For Venice is a kind of metropolis, in the sense that all the world comes to visit her. If I stand upon my balcony and survey the square mile or so that lies within my vision, I can envisage the shades of an extraordinary gallery of people who have been, at one time or another, my neighbours: Duke Sforza the great mercenary, Byron and Ruskin, Réjane, Goethe, Galileo, two Popes, four Kings, Cardinal Pole, de Pisis, Chateaubriand, Barbara Hutton, Taglioni the dancer, Frank Lloyd Wright (whose house beside the Palazzo Balbi was never built), Baron Corvo (whose gondola was rowed, in his shameless last years, by a crew of four flamboyant gondoliers).
In the little square opposite my apartment Casanova was born. In the house to the right, with the flower-pots in the window, W. D. Howells lived. To my left is the palace where Wagner wrote the second act of Tristan, and just beyond it the terrace from which Napoleon once watched a regatta. Near by is the Ca’ Rezzonico, one of the great houses of the world: Browning died in it, the Pope Clement XIII lived in it, the Emperor Francis II stayed in it, Max Beerbohm wrote about it. Across the canal is the home of the Doge Cristoforo Moro, sometimes claimed to be the original of Othello, and to my right is a palace once owned by a family so uncountably rich that it is still called Palazzo degli Scrigni – the Palace of the Money-Chests.
Around the corner is d’Annunzio’s ‘little red house’, where he made love to Duse and wrote Notturno in the dark of blindness. At the Convent of La Carità, now part of the Accademia, Pope Alexander ΙII, exiled from Rome, is said to have worked for six months as a scullion, until he was recognized by a French visitor and so completely restored to power that the Emperor himself came to Venice to beg his pardon. Don Carlos, Charles VII of Spain, used to own the house beyond the mosaic factory. In the enchanting Palazzo Dario de Regnier ‘lived and wrote like a Venetian’, as his memorial plaque says. La Donna of La Donna’ è Mobile lived in the Palazzo Barbaro. In the little Corte Catecumeni, away to my right, malleable Turkish prisoners used to be confined until they had learnt their Catechism, and could embrace Christianity. Wherever I look, I can fancy the shadows of famous men – and of one obscure and pitiful woman, for it was from the balcony of the Palazzo Mocenigo that one of Byron’s Venetian paramours threw herself in desperation into the canal.
Venice was an essential port of call in the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, when fashionable English visitors awaited their audiences of the Doge as eagerly as they now queue, humming a tune from Ancient and Modern, to pay their respects to the Pope. Even now, until you have seen Venice there is an asymmetrical gap in your education. Not many foreigners still rent entire Venetian palaces for the season, but few famous names of the western world have not, at one time or another, appeared in the hotel registers of the city. The Venetian summer season still summons the envoys of the haut monde, in their yachts, Cadillacs or Pipers, to the assemblies of the Serenissima – the Venetians have a fine airport on the mainland for the big jets, and a smaller one on the Lido for private and chartered aircraft, more numerous every year. The most lavish ball of the 1950s, anywhere in the world, was given by a Mexican millionaire at the Palazzo Labia (some of whose previous owners, long ago, had the habit of throwing gold plate in the canal, for the show of it, and later secretly fishing it out again, for thrift).
This gallimaufry of the rich, though it sometimes conjures evocative visions of eighteenth-century Venice, nevertheless does much to corrupt the spirit of the place. Unctuous sycophancy oozes from the grander hoteliers as the summer advances, and even the rhythms of the canals are sometimes shattered when there advances ponderously past the Salute, ensign hugely at the stern, some ostentatious motor cruiser from ports west, all cocktail bars and high fidelity. It is often only a sweeping glance that such visitors grant to the old place, for they are off to the Lido in the evening, merely returning to Venice now and then for an expensive dinner or a well-publicized party: but it is enough to tarnish the pride of the city, so patronizing does their brief survey feel, and so uncomprehending. Many an Anglo-Saxon uses Venice as a summer refuge from stricter conventions at home. Many a loud and greasy visitor brings to Harry’s Bar a sudden whiff of the property developer or the take-over bid – for when you think of sudden fortunes, you often think of Venice. (But other richer men, disembarking from their schooners or swift aeroplanes, still bring to Venice some lost sense of power and worldly style.)
In its great centuries Venice was more than a mere spectacle, and the world came here not only to look at the golden horses or pay tribute to Titian, but to swop currencies, to invest funds, to rent ships, to talk diplomacy and war, to take passage, to learn the news from the East, to buy and to sell. The Fair of the Ascension attracted traders, manufacturers, financiers and even fashion designers from all Europe (a big doll, dressed in the latest fashion, was set up in the Piazza to act as a mannequin for the modes during the coming year). And the most celebrated of all Venetian institutions was the great commercial exchange of the Rialto, one of the prime facts of European history. To Europeans of the Middle Ages, the Rialto was as formidable a presence as a World Bank or a Wall Street today. It was the principal channel of finance between East and West, and the real power-house of the Venetian Empire.
The earliest of all State banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century, and for 300 years the banks of the Rialto dominated the international exchanges. From its business houses the argosies set out to the Orient, to Flanders and to England: most of the ships belonged to the State, and were built to a standard pattern (for easy servicing), but the money invested in them belonged to the merchants of the Rialto. On the walls of the Rialto colonnade a huge painted map illustrated the great trade routes of Venetian commerce – to the Dardanelles and the Sea of Azof, to Syria, Aleppo and Beirut, to Alexandria, to Spain, England and Flanders; and before it the merchants would assemble to watch the progress of their fortunes, like staff officers in an operations room. Beside the Rialto were the Venetian Offices of Navigation, Commerce and Shipping – the ultimate authorities, in those days, on matters commercial and maritime.
