by Jan Morris
The service in Venetian restuarants is usually rough and ready, sometimes off-hand, and occasionally downright rude, and the food, after the first dozen meals, begins to acquire a soporific sameness. The meat revolves sluggishly around a gristly core of veal. The salads are unimaginative, and are redeemed chiefly, if you insist, by the liberal use of fennel. It is only when you come to the fish, the native food of the Venetians, that you may feel a spark of enthusiasm. Venetian scampi are magnificent. There is a dish called mista mare, a fried pot-pourri of sea-foods, that can be delicious, at least for the first twenty or thirty times. Various kinds of eel are splendid, and so are innumerable small shellfish and minor molluscs. If the season is right, and the restaurant not too pretentious, you may be given some delicious soft-shelled crabs, which are a great delicacy in America, but considered coarse fare in Venice.
Indeed to my mind the lower you slither in the hierarchy of the Venetian kitchen, the more you are likely to enjoy yourself, until at last, turning your back on the crêpe suzette of the hotels and the avaricious gentility of the big restaurants, you find yourself in some water-front trattoria eating a fine but nameless fish from the lagoon, garnished with small crabs, washed down with a flagon of rasping white wine, and fortified by a glistening slab of polenta, the warm maize bread of the Venetians, which, eaten in tandem with an eel, a trout or a haunch of tunny, is food fit for Doges.
To live in Venice is one of the supreme pleasures that this world can offer. But though I have often been indescribably happy there, and often dazed with admiration, and often surfeited with the interest and enchantment and variety of it all, yet I have never felt in the least Bacchanalian. The Levantine attitudes of the Venetians are catching. More than once, watching a gay party of visitors float down the Grand Canal, singing to an accordion, exchanging holiday badinage, and toasting each other’s fortunes in beakers of red wine, I have examined my reactions meticulously, and caught myself estimating how much they would get back on the bottles.
18
The Seasons
Venice is a seasonal city, dependent more than most upon weather and temperature. She lives for the summer, when her great tourist industry leaps into action, and though each year nowadays the season grows longer, and visitors pour in throughout the calendar, still on a winter day she can be a curiously simple, homely place, instinct with melancholy, her Piazza deserted, her canals choppy and dismal. The winter climate of Venice is notorious. A harsh, raw, damp miasma overcomes the city for weeks at a time, only occasionally dispersed by days of cold sunny brilliance. The rain teems down with a particular wetness, like unto like, stirring the mud in the bottom of the Grand Canal, and streaming magnificently off the marbles of the Basilica. The fog marches in frowardly from the sea, so thick that you cannot see across the Piazza, and the vaporetto labours towards the Rialto with an anxious look-out in the bows. Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles. Sometimes the fringe of a bora sweeps the water in fierce waves up the narrower canals, and throws the moored boats viciously against the quays. The nights are vaporous and tomb-like, and the days dawn monotonously grey.
So Venice sits huddled over her inadequate stoves, or hugger-mugger in her cafés. The palaces of the Grand Canal are heavily clamped and boarded, with only a handful of dim lights burning from ugly tinkling chandeliers through fusty dark brown curtains. The boatmen crouch at their tillers, shrouded in sacks and old overcoats, and sometimes clutching umbrellas. The alley-cats squat emaciated behind their grilles, and the pigeons cluster dejectedly in sheltered crannies of the Piazza. All Venice snivels with influenza, colds in the nose and throat infections (when the Republic secretly did away with three of its political enemies in the fifteenth century, the cause of death was blandly announced as catarrh, and everyone was satisfied). Not a fiddle plays in the Piazza. Not a tout hangs around the arcades. Scarcely a tourist complains about the price of hot chocolate. It is a very private city.
Its celebrations have a club-like feeling, free of prying outsiders. A Venetian Christmas is a staunchly family festival. The trains are full of returning migrants, waiters and labourers from Paris, mothers’ helps from the Home Counties, and there is a great deal of handshaking in the streets, and many a delighted reunion at the steamboat station. Suddenly everyone in Venice seems to know everyone else. An endless stream of shoppers, dressed in their elegant best, pushes so thickly through the narrow Merceria that sometimes the policemen, stationing themselves at intersections, impose a system of one-way traffic. The windows burgeon with Christmas trees. Every passing barge seems full of bottles, or parcels, or little firs from the mountains, and every child in Venice seems to trail a red balloon.
