Venice

by Jan Morris

  She remained, first of all, uncompromisingly a city of the waters. In the early days the Venetians made rough roads in their islands, and rode about on mules and horses: but presently they evolved the system of canals, based on existing water-channels and rivulets, that is to this day one of the piquant wonders of the world. Their capital, the city of Venice proper, was built upon an archipelago in the heart of the lagoon. Their esplanade was the Grand Canal, the central highway of this city, which swung in a regal curve through a parade of palaces. Their Cheapside or Wall Street was the Rialto, first an island, then a district, then the most famous bridge in Europe. Their Doges rode in fantastic golden barges, and outside each patrician’s house the gondolas lay gracefully at their moorings. Venice evolved an amphibious society peculiar to herself, and the ornate front doors of her mansions opened directly upon the water.

  Against this extraordinary physical background, the Venetians erected a no less remarkable kind of State. At first a kind of patriarchal democracy, it became an aristocratic oligarchy of the tightest kind, in which (after 1297) power was strictly reserved to a group of patrician families. Executive authority passed first to this aristocracy; then to the inner Council of Ten; and later, more and more, to the still more reclusive and reticent Council of Three, which was elected in rotation, a month at a time. To maintain this supremacy, and to prevent both popular risings and personal dictatorships, the structure of the State was buttressed with tyranny, ruthless, impersonal, bland and carefully mysterious. Sometimes the stranger, passing by the Doge’s Palace, would find a pair of anonymous conspirators hanging mangled from a gibbet, or hear a whisper of appalling torture in the dungeons of the Ten. Once the Venetians awoke to discover three convicted traitors buried alive, head downwards, among the flagstones of the Piazzetta, their feet protruding between the pillars. Time and again they learnt that some celebrated national leader, admiral or condottiere, had grown too big for his buskins, and had been strangled or thrown into gaol. Venice was a sort of police State, except that instead of worshipping power, she was terrified of it, and refused it to any single one of her citizens: and by these means, at once fair and ferocious, she outlived all her rivals, and preserved her republican independence until the very end of the eighteenth century.

  All this was wonderful, but no less marvellous was the wealth and strength of Venice – which was, so the Venetians assiduously let it be known, divinely granted. First St Theodore, then St Mark the Evangelist supervised the destinies of the Republic, and all kinds of sacred relics and allusions gave power to the Venetian elbow. ‘Pax tibi, Marce, Evangelista Meus.’ So said a heavenly messenger to St Mark, when the Evangelist was once stranded on an apocryphal sand-bank in this very lagoon: and the words became the national slogan of the Venetian Republic, a divine writ of recommendation.

  She was the greatest sea-power of her day, unrivalled in tonnage, fire-power and efficiency. Her great Arsenal was the supreme shipyard of the world, its secrets as jealously guarded as any nuclear armoury; its walls were two miles round, its pay-roll numbered 16,000, and in the sixteenth-century wars against the Turks a new galley left its yards every morning for 100 days. The Venetian Navy, manned by free men until the slavers’ seventeenth-century heyday, was a most formidable instrument of war, and long after the rise of Genoa and Spain as naval powers, Venetian gunnery remained incomparable.

  Venice stood at the mouth of the great Po valley, facing eastwards, protected in the north by the Alps. She was a natural funnel of intercourse between east and west, and her greatness was built upon her geography. She was hazily subject first to Ravenna and then to Byzantium, but she established herself as independent both of east and of west. She became mistress of the Adriatic, of the eastern Mediterranean, and finally of the trade routes to the Orient – Persia, India and the rich mysteries of China. She lived by the eastern commerce. She had her own caravanserai in the cities of the Levant: and ‘all the gold in Christendom’, as one medieval chronicler querulously observed, ‘passes through the hands of the Venetians’.

  In Venice the Orient began. Marco Polo was a Venetian, and Venetian merchants, searching for new and profitable lines of commerce, travelled widely throughout central Asia. Decked in Oriental fineries, Venice became the most flamboyant of all cities – ‘the most triumphant Citie I ever set eyes on’, wrote Philippe de Commynes in 1495. She was a place of silks, emeralds, marbles, brocades, velvets, cloth of gold, porphyry, ivory, spices, scents, apes, ebony, indigo, slaves, great galleons, Jews, mosaics, shining domes, rubies, and all the gorgeous commodities of Arabia, China and the Indies. She was a treasure-box. Venice was ruined, in the long run, by the Muslim capture of Constantinople in 1453, which ended her supremacy in the Levant; and by da Gama’s voyage to India in 1498, which broke her monopoly of the Oriental trade: but for another three centuries she retained her panache and her pageantry, and she keeps her gilded reputation still.

