The Venetians are not quite so religious as you might suppose from their multitude of churches and their mystical origins. ‘About the same as the Romans,’ an official at the Patriarchate once told me, after judicial thought, ‘perhaps a bit better than the Milanese’ – and these were, he seemed to imply, scarcely celestial standards of judgement. The great force of popular faith, which sustained the Republic through many trials, and was apparently still potent half a century ago, has lost its dominance. Today the great religious festivals are often ill attended, and the supreme summer services at the Basilica generally attract more tourists than Venetians. In some parts of the city, in the Italian manner, religion is laced with politics, so that Catholic and Communist slogans angrily confront each other on shop walls: but there is no sense of priestly power in Venice, and democratic though its Christian Democrats may be, they are not always very profoundly Christian.
The texture of the city, of course, is shot through with Christian symbols, and there are well-known miracles for every quarter. At the ferry station of Santa Maria Zoberugo a devout virgin, denied the use of the ferry to the church, walked across the Grand Canal instead. In the Basilica there is a wooden crucifix which, struck by a blasphemer, gushed forth blood. An angel once broke the fall of a workman who slipped from St Mark’s Campanile, catching him in mid-fall and gently restoring him to his scaffolding. From the Riva degli Schiavoni a fisherman sailed on a voyage across the lagoon commissioned by Saints Mark, Nicholas and George, in the course of which they exorcized a shipload of demons (the fisherman asked anxiously which of the saints was going to pay him). In 1672 an old and simple-minded sacristan fell from the campanile of Santi Apostoli, but was miraculously caught by the minute hand of the clock, which, slowly revolving to six o’clock, deposited him safely on a parapet. In the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, beside the Basilica, a slave was rescued from judicial blinding by the intervention of St Mark, who projected himself upside-down into the assembly and, as a famous Tintoretto demonstrates, froze the burning brand in mid-air. There are miracle-working Madonnas in the churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Madonna dell’ Orto, and the figure of the Virgin in San Marziale came to Venice of its own accord by sea from Rimini.
The celebrated Nicopeia Madonna in the Basilica, one of many such ikons supposed to have been painted by St Luke, is still reverenced; a picture said to be by Giorgione, formerly in the church of San Rocco, was long believed to have miraculous powers; and in all parts of the city there are curative relics, shrines and statues. The silver hearts of votive offerings decorate almost every Venetian church. One grateful supplicant to the Giorgione picture, whose misery we do not know, had a marble cast of the painting made in thanksgiving – and this was prophetic, for presently the picture was removed from the church and placed in the neighbouring Scuola di San Rocco, and now only the votive copy remains. Another grateful worshipper hung a rifle beside a picture of the Madonna near the chapel of the Mascoli in the Basilica: it hangs there still, but nobody seems to know its story.
There are 107 churches in the city proper – one for every 2,000 inhabitants – of which some 80 are still in use. Venice, including its mainland suburbs and its islands, houses 24 men’s convents and about 30 women’s, from at least 13 different Orders. There are some 230 priests in Venice, under a Patriarch who is nowadays nearly always a Cardinal, and who shares his title, in the Western countries, only with the Patriarchs of Lisbon and the West Indies. There have been 51 Bishops of Venice, and 144 Patriarchs, and between them they have produced 3 Popes and 17 Cardinals. More than 100 saints are represented in the street names of the city, from St Julian the Martyr, who is now thought never to have existed at all, to San Giovanni in Olio – St John the Evangelist, who is said to have emerged unharmed from a vat of boiling oil into which the Emperor Domitian had plunged him. There are churches of St Moses and St Job, and the Madonna is honoured in a series of exquisite eponyms – St Mary of the Lily, of Consolation, of Health, of Grace, of The Garden, of the Friars; St Mary the Fragrant, St Mary the Beautiful, St Mary the Processional, St Mary the Mother of the Lord.