In the plushy cafés of St Mark’s (Regency stripes and spindly chairs) spruce infants listen with deference to the interminable reminiscences of immaculate uncles: and in the cafés on Christmas Eve 20,000 families giggle before the television sets, drinking Cinzano and eating sticky cakes, while the favourite melody of the day is passed from shop to shop, from square to square, down one dark alley to another, like a cheerful watchword in the night. The Christmas services are warm, bright and glistening; the cribs are crude but touching; the choirs sing lustily; and Venice feels less like a grand duchess than a buxom landlady, enjoying a glass of stout when the customers have gone (except for the mysterious permutations of clergy, gold and crimson and misty with incense, that you may glimpse passing and repassing the open doors of the Basilica).
To see the Serenissima without her make-up on, try getting up at three in the morning one foggy February day, and watch the old lady reluctantly awakening. As you stand on your terrace above the canal, it is as though you are deposited plumb in the middle of an almost disused nowhere, so deathly silent is the place, so gagged and pinioned with mist. There are sombre pools of lamplight on the shrouded Grand Canal, and the only person in sight is a solitary eccentric in a fur hat, reading the Rules and Regulations at the steamboat pontoon with a cold and unnatural intensity. And when you have plastered your sweaters on, and crept down the scrubbed echoing staircase of your palace (past the sleeping advocate on the second floor, the Slav Baronessa on the first, the one-eyed ginger torn in his niche, the mighty padlocked coal-cellar doors, the pigeon-streaked bust of an unknown hero by the entrance, the little neglected Madonna on the wood shed, the arid tangle of a lawn and the stiff squeaking iron gates) – when you are out at last, you will find the whole great city damp and padded in sleep. In London or New York the night is never absolute: in Venice, at three on a foggy winter morning, it feels as though the day will never come.
All is dank, swirling, desolate. If you stand still for a sudden moment, allowing the echo of your steps to retreat around a corner, you will hear only the sad slapping of the water on a tethered boat, the distant clanging of a fog bell, or the deep boom of a steamer at sea. Perhaps there will be, far away across the rooftops, a distant sporadic splutter of men’s voices. Perhaps a pale faithful light will flicker before a tinsel ex voto. The white cat who lives beneath the seat of a gondola in the Rio della Toletta may spring like a demon from his lair; or there may even scurry by, wrapped in worn wool, with a scarf over her nose and mouth and a string shopping-bag in her hand, some solitary poor conscientious soul off to clean a heartless office or buy the first cabbage of the dawn. For the rest, it is wet, dismal, mist-muffled silence. Water pours miserably from an antique pump. Lamplight shines sullenly among the alleys, and sometimes picks out, with a gleam of wet masonry, half a sculptured saintly nose, the tail end of a carved peacock, a crown, a crest, or a crab in a medallion.
In winter Venice wakes up at her edges. Down beyond the empty car park life begins early. Outside the church of Santa Chiara, where a burly watchman walks heavy-shouldered up and down the quay, light shines from the hatches of a dozen barges, throwing the huge moving shadows of their engineers on the wall across the water. At the end of the causeway the
daily parade of trucks and trailers waits to be unloaded, hung about with diesel fumes. Harsh voices and the banging of crates emerge from the big warehouses by the docks, and there is a smell of eels, apples, onions and cheap tobacco. There are lights about, and policemen, a few bright steamy coffee shops, a chatter and clutter of life beside the wharves.
Slowly, hesitantly, as you range the streets, this animation of morning spreads across Venice. The fringes of the city curl, and colour, and burst into wintry flame. When you walk back across Dorsoduro, shafts of light from opening doors punctuate the fog. The myriad cafés are raising their shutters, and their bottles, coffee-machines and sugar containers stand sleepily shining in the mist. In San Polo a butcher and his assistant are laboriously heaving a carcass into their window. By the Bridge of Fists, around the corner from the Alley of Haste, a fruit-seller, yawning and grunting, climbs blearily from the hold of his barge. A boat-load of wild fishermen from the lagoon is sluicing itself in water under a bridge. Beneath the high arch of the Accademia two hulking cement barges labour up the Grand Canal, their crews shouting to one another, grand, slow and heavy in the gloom, like ancient galleys. Outside the church of San Maurizio two pale novice-nuns are scrubbing the marble steps. Inside Santa Maria Zobenigo the twisted baroque angels of the altar look down compassionately upon an early Mass (a priest, an acolyte, three nuns, and a sad-faced woman in grey). By Harry’s Bar a sailor steps off the vaporetto carrying his rifle wrapped up in newspaper, and along the intersecting alley-ways platoons of litter-men swish their brushes energetically in the cold.