  She was never loved. She was always the outsider, always envied, always suspected, always feared. She fitted into no convenient category of nations. She was the lion who walked by herself. She traded indiscriminately with Christian and Muslim, in defiance of ghastly Papal penalties (she is the only Christian city marked on Ibn Khaldun’s celebrated fourteenth-century map, together with such places as Gog, Oman, Stinking Land, Waste Country, Soghd, Tughuzghuz and Empty In The North Because Of The Cold). She was the most expert and unscrupulous of money-makers, frankly dedicated to profit, even treating the Holy Wars as promising investments, and cheerfully accommodating the Emperor Baldwin of Jerusalem, when he wished to pawn his Crown of Thorns.

  Venice’s prices were high, her terms were unyielding, and her political motives were so distrusted that in the League of Cambrai most of the sixteenth-century Great Powers united to suppress ‘the insatiable cupidity of the Venetians and their thirst for domination’ (and so perversely efficient was she that the news of their resolution was brought by her couriers from Blois to Venice in eight days flat). Even when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she stood almost alone for Christendom against the triumphant Turks, Venice was never embraced by the nations. She was like a griffin or a phoenix, on the outside of a rookery.

  And as the centuries passed, and she lost her supremacies, and the strain of the merchant princes was weakened, and she sapped her energies in endless Italian squabbles and embroilments, and became a mainland Power – as she sank into her eighteenth-century degeneracy, she became another kind of prodigy. During her last century of independence she was the gayest and worldliest of all cities, a perpetual masque and revelry, where nothing was too daring, too shameful or too licentious. Her carnivals were protracted and uninhibited. Her courtesans were honoured. The domino and the Ace of Spades were her reigning symbols. The dissolute of the western world, the salacious and the mere fun-loving flocked to her theatres and gaming-tables, and respectable people all over Europe looked towards her as they might, from a safe distance, deplore the goings-on of a Sodom or a Gomorrah. No other nation ever died in such feverish hedonism. Venice whirled towards her fall, in the reign of the 120th Doge, in a fandango of high living and enjoyment, until at last Napoleon, brusquely deposing her ineffective Government, ended the Republic and handed the Serenissima contemptuously to the Austrians. ‘Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.’

  This peculiar national history lasted a millennium, and the constitution of Venice was unchanged between 1310 and 1796. Nothing in the story of Venice is ordinary. She was born dangerously, lived grandly, and never abandoned her brazen individualism. ‘Those pantaloons!’ is how a gentleman of the sixteenth-century French Court referred to the Venetians in an unguarded moment, and he was promptly slapped hard in the face by His Excellency the Venetian Ambassador. His contempt, anyway, was forced. You could not feel disdainful towards the Venetians, only resentful. Their system of government, for all its cruelties, was a brilliant success, and fostered in citizens of all classes an unparalleled love of
country. Their navies were incomparable. The noblest artists of the day embellished Venice with their genius; the highest paid mercenaries competed for her commissions; the greatest Powers borrowed her money and rented her ships; and for two centuries the Venetians, at least in a commercial sense, ‘held the gorgeous east in fee’. ‘Venice has preserved her independence during eleven centuries’, wrote Voltaire just thirty years before the fall of the Republic, ‘and I flatter myself will preserve it for ever’: so special was the Venetian position in the world, so strange but familiar, like Simeon Stylites on top of his pillar, in the days when Popes and Emperors sent their envoys to Syria to consult him.

