In those days these were holy waters, speckled with monasteries, and almost every islet had its devout but often comfortable community. Many an old print depicts now desolate islands of the lagoon in their days of consequence, with classical porticoes and shady palms, and monks in nonchalant worldly attitudes upon their water-steps. The convents of the Venetian lagoon were famous throughout Christendom, and possessed great treasuries of art and religion. In the later days of the Republic they were often places of gaiety, too, where fashionable society nuns received visitors in an atmosphere of gossip, frivolity, flirtation and even downright salacity. When Charles de Brosses visited Venice in the 1730s three convents were cattily disputing the right to supply a mistress for the new Papal Nuncio. This is the title assumed by one Venetian aristocrat, when she humbly took the veil: ‘Sua Eccellenza Abbadessa reverendissima donna Maria Luigia principessa Rezzonico.’
Life, nevertheless, was not always easy for the monasteries. They were often closed, when Venice’s relations with the Papacy demanded it, and often revived, and sometimes transferred from one brotherhood to another, so that by the time Napoleon suppressed the orders most of them had changed hands several times, and some had already fallen into disuse. Their works of art were neglected or dispersed. When the monastery of San Cristoforo was closed (its island now forms part of San Michele) its pictures and sculptures disappeared all over the world, and the only work left in Italy is a painting by Basaiti that hangs in the church of San Pietro in Murano. The hey-day of the island monasteries was long past, when the new Attila scourged Venice; and today only two survive.
Beside the channel to the Lido, within sight of St Mark’s, lies San Lazzaro, a small, comfortable, well-kept, rather suburban sort of island, with groves of cypresses, a neat little campanile, arbours, terraces and waterside gardens – just the place, you might think, for a languorous but not very sinful dalliance. This is the home of the Mechitar Fathers, members of an independent Armenian order, observing the eastern rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The Mechitarists, with their founder Mechitar (‘The Comforter’), were expelled from their monastery in Modone when the Turks overran Morea in 1715. They were granted asylum in Venice, and given the deserted island of San Lazzaro, in those days an austere and unpromising islet off the lonely reef of the Lido. There they prospered. Mechitar himself supervised the building of their monastery; they acquired productive lands on the mainland; and as the Armenian nation was decimated by persecution, its scholarship suppressed and its energies emasculated, so San Lazzaro became a repository of the national learning and religion. Today the monastery is one of the three principal centres of Armenian culture in the world, the others being Vienna and Etchmiadzin, the religious capital of the Armenian Republic.
San Lazzaro is one of the most genial spots in Venice, not by and large a Dickensian place. Its twenty or so monks, heavily bearded and dressed in voluminous black cassocks, are at once gentle, welcoming and urbane, and though they eat in silence in their dark-panelled refectory, and recite their long offices three times each day, and meditate each evening for a good half-hour, and have a reputation both for scholarship and for piety – nevertheless they somehow give the impression that the pleasures of the world are at least not beyond their powers of imagination. They run a school for Armenian boys on the island, to which pupils come from all over the Mediterranean. They have another school in the city of Venice. Their monastery is the seat of the Academy of Armenian Literature, and they are frequently engaged in learned disputation of dogma or etymology. But the duties of these engaging Fathers are never menial, for as the official guide book to the monastery explains, ‘lay brothers and Italian servants attend to the cooking, cleaning and gardening’.
Everybody has been nice to the Mechitarists, since they arrived in Venice. Their culture, a fusion of East and West, appealed to the Venetians from the start, and the Republic treated them very generously. Even Napoleon reprieved them, when he closed the other monasteries: they had sent their delegates to Paris itself to plead for his favour. Their splendid collection of manuscripts and books has been supplemented, at one time or another, by a mass of miscellaneous gifts, making the whole island a store-house of esoteric curios. A banana tree, a palm tree and a cedar of Lebanon flourish in the central cloister; there are rooms full of quaint paintings, and corridors hung with rare prints. The Duke of Madrid gave a collection of mineralogical and oceanographical objects. Pope Gregory XVI gave a marble figure of himself. Canova gave a plaster cast of a statue of Napoleon’s son. An eminent Armenian of Egypt gave his collection of Oriental books, including signed copies of some not altogether suitable works by Sir Richard Burton. The Patriarch of Venice gave a reliquary divided into fifty compartments, with a small sacred relic in each.