So the day comes up again, pinkish and subdued, a Turnerish, vaporous, moist, sea-birds’ day. ‘Nasty morning’, you say to the waiter, as you order your café breakfast: but he only shrugs his shoulders and smiles a separate, melancholy smile, as a Doge might smile at an importunate emperor, or a great sea-captain patronize a Turk.
And then one morning the spring arrives. Not any old morning, but specifically 15 May, for the Venetians believe in the infallibility of the calendar, and regard the beginning of each season as a strictly immovable feast. Eccentric indeed is the foreigner who bathes before 1 June, when the bathing season opens, and it really does seem to be true that on 25 July each year (St James’s Day) the swallows vanish from the city, and leave the field clear for the mosquitoes.
In spring the swallows are still arriving, and bring a new element of delicate frenzy to the place – ‘There goes a swallow to Venice, the stout seafarer! Seeing those birds fly, makes one wish for wings.’ Generally Venice is not a dancing city, like New York on a frosty morning, or London in early summer, when every man feels like Fred Astaire, and every girl like Cleopatra. Here the whistle is inclined to fade from your lips, as the pensive Venetian faces go by, or a mob of raggle-taggle tourists advances upon you with grimaces, mistaking you for the man who is going to show them round the glass factory. In spring, though, the city has it moments of brilliant exhilaration, when you can happily echo the parodist’s verses:
With due respect to old R.B.
My own especial spring-time prayer
Is ‘Oh to be in Italy,
In Venice, now the spring is there!’
These are the halcyon days of the Venetian year. The city is not too crowded, the sun is not too hot, the fogs have gone, there is a sense of discomforts survived and prosperity to come. The coal man knocks on your door with an eager smile, to say that he is perfectly willing to buy back your unused stocks of anthracite (at a slightly reduced price, of course). The vegetable man plucks a carnation from the vase behind him and offers it to you with a truly Neapolitan flourish. Streaks and flecks of green appear in the city at last, softening its urban stoniness. The female cats, one and all, fatten with kittens: the toms disappear into the shrubbery. As the days brighten, and the warm winds blow up from the south, the very pavements of the city seem to be cherished and revived, not to speak of its dank and frigid drawing-rooms. Spring floods into Venice like a tingling elixir or a dry Martini, or perhaps a dose of Teriaca.
Now the massive tourist machine of Venice greases its cogs and paints its upper works for the summer. Wherever you go in the city, bits and pieces of gondolas hang fresh-painted on its walls, totems of May – shiny seats, velvet cushions, a brass sea-horse dangling from a window-knob, a black walnut panel propped against a door. The boat-yards are full of holiday craft, having the weed scraped from their bottoms. The Grand Canal, which spent the winter as a plain market highway, a bus route, a business street, now becomes the supply route of tourism, as all the curtains, paint pots, upholsteries, cutlery, bedspreads, furniture and chromium fittings of the new season flood towards St Mark’s. The first cruise ship of the year anchors tantalizingly in the lagoon, bright with awnings, with a scent of the Aegean to her funnel vapours, or a thin flicker of rust from the Hudson river. The first spring tourists parade the Piazza, wearing tarbooshes, Maltese slippers, Spanish skirts or burnouses, according to their earlier itinerary. The first visiting warship moors at the Dogana, and its officers of the watch strut on deck in red sashes and swords. The first British seaman of the season retires to the municipal hospital after a jolly brawl on the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Now the hotels and the pensions and the restaurants spring into full life again. Their brass-work is polished, their landing-stages are bright with blue and gold. If you want to book a room the receptionist no longer greets you with cheerful informality, as he did a month ago, but cocks a sophisticated seasonal eyebrow, turns a supercilious page, and informs you kindly that luckily, owing to a late cancellation from Venezuela, he is able to let you have one small but pleasant room, not unfortunately over the Grand Canal, but overlooking the very characteristic, if a trifle noisy, alley-way at the back – without bathroom, alas, though there is one at the end of the corridor, beyond the maids’ pantry – on the sixth floor, but with lift service, of course, to the fourth – and all this, he nearly forgets to add, at a special price which, expressed in Italian lire, seems very little more than you would pay for the royal suite at the Ritz. With a distant smile he adds your name to the register: for it is spring, and the Venetian instincts are reviving.