  Venice is still odd. Since Napoleon’s arrival, despite moments of heroism and sacrifice, she has been chiefly a museum, through whose clicking turnstiles the armies of tourism endlessly pass. When the Risorgimento triumphed in Italy, she joined the new Kingdom, and since 1866 has been just another Italian provincial capital: but she remains, as always, a phenomenon. She remains a city without wheels, a metropolis of waterways. She is still gilded and agate-eyed. Travellers still find her astonishing, exasperating, overwhelming, ruinously expensive, gaudy, and what one sixteenth-century Englishman called ‘decantated in majestie’. The Venetians have long since become Italian citizens, but are still a race sui generis, comparable only, as Goethe said, to themselves. In essence. Venice was always a city-State, for all her periods of colonial expansion. There have perhaps been no more than three million true Venetians in all the history of the place: and this grand insularity, this isolation, this sense of queerness and crookedness has preserved the Venetian character uncannily, as though it were pickled like a rare intestine, or mummified in lotions.

  2

  The Venetian Way

  You can tell a Venetian by his face. Thousands of other Italians now live in Venice, but the true-born Venetian is often instantly recognizable. He probably has Slav blood in him, perhaps Austrian, possibly oriental tinctures from the distant past, and he is very far indeed from the stock music-hall Latin. Morose but calculating is the look in his limpid eye, and his mouth is enigmatical. His nose is very prominent, like the nose of a Renaissance grandee, and there is to his manner an air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes. He is often bow-legged (but not from too much riding) and often pale (but not from lack of sunshine). Occasionally his glance contains a glint of sly contempt, and his smile is distant: usually he is a man of gentle reserve, courteous, ceremonious, his jacket neatly buttoned and his itchy palm discreetly gloved. The Venetians often remind me of Welshmen, and often of Jews, and sometimes of Icelanders, and occasionally of Afrikaners, for they have the introspective melancholy pride of people on their own, excluded from the fold of ordinary nations. They feel at once aloof, suspicious and kind. They are seldom boisterous or swashbuckling, and when you hear a Venetian say ‘Buona sera, bellissima. Signorina!’ he says it without flourish or flattery, with a casual inclination of the head. The Venetian in the street can be uncompromising, and cheerfully butts you in the stomach with the tip of her loaf, or drops her laundry-basket agonizingly on your toe. The Venetian in the shop has a special muffled politesse, a restrained but regretful decorum that is part of the ambience of the city.

  Observe a pair of Venetian housewives meeting, and you will see reflected in all their gestures the pungent character of Venice. They approach each other hard-faced and intent, for they are doing their shopping, and carry in their baskets the morning’s modest purchases (this evidently not being their day for the weekly supermarket expedition): but as they catch sight of each other, a sudden soft gleam of commiseration crosses their faces, as though they are about to barter sympathies over some irreparable loss, or share an unusually tender confidence. Their expressions instantly relax, and they welcome each other with a protracted exchange of greetings, rather like the benign grace-notes and benedictions with which old-school Arabs encounter their friends. Their tone of voice is surprised but intimate, falling and rising with penetration through the din of the market: and they sound as though they are simultaneously sympathetic about something, and mournful about something, and a little peevish, and resigned, and reluctantly amused. (‘Poor Venice!’ the housewife sometimes sighs, leaning from her balcony window: but it is little more than a wry slogan, like a commuter’s exorcism upon the weather, or one of those general complaints, common to us all, about the universal decline of everything.)

  They talk for five or ten minutes, sometimes shaking their heads anxiously or shifting their weight from one foot to another, and when they part they wave good-bye to each other in a manner all their own, holding their right hands vertically beside their shoulders, and slightly wagging the tips of all five fingers. In a flash their expressions are earnestly mercantile again, and they are disputing the price of beans with a spry but knowing greengrocer.

  The modern Venetians are not a stately people. They are homely, provincial, fond, complacent. At heart this is a very bourgeois city. The Venetians have lost the unassertive confidence of power, and love to be thought well of. There was a time when kings and pontiffs bowed before the Doge of Venice, and Titian, the most lordly of the Venetian painters, once graciously allowed the Emperor Charles V of Spain and Austria to pick up the paint brush he had accidentally dropped. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Venetians were already becoming testy of criticism, like Americans before their time of power, or Englishmen after theirs. Parochial to a Middle-Western degree was the reply sent by Giustina Renier Michiel, the last great lady of the Republic, when Chateaubriand dared to write an article unflattering to Venice (‘a city against nature – one cannot take a step without being obliged to get into a boat!’). Frigid is the disapproval of the contemporary Venetian grande dame, if you venture to suggest that some of the city’s gardens might be the better for a pair of shears.

