Part 2
Mr. Horatio F. Brown and Mr. Howells both quote a letter, written in Latin, by Petrarch to his friend Pietro Bolognese, in which he describes a famous festival held in the Piazza S. Marco to celebrate a victory over the Greeks in Candia. The poet was seated in the place of honor, at the right of the Doge, in the gallery of the Cathedral, and in front of the bronze horses; and he tells of the many youths, decked in purple and gold, ruling with the rein, and urging with the spur, their horses in the then unpaved square, and watched by a throng of spectators so great that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. There is not a horse in all Venice to-day; the youths wear ulsters when it is cold, and very little of anything when it is hot; and every grain of barley which falls to the ground is ravenously devoured by the doves, who alone of all the Venetians wear the purple now. If tradition, for the once, speaks truly, these very doves are the direct descendants of the carrier-pigeons which brought to Admiral Dandolo information from spies in Candia leading to the capture of the island, and which may have received grains of barley from the hand of Petrarch himself. As such do the doves of the present day receive grains of barley from me.
Mr. Brown, in his admirable study of _The Venetian Printing Press_, says that Aldus is not known, of a certainty, to have lived in the house, or even on the site of the house, No. 2311 Rio Terra Secondo, in the parish of S. Agostino, which is marked with a tablet
as his. But the fact that there still exists a letter addressed to Gregoropoulos at the little narrow Calle del Pistor, close by, and written while Gregoropoulos was employed by Aldus as corrector of Greek manuscript and Greek proof, would seem to imply that the famous printing-press may have stood in the latter street, if such a gutter can be called a street at all. It resembles no thoroughfares elsewhere in the world except the closes of Edinburgh; but it is not unlikely to have been the scene of the birth of the Aldines so dearly prized by the bookworms of to-day. The original Aldus is believed to have settled in Venice about 1488. As Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement remarks, he was no mere printer; and although it is by that name now that he is most frequently regarded, he was a scholar before he was a printer, and he became a printer because of his scholarship. Concerning the many troublesome visitors to his place of business who went there to gossip and to kill their time, Aldus wrote, upon a later establishment: “We make bold to admonish such, in classical words, in a sort of edict placed over our door, ‘Whoever you are, Aldo requests you, if you want anything ask for it in a few words and depart, unless, like Hercules, you come to lend the aid of your shoulders to the weary Atlas. Here will always be found, in that case, something for you to do, however many you may be.’”
Aldo Pio transferred the business in, or about, 1506 to the Campo S. Paternian, now called the Campo Manin; and there he lived and printed good books and good literature, succeeded by his son and his grandson. A very modern Bank for Savings now occupies the site of this establishment, and covers the entire back of the square. But a marble tablet of recent date, placed on its side, bears an inscription to the effect that “Aldo Pio, Paolo, and Aldo II., Manuzio, Princes in the Art of Typography in the Sixteenth Century, diffused, with classic books from this place, a new light of cultured wisdom”; the translation being by Dr. Alexander Robertson. This Campo S. Paternian house was probably that which bore the inscription quoted above, and relating to Atlas and the intellectual Hercules.
According to tradition, a certain Hercules named Erasmus came, in 1506, to lend his shoulder to the support of the load; and found something to do. Erasmus in the workshop of Aldus, printing, perhaps, his own _Adages_, is a picture for a poet or a painter to conjure with. Venice in all its glory never saw a greater sight.
Luther is known to have passed through Venice a few years later than this. He is supposed to have lodged in the cloisters of the Church of S. Stefano here, on his way to Rome, and to have celebrated mass at its high altar. S. Stefano is near the square of the same name, and it is not otherwise particularly distinguished. It dates back to the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Fourteenth Century.
Another Hercules, as great in his way as was Erasmus, lent the aid of his shoulders to the weary Atlas of the Aldine Press in the Sixteenth Century; to wit, Paolo Sarpi, Scholar, Scientist, Philosopher, Statesman, Author, and Martyr, whom Gibbon called “the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent,” and who is called by his present-day biographer, Dr. Robertson, “the greatest of Venetians.”