To the emporia of this famous place the whole world came for its gold, its exotic textiles, its coffees and spices, sometimes brought to Venice through countries that Europeans had never even heard of: even Henry IIΙ of France thought it worth while to wander around the Rialto shops incognito, in search of bargains. Throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Europe asked with Antonio: ‘What’s new on the Rialto?’: until in the long run the seven caravels of Vasco da Gama, rounding the Cape to India, ended the Venetian monopoly of the Oriental trade, and laid the Rialto low. So sensitive was the Venetian commercial sense that when, one dark morning in 1499, the news of da Gama’s voyage arrived in the city (long before the explorer had returned to Portugal) several of the Rialto banks instantly failed.
Today there are still banks around the eastern end of the Rialto bridge: but the old commercial meeting-place is now a popular market, lively, noisy, and picturesque, and only a few gnarled reminders of its great days remain to stimulate your sense of history. To understand the impact of the Venetian decline, there is no better exercise than to go to the western end of the bridge, near the church of San Giacomo, and survey the scene with one eye on the market-women, and one on the absent magnificos.
The great enterprises have vanished. All around you now, beneath the crooked hump of the bridge, is the animation of petty trade. Under the arcades are the jewellers, their windows full of sovereigns, Maria Theresa dollars, gilded ornaments, and you can see them through their open doors, looking fearfully shrewd, weighing minuscule gold chains (for St Christopher medallions) in desperately delicate scales. In the passage-way is the Erberia, the vegetable market: a jolly, pushing, hail-fellow place, its stalls loaded with succulent peaches, onion strings, bananas, untidy heaps of fennel, lettuces, green jagged leaves like dandelions, gherkins, rigid hares, plucked quails in immaculate rows, spinach, slices of coconut beneath cooling sprinklers, potatoes, dead upside-down seagulls, pieces of artichoke floating in buckets, magnificent apples, vivid radishes, oranges from Sicily and carnations from San Remo. The market men are cheerful and skilled in badinage, the shoppers earnest and hurried, and sometimes a thoughtful lawyer, in his white tabs, stalks through the hubbub towards the criminal courts.
Above the stalls stands the old church of San Giacomo, a poky but friendly little place, which is known to the Venetians familiarly as San Giacometto, and stands among the vegetables precisely as the church of St Paul’s stands in Covent Garden, only awaiting an Eliza. Its big twenty-four-hour clock appears in a famous painting by Canaletto, but has had a dismal mechanical history. It went wrong several times in the fourteenth century, and had to be renewed ‘for the honour and consolation of the city’. It stopped again in the eighteenth century, apparently at four o’clock. In 1914 a traveller reported that it always showed the time as three in the afternoon, and until a few years ago it was permanently stuck at midnight precisely.
Beneath this unreliable piece, hidden away among a clutter of sheds and packing cases, you will find the Gobbo di Rialto, one of the best-known images of medieval Venice. He stands now, abandoned and neglected, among a mass of boxes and old vegetables: a small hobbled granite figure of a man, supporting a flight of steps and a squat marble column. He used to be called a hunchback, but he is really only bent with burdens, for in the hey-day of the Rialto his responsibilities were great. Upon his pedestal the decrees of the Republic were promulgated, in the days when Venetian law was written in blood and enforced with fire: and to his steps men convicted of petty crimes were forced to run naked from St Mark’s, hastened by a rain of blows, until at last, breathless, bleeding and humiliated, they fell chastened at his knobbly feet and embraced him in blind relief.
And around the corner, beside the Grand Canal, there lies the incomparable fish market of Venice, a glorious wet, colourful, high-smelling concourse of the sea, to which in the dawn hours fleets of barges bring the day’s supply of sea-foods. Its stalls are lined deliciously with green fronds, damp and cool: and upon them are laid, in a delicately-tinted, slobbering, writhing, glistening mass, the sea-creatures of the lagoon. There are sleek wriggling eels, green or spotted, still pugnaciously alive; beautiful little red fish packed in boxes like shampoos, heads upwards; strange tube-like molluscs, oozing at the orifice; fine red mullet, cruel pseudo-sharks, undefeated crabs and mounds of gem-like shell-fish; skates, and shoals of small flat-fish, and things like water-tarantula, and pools of soft bulbous octopus, furiously ejecting ink; huge slabs of tunny, fish-rumps and fish-steaks, joints of fish, fish kidneys, innards and guts and roes of fish: a multitude of sea-matter, pink, white, red, green, multi-limbed, beady-eyed, sliding, senuous, shimmering, flabby, spongy, crisp – all lying aghast upon their fresh green biers, dead, doomed or panting, like a grove of brilliant foliage among the tundra of Venetian stone.
By the eighteenth century the quayside beside the fish market, once the economic centre of the western world, had become a dawn promenade for Venetian revellers, haggard or distraught after the night’s love and gaming, and it was the fashionable thing to appear there at first light, displaying all the proper signs of dissipation. Today the Rialto is not even loose-living, only picturesque. There is a sad irony to the description on the apse of San Giacomo, a memento of its Gothic days: ‘Around This Temple Let The Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, And His Covenants Faithful.’ No Shylocks now demand their securities beneath the arcades of Rialto; no giggling courtesans sweep their mud-stained skirts through its market in the dawn; only the greengrocers shout, the housewives haggle, and the tourists on the bridge anxiously consult their exposure meters. You must look at the Rialto with an inner eye: just as, when I inspected the view from my terrace, I saw not only the passing boatmen, and my small son stumbling across the bridge to school, but Napoleon too, pouting on his balcony, and the lovely sick Duse, and Othello, and Corvo, and all those poor imprisoned infidels, desperately memorizing their articles of faith behind the Salute.