There are many houses in Venice that do not stand upon canals, and are inaccessible by boat: but there is nowhere in the city that you cannot reach on foot, if you have a good map, a stout pair of shoes and a cheerful disposition. The canals govern the shape and pattern of Venice. The streets fill the gaps, like a filigree. Venice is a maze of alleys, secluded courtyards, bridges, archways, tortuous passages, dead ends, quaysides, dark overhung back streets and sudden sunlit squares. It is a cramped, crowded, cluttered place, and if its waterways are often sparkling, and its views across the lagoon brilliantly spacious, its streets often remind me of corridors in some antique mouldy prison, florid but unreformed. It is a very stony city. A few weeks in Venice, and you begin to long for mountains or meadows or open sea (though it is extraordinary, when once you have tied your sheets together and jumped over the wall, how soon you pine for the gaol again).
There are several different grades of street and square in Venice. The fondamenta is a quayside, usually wide and airy. The calle is a lane. The salizzada is a paved alley, once so rare as to be worth distinguishing. The ruga is a street lined with shops. The riva is a water-side promenade. The rio terra is a filled-in canal, and the piscina a former pond. Then there is something called a crosera, and something called a ramo, and a sotto-portico, and a corte, and a campo, and a campiello, and a campazzo. There is a Piazzale in Venice (the Piazzale Roma, by the car park). There are two Piazzettas (one on each side of the Basilica). But there is only one Piazza, the stupendous central square of the city, which Napoleon called the finest drawing-room in Europe.
Each section of the city, as we saw from the Campanile, clusters about its own square, usually called a campo because it used to be, in the virginal days of Venice, a soggy kind of field. The most interesting campi in Venice are those of San Polo, Santa Maria Formosa, San Giacomo dellʼ Orio, Santo Stefano, and Santa Margherita – the first rather dashing, the second rather buxom, the third rather rough, the fourth rather elegant, the fifth pleasantly easygoing. In such a campo there is usually no glimpse of water, the canals being hidden away behind the houses, and all feels hard, old and urban. It is, as the guides would say, ‘very characteristical’.
In the middle of Campo Santa Margherita (for example) there stands an inconsequential little square building, rather like an old English town hall, which was once the Guild of the Fur-Makers, and it is the local office of a political party. At one end of the square is an antique tower, once a church, now a cinema, and at the other is the tall red campanile of the Carmini church, with an illuminated Madonna on its summit. Between these three landmarks all the spiced activities of Venice flourish, making the campo a little city of its own, within whose narrow confines you can find almost anything you need for sensible living. There is a bank, in a fine old timbered house; and three or four cafés, their radios stridently blaring; and a swarthy wineshop, frequented by tough old ladies and dominated by a an enormous television set; and a second-hand clothes dealer; and a dairy, and a couple of well-stocked groceries, and a delightful old-school pharmacy, all pink bottles and panelling. At the brightly coloured newspaper kiosk the proprietor peers at his customers through a small cavity among the film stars, as though he has nibbled a way between the magazines, like a dormouse. The draper’s shop is warm with woollies and thick stockings; the tobacconist sells everything from safety-pins to postage stamps; and each morning they set up a market in the square, beneath gay awnings, squirming with fish and burgeoning with vegetables.
Like many another Venetian campo, Santa Margherita is an unsophisticated place. No elegant socialites sit at its cafés. No actresses cross their legs revealingly on the steps of its war memorial. The passing tourists hurry by anxiously consulting their street plans, on their way to grander places. But there is no better way to taste the temper of Venice than to sit for an hour or two in such a setting, drinking a cheap white wine from the Veneto, and watching this particular small world go by.
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Extending from the squares, like tenuous roots, run the alleyways of Venice, of which there are said to be more than 3,000. Their total length is more than ninety miles, but some are so small as to be almost impassable. Browning was delighted to find one so narrow that he could not open his umbrella. The narrowest of all is said to be the Ramo Salizzada Zusto, near San Giacomo dellʼ Orio, which is 2½ feet wide, and can only be traversed by the portly if they are not ashamed to try sideways. The lanes of Venice often have lovely names – the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the First Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley, both commemorating seventeenth-century fires; the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind. Not long ago, before peoples’ skins grew thinner, there was even a Calle Sporca – Dirty Lane.
