The Venetians first filtered into the lagoon because it offered an obvious place of refuge, safe from landlubber barbarians and demoralizing heresies. They fortified it from the start, building tall watch-towers, throwing defensive chains across its waterways, erecting high protective walls along its quays. As early as the sixth century the people of Padua were complaining that the Venetians had militarized the mouth of the Brenta, to prevent alien shipping entering the lagoon. Nine centuries later the traveller Pero Tafur vividly described the war-readiness of the Venetian Navy. As soon as the alarm sounded, he records, the first warship emerged from the gate of the Arsenal, under tow: and from a succession of windows its supplies were handed out – cordage from one window, food from another, small arms from a third, mortars from a fourth, oars from a fifth – until at the end of the canal the crew leapt on board, and the galley sailed away, fully armed and ready for action, into the Canale San Marco. For many centuries the lagoon served the Venetians admirably in the office of a moat, and it stands there still, in the nuclear age, as a wide watery redoubt, studded with antique forts and gun-sites.
No enemy has ever succeeded in taking Venice by storm. The first assault upon it was made by Pepin, son of Charlemagne, in 809; and the legend of his rebuff symbolizes the Venetians’ canny sense of self-defence. When they first came into this waste, established their tribunes in its various islands, and painfully coalesced into a single State, their original capital was the now-vanished island of Malamocco, half a mile off the reef. They were afraid of enemies from the mainland, not from the Adriatic, and so set up their Government as deep in the sea as possible. Pepin, though, in pursuance of his father’s imperial ambitions, determined to humble the Venetians, and attacked the settlements from the seaward side. His forces seized the southern villages one by one, and finally stood before Malamocco itself. The Government then abandoned its exposed headquarters, and withdrew across the mud-flats, through intricate shallow channels that only the Venetians understood, to a group of islands in the very centre of the lagoon, called Rivo Alto – Rialto.
Pepin seized Malamocco triumphantly, and prepared to cross the lagoon in pursuit. Only one old woman, so the story goes, had stayed behind in Malamocco, determined to do or die, and this patriotic crone was summoned to the royal presence. ‘Which is the way to Rivo Alto?’ demanded Pepin, and the old lady knew her moment had come. Quavering was her finger as she pointed across the treacherous flats, where the tide swirled deceitfully, and the mud oozed, and the seaweed swayed in turbulence. Tremulous was her voice as she answered the prince. ‘Sempre diritto!’ she said: and Pepin’s fleet, instantly running aground, was ambushed by the Venetians and utterly humiliated.
The next major enemies to enter the lagoon were the Genoese, the prime rivals of Venetian supremacy throughout the fourteenth century: but they too were kept at arm’s length by its muddy presence. At the most threatening moment of their protracted campaigns against the Venetians, in 1379, they captured Chioggia, the southern key to Venice, and settled down to starve the Serenissima. Their warships burnt a Venetian galley within sight of the city, watched by hundreds of awestruck citizens, and some of their raiders may even have crossed the reef and entered the lagoon proper. The Venetians were hard-pressed. Half their fleet, under the dashing Carlo Zeno, was away in distant waters. The other half was demoralized by past setbacks, and its commander, Vettor Pisani, was actually released from prison to assume his duties. Cannon were mounted in the belfry of St Mark’s Campanile, just in case, and the Doge himself volunteered to go into action, a desperate step indeed.
Pisani thus sailed out to battle with a scratch fleet of warships, a ramshackle army, most of the male population of Venice in patriotic tumult between decks, and this hell-for-leather potentate beside him on the poop. Yet in a few weeks he had so exploited the tactical advantages of the lagoon that the Genoese were placed critically on the defensive. They dared not station their ships outside the lidi, to face the buffeting of the winter sea and the possible return of Zeno, so they withdrew inside the Porto di Chioggia, the southernmost entrance to the lagoon: and there Pisani, swiftly deploying his vessels, promptly bottled them up. He closed the main Porto di Lido, to the north, with an iron chain, guarded by fortress guns. He closed the Porto di Malamocco, the central gate, by sinking two old ships, filled with stone. Four more blockships closed the entrance to Chioggia itself, and two others blocked the main channel from the town towards Venice. A wall was built across the mud-flats at the approaches to the city, in case these successive obstacles were overcome, and for miles around every signpost and marker stake was removed, making the entire lagoon a slimy trap for alien navigators.
