by Jan Morris
The fleet is run by private enterprise, under municipal contract. A small army of uniformed men, pushing neat metal trolleys, collects the plastic bags each morning from the houses of Venice, and hurries them through the alley-ways towards a rendezvous with their barges. The engines whirr; the rubbish is stacked automatically deep in the hold; and away the barge chugs, no dirtier than a vegetable boat, or smellier than a fish-cart. Ruskin caustically described Venice as a City In The Mud, but she is also a City Upon The Garbage: for they take that rubbish to the islet of Sacca Fisola, at the western tip of Giudecca, and eventually, mixing it hideously with sand, silt and seaweed, use it as the basis of new artificial islands.
The municipal hospital of Venice is a vast and rambling structure near the church of San Zanipolo, occupying the cloister of the church as well as the former building of the Scuola di San Marco. Going into hospital is thus a queer experience, for the way to the wards passes through one of the quaintest façades in Venice, a marvellous trompe-l’oeil creation of the fifteenth century, replete with lions, grotesqueries, tricks of craftsmanship and superimpositions. The reception hall is a tall dark chamber of pillars, and the offices, operating theatres and wards run away like a warren to the distant melancholy quayside of the Fondamenta Nuove, looking directly across to the cemetery. If you happen to take a wrong turning, on your way to the dispensary, you may find yourself in the fabulous chapter room of the Great School of St Mark, now a medical library, with the most magnificently opulent ceiling I have ever seen. If you should chance to die, they will wheel you at once into the old church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, which now forms part of the hospital, and is only opened for funerals: it is remarkable partly for its manner of ingrained despair, and partly for a monument to a seventeenth-century worthy so hugely domineering that it faces two ways, one supervising the entire chancel of the church, the other demanding instant obeisance from anyone entering the vestibule. And in an arched boatyard beneath the hospital stand the duty ambulances, powerful blue motor boats which, summoned to an emergency, race off through the canals with a scream of sirens and a fine humanitarian disregard of the traffic rules.
Other city services cannot be wholly mechanized, and retain rituals and conventions passed down from the Middle Ages. The water scavengers, for example, do their work in the old way, scooping up floating scum in baskets, or pottering grimly about in boats with nets and buckets: the man who cleans our side-canal also carries a bottle of wine among his tackle – in case, he once cheerfully told me, his zest should momentarily fail him. The postal service, too, has changed slowly down the centuries. The central post office occupies the enormous Fondaco dei Tedeschi near the Rialto bridge, once the headquarters of the German mercantile community – it contained their offices, their warehouses, their chapel, and even hotel accommodation for visiting traders. This building was once decorated with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione, after those two young geniuses had prudently helped to extinguish a fire there. Today the place is gloomy and echoing, and from it nearly 100 postpersons go out each day in their smart blue uniforms, slung with satchels. They take the vaporetto to their allotted quarters, and then walk swiftly from house to house, popping the mail into baskets lowered from upstairs floors on long strings, and sometimes singing out a name in a rich and vibrant baritone.
Since the twelfth century the city has been divided into six sestieri or wards: to the north and east of the Grand Canal, the sestieri of Cannaregio, San Marco and Castello; to the south and west, San Polo, Santa Croce and Dorsoduro (which includes Giudecca and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore). Within each of these sections the houses are numbered consecutively from beginning to end, regardless of corners, cross-roads or culs-de-sac. The sestiere of San Marco, for example, begins at No.1 (the Doge’s Palace) and ends at No. 5562 (beside the Rialto bridge). There are 29,254 house numbers in the city of Venice, and within the limits of each sector their numbering is inexorable. Through all the quivering crannies of the place, the endless blind alleys and cramped courtyards, the bridges and arches and shuttered squares – through them all, coldly and dispassionately, the house numbers march with awful logic. The postman’s task thus retains a Gothic simplicity and severity. He begins at No. 1, and goes on till he finishes.
