by Jan Morris
Two marvellous Moors, twenty feet high and glistening with sweat, support the monument of the Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Frari, their white eyes bulging and their backs bent double with toil. Two others strike the hours, with surprising delicacy, on the top of the clock-tower in the Piazza: it is true they once inadvertently hit a workman, precipitating him into the square and breaking his neck, but after all their centuries of hammering they have made only a modest indentation in the surface of the bell. The quaintest of sculptured Moors, twisted and one-legged, urges a reluctant camel on the wall of the Palazzo Mastelli. It used to be the custom, if a small child was destined to be a gondolier, for his godfather to screw into his ear an amethyst carved in the shape of a Moor’s head, and to this day half the grander front doors of Venice seem to have thick-lipped Negroes as door-knobs. The classic Venetian souvenir, in the heyday of the Grand Tour, was one of those little black wooden pages, sashed and turbaned, which you sometimes see beside the doors of the more self-conscious English antique shops, like Indians outside American tobacconists: these were reminders of the days when the Venetians had live black slaves at their disposal, only replacing them with wooden substitutes when the slave-traffic petered out.
The Venetians always seem a little offended at Shakespeare’s conception of Othello, and like to suggest that it was all a misunderstanding, and that the prince was not a Moor at all, but a Venetian gentleman named Moro who originated from the Morea – and whose effigy still stands, they add, in shining and very Christian armour, on the corner of his palace in the Campo dei Carmini. But despite a few imperial prejudices, there is no colour bar among the Venetians. The Turks, when they were allowed to establish their national warehouse on the Grand Canal (the Fondaco dei Turchi), were so severely circumscribed that no woman or child was allowed to enter the building at all: but even in the fifteenth century a youth of noblest birth was thrown into the Pozzi for a year for violating the honour of a black slave-girl.
Many and delectable are the suggestions of Islam in Venice – though sometimes, to be sure, they are older than Islam itself, and came direct from old Constantinople in the days before the Arab armies had burst out of their deserts. There are the old iron window-grilles and the cool shaded courtyards of the city; and the Arab schooners you sometimes see, slim and romantic, in the boat-yards of Giudecca; the cobblers, their spectacles on the tips of their noses, and the brawny bare-armed coppersmiths among their lions and sea-horses; the dark little workroom near San Polo where the girls sit cross-legged darning eiderdowns; the small sockets in the walls of houses that act as refrigerated larders; the Bedouin-like mats, all gay stripes, that hang in the windows of the poorer drapers; the little tenement houses of Giudecca, like seaside cottages in Beirut, and the big modern blocks of Sant’ Elena that might be in Heliopolis; the fountains and sudden gardens of the place, like ravishing glimpses of Syria; the images of camels, turbaned merchants, forgotten eastern emperors, that stand sentinel in many a disregarded courtyard; the nasal murmured songs of the girls, such as sometimes emerge from behind the black veils of Arab women; the ladies who peer, like wives in purdah, from the closed windows of lofty palaces; the languid sense of dolce far niente that pervades the Venetian summer; the carved studded doors of Venice, and the coffee-trays that stand upon its official tables, and the jasmine-scented evenings of Giudecca, and the burnous-like cloaks of the policemen. The white fringes of the gondola covers are like camel-trappings, and the star-speckled blue of the Clock Tower is like a tomb at Karnak, and the great Basilica itself, which Mark Twain saw as a ‘vast warty bug taking a meditative walk’, strikes most people as an eastern treasure-house, a Saracen war-tent or a tasselled Shah’s pavilion.
In Venice you can enjoy the pleasures of the Orient without suffering its torments. Flies are few, mosquitoes are decreasing, beggars are unpersistent, water is wholesome, nationalism is restrained, nobody is going to knife you, or talk about Zionism, or blame you for Kashmir, or make you drink brick tea and eat sheep’s eyes. But in Venice, as in the Arab countries, you have the comforting feeling that if you let things drift, and treat life undemandingly, your objectives will eventually be achieved. Do not be alarmed, if you lose sight of your friend on a disappearing steamboat: hang about the Piazza for a while, and she will turn up, miraculously, without surprise or reproach. Do not be despondent if the hull of your boat is splintered by a passing barge: it may look irreparable, but somehow or other, if you do not make a fuss, the boatyard will be able to mend it, and the money will arrive unexpectedly from New York, and you will find the craft more elegant and seaworthy than ever.