Thus the Genoese were caught. Venetian troops were landed near Chioggia, and the Genoese tried helplessly to get out to sea, even cutting a channel through the sand-bank that separated their ships from the Adriatic: but it was hopeless. Their supply routes were cut, and they were presently reduced, so their chroniclers say, to eating ‘rats, mice and other unclean things’. They were doomed already when, in a day famous in Venetian history, the topmasts of Zeno’s hurrying squadrons appeared over the horizon, and the victory was clinched. As a last straw for the poor Genoese, a campanile in Chioggia, hit by a stray shell when all was almost over, collapsed in a heap of rubble and killed their commander, Pietro Doria.
No other battles have been fought within the lagoon. Four hostile forces have, at one time or another, penetrated to the city of Venice, but they have never had to force their way across these waters. The first was a vagabond pirate commando, scum from Dalmatia, who decided one day in the tenth century to raid Venice at a moment when a mass wedding was to take place in the church of San Pietro di Castello. They sidled into the city at night, pounced upon the ceremony, kidnapped the brides with their handsome dowries, ran to their ships (‘their accursed barks’, the poet Rogers called them), and sailed exultantly away. The infuriated Venetians, led by the men of the Cabinet Makers’ Guild, followed in furious chase: and presently skilfully using their knowledge of the lagoon, close-hauled and black with anger, they overtook the pirates, killed them every one, returned with the fainting brides to Venice, married them hastily and lived happily ever after.
It was eight centuries before the next enemy set foot in Venice, and by that time simpler citizens believed their lagoon to be divinely impregnable, so securely had it protected their city through all the switchbacks of Italian history. The mainland of the Veneto had long been a cockpit of European rivalries, and in 1796 Napoleon entered it with his heady slogans, his battle-stained infantry, and his volunteer legion of Italian liberals (some of whom, so Trevelyan tells us, had re-entered their native country by sliding down the Alpine slopes on their stomachs, their horses glissading behind them). Venice carefully looked the other way – by then she was the weakest State in Europe, besotted with hedonism. Even when it became clear that Napoleon was not going to spare her, and that war was inevitable, the emergency orders given by the Republic to her Proveditor General merely enjoined him to ‘maintain intact the tranquillity of the State, and give ease and happiness to its subjects’. One hundred and thirty six casinos still flourished in the city. Five thousand families, we are told, received company every evening. The Venetians were no longer men of war: when the last Doge heard the news of his election, in 1789, he burst into tears and fainted.
This enervated and gangrenous organism Bonaparte had already promised to the Austrians, under the secret agreement of Leoben: and presently he picked his quarrel with the Serenissima. One day in April 1797 a French frigate, Libérateur d’Italie, sailed through the Porto di Lido without permission, an appalling affront to Venetian privilege. Such a thing had not happened for five centuries. The fort of Sant’ Andrea opened fire, the ship was boarded and looted, the French commander was killed. This was Napoleon’s casus belli. He refused to treat with the Venetian envoys sent to plead for peace, and blamed the Republic for a massacre of French troops that had occurred in Verona. The Venetians were, he said, ‘dripping with French blood’. ‘I have 80,000 men and twenty gunboats … io sarò un Attila per lo Stato Veneto.’
