by Jan Morris
The weeds of Torcello are much the more poignant. The city flourished and grew for some centuries, and by the 1500s is said to have had 20,000 inhabitants, a score of splendid churches, paved streets and many bridges. Torcello contributed three completely equipped galleys to the Chioggia wars, and sent 100 bowmen for service in the fifteenth-century Dalmatian campaigns. The two pious merchants who stole the body of St Mark from the Egyptians were both citizens of Torcello. Torcello had her own gateway to the sea, through Cavallino, and was a flourishing mart and shipping centre in her own right, even after the move from Malamocco to Rialto. In the oldest woodcuts and maps of Venice she usually appears formidably in the background, a mound of turrets and towers in the water. In the twelfth century one commentator wrote respectfully of the ‘Magnum Emporium Torcellanorum’.
She then entered a disastrous decline. Her canals were clogged up with silt from the rivers, not yet diverted from the lagoon, and her people were decimated by malaria and pestilent fevers. Her trade was killed at last by the rising energy of the Rialto islands, better placed in the centre of the lagoon, near the mouth of the Brenta. Torcello fell into lethargy and despondence. Her most vigorous citizens moved to Venice, her merchant houses folded and were forgotten. Presently the island was so deserted and disused that the Venetian builders, when they were short of materials, used to come to Torcello and load the remains of palaces into their barges, scrabbling among the rubble for the right size of staircase or a suitably sculptured cornice. Through the centuries poor Torcello rotted, crumbling and subsiding and declining into marshland again. When Napoleon overthrew the Republic she proclaimed herself, in a moment of frantic virility, an autonomous State: but by the middle of the nineteenth century a visit to Torcello was, for every romantic visitor, a positive ecstasy of melancholia.
Today about a hundred people live there: but Torcello is that fortunate phenomenon, a ghost with a private income, like the dead mining towns of the American West, or even Pompeii. It is still an island of exquisite nostalgia. A sad stone Madonna greets you when you land there, behind a tangle of old barbed wire, and a narrow muddy canal leads you through green fields to the decayed Piazza, once the centre of city life, now no more than a village green. Nowhere in the lagoon can you feel the meaning of Venice more pungently, for this place has an inescapable air of hunted determination, and it is all too easy, as you gaze across its empty water-ways, to imagine the fires of terrible enemies burning on the mainland shore, or hear the frightened Te Deums of exiles.
The island is green, and is planted with fields of artichokes and scrubby orchards. Small farmhouses stand here and there, with boat-houses made of thatched wattle, and skinny barking dogs. A wide sluggish canal, more like a great river than a creek, separates Torcello from the patchy mud-islands that run away to the mainland: on this listless channel I once saw a tall white yacht that had sailed from Norway, and was slipping away to Venice in the first dim light of dawn, like a spirit-ship among the marshes. The city of Torcello has utterly vanished: but the little lanes of the place, last vestiges of the Fondamenta Bobizo, the Campo San Giovanni, the Fondamenta dei Borgogni, and many another lost thoroughfare – all these dusty small paths lead, as if by habit, towards the Piazza. It is only a little grassy square, but it still has a suggestion of pomposity, passed down from the days when the Tribune met there, and the patrician palaces stood all about. It stands beside a canal, and around it are grouped a trattoria, a little museum in a Gothic palace, two or three cottages, the octagonal Byzantine church of Santa Fosca, and the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, which a learned man once described as the most moving church in Christendom.
Certainly it is a building of symbolic significance, for at this spot, with the founding of Venice, the tides of Rome and Byzantium met. Torcello marks a watershed. To the west there extends the ribbed and vaulted architecture we call Gothic-Rome, Chartres, Cambridge and the monasteries of Ireland. To the east stand the domes: Mount Athos, Istanbul, the bulbous churches of Russia and the noble mosques of Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan and India. On one side of Torcello is the Palace of Westminster, on the other the Taj Mahal.
