; and he adds: “It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and that I had been suffered to seethis Venice, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to everyday, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua.” It has been my own good fortune to spend, at various seasons, a short time in the pit—“on a standee ticket”—just to drop in for a moment now and then, when the performance is nearly over, and to look not so much at the broken-down stage and its worn-out settings, not so much at the actors and at the acting, as to study the audiences, the crowds of men and women in parquet, gallery, and boxes, who have been sitting for centuries through the different thrilling acts of the great plays played here; and have applauded, or hissed, as the case may be.

So strange and so strong is the power of fiction over truth, in Venice, as everywhere else, that Portia and Emilia, Cassio, Antonio, and Iago, appear to have been more real here than are the women and men of real life. We see, on the Rialto, Shylock first, and then its history and its associations; and the Council Chamber of the Palace of the Doges is chieflyinteresting as being the scene of Othello’s eloquent defence of himself.

It is a curious fact, recorded by Th. Elze, and quoted by Mr. Horace Howard Furness, in his Appendix toThe Merchant of Venice, that at the time of the action of that drama, in Shakspere’s own day, there was living in Padua a professor of the University whose characteristics fully and entirely corresponded with all the qualities of “Old Bellario,” and with all the requisites of the play. In his concluding passages Elze described the University of Padua at the close of the Sixteenth Century, when there were representatives of twenty-three nations among its students. He said that not a few Englishmen took up their abode in Padua, for a longer or a shorter time, for the purposes of study; all of whom must naturally have visited Venice. “And,” he added, “if it has been hitherto impossible to prove that Shakspere drew his knowledge of Venice and Padua, and the region about, from personal observation, it is quite possible to suppose that he obtained it by word of mouth, either from Italians living in England,

THE COUNCIL-CHAMBER OF THE DOGES. IN OTHELLO’S TIME

THE COUNCIL-CHAMBER OF THE DOGES. IN OTHELLO’S TIME

THE COUNCIL-CHAMBER OF THE DOGES. IN OTHELLO’S TIME

or from Englishmen who had pursued their studies at Padua.”

Among the significant names given by Elze as students at Padua are Rosenkranz, in 1587 to 1589, and Guldenstern, in 1603.

One of the most distinguished of the English representatives who took up his abode in Padua in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, was Oliver Goldsmith, who, according to John Forster, received his degree there, although there is no official record of such a fact.

Signor Giuseppe Tassini, in hisCuriosità Veneziane, published in 1863, gives the following account of what is known as “Othello’s House,” which has, in all probability, never before been put into English, and is here roughly translated. At the right-hand side of the Campo del Carmine, or on the little canal of the same name, he says, in effect, stands what is left of an ancient palace supposed, but incorrectly, to have belonged once to an influential family called Moro. Christoforo Moro, a cadet of the house, was sent to Cyprus in 1505; and he returned in1508 to relate to the magnificos of his native city his adventures there, having in the meantime lost his first wife. In 1515 he was married again, and to Demonia Bianco, daughter of Donato da Lazze. Rawdon Brown and other writers, continues Signor Tassini, believe that upon this hint Shakspere spoke, making Othello a Moor, as a play upon the name Moro, and turning Demonia Bianco into Desdemona. But he adds that the Goro, not the Moro, family lived here in the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, the latter occupying a palace in the Campo di S. Giovanni Decollato, now the Campo S. Zan Degolà, some distance away.

Confusing the names of Goro and Moro, and fancying that the ancient figure of a warrior standing on the corner of the Campo del Carmine house, now blackened by time, although not so black as he is painted, represents a Moor, the guides and the gondoliers, and even the antiquaries, of Venice have given to “Othello’s House,” according to Signor Tassini, a local reputation and a name which it does not merit.

