Venice stands, as she loves to tell you, on the frontiers of east and west, half-way between the setting and the rising sun. Goethe calls her ‘the market-place of the Morning and the Evening lands’. Certainly no city on earth gives a more immediate impression of symmetry and unity, or seems more patently born to greatness. On the map Venice looks like a fish; or a lute, Evelyn thought; or perhaps a pair of serpents locked in death-struggle; or a kangaroo, head down for a leap. But to understand the modern topography of the place, you must throw the street plans away and go to the top of the great Campanile of St Mark, above the bustling Piazza. You can make the ascent by lift: but if you prefer to take a horse, like the Emperor Frederick III, there is a spiral ramp for your convenience.
From the bell-chamber of this great tower, once you have fought off the itinerant photographers and the picture-postcard sellers, you can see how curiously compact and undistracted is the shape of Venice. To the north stand the heavenly Alps, beyond the Treviso plain, sprinkled with snow and celestially silent; to the south is the Adriatic, a grim but handsome sea; around you stretches the Venetian lagoon, morose but fascinating, littered with islands. The horizons are wide, the air is crystalline, the wind blows gustily from the south; and in the very centre of it all, lapped in mud-banks, awash in history, lies the Serenissima.
By a paradox of perspective, there is not a canal to be seen from the bell-chamber, only a jumbled, higgledy-piggledy mass of red-tiled roofs, chimneys, towers, television aerials, delectable roof gardens, flapping washing, sculptured saints and elaborate weather-vanes: and the effect is not one of overwhelming grandeur, but of medieval intimacy, as though you are eavesdropping upon a fourteenth-century housewife, or prying into a thane’s back yard. This is not a large city. You can see it all easily, from one end to the other. It is about two miles long by one mile deep, and you can walk from end to end of it, from the slaughter-house in the north-west to the Public Gardens in the south-east, in an hour and a half – less, if you don’t mind shoving. The population of Venice is something over 360,000 but at least two-thirds of these people live in the new mainland suburbs – the big industrial quarter of Mestre and Porto Marghera whose shipyards and shining oil-tanks you can see away to the west.
The city proper shelters perhaps about the same number of inhabitants as Lincoln, say, or Watford. It is built, so they say, on an archipelago of 117 islets (though where an islet begins and a mud-bank ends, the geologists do not seem quite certain); and its canals and alley-ways follow the contours of the myriad rivulets which complicated these shallows before the arrival of the first Venetians. The sub-soil is soft to an average depth of 105 feet; the mean temperature is 56˚ Fahrenheit; and the altitude of Venice, so one guide book solemnly informs us, is seven feet above sea-level.
If you look beyond the Piazza you will observe a vague declivity among the buildings, as you may sometimes see, across the plains of the American West, the first distant indications of a canyon. This gulf sweeps in three abrupt but majestic curves clean through the city, dividing it into convenient halves. It is the Grand Canal, which follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto – the origin of the Rialto. Three bridges cross this tremendous waterway, forty-six side-canals enter it, 200 palaces line it, forty-eight alleys run down to it, ten churches stand upon its banks, the railway station stands gleaming at one end, St Mark’s guards the other. It is at once the Seine and the New Jersey Turnpike of Venice, the mirror of her beauty and the highway by which the cargo barges, horns blaring and engines a-blast, chug towards her markets and hotels. The ordinary Venetian canal feels frankly man-made: but most people have to stifle an impulse, now and again, to call the Grand Canal a river.
Around its banks, and on the big neighbouring island of Giudecca, Venice is tightly packed, in six ancient segments. The city is a sequence of villages, a mosaic of old communities. Once each district was a separate island of the archipelago, but they have been jammed together down the centuries, and fused by common experience. Wherever you look from your eyrie you may discern one of these old local centres, with its fine church and its spacious square, its lively market, its homely shops, its banks, its taverns, its private tourist attractions. The very centre of Venice is said to be the pedestal in the middle of Campo San Luca, but the completeness of these various antique settlements means that the city is rich in depth: it has few barren quarters or sterile suburbs. No part of the city, wherever you look, lacks its great monuments or its pungency of character. To the east are the ramparts of the Arsenal, with its frowning tower-gates; to the north-west you may fancy, a blur among the tenements, the grey enclave of the Ghetto; to the south lies the long rib of Giudecca, where the boatmen live; and all around the perimeters of the place range the waterside promenades, lined with steamboats and fishing vessels and bobbing gondolas, a fine white liner at the Zattere, a timber boat from Istria beside the Fondamenta Nuove, where the lagoon sidles away mysteriously to the cemetery-island of San Michele. From the top of the campanile the whole Venetian story seems simple and self-explanatory, and you may let your eye wander directly from the brown sluggish mud-banks that represent the first beginnings of the city, to the golden ornaments and fret-work of St Mark’s, memorials of its resplendent climax.