Away down the Grand Canal stands the superb Palazzo Corner della Regina. This now houses the archives of the Biennale, Venice’s international art festival, but not so long ago it was the Monte di Pietà, the municipal pawnshop. Nothing could have been more tactfully organized than this institution was. On the ground floor, to be sure, there was a sale room of a certain ragbag ebullience, haunted by fierce-eyed bargain hunters and eager dealers: but upstairs, where you deposited your treasures and drew your cash, all was propriety. The atmosphere was hushed. The counters were discreet and sombre, as in an old-fashioned bank. The attendants were courteous. There was none of the flavour of old clothes, rusty trinkets and embarrassment that pervades an English pawnbroker’s. The Monte di Pietà used to suggest to me a modest but eminent Wall Street finance house, or perhaps a College of Heraldry.
A pawnshop is a pawnshop, though, however kindly disguised; and if you hung around the lane beside that great building you would often encounter the sad people of the hock-shop world, broken old men with sacks of junk, or wispy ladies, hopefully hurrying bent-backed with their mattresses and disjointed sewing-tables.
Everybody dies in Venice. The Venetians die in the normal course of events, and the visitors die as a matter of convention. In the Middle Ages the population was periodically decimated by the plague, which was often brought to Venice by way of the Levantine trade routes, and was only checked, on repeated occasions, by lavish votive offerings and prayers. Immense doses of Teriaca failed to keep the plague at bay. A single fifteenth-century epidemic reduced the population by two-thirds: nearly 50,000 people died in the city, it is said, and another 94,000 in the lagoon settlements. So concerned were the old Venetians with these perennial horrors that they even stole, from Montpellier in France, the body of St Roch, then considered the most effective champion against bacterial demons, and they built five churches in thanksgiving for the ends of plagues – the Salute, the Redentore, San Rocco, San Sebastiano and San Giobe (Job was locally canonized, in the plague areas of the Adriatic shores, because of his affinity with sufferers).
Many a precious fresco has been lost because the Venetians whitewashed a wall to stifle the plague germs; and the whole floor of the church of San Simeone Grande was once laboriously rebuilt and elevated, owing to the presence of plague corpses beneath its flagstones. When Titian died of the plague, in 1576, only he among the 70,000 victims of that particular epidemic was allowed burial in a church. Nor is this all very ancient history. A silver lamp in the Salute was placed there as recently as 1836, to mark the end of a cholera plague: and there were ghastly scenes of suffering – corpses lowered from windows into barges, mass burials in the lagoon – when cholera attacked Venice during the 1848 revolution.
Malaria, too, has killed or debilitated thousands of Venetians down the centuries, and is only now checked by the new chemicals (mosquitoes are still pestilential in the late summer); and the harsh Venetian winters, with their rasping winds and interminable rains, have been fatal to innumerable sickly pensioners. For all its glorious spring idylls, the climate is treacherous – if balanced nowadays by the relative peacefulness of a city without cars. Often the days feel mysteriously depressing and enervating, as though the sadness of Venice has impregnated its air; and it is said that Eleanora Duse suffered all her life from the moods induced by these moments of climatic hopelessness.
The experts say, indeed, that Venice is unusually healthy. ‘The barometric pressure’, says one official pamphlet in its best bed-side manner, ‘is maintained at a uniform level because of the evenness of its oscillations.’ ‘Bacterioscopical laboratory tests’, says another, ‘have proved that the water of the lagoon possesses auto-purifying powers.’ It is odd, all the same, how often foreig
n consuls and ministers have died in Venice in the course of their duties, to leave their high-flown honorifics mouldering on island tombstones: and many a visiting lion has roared his last in Venice. Wagner died in the palace that is now the winter casino. Browning died in the Ca’ Rezzonico, on which the municipality has inscribed his famous couplet of gratitude to Italy. Diaghilev died here, and Baron Corvo, and so did Shelley’s little daughter Clara, after a journey from the Euganean Hills complicated by the fact that Shelley had left their passports behind.