The beautiful little Gothic Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, built in the Fourteenth Century and done over at the end of the Nineteenth, on the right bank of the Grand Canal, going towards the Rialto, and near the Grand Hotel, seems to have no excuse, either from tradition or from any confusion of names, for calling itself “the House of Desdemona” at all. Its only dramatic interest to-day consists in the fact that it has been the home of Signora Eleonora Duse, the leading actress of Italy, who is called by her admirers the Italian Sara Bernhardt, although she has genius enough of her own to warrant her being compared with no one but herself.

And thus perish, at the hands of a transatlantic, present-day iconoclast and grubber after the truth, two of the most cherished of the Landmarks of Venice.

Mr. Hare is of the opinion that the Doge Christoforo Moro, buried in the Church of S. Giobbe in the Canareggio District, is the Moro of the Othello legend, although he died in 1470, almost half a century before Signor Tassini married him to Desdemona; and histomb, in the chancel of the church, as Mr. Hare points out, “is ornamented with the moro or mulberry, which was his family device.” It will be remembered that Othello inherited from his mamma a handkerchief spotted with strawberries (mulberries?) which played an important part in the great tragedy of his life.

Christoforo Moro lies under a large flat stone in front of the altar of the church. The slab has been greatly defaced by the tread of generations of priests and of acolytes, but its carvings still bear distinct traces of fruits which to-day look as much like strawberries as mulberries, while certain of their leaves are decidedly of the strawberry form. A portrait of Doge Moro hangs in the sacristy of S. Giobbe. It exhibits a face in which there are no signs of the duskiness which dramatic tradition has given to Othello during all these years, but which is hard enough to have silenced the most dreadful belle who ever frighted the isle from its propriety.

Mr. Hare also explains that a story very like to that of Shakspere’sOthellowas told

THE OTHELLO HOUSE

THE OTHELLO HOUSE

THE OTHELLO HOUSE

in the seventh novella of the third decade of Giovanni Battista Cinthio’s collection of stories, called theEcatomiti, in which the name of the heroine is the same, and in which the original Iago suggested to Othello that a stocking filled with sand might be an admirable weapon against his wife if it were judiciously applied to her back. Mr. Hare quotes Bishop Bollani as writing in 1602, June 1st: “The day before yesterday, a Sanudo, living in the Rio della Croce, on the Giudecca, compelled his wife, a lady of the Cappello family, to go to confession, and the following night, towards the fifth hour, plunged a dagger into her heart and killed her. It is said that she had been unfaithful to him, but the voice of her neighborhood proclaimed her a saint.”

The voice of the gallery has proclaimed Desdemona a saint ever since!

The Venetians still believe implicitly in the statue of the sunburnt warrior, and in Shakspere’s history of his life. And Mr. Howells’s gondolier not only showed him the house of Cassio, near the Rialto Bridge, but was ready to point out the residence of the amiableIago and of Emilia, his wife. Cassio, I may remark, is said here to have been Desdemona’s cousin, and Iago is believed to have been the major-domo of the distracted household.

The modern Venetian dealers in second-hand portraits, and the venders of bric-à-brac of all kinds, seem to have learned their strict and universal Economy of Truth from the memorial tablets over their shops. If you are offered here an article of original, homemade, present-time antiquity for five lire, you may depend upon getting it for two lire and a half, and you may be sure that it costs you, even then, about twice as much as it is worth. If an inscription in old Latin or in choice Italian tells you that “Here lived” some particular Venetian hero of sword or pen, you may put down in your diary that he probably visited next door, or that he died over the way.

The tablet devoted to Marco Polo, however, being upon the side of a play-house where fiction is supposed to reign supreme, seems to have established itself as the exceptionwhich proves this rule. Only a small portion of the Palazzo dei Polo now remains. What is left of it is little more than a fragment of an outside staircase in a corner of the Corte Millione in the Canareggio District. The mansion at one time covered no small part of the neighboring territory, which still bears distinct traces of wealthy and aristocratic occupancy. Over the door-way of the Malibran Theatre, on the Rio del Teatro Malibran, is an inscription stating that “This was the house of Marco Polo, who travelled in the remotest parts of Asia, and described them. This tablet was placed here by the Commune in 1881.”

