IT WAS FROM BYZANTIUM that the taste for refinement and sensuous luxury came to Venice. ‘Artifciosa voluptate se mulcebat,’ a chronicler wrote of the Greek wife of an early doge. Her scents and perfumes, her baths of dew, her sweet-smelling gloves and dresses, the fork she used at table scandalized her subjects, plain Italian pioneer folk. The husband of this effeminate woman had Greek tastes also. He began, says the chronicler, ‘to work in mosaic,’ importing mosaic workers—and marbles and precious stones—to adorn his private chapel, St Mark’s, in the Eastern style that soon became second nature to the Venetians.
The Byzantine mode, in Venice, lost something of its theological awesomeness. The stern, solemn figure of the Pantocrator who dominates the Greek churches with his frowning brows and upraised hand does not appear in St Mark’s in His arresting majesty. In a Greek Church, you feel that the eye of God is on you from the moment you step in the door; you are utterly encompassed by this all-embracing gaze, which in peasant chapels is often represented by an eye over the door. The fixity of this divine gaze is not punitive; it merely calls you to attention and reminds you of the eternal Law of the universe arching over time and circumstance. The Pantocrator of the Greeks has traits of the old Nemesis, sweetened and purified by the Redemption. He is also a Platonic idea, the End of the chain of speculation.
The Venetians were not speculators or philosophers, and the theological assertion is absent from St Mark’s mosaics, which seek rather to tell a Biblical story than to convey an abstraction. The clothing of the story assumes, in Venice, an adventitious interest, as in the fluffy furs worn by Salome in the Baptistery mosaic. The best Venetian mosaics are not in St Mark’s, the doge’s showcase, but in Torcello, which was an episcopal see in its own right and owed political allegiance to the Greek exarchate of Ravenna.
Torcello is supposed to have been founded by a direct order from God to the Bishop of Altinum. This is a legend one can believe. Unlike Venice, which was the product of necessity and invention, Torcello does indeed appear to be the result of a divine imperative. Only God, you feel, would have commanded a city to be set here on this flat, mournful prairie, barely afloat in the marshy lagoons—an island that was abandoned in the more rational eighteenth century because of the noisome malarious vapours that had reduced the population, once numbering 20,000, to a skeleton crew.
Torcello is healthy enough now and a favourite rendezvous with tourists. A private motorboat runs twice a day in season from Harry’s Bar in urbe to Harry’s Bar in Torcello, a pleasant rustic tavern set in a ragged garden, surrounded by festoons of grapevines. You have an hour and a half to lunch or dine on Harry’s specialities (lobster and scampi and fish soup and lasagne) and half an hour to inspect the two churches, buy souvenirs and postcards and Burano lace doilies, before being sped back to Venice. There is a boy in the Cathedral who explains the mosaics.
If I sigh over this, it is because I have read the accounts of earlier tourists, who used to cross from Burano by gondola and walk alone on the pestilential island, musing on the fate of civilizations in the mood of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias.’ That is how Torcello should be seen. But now to the melancholy of its widowed Cathedral and orphaned daughter-church, Santa Fosca, a new, modern element has been added—the melancholy of desecration and of the tomb’s solitude invaded. All sacred spots today possess this freshened sadness. A double ‘Never more’ echoes over the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna, the catacombs, the temple at Sunium, where Byron carved his name. Not being sacred, Venice is happily free from these gloomy reverberations. But once you embark on the lagoons, it is another matter; the voices of guides and of other touristic parties become suddenly insupportable.
It is still possible, however, to go the old way to Torcello, taking the Murano-Burano vaporetto from the Fondamenta Nuova, lunching at Burano, and continuing by gondola to the sluggish canals and reedy landing-place of Torcello. If you dally in Burano long enough, you will miss the Harry’s Bar parties, who will be on their way back to Venice, and there will only be the souvenir-vendors and the postcard people and the lace-women and the custodians, lined up to speak to you in a babel of tongues.
Burano is ‘a characteristic fishing centre,’ the touring club guide book says. Its speciality is lace, and the thing to do, people tell you, is to go after lunch (in a ‘characteristic’ restaurant, a sort of billiard parlour specializing in sea food and hung with genre studies acquired by the proprietor from artist patrons) to see the lace made in the Scuola dei Merletti down the street. It is upstairs, on the second floor of a little ogival city hall, this institution: a long double room, with rather poor light, where silent rows of little girls in smocks sit on benches, presided over by a nun and a crucifix, pricking out lace for the Society of the Jesurum, a pious, charitable group of worthy ladies who pay the children 400 lire (64 cents, about the same wage they received in 1913) for an eight-hour day making Burano or point de Venise that will sell for very high prices in Venice, in the Society’s shop on the Rio della Canonica near the Bridge of Sighs.