In the museum upstairs there is a fine Egyptian mummy, with some of its teeth still in the jaw, and the rest carefully stowed away in a little linen bag (its covering of beads was restored in the nineteenth century by the glass-makers of Murano). There is some manna in a box, and a telescope trained through a window upon the Campanile of St Mark. There is a collection of books about the Armenian language in languages other than Armenian. There is a Buddhist ritual found by an Indian Armenian in a temple in Madras. There is a collection of wooden carvings from Mount Athos, and another of Chinese ivories, and a small armoury of antique weapons, and a machine for making electric sparks, and a passage from the Koran in Coptic, and a German set of medals depicting the heads of British monarchs, including a fine portrait of King Oliver I. There are autograph letters from Browning and Longfellow, and a visitors’ book reserved (the Fathers have a healthy respect for temporal achievement) ‘for princes and celebrities’. There are signed photographs of statesmen, bishops, sultans and Popes – ‘all presented’, says the official handbook with a sniff, ‘personally’.
Above all there is Lord Byron. In 1816 the poet, anxious to while away the daylight hours of the Venetian winter, decided to learn Armenian – ‘something craggy’ to break his mind upon; and making the acquaintance of the kindly Mechitarists, he used to row across to San Lazzaro three times a week and study the language in their library. For four months he was a regular visitor. The Armenians were enchanted, and have never allowed the memory of their improbable pupil to die, so that many people in Venice, asked to think of San Lazzaro, think first of Byron, and only secondly of the Armenians. Byron’s spirit haunts the island. We see the trees he helped to plant, the summer-house he meditated in, the desk he sat at, the pen he wrote with, the knife he used to cut his pages. We are shown a splendid painting of his first arrival on the island, almost an ex voto, glowing with aristocratic romance; another shows him sprawling in indolent grace upon the terrace, attended by venerable but respectful monks, with the sun falling poetically into the lagoon behind him, and a big dog lying at his feet. We are given a copy of the Armenian Grammar which he compiled, as a very minor collaborator, with a scholar of the monastery (and in which, in my copy anyway, some sober-side has brusquely amended in red ink a passage referring inadvertently, but inoffensively, to ‘the curtain that hangs over the back-side of the tabernacle’).
Byron is not always happily remembered in Venice, but good priests are often attracted by dashing and gifted reprobates, and at San Lazzaro only his better nature is recalled. He seems to have been genuinely liked by the Fathers, and to have treated them with honesty and respect. When the centenary of his death was commemorated, in 1924, a now forgotten poet named Charles Cammell was asked to write some verses, for translation into the Armenian. He addressed them to the Mechitarist Fathers themselves, and ended his poem with the lines:
If England holds his body, Greece his heart,
You surely of his spirit hold a part,
Perhaps the highest, for with you remain
The Friendship and the Peace, but not the pain.
Certainly the Armenians of San Lazzaro will not soon forget Lord Byron. Of his stay among them, as the monastery handbook rightly says, they have kept ‘ample and particular record’ (though I have some doubts, all the same, about his eventual proficiency in their language – a ‘Waterloo of an alphabet’, as he put it himself).
Armenians are practical people. The Mechitarists lead lives of great devotion on their island, and there is something infinitely appealing about the little piles of vestments, each neatly capped with its biretta, that you see trimly folded on a chest in the vestry of their chapel. But the engine-room, the money-vault of their island, is its famous printing press. The first Armenian press in western Europe was established in Venice, then the world capital of printing, in 1512: and soon after the Mechitarists arrived from Greece, they founded one of their own. Its machines are modern and cosmopolitan – some from Germany, some from America, some from Britain – and will print you almost anything, in almost any language. They used to print a book on San Lazzaro that consisted of the prayer of St Nerses divided into twenty-four sections, one for each hour, and translated into thirty-six languages. This entailed printing in twelve scripts – Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Chaldean, Chinese, Ethiopian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Russian and Sanskrit, not to speak of Scandinavian aberrations of the alphabet, and such subtle variations as differentiate the Russian from the Serbian. It is a confusing book. Some of the prayers read backwards, some from top to bottom, and some apparently upside down. It includes prayers in Greenlandish and Gaelic, and in the English section at least (I have not examined the Amharic very carefully) there is not a single misprint.