On 1 May 1797 he declared war. The Venetians were too disorganized, too frightened, too leaderless, too riddled with doubts, too far gone to offer any resistance: and two weeks later forty of their own boats conveyed 3,231 French soldiers from the mainland to the Piazza of St Mark – ‘lean forms’, as a French historian has described them, ‘shaped for vigorous action, grimy with powder, their hats decked only with the cockade’, ‘J’ai occupé ce matin,’ the French general reported prosaically to Napoleon, ‘la ville de Venise, avec la 5e demi-brigade de bataille, et les ties et forts adjacents.’ He was the first commander ever to report the capture of Venice, and as he sealed this matter-of-fact dispatch he ended an epoch.
The Austrians were the next to take Venice. In the vagaries of their relationship with France, they had first been given the city, then lost it after Austerlitz, then regained it after Waterloo: until in 1848 the Venetians themselves, rising under Daniele Manin, expelled them and restored the Republic. This time the citizens, hardened by ignominy and suffering, defended their lagoon with tenacity against imperial blockade. They garrisoned its innumerable forts, breached its newly-completed railway bridge, and even made some successful sorties on the mainland. The Austrians invested the city fiercely. They floated explosives over Venice on balloons, like the balloon-bombs flown over California by the Japanese; and when these operations proved a laughable fiasco, they dismounted their field-guns, to give them more elevation, and shelled the city heavily. Everything west of the Piazza was within their range.
Battered, starving, short of ammunition, ravaged by cholera, without allies, Venice resisted longer than any of the other rebellious Italian cities, but in August 1849 Manin surrendered. The Austrians entered the lagoon without fighting. Their commander, that indomitable old autocrat Marshal Radetzky, whose last illegitimate child was born in his eighty-first year, rode up the Grand Canal in triumphant panoply: but not a soul was there to greet him, scarcely a maidservant peered from the windows of the palaces, and when he reached the Piazza he found it empty but for his own soldiers. Only one obsequious priest, so we are told, ran from the atrium of the Basilica and, throwing himself before the conqueror, fervently kissed his hand.
The last invading force to enter Venice was British. In 1945, when the world war was clearly ending and the German armies were retreating through Italy in a demoralized rout, the partisans of Venice seized the city from the last of the Germans, gave them a safe conduct to the mainland, shot a few of their own particular enemies, and awaited the arrival of the Allies, then storming across the Po. Two New Zealand tanks were the first to arrive: they raced each other down the causeway neck and neck, and one New Zealander reported that as his vehicles clattered pell-mell over a fly-over near Mestre, he looked down and saw the Germans racing helter-skelter in the opposite direction underneath.
The New Zealanders had specific orders from their commander, General Freyberg, to capture the Danieli Hotel – he had stayed there before the war, and wanted to reserve it as a New Zealand officers’ club, even sending a special reconnaissance party to undertake the mission. They were received enthusiastically by the Venetians, and presently the British infantry arrived too, every boat in the place was requisitioned, the Danieli, the Excelsior, the Luna were turned into officers’ clubs, and so many soldiers’ canteens were established that you can still see the blue and yellow NAAFI signs mouldering upon Venetian walls among the other graffiti of history. Three days later the armistice was signed, and the war in Italy was over.
Thus the city has been spared the worst of war, and there have never been bazookas in the Piazza, or tommy-gun bursts across the Grand Canal. No bomb has ever fallen upon the Basilica of St Mark. In none of the several assaults was much damage done to Venice. In the 1848 revolution, though several thousand Austrian shells fell in the city, it is said that only one house was completely destroyed. In the First World War, when Venice was an active military base, she was repeatedly bombed – the bronze horses were removed for safety, the Basilica was heavily reinforced with bags full of seaweed, and night watchmen shouted throughout the night: ‘Pace in aeria!’ – ‘All quiet in the sky!’ In several churches you may see unexploded missiles hung as ex votos upon the walls: but among all the treasures of the city, only the roof of the Scalzi church, near the station, was destroyed. In the Second World War Mestre was heavily bombed, but Venice never. The tower of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli was struck by a stray shell during the German withdrawal, and the Tiepolo frescoes in the Palazzo Labia were damaged when a German ammunition ship blew up in the harbour: but apart from broken windows, nothing was destroyed. Venice was, I am told, the very first city on both the German and the Allied lists of places that must not be harmed. Not everybody has welcomed this immunity. In 1914, when a bomb almost hit the Basilica, the crazy Futurist Marinetti, who wanted to pull down all the Italian masterpieces and begin again, flew over the city in an aeroplane dropping leaflets. ‘Italians, awake!’ they said. ‘The enemy is attempting to destroy the monuments which it is our own patriotic privilege to demolish!’