The lanes are often beguilingly unpredictable, ending abruptly in dark deep canals, plunging into arcades, or emerging without warning upon some breathtaking vista. They can also be misleading, for you will frequently find that the palace looming at the end of an alley-way is separated from you by a wide waterway, and can only be reached by an immense detour. This means that though Venetian houses may be close to one another, they are not necessarily neighbours, and it has led to the evolution of a complicated sign language, enabling housemaids to converse with each other at long range, or conduct gentle flirtations across the chasm: I once saw a young man in the very act of blowing a kiss to a girl across such a canal when his window-pane fell down with a busybody thump, fatally weakening his aplomb. The mystery, secrecy and romance of the lanes is always a fascination, especially if you learn, as the Venetians do, to andare per le fodere – ‘move among the linings’, or poke your way through the little subsidiary passages that creep padded and muffled among the houses, like the runs of city weasels.
They used to have running-races in the crook-back, zigzag streets of Venice, and you can make good speed along them if you develop the right techniques of side-step and assault. The best way to move about Venice, through, is by a combination of methods, based upon careful analysis. You can walk from the Rial to to the church of Ognissanti in half an hour: but if you know the place, you will catch the express vaporetto to San Samuele – take the traghetto across to the Caʼ Rezzonico – follow the linings through the Calle Traghetto, the Calle Lunga San Barnaba, the Calle delle Turchette, the Fondamenta di Borgo, the Fondamenta delle Eremite, the Calle dei Frari, the Rio Terra degli Ognissanti – and in a dazed minute or two, emerging panting upon the Campo Ognissanti, you are there.
‘Turn up on your right hand,’ said Launcelot to Gobbo, when that old gentleman was looking for Shylock’s house – ‘turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but at the next turning of all, on your left: marry, at the very next turning, turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew’s house.’
‘By God’s sonties,’ the old boy replied, ‘’twill be a hard way to find’ – and O Heavens! he was right.
Long centuries ago the Venetians, looking around them at these peculiar circumstances, and examining the best Greek, Roman and Byzantine models, devised their own kind of house. Many an ephemeral taste has embellished their architecture since then, and many fluctuations of fortune have affected their style, so that today Venice is a gallimaufry of domestic architecture, so tightly packed and heavily loaded with buildings that sometimes it feels like one massive jagged stone hillock, projecting irregularly from the waters of the lagoon.
The classic Venetian house remains the palace of the old aristocracy. It is found all over the city, in innumerable back-alleys and little-frequented courtyards – in the best modern guide to Venice 334 such houses are thought worthy of mention. Many a modest old doorway masks a lovely house, and often a butcher’s shop or a grocer’s has been built into the side of an exquisite small fifteenth-century mansion. You can see the greater houses at their best and grandest, though, along the banks of the Grand Canal, where their architecture springs from three distinct periods – the Byzantine, the Gothic, the Renaissance – which are instantly recognizable to writers of guide books, but often indistinguishable to me. Some of these houses are appealingly decrepit. Some have been ruthlessly restored. Some are charming, some (to my mind) perfectly hideous. Some are simple and demure, some massively ostentatious, with immense heavy doorways and ugly obelisks on their cornices. They are, at least those of the Gothic pattern, unique to Venice: but when Mr Tiffany and his associates wanted to erect a jeweller’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, and when the committee of the Army and Navy Club were planning their new premises in Pall Mall, all those gentlemen cast their eyes admiringly towards the Grand Canal, and built their own Venetian palaces at home.
Their basic design is lofty but practical, and clearly derived from Rome and Byzantium. A typical house is roughly rectangular, but with its façade (on the canal) rather broader than its back (on an alley). It has four, five or six stories. The front door opens spaciously upon the water, where the boats are moored at huge painted posts – unless there is a boathouse at the side, like a garage. The back door opens discreetly into a lane, or into a high-walled and often disregarded garden. If the house is venerable enough, there may be a flagged courtyard with a well-head, from which a wide staircase marches upwards, as in the houses of Damascus and Baghdad.