The great voyager was born in this house, and here he spent, in comparative quiet, after many years of toilsome but profitable travel, the last days of his life. Having, like Shakspere’s banish’d Norfolk, retired himself to Italy, here in Venice he gave his body to this pleasant country’s earth, in 1323 or thereabouts. How far the rest of the quotation is applicable to his peculiar case no man, of course, can say. Polo was called byalliterative neighbors “Mark the Millionaire”—hence the “Corte Millione”; and the rich man, proverbially, does not find heaven a place of easy access.

The Corte Millione, Polo’s court-yard, is now theal-frescofoyer of the Malibran Theatre, which was built originally in 1678. But hardly one of the millions of Venetian youths who, for more than two centuries, have cooled themselves under the stars, by the side of Polo’s old well and Polo’s old marble balustrade, between the acts of the play or the ballet, ever heard of Mark the Millionaire, or care where he lived or where he died.

The mystery as to the exact part of this pleasant country’s earth which received Marco Polo’s body has never been cleared up. In a copy of his last will and testament, I read, however, that he left a certain sum of money to the Monastery of Saint Lawrence here, “where I desire to be buried.” He certainly buried his father, Nicolò Polo, in the old and original Church of S. Lorenzo; and the natural inference is that he himself lies somewherewithin its precincts. The sarcophagus erected for the elder Polo by the filial care of the younger Polo is known to have existed, until towards the end of the Sixteenth Century, in the porch leading to the church.

The old building was renewed, from its very foundations, in 1592, and no traces of the ancient structure remain; the old parochial records no longer exist, and even the name of the Polos is as unknown to the parochial authorities to-day as it is to the worldlings who crowd the theatre erected upon the site of the house which was their home.

Petrarch is known to have made several visits to Venice, and he is said to have been very familiar with it, and very fond of it, even in his youth. In 1353 or ’54 he was certainly here, for a short time, in an official capacity; and documentary evidence clearly proves that he settled in Venice in 1362—a cholera year—and remained here until 1368, making annual excursions to Padua, and spending certain of the summer and autumn months with friends at Pavia. During this

DEL PETRARCHA. E. DI M. LAVRA.

DEL PETRARCHA. E. DI M. LAVRA.

DEL PETRARCHA. E. DI M. LAVRA.

period he determined to bequeath a portion of his rich library to Venice for the use of students and the general public, and as an example to other men. He was highly esteemed by the Venetians, and his house was the meeting-place of the wise and the powerful. Boccaccio was his guest here for many months; they talked and walked, and they sailed the canals and the lagoons together in perfect sympathy; and there still exists aletter of Petrarch to Boccaccio, asking the latter poet to come again, and to stay longer next time.

Signor N. Barozzi, in a volume entitledPetrarca e Venezia, published in Venice in 1874, reprints, from the old plan of the city, now in the Archæological Museum, a rough sketch of Petrarch’s house during his residence here between 1362 and 1368; and he seems to establish the fact that it was hired by the poet, not presented to him by the city, as is generally believed. It was then called the Palazzo del Molin, and it stood near to the Ponte del Sepolcro on the Riva degli Schiavoni, a broad promenade and wharf a short distance east of the Ducal Palace. This house, according to Petrarch himself, was humble enough; it had two towers, a style of architecture not uncommon in those days; and according to Signor Barozzi it was, later, a monastery, and at the present time is occupied as a barrack. If Signor Barozzi and the plan are correct, it isnotthe house marked by the tablet, and pointed out in the guide-books as Petrarch’s, but the buildingon the corner of the little Calle del Dose, and some forty or fifty paces to the east of the generally accepted spot.