A fourteenth-century Duke of Norfolk, banished from England after a quarrel with the future Henry IV, was buried in the Basilica, until he was exhumed and taken home by his descendants – he had retired himself to Italy, so Shakespeare wrote of him,
And there, at Venice, gave
His body to that pleasant country’s earth,
And his pure soul until his captain, Christ.
In San Zanipolo you may still see the grandiose tomb of ‘Odoardo Windsor, Barone Inglese’, who died in 1574. The Scotsman John Law, perpetrator of the Mississippi Bubble, died in Venice in poverty, and is buried in San Moise. Even Dante died of a fever contracted during a journey to Venice. The angry Venetian modernists like to say that this has become a city ‘where people come to expire’. The gentle last-ditchers, inspired by so many distinguished predecessors, only wait for the day.
There is nothing more characteristically Venetian than one of the funeral cortèges that plough with such startling frequency down the Grand Canal, on their way to the island cemetery of San Michele (to which Napoleon decreed that all the city’s dead should be carried). Today there is only one model of hearse, a plain blue motor launch with an open cockpit for the coffin and the undertaker’s men, a curtained cabin for the mourners. Not so long ago a saturnine variety of craft offered far more opportunities for grand guignol. The most expensive was a straight-prowed, old-school motor boat, heavily draped in brown, black and gold, and steered by an unshakeably lugubrious chauffeur. The next was a kind of lighter, huge, forbidding and encrusted with gold, like a floating four-poster. Then came an elaborately gilded barge, rowed by three or four elderly boatmen in black tam-oʼ-shanters, at the bows a lion crying into a handkerchief, at the stern that prodigy of paradise, a bearded angel. And cheapest of all was a mere gondola in disguise, a little blacker and heavier than usual, mournfully draped, and rowed by two men in threadbare but unmistakably funereal livery. Photographs of the various vehicles used to be displayed in the undertakers’ windows: and once I overheard a small boy, looking at these pictures with his sister, remarking in a phrase that I found hauntingly ambiguous: ‘There! That’s Daddy’s boat!’
Marvellously evocative is a winter funeral in Venice. A kind of trolley, like a hospital carriage, brings the coffin to the quayside, the priest shivering in his wind-ruffled surplice, the bereaved relatives desperately muffled; and presently the death-boat chugs away through the mist down the Grand Canal, with a glimpse of flowers and a little train of mourning gondolas. They keep close to the bank, in the shade of the tall tottering palaces (themselves like grey symbols of the grave), and thus disappear slowly into the distance, across the last canal.
The procession is not always so decorous when it arrives at San Michele, for this cemetery still serves the whole of Venice, and often there are two or three such cortèges arriving at the landing-stage simultaneously. Then there is a frightful conglomeration of brass impediments, a tangle of plumes, motor boats backing and roaring, gondoliers writhing at their row-locks, hookers straining on the quay, mourners embarrassingly intermingled. It is a funeral jam. I once saw such a mélange, one bright summer morning, into which a funeral gondola of racy instincts was projected forcibly by an accomplice motor boat, slipping the tow neatly as it passed the San Michele landing-stage: never were mourners more mute with astonishment than when this flower-decked bier came rocketing past their gondolas, to sweep beside the quay with a jovial flourish.
Once ashore, though, and there will be no such contretemps, for San Michele is run with professional efficiency, and the director stands as proudly in his great graveyard as any masterful cruiser captain, god-like on his bridge. The church at the corner of the island is beautifully cool, austere and pallid, and is tended by soft-footed Franciscans: Paolo Sarpi is buried at its entrance, and the Austrians used its convent as a political prison. The cemetery itself is wide and calm, a series of huge gardens, studded with cypress trees and awful monuments. Until quite recently it consisted of two separate islands, San Michele and San Cristoforo, but now they have been artificially joined, and the whole area is cluttered with hundreds of thousands of tombs – some lavishly monumental, with domes and sculptures and wrought-iron gates, some stacked in high modern terraces, like filing systems. There is a pathetic little row of children’s graves, and around the cloister at the entrance many an old Venetian worthy is buried, with elaborate inscriptions on big stone plaques (many of which have been unaccountably defaced, by scribbled signatures and lewdities).
