by Jan Morris
It is a novice house. There are thirty friars, all Italian, of whom fourteen are novices. Their cloisters are old and serene, their church is ugly but peaceful, and the most striking thing about their island is its silence. Nobody indeed dances, plays games, utters profanities or talks in a loud voice. Nobody lives there but the friars. A few motor boats bring tourists in the summer months. A jet sometimes flashes overhead, or an airliner lowers its flaps for a landing. Otherwise not a disharmony disturbs the convent. The friars row themselves silently about in sandoli, and you may often see their bent brown figures, labouring at the oar, far away among the flats. The fishermen of the surrounding islets are mostly too poor for motor boats, and the din of Venice (which seems, in this context, positively diabolic) is hours away across the water. The only sounds of San Francesco del Deserto are bells, chanting male voices, sober conversation, the singing of song birds, the squawking of peacocks, the clucking of ducks and hens, and sometimes a deep dissatisfied bellow, as of a soul sated with Elysium, from the ruminating cattle in the cow-house.
The friars seem content with these arrangements. The happy text of San Francesco’s pieties is ‘O beata solitudo, Ο sola beatitudo’, and my cicerone there once quoted the words to me with an expression in his eye not exactly smug – he was much too meek for that – but at least tinged with grateful complacency.
29
Dead and Alive
Many a smaller flowering island lies in these wide waters. Some are little more than shooting-lodges, places of Roman temperament, directly descended from the first pleasure-houses of the lagoon: big four-square buildings on isolated marsh-banks, self-contained as castles, with taciturn slow-witted custodians and angry watch-dogs, and spacious loggias on which, at the right time of year, the duck-hunters assemble in carousal. Others are small fishing settlements, such as the little Isola Tessera, beyond Murano, where a boisterous community of fisherfolk lives in hugger-mugger fellowship, like the jolliest of all kibbutzim: their boats lie bobbing about their water-gate, thick foliage decorates their houses, and when it is foggy, or dinnertime, a big bronze bell rings out from their little campanile, calling the men home across the mud. Most such islets though, are places of decay, decline, or desertion, and stand as sad reminders of the lagoon’s greater days.
A cordon of such doleful relics surrounds the archipelago of Venice proper. The Venetians call them Isole del Dolore, because until recently they all used to be what the guide books tactfully describe as ‘hospital centres’ – that is to say, sanatoria, isolation hospitals and lunatic asylums. A special steamboat service linked them with the Riva degli Schiavoni: the boat was marked Ospedale, and it was usually full of patients’ relatives and nurses (who spent four days of each week at their island posts, and three on holiday in Venice). Some of these sad islets will probably soon be revivified as holiday resorts (‘Caribbean-style Beach Complexes’) but for the moment most of them are abandoned. A sombre silence surrounds them, and sometimes makes them feel less like inhabited places than sea-rocks protruding savagely from the lagoon. They have melancholy and sometimes peculiar histories, too. The most cheerful of them, the former tuberculosis sanatorium called Sacca Sessola, is an artificial island, and has no mournful connotations. The others are all tinged with regret.
La Grazia, for instance, which lies only half a mile beyond San Giorgio Maggiore, used to be a hospice for pilgrims going to the Holy Land – in the days when the Venetians, astutely battening upon this source of income, organized it so thoroughly that they even had teams of multi-lingual officials, precisely like tourist police, always on duty in the Piazza to guide visitors to the glass factories. The island then became a monastery, to honour a miraculous figure of the Virgin which was brought from Constantinople and was said to be the handiwork of St Paul himself. It had a splendid Gothic church with a campanile, but when Napoleon suppressed the monastic orders, it became a powder magazine: and during the 1848 revolution somebody lit a match inside it, and blew the whole place up. It stands there now looking distinctly subdued: for it ended up as the isolation hospital of Venice, where children with pimpled faces gazed wanly towards the distant merry-go-rounds of the Riva fairground.
Farther out is San Clemente, a huge whitish block of masonry, cold and heavy-shouldered. This, too, has been a monastery in its time, and still possesses a handsome seventeenth-century church, decorated with marble mock-draperies, and a pleasant little tree-shaded garden, to soften its severities: but it has a barred and shrouded air, because for a century and more it was a lunatic asylum. It is only two or three miles from St Mark’s, like Alcatraz from Fisherman’s Wharf, but it might be in the middle of a grey ocean, so shuttered does it seem, and so self-sufficient. During the Second World War two young Venetians evading German conscription hid in the boat-house of this gloomy island: their parents brought them provisions once a week by boat, and they lived there in the shadows undisturbed until the end of the war, when they emerged blinking into the sunshine and went home rejoicing.