The lagoon has saved Venice. She has stood aside from the main currents of war, and has fought her battles, like England, chiefly in distant places. She stands upon no vital cross-roads, controls no crucial bridge, overlooks no strategic position, commands no damaging field of fire. You could, if you happened to be another Napoleon, take the whole of Italy without much feeling the exclusion of Venice: and the innumerable wars of the Italian mainland, though they have often involved Venetian troops, have always passed the city by. Even the ferocious Turks, whose armies were so near in 1471 that the fires of their carnage could be seen from the top of St Mark’s Campanile – even those implacable hordes never entered the lagoon. No city on earth is easier to spot from the air, framed by her silver waters, and no city has fewer cellars to use as air-raid shelters: yet almost the only civilian casualties of the two world wars were the 200 citizens who walked into canals in the black-out and were drowned. In the official histories of the Italian campaigns of the Second World War, Venice is scarcely mentioned as a military objective: and one British regimental diary, recording the hard slog up the peninsula, observed in reviewing the battles to come that all ranks were ‘eager to get to grips with Jerry again, and looking forward, too, to some sightseeing in Venice’. In war as in peace, Venice stands alone, subject to none of the usual rules and conventions: like the fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders’ webs as a hobby.
But though nobody much cares nowadays, the lagoon is still a formidable military barrier. Napoleon himself apparently thought that if the Venetians decided to defend it, he would need as many men to beat them as he had at Austerlitz in the greatest battle of his career; but the Austrians were perhaps the last to survey it with a serious strategic eye. It was the main base for their imperial fleet, which was largely Italian-manned, and partly built in the old Arsenal of Venice. They made the lagoon a mesh-work of strong-points – in 1848 there were sixty forts (though visiting British officers were, as usual, not greatly impressed by their design). In the First World War it was a naval base, an armoury, and the launching site for d’Annunzio’s dashing air raids against the Austrians. In the second it was a refuge for many a hunted partisan and prisoner-of-war, lurking in remote and vaporous fastnesses where the Germans never penetrated: and many Venetians hid there too, escaping conscription into Nazi labour forces. The German Army made a short last stand, until blasted out by the guns of the New Zealand armour, on the north-eastern edge of the lagoon, and they used barges to withdraw some of their troops along its water-ways. Before the rot set in they had prepared a defence system along the line of the Adige river, from Chioggia in the east to Lake Garda in the west: and some strategists believe that this line, embedded at its left flank in the impassable mud-flats of the lagoon, might have been the toughest of all the successive barriers that delayed the Allied advance through Italy.
The warlike propensities of the Venetian lagoon are still inescapable. If you come by train, almost the first thing you see is the big mainland fort of Marghera, a star-shaped earthwork outside Mestre, now covered in a stubble of grass and weed, like a downland barrow. Half-way up the causeway there stands the exposed gun platform beside the railway which was, for a few perilous weeks, the outermost Venetian stronghold in the 1848 revolution; and near by is the odd little island called San Secondo, shaped like a Pacific atoll, which is now a municipal stores depot, but was once an important fort and magazine. To the south of the causeway, near the docks, you may see the minute Isola Tresse: this is crowned by a concrete bunker, and on its wall there still stands a black swastika – painted, whether in irony or ignorance, the wrong way round.