  The Venetian way is the right way, and the Venetian nearly always knows best. In the church of San Salvatore there is an Annunciation by Titian which, being a little unconventional in style, so surprised its monastic sponsors that they flatly declared it to be unfinished, or perhaps not really by Titian at all; the old artist was understandably annoyed, and wrote on the bottom of the picture, where you may see it still, the irritated double inscription Titianus Fecit. Fecit. I have often sympathized with him, faced with the know-all Venetians, for the true son of Venice (and even more, the daughter) is convinced that the skills, arts and sciences of the world ripple outwards, in ever-weakening circles, from the Piazza of St Mark. If you want to write a book, consult a Venetian professor. If you want to tie a knot in a rope, ask a Venetian how. If you want to know how a bridge is built, look at the Rialto. To learn how to make a cup of coffee, frame a picture, stuff a peacock, phrase a treaty, clean your shoes, sew a button on a blouse, consult the appropriate Venetian authority.

  ‘The Venetian custom’ is the criterion of good sense and propriety. Pitying, lofty but condescending is the smile on the Venetian face, when you suggest frying the fish in breadcrumbs, instead of in flour. Paternal is the man in the camera shop, as he demonstrates to you the only correct way to focus your Leica. ‘It is our custom’ – by which the Venetian means not merely that Venetian things are best, but that they are probably unique. Often and again you will be kindly told, as you step from-the quayside into your boat, that Venetian seaweed is slippery: and I have even heard it said that Venetian water is inclined to be wet.

  These are the harmless conceits of the parish pump. Foreigners who have lived in Venice for years have told me how detached they have grown to feel from the affairs of the world at large, as though they are mere onlookers: and this sense of separateness, which once contributed to the invincibility of the Republic, now bolsters Venetian complacencies. Like poor relations or provincial bigwigs, the Venetians love to ponder the glories of their pedigree, tracing their splendours ever further back, beyond the great Doges and the Tribunes to Rome hers
elf (the Giustinian family claims descent from the Emperor Justinian) and even into the mists of pre-history, when the original Venetians are variously supposed to have come from Paphlagonia, from the Baltic, from Babylon, from Illyria, from the coast of Brittany, or directly, like nymphs, out of the morning dew. Venetians love to tell you about ‘my grandfather, a man of much cultural and intellectual distinction’; or invite you to share the assumption that the opera at the Fenice is, on the whole, the best and most cultural on earth; or point out the Venetian artist Vedova as the greatest of his generation (‘But perhaps you’re not, shall we say, au fait with the tendencies of contemporary art, such as are demonstrated here in Venice at our Biennale?’). Every Venetian is a connoisseur, with a strong bias towards the local product. The guides at the Doge’s Palace rarely bother to mention the startling paintings by Hieronymus Bosch that hang near the Bridge of Sighs – he was not, after all, a Venetian. The Venetian libraries concern themselves assiduously with Venice. The pictures that hang in Venetian houses are nearly always of Venetian scenes. Venice is a shamelessly self-centred place, in a constant glow of elderly narcissism.

  There is nothing offensive to this local pride, for the Venetians are not exactly boastful, only convinced. Indeed, there is sometimes real pathos to it. Modern Venice is not so pre-eminent, by a half, as they like to suppose. Its glitter and sparkle nearly all comes with the summer visitors, and its private intellectual life is sluggish. Its opera audiences (except in the galleries) are coarse and inattentive, and few indeed are the fairy motor boats that arrive, in the dismal winter evenings, at the once brilliant water-gate of the Fenice. Concerts, except in the tourist season, are generally second-rate and expensive. The celebrated printing houses of Venice, once the finest in Europe, have nearly all gone. Venetian cooking is undistinguished, Venetian workmanship is variable. The old robust seafaring habits have long been dissipated, so that the average Venetian never goes too near the water, and makes a terrible fuss if a storm blows up. In many ways Venice is a backwater. Some people say she is dead on her feet. Memphis, Leeds and Leopoldville are all bigger, and all livelier. Genoa handles twice as much shipping. There is a better orchestra in Liverpool, a better newspaper in Milwaukee, a better university in Capetown; and any weekend yachtswoman, sailing her dinghy at Chichester or Newport, will tie you as practical a knot as a gondolier.