The ground floor of the palace is the entrance hall and boatyard, where the family gondola used to be laid up, high, dry and mysterious, in the winter months, and where the old merchant aristocrats stored their bales of silk, their bundles of ivory, their tapestries, their perfumes and even their shivering apes – ‘from Tripolis, from Mexico, and England’, as Shakespeare once imaginatively put it, ‘From Lisbon, Barbary and India’. The first floor is the mezzanino, the business quarter of the house, where the merchants did their accounts, concluded their agreements and dismissed their dishonest servants. The second is the piano nobile, the most elegant of the apartments, designed for the pleasure of his honour the proprietor. It has a long, dark, imposing central room, often running the whole length of the house, with a large balcony over the canal, and an alcove each side with windows over the water. From this central sala bedrooms lead off on either side, trailing away in a warren of bathrooms, dressing-rooms and miscellaneous offices.
Above the piano nobile the house loses some of its grandeur, each floor becoming successively pokier until at last, above the ultimate attic, you emerge upon the higgledy-piggledy roof, and find there the wooden platform, called the altana, which was originally designed to allow Venetian ladies privacy while they bleached their hair in the sun, but which nowadays generally flutters with washing. The house may once have been covered with frescoes and vivid ornamentation, sometimes vaguely visible to this day, when the sun is right: now it is probably reddish, brownish, or stone-coloured, and enlivened chiefly by its gay mooring-posts, like barbers’ poles, its striped awnings, and the delectable flower-boxes, bird-cages and odd domestic foliage with which elderly Venetian ladies like to freshen their windows.
Plastered and stuccoed on the façades of these houses are the mementoes of progress: bits and pieces of decoration left behind by successive restorers, like sea-shells in a grotto. Angels, cherubs, scrolls and lions abound on every window-sill, and sometimes there are huge pyramidal spikes on the roof, like the rock-temples of Petra. The side façade of a Venetian palace, in particular, can be immensely complicated by these accretions. I once examined the side elevation of a house near mine, and found that beneath its domed tower and its copper weather-vane it was embellished with four chimney-pots, of three different designs; fifty-three windows, of eight different shapes and sizes, two of them blocked and three grilled; the casement of a spiral staircase; twelve iron staples; eight inlaid pieces of white masonry; a defaced memorial slab; a carved rectangular ornament of obscure significance; four buttresses; five external chimney flues; scattered examples of bare brick, cement, piping, stonework and embedded arches; various bits of isolated tiling; a heavy concrete reinforcement at the water’s edge; a carpet hung out to air; a quizzical housemaid at a third-floor window; and an inscription recording the fact that a celebrated French actress had lived there.
The greatest of these strange houses, though much smaller than the country palaces of the English patricians, are very large indeed. (Their owners often had mansions on the mainland, too: the Pisani family had fifty such villas, and at one house in the Veneto 150 guests could be entertained at a go, together with their servants – it contained two chapels, five organs, a concert hall, a printing press and a couple of theatres.) In the early days of Venice, the citizens all lived in virtually identical houses, ‘to show their unity and equality in all things’: later the palaces became symbolic of wealth and success, the most gloriously ostentatious way of keeping up with the Contarinis.
Many stories testify to the pride of the old Venetian householders, as they erected these grandiose homes. One tells of the aristocrat Nicolo Balbi, who was so anxious to move into the new Palazzo Balbi that he lived for some months in a boat opposite the building site: alas, he caught cold, and before he could take up residence in the mansion, poor old Balbi died. Another concerns a determined suitor who, refused a lady’s hand because he did not possess a palace on the Grand Canal, promptly built one so large that, as he pointed out, any one of its principal windows was bigger than his father-in-law’s main portal: the young man’s house is the Palazzo Grimani, now the Court of Appeal, and the old man’s the Coccina-Tiepolo, almost opposite. A third story says that the truncated Palazzo Flangini, near San Geremia, was once twice its present size, but that when two brothers jointly inherited it, one of them demolished his half in a fit of jealous dudgeon. The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni remains unfinished, so it is said, because the owner of the immense Palazzo Corner, directly opposite, objected so strongly to the impertinence of its completion: it was certainly going to be enormous, as you may see from a model in the Correr Museum. The palace of the Duke of Sforza, near the Accademia, was apparently intended by that ambitious condottiere to be more of a fortress than a mere house, and that is why it remains at half-cock, with a princely set of stairs but a modest elevation.