It is a spiritual watershed, too. At Torcello the theologies overlap, and the rival ideals of Christianity met here, half-way between the old Rome and the New. The cathedral of Torcello is part Byzantine, part Gothic, partly eastern, partly western. It was built badly, by scared men in a hurry – some say in a panic, because they thought that the end of the world would occur in the year 1000. It is simple and sophisticated at the same time, bold and tremulous too. Its campanile is grandly defiant (and was grander still, before lightning lopped off its top in 1640); but enormous stone shutters, swinging on stone pegs, protect its windows from the furies of elements and enemies. Tall and aloof it stands there, with nothing warm or welcoming to its spirit, and it still feels almost makeshift, barn-like, as if it is uncompleted, or only temporary.
At one end of the nave is a vast mosaic, covering the entire west wall, and illustrating in profuse and often grotesque detail the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of the Dead and the imminent Day of Judgement – an illustrated manual of dogma, from St Michael conscientiously weighing the souls, like an apothecary, to the poor damned sinners far below. At the other end of the church, above the stalls of the rounded apse, there stands something infinitely more magnificent: for there against a dim gold background, tall, slender and terribly sad, is the Teotoca Madonna – the God-Bearer. There are tears on her mosaic cheeks, and she gazes down the church with an expression of timeless reproach, cherishing the Child in her arms as though she has foreseen all the years that are to come, and holds each one of us responsible. This is the noblest memorial of the lagoon. Greek craftsmen made it, so we are told: and there are some who think that the Venetians, through all their epochs of splendour and success, never created anything quite so beautiful.
Beneath that sad and seer-like scrutiny, a host of tourists mills about the church: popping into Santa Fosca if they have a moment to spare; buying postcards from the women who have set up their stalls on the grass outside, like village ladies at a fête; posing for photographs in the great stone chair, called obscurely the Throne of Attila, that stands in the middle of the Piazza (even the soul-struck Victorians, on their shaky progressions through the remains, allowed themselves this moment of tourist levity, and many a faded snapshot shows them, in their flowered hats and mutton-chop sleeves, posing as to the manner born in this imperial seat).
Some of these people, but not many, have come on the regular ferry service from Venice, and are going to have a picnic beside a muddy rivulet somewhere behind the cathedral, while their children catch crabs and prawns among the pools and their wine grows steadily hotter in the sun. Most of them, though, have come to Torcello primarily for lunch at the trattoria: for this simple-looking inn, with its rustic tables beside the door, its complement of picturesque pedlars – this unpretentious hostelry is one of the most famous restaurants in Italy, where you can eat splendidly, drink from tall frosted glasses, and bask the afternoon away among flower gardens in the shadow of the campanile.
Harry’s Bar owns and runs this inn, and provides comfortable motor boats to take you there, and spares you half an hour or so before lunch to look at the cathedral: and it has all the pretensions of its celebrated progenitor (mock-modesty, mementoes of the great, fancy cocktails) and all the considerable attractions (admirable food, excellent service, and a certain simplicity of spirit that is not all spurious).
I have eaten many a delicious dish there, and have enjoyed my ham and eggs among the sighing of the laurels, the creaking of old timbers, the splashing of small ducks and amphibious dogs, and the early-morning chatter of the island women, washing their smalls upon the quay. And by a swift adjustment of the imagination, I find it easy still, when I stand upon the mainland shore, and see that distant campanile in the mud, to fancy Torcello as deserted, desolate and abandoned as she used to be, when the wind blew through empty ruins, and only a dim
rustic lamp burnt in the bar-room of the inn. I dismiss the gin-fizzes and the filet mignon from my mind: and I think of the haunted water-ways of the island, that silent white ship among the marshes, the great stone shutters of the cathedral, the soft rustle of trees in the night, and the lanky image of the Teotoca Madonna, tear-stained and accusing, which a child once gravely described to me as ‘a thin young lady, holding God’.
Many other islands of the lagoon have had their eras of urban glory, before fading, like Torcello, into bleached obscurity, for the life of a lagoon town is beset with inconstancy. It is always rising or waning, sinking or abruptly reviving: either being slowly sucked into the subsoil, or converted at great expense into a little Coney Island. Two islands only have survived as living townships from times immemorial, and both lie in the melancholy expanse of the northern lagoon, on the water-route between Torcello and Venice.