The cult of death is still powerful among the Venetians, and a constant flow of visitors moves silently among the graves, or meditates among the pleasant flower-beds of the place. Many of the grander tombs, already inscribed and shuttered, are not yet occupied, but await a death in the family. Others are so spacious, well built and frequented that they are more like nightmare summerhouses than tombs, and remind me of the hospitable mausoleums in Cairo’s City of the Dead. Inside others again there hang, in the Italian manner, portraits of the departed, giving them rather the feeling of well-polished marble board-rooms, awaiting a quorum. There is an annual pilgrimage of ballet-lovers to the modest tomb of Diaghilev; and an increasing trickle of visitors finds its way to the obscure burial-place, high in a tomb-terrace, of Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo’. He died, according to British Consulate records, in October 1913, in the Palazzo Marcello, at the age of 53: his life in Venice had sunk from eccentricity to outrage to depravity, but he refused ever to leave the city, wrote some incomparable descriptions of it, died in poverty and obloquy, and was buried (characteristically) at his brother’s expense. Silently this multitude of shades lies there beneath the dark trees of San Michele; and at night-time, I am told, a galaxy of little votive lamps flutters and twinkles on ten thousand tombstones, like so many small spirits.
At the eastern corner of San Michele is an old Protestant graveyard of very different temper. It is like a Carolina churchyard, lush, untended and overgrown, shaded by rich gnarled trees, with grassy walks and generations of dead leaves. Most of its graves are obscured by weeds, earth and foliage, and it is instructive to wander through all this seductive desolation, clearing a gravestone here and there, or peering through the thickets at a worn inscription. There are many Swiss and Germans in these graves; and many British seamen who died on their ships in the port of Venice. There is an English lady, with her daughter, who perished in a ferry disaster off the Lido in the early 1900s; and several Americans with names such as Horace, Lucy or Harriet; and one or two diplomats, among whose flowery but almost illegible epitaphs you may discern a plethora of adjectives like ‘noble-minded’, ‘lofty’, ‘much-respected’, ‘eminent’. There is a long-forgotten English novelist, G. P. R. James, whose merits as a writer, we are ironically assured, ‘are known wherever the English language is spoken’; and there is an unfortunate Mr Frank Stanier, of Staffordshire, whose mourners wrote of him in a phrase that might be kindlier put, that he ‘Left Us In Peace, Febry 2nd, 1910’.
The marble-workers who erect the fancy mausoleums of San Michele are understandably cynical about the expenses of death in Venice, and say that only the rich lie easy in their graves. Certainly the Venetians have sometimes paid heavily for immortality. One sixteenth-century patrician directed in his will that his body should be washed in aromatic vinegar by three celebrated physicians, wrapped in linens soaked in essence of aloes, and placed in a lead coffin enclosed in cypress wood: upon the surrounding mo
nument the virtues of the deceased were to be engraved in Latin hexameters, in letters large enough to be easily read at a distance of twenty-five feet, and the history of the family was to be added in a series of 800 verses, specially commissioned from some expensive poet. Seven commemorative psalms were also to be composed, and twenty monks were to chant them beside the tomb on the first Sunday in every month for ever. (But if you want to see how Pietro Bernardo’s executors honoured this will, go and look at the bourgeois memorial they in fact erected to him in the Frari, and ask how often the monks sing those psalms these days.)
Humbler Venetians, too, have always hankered after a comfortable oblivion in the tomb. ‘Here we poor Venetians become landowners at last,’ said a Venetian woman to W. D. Howells, as they approached the cemetery just a century ago: but it is not strictly true. For twelve years they lie at peace in their graves: but then, unless their relatives are prepared to pay a substantial retaining fee, their bones are briskly exhumed and dumped in a common grave, and their pitiful little headstones, inscriptions and memorial photographs are left cracked and mouldering on a rubbish dump. Until a few years ago their bones were shipped away to a distant island of the lagoon. Nowadays they remain upon San Michele, and extra land is being reclaimed on the eastern side of the island, to make room for more.