The Grand Canal, as Gautier once said, was the register of the Venetian nobility – ‘every family has inscribed its own name on one of these monumental façades’. The Palazzo Vendramin, where Wagner died, was built by the Loredan clan, and passed in aristocratic succession to the Duke of Brunswick, the Duke of Mantua, the Calerghi family, the Grimani family, the Vendramin family, the Duchesse de Berri (mother of Henri V) and the Duca della Grazia. Countless and often fabulous were the festivities mounted in such houses, in the days of the Venetian decline. They used to have bull-baitings in the courtyard of the Caʼ Foscari, and sometimes people erected floating platforms on the canal outside their front doors, and had dances on them.
Only a few years ago a ball of legendary luxury and splendour was held in the Palazzo Labia, beside San Geremia, and the grandest parties of the Grand Canal are still among the greatest events of the international season. Few of the larger palaces, though, are still private houses, and if they are, their proprietors are not usually Venetians. One or two patrician families maintain their old homes, usually keeping well out of the social limelight: but their palaces are likely to be divided among different members of the family, floor by floor, with a chaperone or housekeeper to give a respectable unity to the ménage.
Many other palaces are now institutions – the Municipality, which occupies two, the Museum of Modern Art, the winter casino, the Franchetti Museum, the Ca’ Rezzonico Museum, the International Centre of Art and Costume, the headquarters of the Biennale, the Museum of Natural History, the Prefecture, the municipal pawnshop. Some of the finest are hotels. Some are offices, some are antique shops, one is a mosaic workshop, two are showrooms of Venetian glass. Many more are apartments, mostly expensive (especially at the southern end of the Grand Canal), some magnificent. The ownership of these structures can be involved, for they are often divided by floors, so that one landlord owns the top of the house, and quite another the middle, and a third the garden and the water-gate, and a fourth the path that leads you into the common land of the back-alley. Sometimes ownership extends to part of the pavement outside. Near the Rialto there is a house whose garden gate juts abruptly into the passing lane. Across the angle thus made with the wall of the alley a stone has been set in the pavement, enclosing an area of about two square feet between the gateway and the wall, and upon it is engraved the inscription: ‘Private Property’. I once put my foot across this mystic barrier, into the forbidden inches beyond: and sure enough, such is the strength of Venetian tradition, a queer tingle ran up my leg, like a psychic admonition.
Do not judge the prosperity of a Venetian house by the opulence of its doorway, especially if it stands well away from the Grand Canal. There are, of course, many poor houses in Venice, drab uniform tenements, dreary cottages, even the remnants of rock-bottom slums. The apparent squalor of many homes, though, is merely a veneer. Downstairs the house may be dank, messy, derelict or even sinister: but once you are inside, and past the musty obscurity of the hall, and up the rickety stairs, and through the big black door of the principal apartment, and along a gloomy echoing corridor or two, and up a few shaky staircases – then suddenly, passing through a heavy curtain, you may find yourself in the brightest and most elegant of rooms, locked away in that dark exterior like a pearl in a knobbly oyster. (Venetians have always liked to live out of doors, anyway, as you may see from the countless cheerful citizens who take their knitting and their newspapers each summer evening to the cafés of the Riva or the quaysides and trattorias near the docks.)
Do not think, either, that Venice has no gardens. In the winter, when all this maze of buildings is cold, shuttered and depressed, it can feel the most barren of cities, starved of green, sap and juices. This is misleading. Hundreds of gardens lie hidden among the stones of Venice, protected by iron gates and old brick ramparts, so that you only catch a quick passing glimpse of wistaria, or a transient breath of honeysuckle. The Venetians love flowers. Florists abound, and there are shops where you can buy edible essence of rose-petal, or bunches of orange marrow-blossom to fry in flour. There are trees in Venice, too – hundreds of pines, regimentally paraded, in Napoleon’s Public Gardens; handsome plane trees in several squares: myrtles, laurels, oleanders, pomegranates, tamarisks and palms in many a private garden. There is even, a learned man once assured me, ‘a genuine lodogno tree,’ in the Campo San Zaccaria – information I could only accept in respectful silence.
