CANAL AND BRIDGE

From the Rialto’s edge,I looked into the waters, on whose faceGlimmered the reflex of some few faint stars,And two far-flitting lamps of gondoliers,That seemed on that black flat to move alone,While, on each side, each well-known building lostIts separate beauty in one dark long curve.RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

From the Rialto’s edge,

I looked into the waters, on whose face

Glimmered the reflex of some few faint stars,

And two far-flitting lamps of gondoliers,

That seemed on that black flat to move alone,

While, on each side, each well-known building lost

Its separate beauty in one dark long curve.

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.

The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

Thehistory of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never was any such city.... The Church ofSt.Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least grey with time—no greyer than a Greek lyric.

‘All has suffered a sea-changeInto something rich and strange,’

‘All has suffered a sea-change

Into something rich and strange,’

in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its baptism in the sea....

The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads to look into the lofty windows,—blind long ago to their leafy tenderness,—while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well, with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought for ever into the stone. Or Venice lures you in a gondola, into one of her remote canals, where you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise; where the innumerable balconies are full of the absences of gay cavaliers and gentledames, gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthrals with a yet more unearthly and incredible enchantment.... But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay, what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal?... For myself, I must count as half lost the year spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have the perfect local flavour. But by what witchery touched, one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us....

October is the month of the sunsets, and are best seen from the Public Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the Gardens,therefore, grow further and further) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty—all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the neighbourhood of that part of the ‘Palace of Art,’ whereon

‘The light aerial gallery, golden railed,Burnt like a fringe of fire.’

‘The light aerial gallery, golden railed,

Burnt like a fringe of fire.’

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga....

About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market, bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the mainland; and far into the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet seemed to rest.

W. D. HOWELLS.

VENICE,DEC.15, 1889

Now‘past they glide,’ and bear the flower-wreathed bierAcross the soundless waters, cold and grey,Ere Night falls, sable-vestured and austere,And Day dies in one roseate flush away,While they who follow, tearful, in the trainSee wonted sights with unfamiliareyes;—Like dreams, amid the fevered sleep of pain,Rich domes and frescoed palaces arise.Yet haply, mixed with sorrow, dawns the thoughtHow fit such obsequies for him whose penHath given a wondrous poem,[3]passion-fraught,—Breathing of love and Venice,—unto men:And so hath added to her deathless gloryA shining scroll of pure and ageless story.MACKENZIE BELL.

Now‘past they glide,’ and bear the flower-wreathed bier

Across the soundless waters, cold and grey,

Ere Night falls, sable-vestured and austere,

And Day dies in one roseate flush away,

While they who follow, tearful, in the train

See wonted sights with unfamiliareyes;—

Like dreams, amid the fevered sleep of pain,

Rich domes and frescoed palaces arise.

Yet haply, mixed with sorrow, dawns the thought

How fit such obsequies for him whose pen

Hath given a wondrous poem,[3]passion-fraught,—

Breathing of love and Venice,—unto men:

And so hath added to her deathless glory

A shining scroll of pure and ageless story.

MACKENZIE BELL.

[3]See ‘In a Gondola,’ p. 136.

Westarted together, Lord Byron and myself, in my little Milanese vehicle, for Fusina,—his portly gondolier, Tito, in a rich livery and most redundant mustachios.... As we proceeded across the lagoon in his gondola, the sun was just setting, and it was an evening such as Romance would have chosen for a first sight of Venice, rising with her ‘tiara of bright towers’ above the wave; while to complete, as might be imagined, the solemn interest of the scene, I beheld it in company with him whohad lately given a new life to its glories, and sung of that fair City of the Sea, thus grandly:

‘I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs.’

But, whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under other circumstances, have inspired within me, the mood of the mind in which I now viewed it was altogether the very reverse of what might have been expected. The exuberant gaiety of my companion, and the recollections—anything but romantic—into which our conversation wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetic and historical associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of uninterrupted merriment and laughter, till we found ourselves at the steps of my friend’s palazzo on the Grand Canal.

THOMAS MOORE.

CouldI but place the reader at the early morning on the quay below the Rialto, when the market boats, full laden, float into groups of golden colour; and let him watch the dashing of the water about their glittering steely heads, and under the shadows of the vine leaves; and show him the purple of the grapes and the figs, and the glowing of the scarlet gourds carried away in long streams upon the waves; and among them, the crimson fish baskets, plashing and sparkling, and flaming as the morning sun falls on their wet tawny sides; and above, the painted sails of the fishing boats, orange and white, scarlet and blue; and better than all such florid colour, thenaked, bronzed, burning limbs of the seamen, the last of the old Venetian race, who yet keep the right Giorgione colour on their brows and bosoms!

JOHN RUSKIN.