I will not vouch for these figures. They were supplied by an angry Burano gondolier, who may well have been a Communist. There are plenty of hammers and sickles on the Venetian red housefronts of Burano, as in the scabious lagoon towns of the Chioggia itinerary—Malamocco, San Pietro in Volta, Pellestrina. But I believed the gondolier because what he said matched the ferocious looks in the eyes of the children as they passed their hoops of needlework up to the floorwoman for us to marvel over. We came in, smiling, a group of three, exclaiming to ourselves mentally, ‘What a charming scene!’ But when we tried to shower these smiles on the children, not a muscle moved in their faces; only the raised eyes shot looks like poisoned darts.
Yes, said the gondolier, the eyesight was often affected; many could not work after a few years in the lace school. ‘Who is responsible?’ ‘Who gets the money?’ we demanded. A lady in Venice, he said promptly: the Contessa Margherita. I was eager to see this ‘Contessa Margherita,’ whom I imagined as belonging to the chipper smart set that appears every Sunday, like a covey of birds, for a pre-lunch apéritif at Florian’s, sitting at the far end, near the Bocca di Piazza. But in fact there is no such person. The old queen Margherita, long since dead, was once a patroness of the Society. Who actually profits I have never been able to find out. The signora, who knows everything, does not know; the head of the Venetian gondoliers’ co-operative, a veteran anti-fascist with a halo of white hair, does not know. Everyone I ask is vague. I went back to Burano one day to check my first impression, which remained unaltered. And I have found the Burano lace school a useful touchstone for judging the authors of travel books on Venice. There are those like E. V. Lucas, in A Wanderer in Venice, published in 1914:
‘Yet there is an oasis of smiling cleanliness, and that is the chief sight of the place—the Scuola Merletti, under the patronage of Queen Margherita ... thousands of girls, pretty girls too, some of them, with their black massed hair and olive skin and all so neat and happy. Specimens of their work, some of it of miraculous delicacy, may be bought and kept as a souvenir of a delightful experience.’
A different age, you might say, but here is André Maurel in Quinze Jours à Venise, published the same year:
‘Ce n’est pas ici la tristesse de l’usine. Mais peut-être plus pénible encore. Hôpital, orphelinat, ouvroir, asile, de pauvres d’esprit? C’est un peu tout cela à la fois, l’atelier des dentelles à Burano, sans tragique, mais d’une faiblesse qui apitoie infiniment ...Il n’est pas bon de remonter à la source du luxe ... La religieuse qui dirige les filles me dit que certaines arrivent a gagner des trois et quatre francs par jour. Après combien d’années d’affaissement sur la taille, de tête courbée, de pauvres yeux perdus?’
Fortunately, Burano has less daunting sights to offer. In the church of San Martino, in the sacristy, there is an early Tiepolo ‘Crucifixion,’ which is like a ghastly masquerade ball, with banners and swirling draperies and late-Goya faces and peering, deformed wretches in stage rags. The swooning virgin wears a dainty slurred morning cap and a red gown. In the background, there are clown figures in chalky grisaille with leering swollen lips and potato noses. It is a more theatrical vision than that of the Madonna dell’Orto ‘Crucifixion,’ with its transfiguring light; yet it shares with it a kind of terror, a sense of the day when the veil of the Temple was riven, that suggests that Tiepolo was not so devoid of feeling as some recent critics assert.
The same sacristy has a charming Mansueti ‘Flight into Egypt,’ which swarms with odd fancies too, though of a humbler kind. A domestic, Italian donkey with his precious burden toils through a landscape that is alive with exotic birds, both real and imaginary, as well as lions and tigers.
Along the side-streets of Burano, you see groups of old black-shawled women sitting on chairs in the sun in front of the low houses, making lace. No doubt, these are the apprentices of Maurel’s day. Now that they are old, it does not seem to matter. Their eyes are past harming, if they have kept them this long, and the trade is a sociable one, suited to the habits of declining years. Bead-stringing is also a speciality with the Burano old wives, who like to have you watch them as they stand in their open kitchens, poking a long wire into a dish of white beads and bringing it up, strung, after a rapid, dexterous stirring motion, as if with an egg whisk. This legerdemain is the home counterpart of the glass-blowing feats of nearby Murano. Burano is cheerful because so much takes place outdoors here, in the sunlight. There seem to be no secrets. The first sight that meets the visitor’s eye as he arrives on the vaporetto is the whole town’s laundry blowing in the breeze, a banner welcome, in the green public park at the quayside.