The two original towers of the Petrarch house disappeared long ago; the entire front is new and ugly, and the rear portions, although they are old and picturesque, do not date back to the Fourteenth Century. There is, probably, no part of the mansion left, as Petrarch knew and loved it, except, perhaps, the pavement of the court-yard. Even the old marble well is not as old as the days of the great poet. The interior of the establishment is not now seen of the public, except by permission of the military authorities, but it is one of the most interesting of the Landmarks of Venice, because of its association with the two immortal men who once adorned it.

Petrarch from his tower had a perfect view of the city and of the Adriatic, watching as he did the navies of the then known world as they entered and left the harbor, and looking out over the sea and down upon the crowds of busy men. His life here was,no doubt, a happy one; as must be the life of any man who brings to Venice some knowledge of its history, some idea of its art, some fondness for its traditions, and letters of introduction to some of its men of mind in all professions.

Signor Tassini says that while Petrarch lived here he often enjoyed the society of his natural daughter, Francesca, who once, in this house, and in the absence of her father, received the sad news of the death, at her home in Pavia, of her infant child; when Boccaccio acted as comforter, and tried in vain to stay her maternal tears.

Mr. Horatio F. Brown and Mr. Howells both quote a letter, written in Latin, by Petrarch to his friend Pietro Bolognese, in which he describes a famous festival held in the Piazza S. Marco to celebrate a victory over the Greeks in Candia. The poet was seated in the place of honor, at the right of the Doge, in the gallery of the Cathedral, and in front of the bronze horses; and he tells of the many youths, decked in purple and gold, ruling with the rein, and urgingwith the spur, their horses in the then unpaved square, and watched by a throng of spectators so great that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. There is not a horse in all Venice to-day; the youths wear ulsters when it is cold, and very little of anything when it is hot; and every grain of barley which falls to the ground is ravenously devoured by the doves, who alone of all the Venetians wear the purple now. If tradition, for the once, speaks truly, these very doves are the direct descendants of the carrier-pigeons which brought to Admiral Dandolo information from spies in Candia leading to the capture of the island, and which may have received grains of barley from the hand of Petrarch himself. As such do the doves of the present day receive grains of barley from me.

Mr. Brown, in his admirable study ofThe Venetian Printing Press, says that Aldus is not known, of a certainty, to have lived in the house, or even on the site of the house, No. 2311 Rio Terra Secondo, in the parish of S. Agostino, which is marked with a tablet

THE HOUSE OF PETRARCH

THE HOUSE OF PETRARCH

THE HOUSE OF PETRARCH

as his. But the fact that there still exists a letter addressed to Gregoropoulos at the little narrow Calle del Pistor, close by, and written while Gregoropoulos was employed by Aldus as corrector of Greek manuscript and Greek proof, would seem to imply that the famous printing-press may have stood in the latter street, if such a gutter can be called a street at all. It resembles no thoroughfares elsewhere in the world except the closes of Edinburgh; but it is not unlikely to have been the scene of the birth of the Aldines so dearly prized by the bookworms of to-day. The original Aldus is believed to have settled in Venice about 1488. As Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement remarks, he was no mere printer; and although it is by that name now that he is most frequently regarded, he was a scholar before he was a printer, and he became a printer because of his scholarship. Concerning the many troublesome visitors to his place of business who went there to gossip and to kill their time, Aldus wrote, upon a later establishment: “We make bold to admonish such, in classical words, in a sort ofedict placed over our door, ‘Whoever you are, Aldo requests you, if you want anything ask for it in a few words and depart, unless, like Hercules, you come to lend the aid of your shoulders to the weary Atlas. Here will always be found, in that case, something for you to do, however many you may be.’”