Thegondola was waiting as usual at the corner; it took them but a very little way, and landed them on the quay near the Rialto.... All the pictures out of all the churches were buying and selling in this busy market; Virgins went by, carrying their Infants;St.Peter is bargaining his silver fish; Judas is making a low bow to a fat old monk, who holds up his brown skirts and steps with bare legs into a mysterious black gondola that has been waiting by the bridge, and that silently glides away.... A girl came quietly through the crowd, carrying her head nobly above the rest, and looking straight before her with a sweet and generous face. ‘What a beautiful creature! Brava, brava!’ shrieked Lady W. The girl hung her sweet head and blushed. Titian’s mother, out of the ‘Presentation,’ who was sitting by with her basket of eggs, smiled and patted the young Madonna on her shoulder. ‘They are only saying good things; they mean no harm,’ said the old woman.... Then a cripple went along on his crutches; then came a woman carrying a beautiful little boy, with a sort of turban round her head.... One corner of the market was given up to great hobgoblin pumpkins; tomatoes were heaped in the stalls; oranges and limes were not yet over; but perhaps the fish-stalls are the prettiest of all. Silver fish tied up in stars with olive-green leaves, goldenfish, as in miracles, with noble people serving. There are the jewellers’ shops too, but their wares do not glitter so brightly as all this natural beautiful gold and silver.

LADY RITCHIE.

Thetraveller who delights to linger onSt.Mark’s Place, in the Basilica, at the Ducal Palace, in the museums and churches, should also halt long and often at the Rialto. This is a corner with a character quite its own; here crowd together, laden with fruit and vegetables, the black boats that come from the islands to provision Venice, the great hulls laden withcocomeri,angurie, with gourds and water-melons piled in mountains of colour; there the gondolas jostle, and the gondoliers chatter like birds in their Venetian idiom; there, too, are the fishermen in their busy, noisy, black-looking market, an assemblage of strange craft and strange types of humanity; and as a pleasant contrast, on the steps of the bridge and stepping before the jewellers’ shops, are girls from the different quarters of Venice, from Canareggio, Dorso Duro, San Marco, and Sante Croce, and from every corner of the town, come to buy the coloured handkerchiefs they deck themselves in, and jewellery of delicately worked gold, or bright glass beads from Murano, or glass balls iridescent with green, blue, and pink; while, wrapped in old grey shawls and showing only their wrinkled profiles and silver locks, the old women of the Rialto drag their slippers up the steps, and glide among the crowd, hiding under the folds of their aprons the strangefries they have just bought from those keepers of open-air provision stalls who ply their trade on the approaches to the Rialto.

CHARLES YRIARTE.

Itwas not five o’clock before I was aroused by a loud din of voices and splashing of water under my balcony. Looking out, I beheld the Grand Canal so entirely covered with fruits and vegetables, on rafts and in barges, that I could scarcely distinguish a wave. Loads of grapes, peaches, and melons arrived, and disappeared in an instant, for every vessel was in motion; and the crowds of purchasers, hurrying from boat to boat, formed one of the liveliest pictures imaginable. Amongst the multitudes I remarked a good many whose dress and carriage announced something above the common rank; and upon inquiry I found they were noble Venetians, just come from their casinos, and met to refresh themselves with fruit, before they retired to sleep for the day.

Whilst I was observing them, the sun began to colour the balustrades of the palaces, and the pure exhilarating air of the morning drawing me abroad, I procured a gondola, laid in my provision of bread and grapes, and was rowed under the Rialto, down the Grand Canal, to the marble steps of S. Maria della Salute, erected by the Senate in performance of a vow to the Holy Virgin, who begged off a terrible pestilence in 1630. I gazed, delighted with its superb frontispiece and dome, relieved by a clear blue sky. To criticize columns or pediments of the different façades would be time lost; since one glance upon the worst viewthat has been taken of them conveys a far better idea than the most elaborate description. The great bronze portal opened whilst I was standing on the steps which lead to it, and discovered the interior of the dome, where I expatiated in solitude; no mortal appearing except an old priest who trimmed the lamps, and muttered a prayer before the high altar, still wrapped in shadows. The sunbeams began to strike against the windows of the cupola just as I left the church, and was wafted across the waves to the spacious platform in front ofSt.Giorgio Maggiore, by far the most perfect and beautiful edifice my eyes ever beheld.

When my first transport was a little subsided, and I had examined the graceful design of each particular ornament, and united the just proportion and grand effect of the whole in my mind, I planted my umbrella on the margin of the sea, and reclining under its shade, my feet dangling over the waters, viewed the vast range of palaces, of porticos, of towers, opening on every side and extending out of sight. The Doge’s residence and the tall columns at the entrance of the place ofSt.Mark, form, together with the arcades of the public library, the lofty Campanile and the cupolas of the ducal church, one of the most striking groups of buildings that art can boast of. To behold at one glance these stately fabrics, so illustrious in the records of former ages, before which, in the flourishing times of the republic, so many valiant chiefs and princes have landed, loaded with the spoils of different nations, was a spectacle I had long and ardently desired. I thought of the days of Frederic Barbarossa, when looking up the piazza ofSt.Mark, along which he marched in solemn procession, to cast himself at thefeet of Alexander the Third, and pay a tardy homage toSt.Peter’s successor. Here were no longer those splendid fleets that attended his progress; one solitary galeass was all I beheld, anchored opposite the palace of the Doge, and surrounded by crowds of gondolas, whose sable hues contrasted strongly with its vermilion oars and shining ornaments. A party-coloured multitude was continually shifting from one side of the piazza to the other; whilst senators and magistrates in long black robes were already arriving to fill their respective charges.

I contemplated the busy scene from my peaceful platform, where nothing stirred but aged devotees creeping to their devotions; and, whilst I remained thus calm and tranquil, heard the distant buzz and rumour of the town. Fortunately a length of waves rolled between me and its tumults; so that I ate my grapes, and read Metastasio, undisturbed by officiousness or curiosity.

WILLIAM BECKFORD.

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