During the fall, big chunks of hot roasted winter squash—a rough Burano delicacy—are sold from barges in the canals. The Burano barge men are dark and wild-looking, with great moustaches, like Sicilians. When they make the trip to Venice, they anchor their boat under one of the bridges and eat and sleep there—in public. For several days in November, one of these boats spent the night under my bridge. Coming home after dark, I would see the glowing stove and the lantern lighting up the figure of an old man peeling potatoes under the shadow of the bridge against the black canal water. It was a primitive, almost an aboriginal sight, an apparition in worldly Venice from Vulcan’s ancient forge. The Buranese fishermen and boatmen are aware of how different they are from the slender, fragile, civilized Venetians—how picturesque and brawny. A group of them, all sooty, rows under the Academy bridge, waving and roaring and flashing their teeth up at us, like circus strong men. They have the reputation of being very handsome, but they are not. The poverty of the island has misshapen most of them, squinted their eyes, pocked their skins, and left them short of teeth
Burano is a good approach to Torcello, for one is going, by stages, backward in time. Venice is an eternal present; Burano is the nineteenth century, operatic, vivid, with ragged coloured sails in the canals, nets being mended, roasting squash, emerald-green water, and yellow and white houses. You step off the vaporetto straight into an old-fashioned opera setting, with a cast of characters and a chorus provided by the local trades; there is even a villainess in the wings, the ‘Contessa Margherita,’ a contralto part, who will arrive from Venice in her laces and silks. The poverty of Burano is the ‘happy poverty’ dear to the nineteenth century: rags and sunlight and an artist with a flowing necktie sketching the scene.
Chioggia is a different story. Chioggia is the nineteenth century in its miserable aspect. I went there one day on a motorboat in a pearl-grey fog—a sinister excursion past a chain of islands that encloses Venice like a cordon sanitaire: the island of the contagious-disease hospital, the island of the tuberculous hospital, the island of the female insane, the island of the male insane. (And it is along here, I have discovered, that Wotton’s Orphans’ Canal runs—the executioner’s oubliette.) These islands and the wretched lagoon towns strung out along the Lido and Pellestrina are haunted by legends of the remote past—of the repulse of Pepin, of the repulse of the Huns—and by stories of ghosts and miraculous visitations. Here were the original, imperilled settlements, before the move to Rialto in the ninth century, and here begin the hammers and sickles of today.
Chioggia must have had a different look before they filled in the main canal, so that automobiles can drive down the broad grey main street. In the old photographs it is like a bigger Burano and it was famous for its rough humours, out of which Goldoni made Le Baruffe Chiozzotte. Now on a grey, foggy day, it is the picture of dereliction. The sails are beautiful, with their curious mystic designs, roses and crescents and cups, in yellow, orange, blue, and watermelon pink, but the town is fly-specked and mangy. The buildings are all peeling; the communal watertaps drip; the paintings are rotting in the gloomy churches. The cats are so thin that they look like a single bone with fur draped loosely around it. The inhabitants are no longer the weatherbeaten, bloused banditti that one sees in the old photographs, but greyfaced city denizens, wearing cheap business clothes. The whole town is like a big, secretive nineteenth-century tenement or warehouse on which hammers and sickles have been scrawled.
It was the scene of the great naval victory of the Venetians over the Genoese in the fourteenth century, when the Venetians, under their intrepid admiral, Vettor Pisani, released from jail for the emergency by popular demand, blockaded the blockaders within the port of Chioggia and waited anxiously for relief from the erratic captain, Carlo Zeno, coming from God knew where—Crete or the Bosporus. This is the one heroic moment in Venetian history, a long tense moment in which calculation was forgotten and everything was left to fate. Here, uniquely for Venice, individual character marked an event; Carlo Zeno was a bankrupt gambler and troubadour who had been wandering over Europe as a soldier of fortune; Pisani was a choleric patriot, simple, impulsive, athletic, and quick with his fists. Each of these two patricians was reckless in his own way; each was a popular idol and suspect to the oligarchy. As usual, there was a peace party in Venice that favoured compromise or surrender, and Pisani was allowed till January 1, 1380, to continue the counter-blockade; if Zeno did not arrive by then, Pisani agreed to give up his strategy, and starving Venice would submit to the hereditary enemy. This fairy-tale bargain had a fairy-tale ending. At dawn on January 1, after more than two months of suspense, five sails were sighted on the horizon, too far distant for the eye to make out whether they were friend or foe. Scouts were sent out in small boats and they watched while a flag was hoisted. The Lion of St Mark unfurled. The impossible had happened; Carlo Zeno had got the message. Or, as the historian Hazlitt put it, losing his professional restraint: ‘IT WAS CARLO ZENO WHO HAD COME AT LAST; AND VENICE WAS INDEED SAVED.’