There is a beguiling secrecy and seclusion to these green places of Venice, and they are often littered with quaint statues and carvings, and haunted by cats, and dignified by old overgrown well-heads. On Giudecca, once the garden-island of Venice, there are still one or two rich flower gardens running down to the lagoon, their heavy fragrance hanging like a cloud above the water; and even in the very centre of the city, where you should take nothing for granted, solemn forbidding buildings often secrete small bowers of delights. Behind the old convent of the Servites, enclosed by high walls, there is a vegetable garden (tended by nuns in cowls and gum-boots), so wide and richly cultivated that it feels like a transplanted patch of Tuscany, snatched from the farmlands: and above the low roof of the Palazzo Venier you may see the tall luxuriant trees of its garden, a place of deep evocative melancholy, like a plantation garden in the American South.
Such places are not often public. Most of the Venetian gardens are jealously locked, and impenetrable to strangers. On the entire southern shore of Giudecca there is now only one spot where ordinary people may wander down to the water. To see the gum-booted nuns at work you must persuade some friendly local housewife to give you access to her roof, and look at them over the wall. Few benches stand among the Venetian greeneries as encouragements to dalliance, and the ones in the big Public Gardens, at the end of the Riva, are nearly always occupied.
Venetians, indeed, do not always have much feeling for gardens. Many a private paradise is cruelly neglected, while others are laid out with crude display. Some neighbours of mine, in a spasm of enthusiasm, recently engaged a landscape gardener to rearrange their entire garden, hitherto a tangled wilderness. They ordered it all by the book, complete with a lawn, a garden path, a flower-border, a handful of small trees and a garden gate with brass insignia. The gardeners worked hard and skilfully, and within a month they had created a spanking new garden, as neat, correct and orderly as a ledger: and some time later, when the flowers came out, I observed the mistress of the house wandering among the roses with a catalogue in her hand, making sure she had got what she ordered. Where an alley meets a water-way, there you have a Venetian bridge. The bridges, as Evelyn observed, ‘tack the city together’. There are more to the square mile in Venice than anywhere else on earth – more that 450 of them, ranging from the gigantic twin spans of the causeway to the dainty little private bridge on Giudecca which, if you open its wicket gate and cross its planks, deposits you prudently in the garden of the Queen of Greece. There is the Bridge of Fists and the Bridge of Straw and the Bridge of the Honest Woman and the Bridge of Courtesy and the Bridge of Humility and the Little Bridge and the Long Bridge and the Bridge of Paradise and the Bridge of the Angel and the Bridge of Sighs, where Byron stood, lost in sentimental but misinformed reverie.
The arched bridge turned the canals into highways: but to this day many of the Venetian bridges are so low, so dark and so narrow that the gondolier has to crouch low on his poop to get through them, while his passengers clutch their new straw hats and laugh at their own echoes (and if it is one of those bridges whose undersides are flecked with moving water-reflections, going beneath it is like gliding behind a silent waterfall). The ubiquity of bridges has given the Venetians their peculiar clipped gait, and contributes heavily to the swollen ankles and unsteady heels with which unaccustomed visitors, swearing inexpressible enjoyment, stagger back to a restorative bath after an afternoon of sightseeing.
The early Venetian bridges were used by horses and mules as well as humans, and therefore had ramps instead of steps. They had no parapets, and were made of tarred wood, as you can see from Carpaccio’s famous Miracle of the True Cross at the Rialto. Today the ramps have all disappeared, but there is still one example of a bridge without parapets, on the Rio San Felice near the Misericordia. Most of the minor bridges nowadays are single-spanned, high-arched, and built of stone. There are still a few flat wooden bridges, approached by steps from the pavement, like an English railway bridge. There is a three-arched bridge over the canal called Cannaregio. There is an eccentric junction of bridges near the Piazzale Roma, where five separate structures meet in a baffling confrontation of steps and directions. There are some private bridges, ending abruptly and haughtily at the great wooden doors of palaces. There are a few iron bridges, some of English genesis. At certain times of the year there are even pontoon bridges, erected by Italian Army engineers from the Po Valley garrisons. In November one is thrown across the Grand Canal to the Salute. In July they build one across the wide Giudecca Canal to the church of the Redentore, for the commemoration of another plague delivery (for thirty hours no ship can enter or leave the inner port of Venice). They used also to build one, on All Soul’s Day, to the cemetery of San Michele: but today a water-bus will take you to the graveside anyway, in a matter of mournful moments. For the rest, the little bridges of Venice are so numerous, and so unobtrusive, and so alike, that you may cross ten or twenty in the course of half an hour’s stroll, and hardly even notice them.