But it seems a dying order that is represented by these pieties. Only the guides speak of the Venetian miracles with much air of conviction, and the young Venetians tell the old stories, often enough, with a fond but patronizing smile. Rome, indeed, has never maintained an easy hold over Venice. Veneziani, pot Cristiani, is how her people used to describe themselves – Venetians first, Christians afterwards. ‘Redeem us, Ο Christ!’ sang the choir of St Mark in the Middle Ages. ‘O Christ, reign! Ο Christ, triumph! Ο Christ, command!’ The response, though, was not so orthodox, for the other half of the cathedral would answer: ‘To the Most Serene and Excellent Doge, Health, Honour, Life and Victory Perpetual!’
‘Are you a Venetian?’ I once asked a saintly Dominican in the church of San Zanipolo. ‘No, thank God!’ he replied, in a genuinely grateful tone of voice. This is a citizenry more hard-boiled, sceptical and sophisticated than the peasantry of the mainland countryside. The ‘Show Me State’ is an old sobriquet for Missouri, implying a tendency to look gift horses attentively in the mouth; it would do equally well for Venice. The Republic was never feudal, and its political system was never amenable to clerical intimidation. There was a time, early in the seventeenth century, when Venice hesitated on the brink of Protestantism (with Sir Henry Wotton, the British Ambassador, energetically trying to push her over). Several times in her history she was indicted or excommunicated by the Pope; during Paolo Sarpi’s period of office as theological adviser to the Doge, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the quarrel with the Holy See was so profound that Venice became the champion of secular State rights, and two bishops languished in the prisons of the Doge’s Palace.
Her painters were sometimes notable for an almost pagan profligacy and riot of imagination. Veronese, indeed, was summoned before the Inquisition of the Holy Office for including ‘dogs, buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such absurdities’ in a picture he had painted of the Last Supper. He replied that he had allowed himself ‘the same licence as poets and madmen’, and this the inquisitors seemed to accept, not without humour. They ordered him to ‘correct’ his picture, but instead he simply altered its title, and today it hangs in the Accademia as the Feast at the House of Levi, dwarfs, Germans, dogs and all. (‘What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?’ asked the inquisitors during the hearing. ‘He is a servant’, replied the artist blandly, ‘who has a nose-bleed from some accident.’)
For in her heyday Venice was subservient to the Papacy only when she found it convenient. Her parish priests were elected by a ballot of parishioners, under State direction, and the Pontiff was merely notified of their appointment. Bishops were nominated in the Senate, and even the Patriarch could not convene a synod without the permission of the Doge. All priests had to be of Venetian birth, and they could never be sure of their customary privileges: in the fifteenth century clerics convicted of various immoralities were hung in cages high on the side of St Mark’s Campanile, sometimes living there for a year on bread and water, sometimes allegedly starving to death, and providing one of the principal tourist attractions of the city. The Grand Council of Venice met pointedly on Sundays and feast days, and time and again its policies on the slave trade, and on intercourse with Muslims, were in direct defiance of Papal decrees. A party of fifteenth-century Christian missionaries, lost in the Balkan hinterland, eventually turned up for sale in the Venetian slave market: and when da Gama found the sea route to India, the Venetians openly incited the Sultan of Egypt to make war upon the Portuguese, offering to find timber for the necessary warships, and to provide shipwrights, caulkers, cannon-founders and naval architects. In the Venetian priorities, Venice came unmistakably first.
The true cathedral of the city (until 1797) was San Pietro di Castello, on the eastern perimeter: but its practical spiritual centre was the Basilica of St Mark’s – the Doge’s private chapel. During the period of the great interdict, in 1606, one priest, wary of Venetian pride but not wishing to disobey the Pope, announced that he was waiting for the Holy Ghost to tell him whether to celebrate Mass or not: the Republican Government replied that the Holy Ghost had already inspired them – to hang anyone who refused. ‘Will you kindly kneel?’ said an eighteenth-century Venetian senator to a visiting Englishman, as the congregation in the Basilica fell on their knees before the Host. ‘I don’t believe in transubstantiation,’ the Englishman replied. ‘Neither do I,’ said the senator, ‘but either kneel down or get out of the church!’