Sarpi was born in Venice, in 1552; he was educated in Venice; in Venice he spent the better part of his life; in Venice he died; and in Venice he was very much buried. He was brutally stabbed by hired assassins while crossing the Ponte dei Pugni, in 1607; but he recovered, and did not surrender his indomitable soul until 1623.
Sarpi’s posthumous fate for two centuries was an exceedingly restless one. His body was interred originally at the foot of an altar in the Servite Church here, with which he was intimately associated. In 1624 the Servite friars, warned of an intended desecration of his grave, removed his bones to a secret place in their monastery. The next year they carried them back to the church. In 1722 they were removed to still another part of the same church. In 1828, the whole establishment having become a ruin, Sarpi’s bones were carried to the Seminary belonging to, and adjoining, S. Maria della Salute. They were next transferred to a private house in the parish of S. Biagio; then they were kept, for a time, in the Library of Saint Mark, in the Doge’s Palace, and finally they were placed under a slab, near the main entrance of the Church of S. Michele, on the Cemetery Island of that name, where, after having been once more disturbed, in 1846, it is to be hoped they will be permitted to rest.
The church of the Servites no longer exists. A fragment of its ancient wall and two fine old door-ways, however, are still left. The main entrance, long ago bricked up, remains to-day, with one other old gate, which was the entrance to the monastery; and that is all. The larger portion of the site of the foundation is a flower garden; a modern chapel, dedicated in 1894, occupies a small corner of the ground. And the rest is an industrial school for poor girls, from seven to twenty-one years of age, who here, without cost to themselves, are educated for a self-supporting, useful life; as noble a monument as Paolo Sarpi could wish or have. The remains of the church of the Servites may be reached by the Rio di S. Fosca; and they stand in the parish of S. Maria dell’ Orto. Here Sarpi wrote his almost countless works, from a _Treatise on the Interdict_, and a _History of Ecclesiastical Benefices_, to the _History of the Uscocks_, a band of pirates who infested the Dalmatian coast.
An elaborate statue of Sarpi, erected in 1892, is in the Campo Fosca, near the scene of his attempted murder, and on his direct way between his cloistered home and the Ducal Palace. The Greatest of the Venetians stands, in monumental bronze, with his face to the street and his back to the canal, and in figure as well as in features he suggests in many ways the younger, and the greater, of the D’Israelis, with whom, except in nationality, he had so little in common.
The D’Israelis, it will be remembered, were descended from a line of prosperous Jewish merchants who had lived here in the days when Venice was still, in a measure,
the Queen of the Adriatic. Neither of the two men of the race who made it famous in the annals of literature was born here, but they were both of them visitors here, although neither of them has left any record as to where or when. Isaac D’Israeli, however, in a paper upon “Venice,” among his _Curiosities_, in refuting Byron’s statement that “In Venice Tasso’s Echoes are no more,” takes bodily and literally, without credit, Goethe’s description of how he “entered a gondola by moonlight. One singer placed himself forwards and the other aft, and then proceeded to S. Giorgio.” Then follow, in Goethe’s words, D’Israeli’s remarks upon the music of the gondoliers, closing, still in Goethe’s words, with an experience familiar to all subsequent visitors here: “The sleepy canals, the lofty buildings, the splendor of the moon, the deep shadows of the few gondolas that moved like spirits hither and thither, increased the striking peculiarity of the scene; and amidst all these circumstances it was easy to confess the character of this wonderful harmony.”
In another chapter of _The Curiosities_, which is entitled “The Origin of the Newspaper,” D’Israeli, stealing, perhaps, from somebody else, tells us that the first expression of Literature in the form of a periodical was made in Venice. It was, he says, a Government organ originally issued once a month; and even long after the invention of printing it appeared in manuscript. It was called _La Gazetta_, he adds, perhaps from “gazzera,” a magpie, or chatterer, or more likely from “gazzeta,” the small Venetian coin which was its price after it appeared in type. If this fact establishes another Literary Landmark for Venice, let Venice have all the credit of it.