Nothing is more reminiscent of the Middle East than one of the gondoliers’ quarrels that have given so much picturesque pleasure to visitors down the centuries. They start in some niggling disagreement about a mooring or a rope, and they proceed in a series of abrupt crescendoes and deflations, as the protagonists flex their muscles. Sometimes, when their rancour has flared to one of its successive apexes, one gondolier suddenly walks off into the Piazza, turning his back on the whole affair, as if he is suddenly wearied of it all; but after a few moments of utter silence, such as precedes a thunderstorm or a caterwaul, he swivels violently around again and advances upon his rival with a fresh torrent of abuse. The quarrel thus proceeds sporadically, in fits and starts, gradually increasing in warmth and invective, getting louder and shriller and more sustained and more ferocious, the eyes flashing, the voices trembling, the feet stamping, until at last the ultimate exchange seems upon us, the flow of insult is almost uninterrupted, the outbreak of actual physical assault seems inescapable – and suddenly all evaporates, the gondoliers are inexplicably reconciled, the expectant crowd laughingly disperses, and the disagreement trails away in a murmur of mingled self-justification and understanding. I have seen the same process a hundred times in the streets of Egypt, when one man has often been on the very point of cutting his opponent’s throat, and then lost interest.
All these things – buildings, memories, manners – bind Venice to the East, and make the exotic seem common-place. In the 1920s there returned to Venice a grandee who had been governor of an Italian colony in East Africa. He brought with him a stalwart African servant, and dressing him flamboyantly, as his forebears had dressed their slaves, in a red turban and a green sash, taught him to drive the family motor boat. The Venetians, I am assured, scarcely looked twice at this spectacular figure, so immemorial have been their associations with the East, just as they hardly seemed to notice the grande dame whose handsome Indian leopard habitually occupied the front seat of her gondola.
The noises of Venice are often Oriental, too, not least the blaring radios and television sets that hurl their melodies after you down the back-streets, and the din of porters, whistles and importunate guides that greets you at the railway station. Many long years ago the city lost its silver reputation for silence. The steamboats did not entirely shatter it, for they used to ease their way down the Grand Canal with the gentle chugging, thumping and hissing that went with polished brass and oiled pistons: but once the petrol engine arrived in Venice, the peace of the city was doomed.
Today Venice is at least as noisy as any mainland city. The throbbing of engines, the blowing of horns, the thudding of steam-hammers, the shouting of irate boatmen, the girl next door laboriously practising her Chopin, the warning cries of the gondoliers, the communal singing of students, the inanities of louts, the jollities of drunks – all are hideously magnified and distorted by the surface of the water and the high walls that surround it, and reverberate around the houses as from a taut drum-skin. (It is disconcerting to hear a snatch of your own conversation, as you meander home from a midnight party, and realize in a moment of clarity how far and how loudly it carries down the canals.) I used to be woken every morning by a terrible racket of engines, klaxons and voices outside my window – as an infatuated Victorian poet put it, ‘From the calm transparent waters Float some thrilling sounds of Amphionic music’. You might have
thought, from the babel of it all, that the Goths were in the lagoon at last: but in fact it was only the dustbin convoy streaming into the city, foam at the prow, helmsmen high and threatening in the stern.
There are other, more evocative noises. The streets of Venice have their own sound, the quick tap of heels upon stone flagstones. From a thousand houses comes the chirping of a myriad canaries. At the backs of trattorias skittle balls clatter against wood. The postman’s call rings richly through the streets, and sometimes a bargee announces his eruption into the Grand Canal with a magnificent bellow from the pit of his stomach. The rattle of shutters is a familiar sound, for this is a resolutely closeted city, and is always opening and closing its windows.