The churches of Venice have thus had their ups and downs. The blackened chapel of the Rosary in the church of San Zanipolo, which was burnt in 1867, was deliberately destroyed, so the monks tell you darkly, ‘by Anti-Religious’. The church of San Gerolamo once became a brick factory, and had smoke belching from its bell-tower. The church of Sant’ Elena was used as an iron-foundry. The church of San Bartolomeo, in the fifteenth century, was used as a civil service school. The church of Santa Marina, in the nineteenth, was used as a tavern, and a visitor reported that its servants, hurrying between customers and bar, used to be heard shouting: ‘A jug of white in the Chapel of the Madonna! The same again at the Altar of the Sacrament!’ Madonna dell’ Orto has been, in its time, a stables, a straw store and a powder magazine. The church of San Vitale is now an art gallery, its frenzied abstracts supervised in serene splendour by a Carpaccio above the old high altar. The church of San Leonardo is the practice-room of the municipal band, heavily decorated with photographs of whiskered long-dead maestros. There is a church used as a factory on Giudecca, and another provides some of the galleries of the Accademia, and a third is a cinema in Campo Santa Margherita. San Basso is a lecture hall. San Vio only opens on one day each year – its saint’s day. Santa Maria Maggiore is part of the prison.
Some of the finest Venetian churches – San Zanipolo, San Marcuola, San Lorenzo, San Pantaleone – have never been finished, as their brick façades show. Many others have disappeared. Four churches were demolished, at Napoleon’s orders, to make the Public Gardens. One, by Palladio, vanished beneath the foundations of the railway station. The remains of one lie beneath the great red mills at the western tip of Giudecca, and the wreck of another still lingers beside the docks. Sant’ Aponal was once put up for auction; so was San Paternian, but as nobody bought it they pulled it down instead to make way for the statue in Campo Manin. A Byzantine column near the station bridge is all that remains of the church of Santa Croce, which still gives its name to one of the Venetian postal districts. As long ago as 1173 the Venetians were placed under papal interdict for altering the church of San Geminiano without the Pope’s permission – they wanted to improve the appearance of the Piazza; in the end Napoleon demolished it altogether, but it is said to have looked, in its final version, exactly like the church of San Maurizio, near the Accademia bridge. In the 1860s there were serious demands for the demolition of St Mark’s Basilica itself, made by those Italian iconoclasts who, sick to death of being treated as curators in a national museum, wanted to knock all of old Italy down, and start afresh.
Today the worst is probably over. The priest at the Patriarchate may tell you, with a meaning sigh, that Venice is a religious city by tradition: but at least there is not much active hostility to the faith. Religious processions are no longer derided, as they were, so Wagner tells us, as recently as 1858 (partly, no doubt, because many priests collaborated with the Austrian overlords). The church suffers no ignominies in Venice. Its buildings are usually immaculate, and you will find little of that damp rot and neglect so deliriously apparent to the old Protestant guide books. Several disused churches have been restored, and the activities of the church, from youth clubs to magazines, are inescapable. The Patriarch is one of the great men of Venice, and most citizens, even the agnostic, have strong feelings about him. Cardinal Sarto, who became Pope Pius X, is remembered with real affection, especially among the poorer people. One of his successors is less happily recalled. ‘We Venetians, we like sympathetic people.’ you will be told, ‘we like simple people, kind people’ – and here your informant, looking up from her washing, will give you a long sickly smile, intended to indicate compassion, understanding, humility. ‘But this Cardinal So-and-So, he was not at all like that, he was always cost – urgh!’ – and with this sharp guttural expletive she will look up again, this time her face congealed in a condition of unutterable hauteur, its eyes drooping contemptuously, its chin compressed. ‘Ah, no, no, no, we did not like him – but then, guarda, along came Cardinal Roncalli, Pope Giovanni XXIII – ah, ah, so different …!’ And so intense will be the sickly smile this time, so brimming the eyes with admiration, so limp the entire body under its load of commiseration, that she is quite unable to finish the sentence, wipes her face with the corner of her apron, and returns to the sink speechless. The Patriarchs of Venice do not go unremarked.