Marino Sanudo, the younger and the greater of that name, was one of the early sons of Venice who found his mother neither nourishing, comforting, nor affectionate. He began to take notes, and to make notes, even as a child, his initial researches having commenced before he was ten years of age. He started his _Diary_ when he was about seventeen; fifty-six volumes of it, covering a period of almost as many years, are still in existence, although not in Venice; and the larger portions of them have been printed. Besides these, he published voluminous works, all of them of the greatest value to the student of the history of his native state. Mrs. Oliphant calls him “one of the most gifted and astonishing of historical moles.” The height of his aspiration was the gratitude and appreciation of the world, by whom he was entirely forgotten for three centuries or more, until Rawdon Brown rescued his name, and his works, from oblivion, and shamed the Venetians into marking, in a suitable way, the house in which he lived; although there is no record of the grave in which he was laid.
Sanudo’s house is still standing on the corner of the Fondamenta and the Ponte del Megio, directly in the rear of, and not far from, the Fondaco dei Turchi. It is plain and substantial, what is called a genteel mansion, and it was a worthy home for a plain and substantial and modest Man of Letters. The tablet is weather-worn and stained, and it looks much older than the days of Rawdon Brown. The inscription, roughly translated, states that “Here dwelt Marino Leonardo F. Sanuto, who, while he well knew the history of the whole universe, still wrote with truth and fidelity of his own country and of his own times. He died here in April, 1536.”
According to tradition, says Signor Tassini, when Tasso came to Venice with Alfonso di Ferrara to meet Henry III. of France, he lodged in what is now known as the Fondaco dei Turchi, an Italo-Byzantine structure of the Ninth Century, and one of the oldest secular buildings in the city. It stands on the Grand Canal, on the left as one sails from St. Mark’s to the railway-station, and past the Rialto; but it was entirely modernized about a quarter of a century ago, and it now contains the collection of the Museo Civico. There is also a tradition that Tasso, in later years, found refuge in the Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, on the other side of the Grand Canal and on the other side of the Rialto Bridge. It is near to the Mocenigo Palace, once the home of Byron.
Montaigne arrived in Venice in 1580, and his remarks about the city and its inhabitants three centuries ago are quaint and entertaining. He was somewhat disappointed in the show places, but greatly interested in the people. He recorded that he hired for himself a gondola, which he was entitled to the use of, night and day, for two lire _per diem_, about seventeen sous, as he explained, including the boatman. Provisions here he found as dear as at Paris; but then, in other respects, he considered it the cheapest place in the world to live in, for the train of attendants which one required elsewhere was here altogether useless, everybody going about by himself, which made great saving in clothes; and, moreover, one had no occasion for horses. His stay here was very short. He said of Italy generally that he had never seen a country in which there were so few pretty women. And the inns he found far less convenient than those of France or Germany. The provisions were not half so plentiful, and not nearly so well dressed. The houses, too, in Italy were very inferior; there were no good rooms, and the large windows had no glass or other protection against the weather; the bedrooms were mere cabins, and the beds wretched pallets, running upon casters, with a miserable canopy over them; “and Heaven help him who cannot lie hard!”
Milton was in Venice in the months of April and May, 1639, but the only incident of his stay here which he recorded is that he shipped to England a number of books which he had collected in different parts of Italy; and some of these, we are told, by one who saw them later in the lodging-house in St. Bride’s Church-yard, London, were curious and rare, “including a chest or two of choice music-books from the best masters flourishing then in Italy.”
Among the volumes which Milton bought and studied in Venice was a history of the town, in Latin, printed by the Elzevirs in 1631. It contains the folding-plates of the Rialto, and of the interior of the Council Chamber of the Doges, which are reproduced here; and the well-preserved copy of the same work, bought behind the Cathedral by
the present chronicler, for a few lire, he highly prizes, as presenting views of the public places of Venice contemporary with _The Merchant of Venice_ and _Othello_, and as, perhaps, having passed here through Milton’s own hands. It was the latest and most authentic chronicle of its kind when Venice received Milton on the bosoms of her canals.