The boom of a ship’s siren is a Venetian noise, and the trumpeting of tugs; and in the foggy winter nights, when the city is blanketed in gloom and damp, you can hear the far-away tinkling of the bell-buoys out in the lagoon, and the distant rumble of the Adriatic beyond. The great Piazza of St Mark, on a high summer day, is a rich medley of sounds: the chatter of innumerable tourists, the laughter of children, the deep bass-notes of the Basilica organ, the thin strains of the café orchestras, the clink of coffee cups, the rattling of maize in paper bags by the sellers of bird food, the shouts of newspapermen, bells, clocks, pigeons, and all the sounds of the sea that seep into the square from the quayside around the corner. It is a heady, Alexandrian mixture. Fielding’s blind man said that he had always imagined the colour red as being ‘much like a sound of a trumpet’: and if you want a visual equivalent for the symphony of the Piazza, think of a sheet of vermilion, shot with gold and dyed at the edges with sea-green.
Venice is no longer the supreme city of music, as she was in the eighteenth century, when four celebrated conservatoires flourished there, when her choirs and instrumentalists were unrivalled, and when the abbé Vivaldi, suddenly inspired with a melody in the middle of celebrating Mass, instantly rushed off to the Sacristy to scribble it down. Music, nevertheless, often sounds in the city. The strains of great symphonies rise, in the summer season, from breathless floodlit courtyards; twelve-tone scales and electronic cadences ring from the International Festival of Contemporary Music, which frequently brought Stravinsky himself to conduct his own works in the Fenice; the noble choir of St Mark’s, once trained by Monteverdi, sings seraphically from its eyrie among the high mosaics of the Basilica. The gondoliers no longer quote Tasso to one another, or sing old Venetian love songs (most of the popular tunes nowadays are from Naples, London or New York): but sometimes an ebullient young man will open his heart and his lungs together, and float down the canal on the wings of a throaty aria.
To hear the bells of Venice it is best to come at Christmas, when the air is mist-muffled, and the noises of the city are deepened and richened, like plum-duff. A marvellous dash of bells rings in Christmas morning, noble bells and frenzied bells, spinsterish bells and pompous bells, cracked bells and genial bells and cross reproving bells. The bells of San Trovaso sound exactly like Alpine cowbells. The bells of the Carmini sing the first few notes of the Lourdes hymn. The bells of Santa Maria Zobenigo are rung ‘with such persistency’, so one Victorian visitor recorded, ‘that the whole neighbourhood must be driven almost to distraction’. The bells of the Oratory of the Virgin, near San Giobbe, so annoyed the monks of the neighbouring convent that in 1515 they went out one night and razed its little campanile to the ground: they had to rebuild it at their own expense.
The great Marangona bell, rescued from the ruins of the old Campanile of St Mark, no longer sounds, but hangs there in the belfry looking frail and venerable: but the big new bell of St Mark’s is alone permitted to sound at midnight, and also rings, to an erratic timetable, at odd intervals during the day. There is a little bell that strikes the hours on the north-western corner of the Basilica, beneath a small stone canopy; and this seems to act as a kind of trigger or stimulus to the two old Moors on the Clock Tower, who promptly raise their hammers for the strike. All these bells, and a hundred others, welcome Christmas with a midnight flourish, and for long echoing minutes after the hour you can hear them ringing down again, softer and softer across the lagoon, like talkative old gentlemen subsiding into sleep.
And there is one more sound that evokes the old Venice, defying the motor boats and the cacophony of radios. Sometimes, early in the morning, as you lie in bed in the half-light, you may hear the soft fastidious splash of oars outside, the swish of a light boat moving fast, the ripple of the waves against the bulwarks of the canal, and the swift breathing of the oarsman, easy and assured.