The other ex-asylum, if less forbidding, is much more celebrated. San Servolo (or San Servilio, as non-Venetians would call it) was a Benedictine monastery as early as the eighth century, and played a curious part in the history of the Republic. In 1001 the Western Emperor Otto III, observing the growing power of Venice, visited the city incognito, partly for curiosity, partly for reasons of policy: and it was to this island that he was secretly ushered, muffled in black, at dead of night, upon his arrival in the lagoon. (He was met at the monastery by the Doge Pietro Orseolo II, who promptly deluded the unfortunate young man, so some historians say, into granting all kinds of quite unpremeditated concessions.)
For several centuries San Servolo flourished with the Benedictines, assuming various medical and charitable functions until, in 1725, it became a hospital for the insane – but only, by order of the Council of Ten, ‘maniacs of noble family or comfortable circumstances’: less fortunate lunatics were left at large in the city, or shut up in prison. Napoleon’s arrival ended this fearful injustice, and presently Shelley made San Servolo the most famous madhouse on earth – ‘a window-less, deformed and dreary pile’, as Julian thought with Maddalo, ‘such a one as age to age might add, for uses vile’.
Poor San Servolo! The very presence of the island, its past and its purpose cast a chill upon the passer-by; and there are still people who claim to hear, from the transient vaporetto, those same ‘yells and howlings and lamentings keen’ that made Julian shudder that evening, looking across the lagoon with Maddalo.
Other inshore islands are less haunted, though still often wreathed in nostalgia. On the channel to Fusina there is an islet called San Giorgio in Alga – St George In the Seaweed – to which Baron Corvo liked to row his sandolo, in his days of Venetian watermanship, and from where Ruskin considered you could get the best view in all Venice. This little place has also had its moments of consequence. Here, it is said, the unlucky Doge Faliero, sailing through a mist to take up office in his palace, ran ashore in his Bucintoro: it was regarded as an ill omen for his reign, and sure enough, only eight months later he was decapitated for treason (he also made the foolish mistake, when at last he stepped ashore at the Piazzetta, of walking between the two columns on the Molo, than which, as any fish-wife knew, nothing was more certain to bring a man bad luck).
Here too, in the island’s monastic days, there lived a humble but learned monk named Gabriele Condulmer. One day, when this man was doing his turn of duty as monastery porter, an unknown hermit rowed himself to the water-gate. Condulmer welcomed him kindly, took him into the church and prayed with him, and when the visitor returned to his boat, he turned to the monk and made a solemn prophecy. ‘You, Gabriele Condulmer,’ he said, ‘will become first a Cardinal, then a Pope: but in your pontificate, I prophesy, you will suffer many and grievous adversities.’ The hermit then rowed himself away, and was never seen again. The monk became Eugenius IV, one of the unhappiest and most ill-used of all the Popes.
His
monastery has long fallen into disuse and dereliction. It was half-destroyed by fire in 1717. Its campanile had its top lopped off to serve as an observation post in the 1848 revolution, and was later demolished altogether. The remains of its buildings became first a powder magazine, then a fort, and are now the home of a fisherman’s family. Two vicious dogs bark at you ferociously if you approach too closely, even splashing into the water to get to grips with you. Only a stone plaque of St George, and a sweet figure of the Madonna, modestly standing beneath a stone canopy at an angle of the wall, remain as reminders of old sanctities.
Or there is Poveglia, away beyond San Servolo, a low huddle of buildings on a flat islet, with a single tall campanile in the middle. It is like a stylized Venetian island, such as you see drawn, with a few deft strokes of the air-brush, in the background of the travel posters. This was once Popilia, named for its abundance of poplars, an autonomous community with its own vigorous Government. It played an heroic and blood-thirsty part, so we are told, in the defeat of Pepin – the Poveglians, living at the end of the Canale Orfano, are said to have pushed more Franks under the mud than any other body of combatants. In the war against the Genoese, so the official chronicles record, Poveglia was devastated by its own inhabitants ‘by public order’. Romantics say this was an early example of ‘scorched earth’ policies: cynics with a nose for euphemisms suspect that a party of Genoese raided the island, and devastated it for themselves.