Burano you will see first, and remember longest, as a sheer splash of colour. A wide brackish waste surrounds it, exuding dankness. A mile or two away is the solemn tower of Torcello; to the east a small island is clad in cypress trees; to the north the marshes trail away in desolation. It is a muted scene, slate-grey, pale blue and muddy green: but in the middle of it there bursts a sudden splurge of rather childish colour, its reflections spilling into the water, and staining these lugubrious channels like an overturned paint-pot. This is the island town of Burano. Its campanile leans at a comical angle, and it is packed tightly with hundreds of bright little houses, like a vivid adobe village in a dismal desert: red and blue houses, yellow and orange and blazing white, a jumble of primary colours shining in the mud.
It lives by fishing and by lace-making, an old Venetian craft which was revived in the nineteenth century. In its hey-day Venetian lace was the best in the world, sometimes so delicate that a collar ordered for Louis XIV was made of white human hair, no spun thread being fine enough for the design. Later the industry languished so disastrously that when they came to resuscitate it, only one very old lady survived who knew how to make Venetian point: they muffled her in woollies, stuffed her with pills, and gently filched, her secrets before she died.
The lace industry is now conducted with an air of profound charitable purpose, but at a pleasant profit for its sponsors. There is a school of lace-making near the church, where tourists are more than welcome, and may even be allowed, if they press hard enough, to make some trifling purchase; and every Burano cottage doorway has its demure lace-maker, stitching away in the sunshine, eyes screwed up and fingers flickering (if the tourist season is bad, she may have abandoned lace, and be devoting her talents to the production of coarse net curtains). Only a hint of tragedy sours the spectacle: for no occupation looks more damaging to the eye-sight, except perhaps writing fugues by candle-light.
While the women stitch, the men go fishing, as in an allegory, or an opera. Wild-eyed fishermen stalk the streets of Burano, carrying cork floats and enormous shoes, and there are nets hanging up to dry on the wall of the church. The fishermen sail their boats to the very doors of their houses, to be greeted with soups and fond embraces: and this suggestion of ideal domesticity, the quintessential femininity of the women, the shaggy masculinity of the men, the gaudy little houses, the soups and the nets and the flashing needles – all this makes Burano feel like one protracted amateur theatrical. Until recently the island was very poor indeed, and you will still find Hammers and Sickles upon its walls, until the tidy housewives wash them off: but the place does not seem real enough to be hungry. It is an island of absurd diminutives: tiny canals, toy-like homes, miniature bridges, infinitesimal stitches. Nothing very much has ever happened in Burano (though there can scarcely be a town on earth that has more memorial plaques to the square mile) and life there feels flaky and insubstantial. The lace-makers bend over their frames, the fishermen paddle out to the mud-banks, the tourists take a quick look round on their way to Torcello, and the hours pass like the first act of an obvious play, or a rousing opera chorus.
Water surrounds it, though, and it lies embedded like a trinket in the lagoon. Its canals are silted and blocked with mud, making it extremely difficult to sail a boat into the town – ‘Scavate Canale!’ says a slogan painted angrily on one wall. The drainage of Burano is the filthiest and smelliest in the lagoon, pouring visibly into the shallow canals around you, and its streets are thick with muck. It looks gay and operatic in summer, but in winter its colours wilt before the grey gust of the wind, and its old women huddle about in their long black shawls, like undernourished eagles.
I once turned into Burano as a refuge, driven back from Venice by a rising storm, and deposited my crew of five hilarious and ill-disciplined children upon a quayside. They were soaked to the skin, splashed with mud and very cold, and they ran about the place in a frenzy of excitement, burbling inexplicable English slang. Observing this minor emergency, the Buranese threw off their pose of fancy dress and demonstrated how deep were their island instincts, for all their manner of stage-struck flippancy. In a trice those children were silenced and muffled in the back rooms of cottages, wrapped in towels; in a moment there emerged from unknown kitchens bowls of an aromatic soup; in five minutes a crowd of skilled bystanders had stripped my boat of its gear and stacked it away neatly in cubby-holes and sheds; in half an hour our night’s programme was arranged for us; and through it all two or three old ladies in black, crouched on stools beside their doors, continued blandly with their needle-work, clickety-click, clickety-click, as though they were waiting for the water-tumbrils.