A sense of Islamic denial seems to govern the Venetian attitude to pleasure. This is no longer a city of boisterous and extrovert enjoyment, and the Venetians have long lost the harum-scarum gaiety that characterized the place during the last decade of its decline. The modern Venetian is a deliberate kind of man, bred to scepticism. He looks an indulgence firmly in the eye, and examines the world’s delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider. Venice is still a fine place for dawdling or frivolity: but like the cities of the Muslim world, it is not ideal for orgies.
It is not, for example, a gourmet’s city. Once upon a time the cucina Veneziana was considered the finest in the world, specializing in wild boar, peacock, venison, elaborate salads and architectural pastries. Even then, though, some perfectionists thought it was spoiled by an excessive use of Oriental spices: Aretino, the poet-wastrel, used to say that the Venetians ‘did not know how to eat or drink’, and another commentator reported caustically that the pride of Venetian cookery was the hard biscuit, which was particularly resistant to the nibblings of weevils (some left in Crete in 1669 were still edible in 1821). Certainly by now the victuals of Venice have lost any traces of antique glory, and generally conform tamely enough to the Italian cuisine.
There is no drink that feels organic to Venice, as beer seems to spring from the fields of Germany, and arak from the very sap of the Baghdad date trees. The wines of the Venetian hinterland are mostly ordinary, and limited indeed are the foreign varieties stocked by the vintners. Most Venetian restaurants merely offer you red or white (if it is one of the simpler trattorias, they call it nero and bianco.) The most famous bar of the city is excellent, but always feels contrived: Harry’s Bar is Venetian-owned and Venetian-staffed, and loves to talk about its visiting celebrities – Hemingway, spectacularly slung with bandoliers and dead birds, striding in from Torcello; Orson Welles propped beside the toasted sandwiches; duchesses (with and without dukes); presidents (in and out of office); film stars (contracted, resting, or in predatory attendance at the Film Festival); a bishop or two, Truman Capote, a few Nobel prizewinners, and Winston Churchill himself, the last of the nabobs, hugging a paint-box.
Here the Italian aristocracy, heavily made up about the eyes, loves to sit in smoky silence, looking terribly distinguished or fearfully scandalous, and here the barman will offer you a Bellini or a Tiziano, two of his cocktail specialities. At Harry’s Bar the jet set assembles in summer, and Venetians speak of it with a certain pride, for since its foundation in the 1920s it has been a fairy-tale success: but it feels harshly at odds with the mouldering spirit of Venice, her lofty monuments and her reflective soul.
The pleasures of sex, of chance, of intrigue, of display – all are drawn largely in the Venetian chronicles, and reflected in the voluptuous canvases of the Venetian artists: but the pleasures of wine seldom appear, and it has been said that Carnival itself was a means of escaping into unreality without getting drunk. Everyday hospitality in Venice has always been abstemious – a glass of Marsala, a sickly nip from a ready-mixed cocktail bottle, a box of biscuits, and everyone is satisfied. If the old palaces of Venice could drink today, they would probably stick to the most expensive kind of coffee, especially imported from the western shores of Arabia, and served in chipped gold cups at the card-table.
And they would eat with lofty frugality. One restaurant in the city advertis
es its merits in an appealing jingle:
From north to south of Italy
Runs Nane Mora’s fame.
His precious cooking is the queen
Of every Gent and Dame.
And the almond cake, oh wonder!
It’s a glory of its kind.
Have a try, your griefs will sunder
When you taste its crispy rind!
Not every Gent or Dame, though, will relish the meals of Venice. Even the Venetians have their doubts. I once saw a party of Venetian restaurateurs assembling at the Patriarchate for a convention: most of them looked sallow and pimply, and some seemed actually undernourished. You can eat expensively and quite well at two or three of the grander hotels, but a cruel monotony informs the menus of the average restaurant. In the first years of this century E. V. Lucas spent a month eating in every Venetian restaurant in turn, and decided that there was only one he wanted to visit a second time. I have tried about thirty, and shall not feel intolerably misused if denied re-entry to any of them (though I shall cherish an affectionate nostalgia for the innumerable modest eating-houses which put up your dinner in a bag for you and send you steaming homewards through the streets, reeking of prawns and lasagna).