Much of the colour and richness of the city still comes from the church – its myriad wonderful buildings; its processions and festivals and treasures; its incense and organ music, billowing through curtained doors into dim-lit squares; its thousands of monks, biting their lower lips in self-deprecation as they make their rounds of mendicancy, or swarming athletically up dizzy wires to attend to the lamps of the Frari. Priests are ubiquitous in Venice, and I remember with particular delight walking towards the Zartere on the morning of Palm Sunday, and meeting on the quayside a column of cheerful chattering nuns, all pink, black and wimpled white, scurrying home to lunch with their palms held high and joyful. On Sunday afternoons the churches are full of ill-disciplined children’s classes, the cracked voices of youths, the high tinny catechisms of little girls: and almost every Venetian water-bus has a small crucifix on the wall of the steersman’s cabin.
The church in Venice, though, is something more than all things bright and beautiful. It is descended from Byzantium, by faith out of nationalism: and sometimes to its high ritual in the Basilica of St Mark there is a tremendous sense of an eastern past, marbled, hazed and silken. St Mark’s itself is a barbaric building, like a great Mongolian pleasure pavilion, or a fortress in Turkestan: and sometimes there is a suggestion of rich barbarism to its services too, devout, reverent and beautiful though they are.
In Easter week each year the Patriarch and his clergy bring from the vaults of the church treasury all its most sacred relics, and display them ceremonially to the people. This ancient function is heavy with reminders of the Orient. It takes place in the evening, when the Piazza is dark, and the dim lights of the Basilica shine mysteriously on the gold mosaics of its roof. The congregation mills about the nave in the half-light, switching from side to side, not knowing which way to look. A beadle in a cocked hat, with a silver sword and the face of a hereditary retainer, stands in a peremptory eighteenth-century attitude beside a pillar. The organ plays quietly from its loft, and sometimes there is a chant of male voices, and sometimes a sudden hubbub from the square outside when the door of the church is opened. All is murmurous and glinting.
A flash of gold and silver from an aisle, a swish of stiff vestments, the clink of a censer, and presently there advances through the crowd, clouded in incense, the patriarchal procession. Preceded by flurrying vergers, clearing a way through the congregation, it sweeps slowly and rheumatically up the church. A golden canopy of old tapestry sways and swings above the mitred Patriarch, and around it walk the priests, solemn and shuffling, clasping reverently the celebrated relics of St Mark’s (enclosed in golden frames, jewelled caskets, crucifixes, medieval monstrances). You cannot see very well, for the crowd is constantly jostling, and the atmosphere is thick; but as the priests pass slowly by you catch a queer glimpse of copes and reliquaries, a cross set with some strange sacred souvenir, a fragment of bone in a crystal sphere, weird, ornate, elaborate objects, swaying and bobbing above the people as the old men carrying them stumble towards the altar.
It is an eastern ceremonial, a thing of misty and exotic splendour. When you turn to leave the great church, all those holy objects are placed on the rim of the pulpit, and all those grave priests are crowded together behind, like so many white-haired scholarly birds. Incense swirls around them; the church is full of slow shining movement; and in the Piazza outside, when you open the door, the holiday Venetians stroll from café to café in oblivion, like the men who sell Coca-Cola beneath the sneer of the Sphinx.
If the Venetians are not always devout, they are usually kind. They have always had a reputation, like other money-makers, for generosity to the poor. The five Great Schools of Venice, of which the Scuola di San Rocco is now the most famous, were charitable associations set up to perform ‘temporal works of mercy’: and even Baron Corvo, in his worst years of disillusionment, had to admit that when it came to charitable causes the Venetians were extraordinarily generous. The indigenous beggars of the city are treated with indulgence, and are seldom moved on by the easy-going police. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evenings at the bottom of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano, and who is often to be seen, pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafés, and planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud and quite incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are always a few innocents to be seen following the melodic line with rapt knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, held upside-down and close to the stomach.