All about the city there stand such relics of a military past – shuttered little islands and abandoned barracks, fine old forts and aircraft hangars. The distant Sant’ Angelo della Polvere – St Angelo of the Gunpowder – looks like a fairy island, crowned with towers, but turns out to be, when you approach it in disillusionment, only an old powder factory, clamped and padlocked. San Lazzaretto, on the other side of the city, was once the quarantine station of Venice, then a military detention depot. In the seventeenth century, when Venice was threatened by Spanish ambitions, a division of Dutch soldiers, hired direct from Holland and brought to the lagoon in Dutch ships, was quartered on this island: they got so bored that they mutinied, and to this day the sentries still pace the grim square ramparts of its barracks with an air of unutterable ennui, waiting for an enemy that has never in all the 1,500 years of Venetian history chosen to come this way.
From the windows of San Giacomo in Palude – St James in the Marshes – to the north of Venice, cheerful soldiers in their shirtsleeves, doing the washing-up, still grin at you as your boat chugs by, and a notice sternly forbids your presence within fifty yards of this vital outpost. Half a mile away, on the islet of Madonna del Monte, stands a huge derelict ammunition building, littered with rubble but still bound about with iron cables, to keep it standing in case of an explosion: it is a sun-soaked but eerie place –I once found six dead lizards lying side by side on a stone there, with a swarm of locusts performing their obsequies round about, and in the winter the dried pods of its little trees jingle metallically in the wind like the medals of long-dead corporals. Another barred and abandoned powder-island is Santo Spirito, away beyond Giudecca. From here Pisani’s engineers built their protective wall to the lidi, but it later became a famous monastery, with pictures by Titian and Palma Vecchio, and a church by Sansovino. The church was despoiled when its monastic order was suppressed, in 1656, but as they were at that moment building the great new church of the Salute, the pictures were opportunely taken there, and they hang still in the Sacristy.
Out beside the great sea-gates, you may see the Adriatic defences of the lagoon. At the southern porto there stands behind high grass banks, still flying its flag, the fortress of La Lupa – the She-Wolf – medieval in masonry, eighteenth century in embellishment: and near by a little stony settlement by the water, now inhabited by a few fisher-families, is the remains of the powerful Fort Caromani, itself named for a much older strong-hold still, Ca’ Romani – the House of the Romans. Two big octagonal fortresses, rising sheer from the water, guard the central porto of Malamocco. They are overgrown and deserted nowadays, and look rather like the stilt-forts that the British built in 1940 to protect their sea-approaches; but not long ago a passing fisherman, observing me raise my camera towards these dilapidated defences, told me gently but firmly that photography of military works was, as I surely ought to know, strictly forbidden.
At the northern end of the lagoon, near Punta Sabbione, there stands Fort Treporti, a comical towering construction, all knobs and tessellation, that looks like a chess-board castle. Not far away is the old seaplane base of Vignole, now a helicopter station, and the Italian Air Force still occupies the rambling slipways, hangars and repair shops of the amphibians, haunted by D’Annunzio’s flamboyant shade. If you are ever silly enough to charter an aeroplane at the Lido airfield, you will learn (during your long and fruitless hours of waiting) how often the airspace of the lagoon is monopolized by military manoeuvres. And four-square before the Porto di Lido, the principal gateway of the lagoon, glowers the magnificent castle of Sant’ Andrea, on the islet of Certosa; from its mighty ramparts they used to stretch the iron chain that blocked the channel to enemy ships, and it still stands there undefeated, the senior sentinel of Venice.
So the old lagoon still bristles. Its forts may be, as those visiting officers reported, ‘not up to British standards’; its great navies have vanished; its guns are mostly spiked; its prickles are blunted; the jets that whistle overhead have come here in the twinkling of an eye from airfields on the Lombardy flat-lands. But sometimes, as your boat potters down the Canale San Marco, you may hear an ear-splitting roar behind your stern; and suddenly there will spring from the walls of the Arsenal a lean grey torpedo-boat, with a noble plume of spray streaming from her stern, and a shattering bellow of diesels; and she will disappear thrillingly towards the open sea, the rumble of her engines echoing among the old towers and ramparts of the place, the fishing boats bobbing and rolling in her wash.