The Chioggians themselves took no part in this valorous dream, their town having fallen to the Genoese, who with the help of the Carraresi of Padua sacked it cruelly. The decline of Chioggia dates from this episode. It made a brief sortie into history at the time of the Risorgimento when the Chioggian sailors helped Garibaldi, who was trying to reach Venice, escape from the Austrians into the Ravenna pine forest. The smell of the past is sour here in Chioggia, like rancid pee of the crouching lion on the pillar by the harbour, the lion the Venetians say is a cat.
But Chioggia is a long way from Torcello, which lies on the other side of Venice in the northern lagoons. Torcello is only a few minutes from Burano, however. One steps out of the gondola into the pioneer days of the lagoon. On this flat, treeless island, with its low, desultory vineyards and stretches of meadow grass, broken vertically only by the Cathedral and the tall isolated bell-tower, one is awesomely conscious of history, for the first time in the Venetian ambience. Indeed, there is nothing else here: only the Cathedral, with the little octagonal church of Santa Fosca close beside it, like a nursling, the bell-tower (closed), the provincial museum, a house or so, a Devil’s Bridge with a legend attached to it, a few fishermen and museum custodians, and, of course, Harry’s Bar. It is easy to imagine the first settlers arriving here on a little boat, led by their bishop with a cross. The little boat, the vast Cathedral—this is the measure of their piety.
Torcello is said to have been named for the tower in Altinum where the bishop was vouchsafed his vision, when he was seeking refuge for his flock from the savage, heretic Lombards. The idea of height seems essential to this tiny island, which must have figured in its own eyes as a lighthouse of faith and a lookout-point for dangers. The flight of the faithful took place in 638, though in fact some earlier settlers had fled here from Attila in 452. Nothing remains of this first settlement, which may have been impermanent. But Bishop Paul took his see with him from ravaged Altinum, and the Cathedral to S. Maria Assunta (again the idea of height) was erected the next year, in 639. It was modified twice, finally in 1008, but it kept its original form, that of the Ravenna churches, and, standing in tall grass, it still diffuses the early-Christian aura of the Exarchate, of Ravenna’s San Vitale and Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, which once too looked over a harbour, now silted in and covered with that lonely pine forest where Dante and Byron poeticized and Garibaldi hid.
No building in Venice is as old as this. St Mark’s, in the Ravenna style, was begun in 829, but it was twice destroyed, burned down once by the people in rebellion against a tyrannous doge, restored, and torn down again by an eleventh-century doge who wanted his chapel in the fashionable Byzantine style. (It was his successor, Doge Selvo, that married the Greek wife.) The present St Mark’s, in the shape of a Greek cross with five domes and modelled, some think, on the church of the Twelve Apostles in Constantinople, is the result of his initiative. The Venetian passion for building had its destructive side. When the Doge’s Palace was partly destroyed by fire in the sixteenth century, a commission of architects was consulted, and Palladio counselled tearing down what was left and building a new one. If it had not been for the counter-advice of the Florentine Sansovino, who was more of a trimmer, the Doge’s Palace today would be in the Palladian style and a wonder of the world would be lost. The church of San Geminiano (whose destruction brought down the Pope’s interdict) was repeatedly torn down; its position in St Mark’s Square was unlucky for it. Sansovino’s San Geminiano, the last of its line, was demolished by Napoleon to create the Fabbrica Nuova, where the Correr Museum is now located.