Aldo Pio transferred the business in, or about, 1506 to the Campo S. Paternian, now called the Campo Manin; and there he lived and printed good books and good literature, succeeded by his son and his grandson. A very modern Bank for Savings now occupies the site of this establishment, and covers the entire back of the square. But a marble tablet of recent date, placed on its side, bears an inscription to the effect that “Aldo Pio, Paolo, and Aldo II., Manuzio, Princes in the Art of Typography in the Sixteenth Century, diffused, with classic books from this place, a new light of cultured wisdom”; the translation being by Dr. Alexander Robertson. This Campo S. Paternian house was probably that which bore the inscriptionquoted above, and relating to Atlas and the intellectual Hercules.

According to tradition, a certain Hercules named Erasmus came, in 1506, to lend his shoulder to the support of the load; and found something to do. Erasmus in the workshop of Aldus, printing, perhaps, his ownAdages, is a picture for a poet or a painter to conjure with. Venice in all its glory never saw a greater sight.

Luther is known to have passed through Venice a few years later than this. He is supposed to have lodged in the cloisters of the Church of S. Stefano here, on his way to Rome, and to have celebrated mass at its high altar. S. Stefano is near the square of the same name, and it is not otherwise particularly distinguished. It dates back to the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Fourteenth Century.

Another Hercules, as great in his way as was Erasmus, lent the aid of his shoulders to the weary Atlas of the Aldine Press in the Sixteenth Century; to wit, Paolo Sarpi, Scholar, Scientist, Philosopher, Statesman,Author, and Martyr, whom Gibbon called “the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent,” and who is called by his present-day biographer, Dr. Robertson, “the greatest of Venetians.”

Sarpi was born in Venice, in 1552; he was educated in Venice; in Venice he spent the better part of his life; in Venice he died; and in Venice he was very much buried. He was brutally stabbed by hired assassins while crossing the Ponte dei Pugni, in 1607; but he recovered, and did not surrender his indomitable soul until 1623.

Sarpi’s posthumous fate for two centuries was an exceedingly restless one. His body was interred originally at the foot of an altar in the Servite Church here, with which he was intimately associated. In 1624 the Servite friars, warned of an intended desecration of his grave, removed his bones to a secret place in their monastery. The next year they carried them back to the church. In 1722 they were removed to still another part of the same church. In 1828, the whole establishment having become a ruin, Sarpi’s bones were carried to the Seminary belonging to, and adjoining, S. Maria della Salute. They were next transferred to a private house in the parish of S. Biagio; then they were kept, for a time, in the Library of Saint Mark, in the Doge’s Palace, and finally they were placed under a slab, near the main entrance of the Church of S. Michele, on the Cemetery Island of that name, where, after having been once more disturbed, in 1846, it is to be hoped they will be permitted to rest.

The church of the Servites no longer exists. A fragment of its ancient wall and two fine old door-ways, however, are still left. The main entrance, long ago bricked up, remains to-day, with one other old gate, which was the entrance to the monastery; and that is all. The larger portion of the site of the foundation is a flower garden; a modern chapel, dedicated in 1894, occupies a small corner of the ground. And the rest is an industrial school for poor girls, from seven to twenty-one years of age, who here, without cost to themselves, are educated for a self-supporting,useful life; as noble a monument as Paolo Sarpi could wish or have. The remains of the church of the Servites may be reached by the Rio di S. Fosca; and they stand in the parish of S. Maria dell’ Orto. Here Sarpi wrote his almost countless works, from aTreatise on the Interdict, and aHistory of Ecclesiastical Benefices, to theHistory of the Uscocks, a band of pirates who infested the Dalmatian coast.

An elaborate statue of Sarpi, erected in 1892, is in the Campo Fosca, near the scene of his attempted murder, and on his direct way between his cloistered home and the Ducal Palace. The Greatest of the Venetians stands, in monumental bronze, with his face to the street and his back to the canal, and in figure as well as in features he suggests in many ways the younger, and the greater, of the D’Israelis, with whom, except in nationality, he had so little in common.

The D’Israelis, it will be remembered, were descended from a line of prosperous Jewish merchants who had lived here in the days when Venice was still, in a measure,

Back to IndexNext