Up and down the waterways, too, the ponderous mansions are burgeoning with flower-pots, canary-cages and varnish. There is a stir of impending arrival among the servants of the peripatetic rich. In many a winter-shuttered apartment the maids and house-men are at work, in a cloud of dust and a flash of aprons, and not a few astute householders are packing their own bags in expectation of lucrative summer tenants. ‘On their first evening’, a Venetian nobleman once told me, ‘my American tenants will find everything prepared for them, from butler to candlesticks – within an hour of their arrival they will be able to entertain a dozen guests to a succulent dinner: but if this high standard of service falls off a little during their occupancy of my apartment, well, it is a difficult world, is it not, and heavy with disillusionment?’
And sometimes, in the Venetian spring, you awake to a Canaletto day, when the whole city is alive with sparkle and sunshine, and the sky is an ineffable baby-blue. An air of flags and freedom pervades Venice on such a morning, and all feels light, spacious, carefree, crystalline, as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender.
With a thud, a babble of voices and a crinkle of travellers’ cheques, summer falls upon Venice. The pleasure factory works at full blast, and the city’s ingrained sadness is swamped in an effulgence of money-making. This is not quite so unpleasant as it sounds. Venice in her hey-day has been described as ‘one vast joint-stock company for the exploitation of the east’. Today her money is in tourism. Her chief function in the world is to be a kind of residential museum, a Tintoretto holiday camp, just as Coventry makes cars and Cedar Rapids corn flakes: and though the city in summer can be hideously crowded and sweaty, and the mobs of tourists unsightly, and the Venetians disagreeably predatory, nevertheless there is a functional feeling to it all,
as of an instrument accurately recording revolutions per minute, or a water-pump efficiently irrigating.
There is nothing new in this. ‘The word Venetia’, wrote one old chronicler, ‘is interpreted by some to mean Veni Etiam, which is to say, “Come again and again”.’ The Venetians have always exploited the holiday assets of their city. Even in the fourteenth century it was a city of hotels – the Hat, the Wild Savage, the Little Horse, the Lobster, the Cock, the Duck, the Melon and the Queen of Hungary. (It was a city of rapacious monopolists, too – one man owned nine of these hostelries.) One inn, on the site of the modern prison, was kept by an Englishman, and was much patronized by English tourists because of its excellent stables. Another, which still exists, was temporarily closed in 1397 when its landlord was condemned for giving short measure. As early as the thirteenth century the Venetians had their Tourist Police, to inspect hotels for cleanliness and comfort, and speed the lost visitor (in any of several languages) towards the more expensive shops.
‘The piazza of St Mark’s’, wrote a medieval Venetian monk, with a fastidious sigh, ‘seems perpetually filled with Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea.’ One hundred thousand visitors came in a good year to the great fair of the Ascension, the first international trade festival, when the Piazza was covered with a great marquee, and there were booths and stalls all down the Riva. Tourists from all over Europe flocked to see the annual ceremony in which the Doge, riding in a barge of dream-like elaboration, threw a ring into the Adriatic in token of perpetual domination. The carnivals of the eighteenth century, when the city was peopled with masked gamblers, courtesans, adventurers and wild hedonists – those delightful but decadent jamborees were purposely fostered by the State, partly to keep the powerless population happy, but partly to attract the tourists. Venice is perhaps the supreme tourist attraction of the world. She lives for flattery, and peers back at her admirers with an opal but heavy-lidded eye. When summer sets the city humming, the turnstiles creaking, the cash registers ringing, it feels only proper: the machine is back at work, the factory hooters blow, Sheffield is making knives again, a pit-wheel turns in Rhondda.