I suspect the Venetians, who still have a strong clan feeling, may sometimes be less forbearing towards unfamiliar loafers. Now and then you see gypsies who have penetrated the city from the mainland in their colourful long-skirted dresses, and who whine their way from square to square with babies in their arms and skinny hands outstretched. I myself have a weakness for gypsies, but the Venetians are evidently not addicts, and you hardly ever see a Romany beggar rewarded. I was once a beggar in Venice myself. One bleak winter evening my boat engine broke down, and I needed a few lire to take the ferry-boat home. Providence, I assured myself, in a city so divinely founded, would certainly provide: and sure enough, presently there approached me a monk from one of the mendicant orders, whom I had often seen carrying sacks from household to household, and who was now returning to his nearby convent. I stopped him and asked him for the loan of 100 lire until the next day: but chill and suspicion was the response I got; and cold the doorstep upon which, at the entrance to the monastery, my family and I were left in lonely hope; and tortuous were the channels through which the consent of the Abbot was vainly sought; and gruff was the porter who told us to go and wait in the adjacent church; and low-voiced the consultation of friars which reached us sibilantly as we stood in the nave; and hasty and off-hand were the manners of the monk who at last approached me sidelong, as if unwilling to come too close, and thrust the coin into my hand as you might offer a bone to an unreliable terrier; and irritating was my conviction, when I returned to repay the loan next morning, that the doorman who casually accepted it, beneath the grinning memento mori decorating his portal, almost certainly pocketed the money for himself.
But if I was cynical then, I am less so today, for now I know Venice better, and have no doubt that if I had entered some slatternly dockside tavern that evening, and put my case to the ill-shaved sinner behind the bar, he would have lent me the money in a trice, and thrown in a glass of sour white wine as a bonus, Compassion really is a powerful emotion among the simpler Venetians. In the eighteenth century the idea of pain was so insufferable to them that even characters in a play, if they happened to be killed, had to take a quick posthumous bow, to reassure the anxious audience, and accept its sympathetic cries of ‘Bravo i morti!’ This is a melancholy city at heart, and its inhabitants are constantly shaking their heads in pity over some pathetic new evidence of the world’s sadness. When a visitor from Bologna was drowned in the Grand Canal one evening, my housekeeper was almost in tears about him next day; and when a funeral goes by to the cemetery of San Michele, you may hear the onlookers muttering to themselves in condolence: ‘Oh, the poor one, oh, dead, dead, poor thing – ah, away he goes, away to San Michele, il povero!’
Bad weather, too, is a subject for tender distress; and the fate of poor Venice herself, once so powerful; and sometimes a stroke of international ill fortune, a train accident in Uruguay, the failure of a conference, a princess unmarried or a sportsman discarded, summons a brief gleam of poignancy into the Venetian eye. Searing indeed is the sorrow that lingers for months, even years, after the death of a second cousin, so that the very mention of the cemetery is enough to send a mask of mourning fleeting across the bereaved features: and whenever the Venetian woman mentions her dear Uncle Carlo, who passed to a higher realm, as you will have long ago discovered, on 18 September 1936 – the mere thought of Uncle Carlo, and the whole business of the day must be momentarily suspended.
There is a trace of the morbid to this soft-heartedness. Venetians are fascinated by dead things, horrors, prisons, freaks and malformations. They love to talk, with a mixture of heartburn and abhorrence, about the islands of hospitals and lunatic asylums that ring Venice like an incantation, and to demonstrate with chilling gestures the violence of some of the poor inmates. Fierce was their disappointment when the corpse of their beloved Pius X, laid in state in its crystal coffin, turned out to have a gilded mask for a face (he had been dead for forty years, and they were curious about his condition).