John Evelyn came to Venice in the month of May, 1645, and, as he put it, as soon as he got ashore his portmanteaus were examined at the Dogana, and then he went to his lodging, which was at honest Signor Rhodomante’s, at the Black Eagle, near the Rialto, one of the best quarters of the town. The journey from Rome to Venice, he stated, cost him seven pistoles and thirteen julios. “Two days after, taking a gondola, which is their water-coach,” he said, “we rode up and down their canals, which answer to our streets. These vessels are built very long and narrow, having necks and tails of steel, somewhat spreading at the beak, like a fish’s tail, and kept so exceedingly polished as to give a great lustre.” His first visit was to the Rialto. “It was evening, and the canal where the Noblesse go to take the air, as in our Hyde Park, was full of ladies and gentlemen.... Next day I went to the Exchange, a place like ours, frequented by merchants, but nothing so magnificent.... Hence I passed through the Merceria, one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness of it [!]; and is all the way, on both sides, tapestried, as it were, with cloth of gold, rich damasks and other silks, which the shops expose and hang before their houses from the first floor; ... to this add the perfumes, apothecaries’ shops, and the innumerable cages of nightingales, which they keep, that entertain you with their melody from shop to shop, so that shutting your eyes you could imagine yourself in the country, when, indeed, you are in the middle of the sea.” Evelyn left Venice at the end of March, 1646.
Ruskin, in _The Stones of Venice_, speaks of “the hostelry of the Black Eagle, with its square door of marble deeply moulded in the outer wall, where we see the shadows of its
pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side.” This must not be confounded with Signor Rhodomante’s establishment, where Evelyn was entertained two centuries earlier. Evelyn’s Black Eagle, after many inquiries among the oldest residents of its neighborhood, and after much interesting and fluent interchange of bad Italian and worse English, was discovered to be the ancient house near the Rialto Bridge, now numbered 5238 Calle dei Stagneri, on the Ponte della Fava, and close to the Campo S. Bartolommeo, where stands the Goldoni statue. The house has retired to private life, and is, at present, the home of a practising lawyer in good standing.
Ruskin’s Black Eagle died an unnatural death in 1880, when a certain unusually narrow street was wiped out of existence, under the direction of a chief magistrate (whose name was Dante di Siego Alighieri), to make way for the broad avenue now known as the Street of the 22d of March. The inn was in a retired corner, but on the line of travel between the larger hotels and the Square of S. Moisè. Not a stone of it seems to be left in Venice now.
Ruskin himself, while preserving and polishing _The Stones of Venice_, was very fond of an old-fashioned modest little inn, called La Calcina, in the Zattere Quarter, on the corner of the Campiello della Calcina and by the bridge of the same name. Ruskin’s rooms were over the portico, looking out on the Giudecca Canal, and in fair weather he breakfasted and dined under the shadow of a pergola of vines in the very small garden in the rear of the house.
On the Zattere side of this hostelry, over a little gateway in a passage leading to the garden, is a tablet stating that here died the celebrated poet Apostolo Zeno, in 1750. He was born in Venice, eighty-two years before. He came of an old Venetian family, distinguished in the world of letters. He was a poet, “and the reformer and renovator” of the melodrama in Italy, and he wrote works of a serious as well as of a romantic character. His fine library is now a portion of the Library of St. Mark.
During another visit to Venice Ruskin lived in the house of Rawdon Brown (q. v.); and after Mr. Brown’s death he lodged at the Hotel Europa. All this information was gathered from his personal guide, who described him as “a very curious man, who looked at things with his eyes shut,” imitating, as he spoke, that half-closed-eyelid gaze of a near-sighted person so familiar to all normally visioned observers.