Very different is the spirit of Murano, the most curmudgeonly of the Venetian communities, where it always feels like early-closing day. Once upon a time this big island, only a mile from the Fondamenta Nuove in Venice, was the gentlemen’s playground of Venice, a kind of private Vauxhall, where the aristocrats of the time, lapped in everything exquisite, strolled beneath their vines and fruit trees, discussing poetry and philosophical conceptions, and conducting discreet but delicious amours. Successive English Ambassadors had sumptuous apartments on Murano, and by all accounts made excellent use of them.
The island then became the glass foundry of Venice, in the days when the Venetians held a virtual monopoly of the craft, and were the only people in Europe who knew how to make a mirror. So many disastrous fires had ravaged Venice that in the thirteenth century all the furnaces were compulsorily removed to Murano, which became the principal glass manufactory of the western world, with a population in the sixteenth century of more than 30,000. In envious foreign eyes Murano was imbued with almost mystical technical advantages. It was true that particular qualities of the local sand, and deposits of marine vegetation in the lagoon, made it a convenient place for glass-making; but many visitors thought, like the sixteenth-century James Howell, that the superiority of Venetian glass was due to ‘the quality of the circumambient Air that hangs o’er the place’. So beneficient was this air, so it was said, that the best Venetian tumblers would break instantly into fragments if the merest drop of poison were poured into them.
In fact Venice owed her supremacy to the ingenuity of her artisans, the knowledges she filched from the East, and the strict protectionist policies of the State. Like the steel-makers of Stalin’s Russia, the glass-men of Murano became pampered wards of Government. Nothing was too good for them, so long as they worked. They even had their own nobility, and you may see its Golden Register in the Museum of Glass, among a wide variety of Murano products, and portraits of eminent glass-makers. All kinds of civic privileges were granted to Murano. The island coined its own money, and the ubiquitous spies of the Republic were forbidden to set foot there, so important to the national economy were its crafts and secrets. (But if a glass-maker took his knowledge out of Murano, and set himself up in business elsewhere in the world, inexorable and pitiless were the agents of State sent to find him out, wherever he was, and kill him.)
Glass is still the raison d’être of Murano, its pleasure-gardens having long ago been buried beneath br
ick and paving-stones. The glass industry, like the lace industry, withered with the Republic, but was revived in the nineteenth century and now dominates the island. A handful of imposing patrician palaces remains, and Murano’s own Grand Canal has a grandeur still not unworthy of its great progenitor. There is an elegant mouldy Piazza, and one excellent trattoria, and two great churches survive – a third, at the western end of the Grand Canal, has been turned into a tenement block, its high chancel stuffed with layers of ramshackle dwelling-places, a grubby line of washing strung from the remains of its porch. For the rest, Murano is a clutter of small glass factories, rambling, messy, uncoordinated places, built of red brick or dingy stonework, with tall blackened chimneys and wooden landing-stages. All along the canals these slipshod establishments stand, and scarcely a tourist comes to Murano without visiting one (though you can watch the processes much more comfortably, if not caught unawares by tout or hall porter, within a few hundred yards of St Mark’s).
The important thing to know about the Murano glass-makers is that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous. This has always been so. Only one nineteenth-century designer, in all the hundreds whose work is displayed in the museum, seems to me to have evolved any elegance of line. When the Emperor Frederick III passed through Venice, on the occasion when he rode his horse up the Campanile of St Mark’s, he was given an elaborate service of Murano glass: but he took such an instant dislike to the pieces, so the story goes, that he tipped off his court jester, in the course of his buffooneries, to bump into the table on which they were displayed, shattering them into a thousand merciful fragments. The Venetians still profess to find Murano glass lovely, but sophisticates in the industry, if you manage to crack their shell of salesmanship, will admit that bilious yellow is not their favourite colour, and agree that one or two of the chandeliers might with advantage be a little more chaste.