Away to the west, beyond the railway station, a noble double causeway strides across the water to the mainland. The prime fact about twentieth-century Venice is that the city is no longer an island. The causeway is a symbol, at once sad and high-vaulted, of Venice’s lost supremacies. In her heyday Venetian communications were entirely maritime, and a highly organized system of boats linked the city with the mainland by four principal routes: through Fusina and the Brenta canal to Padua; through Mestre to Udine and Austria; through Pellestrina and Chioggia to the Po and Lombardy; through Treviso to Friuli. So long as Venice was a city-State, facing the ocean, her difficulties of landward communication were a positive advantage. In the fifteenth century, though, she established a mainland empire, setting up the winged lion in Padua, Ravenna, Verona, Treviso, Vicenza, Brescia, Bergamo, Belluno – half-way across Italy, to the approaches of Milan. Becoming at last a European Power, her outlook slowly changed: and by the final days of the Republic, when she was inextricably entangled in Italian affairs, the idea of a bridge to the mainland was being earnestly discussed. The Doge Foscarini carefully considered it, as a means of injecting some new commercial guts into the flaccid body politic, but decided instead to revive the languishing glass industry and merchant navy. Napoleon, so it is said, ordered his engineers to survey the ground for bridge-piles. A group of Italian business men, in the early 1840s, launched a company to finance a railway line to Venice. And the Austrians, in 1846, actually built a bridge. It linked Venice by rail with Vicenza, and it horrified the world’s romantics (Ruskin likened it to ‘a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it’).
It stands there today, 3,000 yards long, supported upon 222 arches, and provided with forty-eight explosive chambers, for easy demolition in emergencies. It brings about 100 passenger trains each day into Santa Lucia station, where the tourists, struggling out of their wagons-lits, are whisked bemused into gondolas and launched directly into the Grand Canal. There were once plans to have the trains puffing into the very heart of the city: they were to pass behind Giudecca on an elevated line, and end beside Palladio’s church on the islet of San Giorgio Maggiore. Other nineteenth-century visionaries proposed a dual bridge, dividing at the entrance of the city, one part to run away across the lagoon to the Lido and Chioggia, the other to end at the island of Murano, to the north.
One bridge it remained, though, for nearly a century, until the railway line had become an essential part of the Venetian scene, and had extended into a meshwork of sidings beside the docks, and the city had long been accustomed to the wail of its sad steam-whistles in the night (now no longer to be heard, alas, above the hubbub of the motor-boat engines). A prolonged and bitter controversy preceded the building of the second causeway, the road bridge. On the one side stood the pontisti, the men of progress, who wanted ever closer links between Venice and the great modern world, with ‘the heart of Italy beating against her own’: on the outer side were the traditionalists, the lovers of things old and honoured, who wished to keep their Venice as close to virginity as was physically possible, and who argued on a spectacular variety of premises, from the danger that a second bridge would stifle the flow of tides and kill the city by malaria, to the possibility that the rumble of cart-wheels would weaken the foundations of its buildings.
Thus they stood as exemplars of a perennial Venetian dispute: whether to modernize the Serenissima, or preserve her. Through any modern book on Venice this problem runs as a leitmotiv, tingeing every page with the thought that Venice, as we see her now, may not last much longer, and giving her future a microcosmic quality. The conflict between old and new, between the beautiful and the profitable, between progress and nostalgia, between the spirit and the crank-case, is one that involves us all: and in Venice you may sense it, if you are not too obsessed with the tourist sights, crystallized and in synthesis. It is not decided yet. Even Mussolini at first forbade the building of another bridge, and said that if he could have his way he would destroy the railway too: but in Anno X of his dictatorship, 1931, the pontisti won their particular campaign, and the motor causeway was completed. It has eight more arches than its companion, and swings away from it, as they enter the city side by side, to end with a bang at the Piazzale Roma in a cruelly expensive clutch of multi-storied car parks.
Consider, as you prop yourself against the wall of the Campanile (you cannot fall out, for there is a wire mesh to prevent suicides) how these two bridges have affected the character of Venice. First, they ended any pretence of insular Republican independence. Manin’s forces, it is true, breached the railway bridge and defended it against all comers: but it is almost inconceivable that a city so intimately linked with the mainland could long have maintained its sovereignty, except as a kind of joke or fiscal fiddle. Secondly, the bridges weakened the isolation of the Venetian character. Many more mainland Italians followed the railway into the lagoon; many more Venetians visited the hinterland; the inbred, introspective complex of Venetian society was cracked. Thirdly, the causeways brought an influx of new life and vigour into the city, helping to account for the strange and sudden renaissance of 1848. They fostered trade, they encouraged tourism, and they did something to revive the languishing entrepôt activity of the port.
Finally, the bridges shattered a myth. They dispelled some of the gilded mystery of Venice, laid her open to the Cook’s tour and the family motorist, forced her, willy-nilly, half-way into the modern world. She became, as she remains, an ex-island. Modern Venice begins, not at the distant entrances of the lagoon, where the sea shimmers beyond the lighthouses, but down there at the causeway, behind the petrol pumps and the station platforms. When you leave the bell-chamber, clutching your photographer’s ticket (‘Reddy in Two Hours, Garanted Perfect’), and pushing your way diffidently but firmly into the lift, mark the causeways black on your mind’s map of Venice, and keep the rose-red for the canals.