In what is now called the Casa Brown, a stone’s-throw from the Calcina Inn, and in the home of his warm friend and literary executor Mr. Horatio F. Brown, lived and worked, while in Venice, John Addington Symonds, and herefrom he went, in the spring of 1893, to Rome to die. Symonds’s apartments were on the lower floor of the house, which stands on the Bridge and Campiello Incurabili, of the Zattere. In the upper story were written Mr. Brown’s _Venetian Studies_, _Life on the Lagoons_, _The Venetian Printing Press_, etc.
Rawdon Brown lived and died in the Casa della Vida; S. Marcuolo--the address is taken from one of his own visiting-cards. He occupied the second and third floors of this house, which fronts upon the Grand Canal, nearly opposite the Church of S. Eustachio; and many of his contemporary Men of Letters, besides Ruskin, were here his guests. He bequeathed his apartments and their contents to two faithful old servants.
Mr. Brown was buried, in August, 1883, in the Protestant portion of the Cemetery of S. Michele.
Not far from Brown, in the same grounds, lies Eugene Schuyler, “Statesman, Diplomatist, Traveller, Geographer, Historian, Essayist,” who died at the Grand Hotel in Venice in 1890.
G. P. R. James, who died in Venice in 1860, was buried in this same Protestant Cemetery. The tablet over his grave, blackened by time, broken and hardly decipherable, contains the following epitaph, said to have been the composition of Landor: “His merits as a writer are known wherever the English language is, and as a man they rest on the heads of many. A few friends have erected this humble and perishable monument.” There is a vague tradition among the older alien residents here that James was not buried at S. Michele at all, but on the Lido, where are a few very ancient stones and monuments marking the graves of foreign visitors to Venice. They are in a state of picturesque and utter dilapidation, moss-covered, broken, and generally undecipherable; and none of them seem to be of later date than the middle of the Eighteenth Century. They are within the ramparts of Forte S. Nicolò, near the powder-magazine, and are only seen by the consent of the military authorities, which is obtained with difficulty. It is said that Byron expressed a wish to leave his bones here, if his soul should be demanded of him in Italy.
Sir Henry Layard lodged at the Hotel di Roma in 1867, when began his connection with the glass-works of Murano.
He did not purchase the Palazzo Cappello, on the Grand Canal, corner of the Rio S. Polo, until 1878. Here he received and entertained nearly all the distinguished visitors to Venice, until the time of his death, which occurred in London in 1894.
Mr. Howells, upon his first arrival in Venice, lodged, for a time, in the house of his predecessor as American Consul, in a little street behind the Square of St. Mark. Then he removed to the Campo S. Bartolommeo, on the Rialto side of the square, and later he lived in the Campo S. Stefano before he began house-keeping in the Casa Falier, a queer little mansion on the right-hand side of the Grand Canal, three doors from the infamous Iron Bridge. The Casa Falier has cage-like, over-hanging windows, one of them figuring as “The Balcony on the Grand Canal,” from which he saw, and set down, “sights more gracious and fairy than poets ever dreamed.”
His latest house here, in 1864-5, was in the Palazzo Giustiniani dei Vescovi, on the other side of the thoroughfare. It is the middle of three Gothic palaces on the Grand Canal which look towards the Rialto, are next to the Palazzo Foscari, and which, as some one has expressed it, are now a
mosaic-mill. Here he received and put upon record the impressions of his _Venetian Life_, which have given so much pleasure to so many readers, in Venice and out of it, and which have told us so many things we want to know about Venice and the Venetians.
Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, during one long and happy summer in Venice, wrote the story of his _Winter on the Nile_. He lived in the Barbaro Palace, on the Grand Canal, not far from the Falier house of Mr. Howells, on the same side of the stream, but on the other side of the Iron Bridge, and nearly opposite the modern-mosaic-frescoed ancient establishment of Murano-work, which Mr. Howells occupied later. Over the front door of Mr. Warner’s house is a great carved head of some ancient worthy, perhaps a Barbaro, perhaps a saint or a god, whose rank or title is to-day unknown. Mr. Warner’s writing was done in a little room with a balconied window, on the top floor of the neighboring Palazzo Fosclo.