There is something Oriental, too, about the predictability of their emotions. A sort of etiquette or formality summons the tears that start so instantaneously into the eyes of Maria, when you mention her poor relative, as if her affliction were no more than an antique ritual, like the wailing of hired mourners at an Egyptian funeral. It is a custom in Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, to announce deaths by posting notices in shops and cafés, often with a photograph; and elaborate is the sadness of the people you may sometimes see distributing these announcements, and extraordinary its contagiousness, so that for a few moments after their departure the whole café is plunged in gloom, and the very hiss of the espresso machine is muffled.
A streak of sentimentality runs through Venetian life, surprising in a city of such stringy fibre. A Venetian crowd usually has a soft spot for the under-dog, and the last competitor in the regatta always gets a kindly cheer. I once saw the aftermath of a fight between two youths, beside the Rial to bridge. One was a willowy, handsome young man, who had placed a tray of packages on the stone steps beside him, and was engulfed in tears; the other a bronzed, tough and square-cut fish-boy, a Gothic boy, with a stentorian voice and a fist like iron. The slender youth was appealing to the crowd for justice, his voice breaking with grievances, now and then hoisting his shirt from his trousers to exhibit his bruises. The fish-boy was pacing up and down like a caged lion, sporadically pushing through the spectators to project an insult, now spitting, now giving his opponent a contemptuous shove or a grimace of mockery. My own sympathies were whole-heartedly with this uncouth ruffian, a Venetian of the old school: but the crowd clustered protectively about the other, and a woman ushered him tearfully towards the Rialto, out of harm’s way, amid murmured commiserations on all sides. One man only held himself aloof, and seemed to share my sympathies. He was a dwarf, a little man dressed all in black, with a beret on his head, who stood on tiptoe at the back of the crowd, peering between its agitated shoulders: but I was mistaken, for when I caught this person’s eye, and offered him a guilty and conspiratorial smile, he stared back at me balefully, as you might look at an unrepentant matricide, or a man with a well-known penchant for cruelty to babies.
There are many such dwarfs and hunchbacks in Venice, as observers have noted for hundreds of years, and they too are treated with kindness (though there used to be a superstition to the effect that you must keep thirty paces away from a lame man, which perhaps contributed to Lord Byron’s well-known reluctance to appear in the Piazza in daylight). Many are given jobs as sacristans or cleaners in churches, and flit like smiling gnomes among their shadowy chancels. There are also many and varied originals, women a-flutter with scarves and anachronistic skirts, men talking angrily into the night from the parapets of bridges. Artists are really artists in Venice, and meet jovially to eat enormous meals in taverns. In the spring evenings a group of apparently demented girls used to dance beside the Grand Canal outside my window, and sometimes in the middle of the night you will hear a solitary opera-lover declaiming Tosca into the darkness from the poop of a water-bus. Foreigners of blatant individualism have always frequented Venice, from George Sand in tight trousers at the Danieli to Orson Welles massively in Harry’s Bar: but they have never disconcerted the Venetians, long accustomed to the extremes of human behaviour. At the height of the Venetian autocracy, in the fifteenth century, a well-known exhibitionist used to parade the canals in a gondola, shouting abuse at the regime and demanding the instant obliteration of all aristocrats everywhere. He was never molested, for even the stern Council of Ten had a soft spot for the eccentric.
You may also be drunk in Venice, oddly enough, without antagonizing the town. Though most proper Venetians have lost their taste for the bawdy, and are a demure conventional people, nevertheless their evenings are frequently noisy with drunks. Often they are visitors, or seamen from the docks, but their clamour echoes indiscriminately through the high walls and water-canyons of the place, and sometimes makes the midnight hideous. In Venice you may occasionally see a man thrown forcibly from a bar, all arms and muddled protests, just like in the films; and rollicking are the songs the Venetian students sing, when they have some wine inside them. I once heard a pair of inebriates passing my window at four o’clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices: but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.