Three bigger bridges span the Grand Canal. Until the last century there was only one, the Rialto – which all Venetians meticulously call Ponte di Rialto, the Rialto being, in their long memories, not a bridge but a district. There have been several bridges on this site. The first was a bridge of boats. The second was broken during the Tiepolo revolution in 1310, when the rebels fled across the canal. The third collapsed in 1444 during the Marchioness of Ferrara’s wedding procession. The fifth, portrayed in Carpaccio’s picture, had a drawbridge in the middle. It was temporarily removed in 1452 to let the King of Hungary pass by in suitable state with the Duke of Austria; and it became so rickety over the years that one chronicler described it as ‘all gnawed, and suspended in the air as if by a miracle’.
The sixth was the subject of a famous sixteenth-century architectural competition. Sansovino, Palladio, Scamozzi, Fra Giocondo and even Michelangelo all submitted designs (you may see Michelangelo’s, I am told, at the Casa Buonarotti in Florence). Most of the competitors suggested multi-arched bridges, but one, Antonio da Ponte, boldly proposed a single high arch, based upon 12,000 stakes, with a span of more than 90 feet, a height of 24, and a width of 72. This was a daring gesture. Da Ponte was official architect to the Republic, and the Signory was hardly lenient with employees’ errors – Sansovino himself was presently to be imprisoned when his new library building unfortunately fell down. Nevertheless, da Ponte’s design was accepted, and the bridge was built in two years. It has been a subject of controversy ever since. Many Venetians disliked it at the time, or mocked it as an unreliable white elephant; many others objected when its clean arch was loaded with the present picturesque superstructure of shops; and it has been, until recently, fashionable to decry it as lumpish and unworthy (though several great painters have fondly pictured it, including Turner in a lost canvas).
Structurally, it was a complete success – during rioting in 1797 they even fired cannon from its steps, to dispel the mobs: and for myself, I would not change a stone of it. I love the quaint old figures of St Mark and St Theodore, on the station side of the bridge. I love the Annunciation on the other side, angel at one end, Virgin at the other, Holy Ghost serenely aloft in the middle. I love the queer whale-back of the bridge, humped above the markets, and its cramped little shops, facing resolutely inwards. I think one of the great moments of the Grand Canal occurs when you swing around the bend beside the fish market and see the Rialto there before you, precisely as you have imagined it all your life, one of the household images of the world, and one of the few Venetian monuments to possess the quality of geniality.
For another three centuries it remained the only bridge over the Grand Canal. As late as 1848 the Austrian soldiers could prevent subversive foot passage across the city simply by closing the Rialto bridge. Then two iron structures were thrown across the water-way – one by the railway station, one near the Accademia gallery. They were flat, heavy and very ugly, and the Accademia bridge was sometimes known, in mixed irony and affection, as Ponte Inglese. Both lasted until the 1930s, when they had to be replaced because of the increased size of the vaporetti. The new station bridge was a handsome stone structure, far higher than the Rialto. The new Accademia bridge was of precisely the same proportions, but because money was short it was built (just for the time being, so they cheerfully said) of tarred wood – a return to the original materials of Venetian bridge-building.
And here is an extraordinary thing. There are only these two modern bridges across the Grand Canal, the world’s most resplendent water-way; but one day not long ago I took a vaporetto to Santa Maria del Giglio, and walked across to the Fenice Theatre, and crossed Campo San Fantin, and took the first turning on the left, and the third on the right, and followed the alley to the left again, and knocked on the door of third house on the right, and when the face of a jolly housekeeper had inspected me from an upstairs floor, and the door had clicked open, I found myself shaking hands with the architect who designed and built them both – one of the most remarkable monuments any man of our time has erected to himself.