Today the press is still polyglot, but it also specializes in glossy picture postcards, posters and shiny commercial labels. You may feel agreeably elevated by your visit to San Lazzaro, and sail away with the music of its immemorial chants ringing like a benediction in your ears: but when you buy a bottle of Italian Vermouth in Venice, the chances are that its slick coloured label rolled off the printing presses of the Armenians.
San Lazzaro is always on the move. The very structure of the island has trebled in size since the foundation of the monastery, as you may see from a plaque on the landing-stage. The orginal buildings are cracking – the Abbot Mechitar, though a versatile man, was no architect – and there are plans to rebuild the whole place, illustrated in a plaster model near the electric-spark machine. The Armenians are on familiar terms with the authorities of Venice (which one lay brother solemnly insists upon calling the Serenissima – ‘The Serenissima has been most helpful with the drainage’, or ‘We have made the necessary application to the Serenissima’). San Lazzaro never feels far from the great world, and takes modernity easily in its stride.
The other island monastery of the lagoon shares none of this sophisticated bounce, but lies becalmed in perpetual peace, among the northern marshlands. San Francesco del Deserto is a small and captivating island in the fens to the east of Burano, and beckons you shyly across the waters with a row of cypresses and tall umbrella palms, waving and buckling in the breeze like a line of Tibetan prayer flags. A tortuous shallow channel takes you there, and you step from your boat on to grass as green as an English lawn, speckled with Wiltshire daisies, beneath trees as rich as Connecticut elms, to a scent of Mediterranean flowers and rich tilled earth. A crucifix stands guardian above the landing-stage, and a notice on the wall gives you grave warning that games, dancing, profanity and loud voices are all equally prohibited. San Lazzaro is a plump little Riviera, but San Francesco is Shangri-la.
They say that St Francis was shipwrecked here during a voyage from the East in a Venetian ship – perhaps, so some indulgent hagiographers suggest, after his attempt to evangelize the Muslims in 1219. They show you a piece of tree that sprouted miraculously from his staff, and a coffin in which it was his practice to lie as acclimatization for the tomb (the friars of the island, I am told, have now adopted the system for themselves). Certainly the place is full of the Poverello’s friends. A friar will meet you as you walk towards the convent from the creek (he is sure to speak excellent English and French, and probably German too, and is one of those who hear the confessions of foreigners in St Mark’s Basilica, three days a week); and as he guides you through the green bowers of this Arcadia, he will introduce you to the beasts of the garden, posed among the shrubberies as in an illuminated Breviary. Here on a grassy bank struts a pair of peacocks. Here is a brood of ducklings, scuttling away towards the water’s edge, and here a flutter of scraggy hens. Everywhere there are swallows, most Franciscan of creatures, and the island is loud with bird song. There are even two cows, munching hay in a barn among the vegetable gardens.
It is a novice house. There are thirty friars, all Italian, of whom fourteen are novices. Their cloisters are old and serene, their church is ugly but peaceful, and the most striking thing about their island is its silence. Nobody indeed dances, plays games, utters profanities or talks in a loud voice. Nobody lives there but the friars. A few motor boats bring tourists in the summer months. A jet sometimes flashes overhead, or an airliner lowers its flaps for a landing. Otherwise not a disharmony disturbs the convent. The friars row themselves silently about in sandoli, and you may often see their bent brown figures, labouring at the oar, far away among the flats. The fishermen of the surrounding islets are mostly too poor for motor boats, and the din of Venice (which seems, in this context, positively diabolic) is hours away across the water. The only sounds of San Francesco del Deserto are bells, chanting male voices, sober conversation, the singing of song birds, the squawking of peacocks, the clucking of ducks and hens, and sometimes a deep dissatisfied bellow, as of a soul sated with Elysium, from the ruminating cattle in the cow-house.
The friars seem content with these arrangements. The happy text of San Francesco’s pieties is ‘O beata solitudo, Ο sola beatitudo’, and my cicerone there once quoted the words to me with an expression in his eye not exactly smug – he was much too meek for that – but at least tinged with grateful complacency.