The pope had some reason to be angry, for the old church was believed to go back to the sixth century, to Narses the Eunuch who ruled Italy from Ravenna for the Emperor Justinian and had made use of Venetian transport for his armies in his campaign against the Goths. He was one of the first foreigners to be struck by Venetian prosperity. According to tradition, Narses built two churches on what is now the Piazza in fulfilment of a vow: San Geminiano, which he ornamented with marble columns and precious stones, and the more modest church of St Theodore, later swallowed up by St Mark’s, like its patron and his crocodile. A still earlier church, San Jacopo di Rialto, is supposed to have been put up on the site of a shipyard in the fifth century. But the present San Giacometto di Rialto (open one day a year), which claims to be that church, is really an eleventh or twelfth century creation, much restored and rebuilt, the last time in the seventeenth century.
The Venetians are enthusiastic restorers. The paintings of the Doge’s Palace have been worked on by gangs of restorers ever since the eighteenth century. That is perhaps why, at least to my eyes, they look so verveless; even Tintoretto’s great blue circling ‘Paradise’ is a disappointment, close up—I prefer the cartoon for it in the Louvre. Except for the Veronese ‘Industry’ with her marvellous spider web on the ceiling of the Sala del Collegio and Tintoretto’s ‘Marriage of St Catherine’ in the same room, Tiepolo’s ‘Neptune Offering Venus the Gifts of the Sea’ on an easel in the Sala delle Quattro Porte and the bonneted figure of the Doge Grimani in the large semi-Titian in the same room, these yards of paint and canvas seem dead and honorific. A better idea of these masters can be formed in the Scuole and the churches, long neglected by the restorers, or in the Academy, which got most of its paintings during the nineteenth century from private collections, or in the various small museums—the Correr, the Querini Stampalia, the Ca’ Rezzonico—which were themselves private collections until recent years.
As every visitor knows, only one original mosaic—the left-hand one—has survived on St Mark’s façade. The others are ‘restorations.’ A less advertised fact is that the Torcello mosaics have been restored too, particularly the ‘Universal Judgment.’ I myself would never have noticed this, had I not been told. But it pains more expert people, who say that it has lost its depth and sparkle, which were due to the uneven setting of the old tiles. The whole Cathedral and Santa Fosca too have undergone restorations; their baroque ornaments have been stripped from them and some new brick has been laid in, to give them once again their bare, primitive aspect. I do not find this objectionable here on Torcello, for the restoration only emphasizes a truth about these churches, which is that life has fled from them.
You pay your admission and enter the Cathedral. In the depths of the church, behind the altar, high up, is the Virgin against a gold background. Facing her, on the entrance wall, is the ‘Universal Judgment’. A solemn confrontation, thinks Ruskin, and in theory it ought to be: the Last Things—death, resurrection, immortality, judgment—confront the First Thing—the mystery of the Incarnation. But the real effect is quite different. You must turn your back on the Virgin to look up at the Universal Judgment (12th century, Venetian, Byzantine iconography), and this wheeling has a significance, certainly not intended, but nonetheless real.
The Universal Judgement is arranged in five tiers, with the Crucifixion above and a praying Madonna in the lunette over the door: the Descent into Limbo; Christ in Glory with the Madonna and Saints; the Resurrection of the Body; the Elect separated from the Damned; Bliss and Eternal Fire. It is a solemn arraignment, and the huge mosaic at first sight is awe-inspiring, as the Greek mosaics are. But the Christ in Glory, which should, in the Greek notion, be the radiant centre of the story, is the most perfunctory of the panels. Interest is dispersed to the ‘amusing’ aspects of the narrative: the Angel, on the right-hand side of the third panel, with the Last Trump, represented as a sort of tuba-horn, and his companion Angels with flutes, blowing a summons to a pagan Nereid, in bracelets and anklets and head-dress, to release the manikin bodies that have been devoured by man-eating fish and spotted sea-serpents and other monsters of the sea, while, on the left-hand side, two land-based Angels pipe to the Lion, king of beasts, seated outside his cave, to order his minions to cough up their half-devoured prey; the damned, in the fourth panel, being chivied into hell, where the devil, a hoary grandfather in blackface, sits dandling a soul on his lap, while the Elect, across the way, look on, like spectators at a sporting event. In the bottom panel, Eternal Fire, with its curly flames licking naked old debauchees, diverts attention from Bliss; in the top panel, majesty is sacrificed to the spectacle of a reluctant, protesting, unregenerate Adam in a white beard being pulled along by a stern Redeemer, Who is obliged to use force to get the old fellow out of his soft life in Limbo.
All this is orthodox theology. The Last Trump does indeed call for the Resurrection of the Body—‘all those whom the flood did and fire shall o’er throw’—and one of the pleasures of the blessed will be to look down over the banisters into hell and watch the damned being tortured. Yet one cannot help smiling over this mosaic, because the Venetian concreteness and visualizing power has turned eschatology into a quirkish folk legend that is not far from the novelistic tales of Carpaccio. The tuba-horn, the costumed Nereid, the spotted sea serpent sitting up like an obedient Fido with his victim between his jaws—these lively details, in bright, clear colours, red and white and turquoise, are pure Venetian fantasy, which is always an extension of Venetian common sense and logic.
All that is left of Byzance in this mosaic is the stupendous size of it, the monitory figure of the Redeemer with his cross, and the two hieratic Archangels in Oriental dress on either side of the top panel. And, of course, the ladies’ fashions.
Once you turn round to face the altar, however, the joyous literalness of Venice is behind you. A very different atmosphere emanates from the luminous whitewashed basilica, with its three simple naves, carried on eighteen Greek columns with leafy white marble capitals. Ruskin compared it to an ark, and indeed there is that feeling about it: a sense of a covenant between God and the early settlers, with the bishop, as Ruskin says, being their pilot—a common early Christian conception. A marine light flows in through the high, rude windows, and the Nereid and the denizens of the deep are just behind you. Representation is kept to a minimum, and all attention is directed by the ushering columns to the plain stone altar, literally a table, and to the gold vault above, which symbolized the celestial light. Against this gold background, on a kind of rug-like platform stands the mosaic Virgin, a sober figure in a dark blue fringed dress, holding the Child in one arm while the other is folded stiffly against her breast. She is very thin, compressed to a narrow, sad reminder, a dark, single exclamation point on the empty gold vault. Her expression is strict—more than that, forbidding, as though she were the superior of a harsh, penitential order. Even this is not strong enough; her expression is accusatory.
Below her there is a band of Apostles in the Ravenna style. In the right side-chapel, there are some charming early mosaics, of angels with a lamb; in the main nave is a lovely bas-relief of lions and peacocks; in the right nave, Attila’s Chair, said to be the seat from which the tribunes administered justice under the Exarchate. The church also contains the bones of St Heliodorus, first bishop of Altinum, and an inscription, the earliest in Venetian history, noting the foundation of the Cathedral in the names of the Emperor Heraclius and Isaac the Exarch.
What remains most haunting, however, is that strange figure of the Virgin, small and slender and taut, like a severe little statue raised up to a great height. She is not Byzantine, despite her austerity. Nor is she Ravennate, if there is such a word. She is officially enrolled as a ‘capo-lavoro of the Venetian school. Yet there is nothing like her in Venice, and her sad, accusing gaze seems to be fixed on the Venetian caprices of the ‘Universal Judgment’—half a century earlier—as if in condemnation. She appears, an isolated perpendicular, to be a peculiar place-spirit of Torcello, a sobering, unwavering beacon in the empty Cathedral, itself a lighthouse of an extinguished faith.
Something of this obstinate faith survives in the red-haired boy who explains the mosaics. He heard me one afternoon explaining them myself to a friend, and it cannot have been professional rivalry that caused him to interrupt. ‘After the Crucifixion,’ I was saying, ‘Christ is supposed to have gone down to Limbo—.’ ‘Not “supposed”; ’E did’ the boy cut in, peremptorily. This was a disconconcertingly far cry from the Venetian sacristans with their ‘Che bello,’ ‘Che luce,’ etc. Torcello is ‘something different,’ as the tourists say to each other. Ruskin’s notion of medieval Venice, ‘città apostolica e santa’ receives support from Torcello, just as the operatic conception of Venice as a northern Naples receives support from Burano and Chioggia, while the glass-blowing town of Murano, with its ogival palaces, arches, arcades, and porticoes, proffers a glimpse of the sybaritic Renaissance Venice that was a kind of specious ‘Florence in-exile’. Bembo and Tasso and Aretino lived on Murano; it was a breezy garden retreat for humanist gentlemen, who collected art-objects and rare botanical specimens, engaged in Platonic dialogues, and perused Greek and Latin volumes in fine Venetian bindings. Murano was a sort of ‘folly’ and fell into decline in the seventeenth century; it was revived as an industrial town at the end of the nineteenth century, when the glass-industry made a comeback. That is the eerieness of the lagoons; Venice is ringed by a series of dead cities, each representing a Venetian possibility that aborted.