Poor Poveglia declined sadly down the centuries – it became a quarantine station first, then an isolation hospital, and finally a home for aged indigents: aged people, who were to be seen sunning themselves happily upon its lawns, or aged ships, which are still laid up in a neighbouring channel, hull to hull, funnel to funnel, pitifully streaked with rust and salt, their only attendants the skeleton crews who maintain their engines and the marine surveyors who now and then, clambering up their quavering gang-planks, shake their heads doubtfully upon their forecastles. Poveglia is shaped like a fan, and is cultivated to the water’s edge with vines and maize, with a fringe of small trees running around its perimeter as a hem. At its apex there is a small octagonal stone fort, covered with shrubberies, in which there lives, so somebody recently assured me, a colony of several hundred plump rabbits, tastily varying the diet of crabs and stewed mussels on which I had always assumed the old people next door to subsist.
To the east two big agricultural islands, intersected by shallow canals, form the market garden of Venice, fertilized by her manure, sustained by her appetite, but scarcely visited by her citizens from one year to another. Sant’ Erasmo and Vignole extend almost from the tip of the city itself to the island of San Francesco del Deserto – five miles of damp but fertile vegetable-bed, inhabited only by gardeners and fishermen.
They are interesting but dowdy islands. Nosing your way down their brown waterways, you might be in the heart of some fecund but dilapidated countryside – Carolina, perhaps, or Kildare. The water is overhung with trees and thick tangled shrubberies, and in the summer a layer of country dust lies heavily on the leaves like chalk. The cottages are clean but tumble-down, the gardens scrubby but productive. You may pass a fishermen’s slipway among the fields, with their boats high and dry among their nets: or you may moor your boat beside a rickety white clapboard chapel, like a fundamentalist shrine in the American South, so that you almost expect to hear the whine of piccaninny hymn tunes from their windows, or the fruity acclamations of Holy Rollers.
A farmyard smell hangs in the air of these places, heavily freighted with mud and manure. Their gardens are rich with onions, asparagus, potatoes, cabbages and artichokes – for which, so the islanders gloomily complain, they are meagrely underpaid by the middle-men who convey this produce to the markets of the city. These are the islands upon which the bolder Venetian planners hope to erect brand-new industrial communities, swamping their onion-patches in apartment blocks and power-stations; and already their earthy dereliction seems doomed and transient, like the crannies of countryside that you will sometimes find, hemmed in by housing estates, on the outskirts of London and Los Angeles.
There is only one village in these islands – the area of which, put together, is substantially greater than Venice herself. It stands on the western shore of Sant’ Erasmo, looking vapidly across to the cypresses of San Francesco and the patchwork muddle of Burano. It has a café with striped parasols propped pathetically outside it, and an old black landing-stage where the ferry-steamers stop, and a white barn of a church, cold and characterless. No history seems to be attached to these places – they are not even surrounded, as an estate agent once said to me of a peculiarly repellent half-timbered house, ‘by the amenities of tradition’. The most conscientious guide books scarcely mention them. So resolutely has the world ignored them that some obscure medieval by-law, so I am assured, even forbids dancing on them. The people of Vignole and Sant’ Erasmo strike me as a grumpy lot; and who can blame them?
Mazzorbo is a backwater of quite another kind. It lies west of Burano, to which it is connected by a footbridge, and it consists of a church, a cemetery, a fine broad canal, a few fields, a long stone wall always scrawled with politics, a handful of houses and an excellent trattoria where, if the wind is right, they will roast you a wild duck in the twinkling of an eye, or pull a fat wriggling eel from the bog at the bottom of the garden. The Mazzorbo people are simple but expansive, and will welcome you genially to their tables in the inn, and happily share your white wine and spaghetti: and this is unexpected, for if Sant’ Erasmo is moribund, Mazzorbo is a living elegy.
Once it was very grand. Even in Roman times it was the site of a celebrated shrine to the god Belenus, and its very name means major urbs. In the Middle Ages it became the Venetian port of entry for the great German trade route – the Alemagna – and almost all imports from central Europe passed through the Mazzorbo customs. Particularly well-endowed, racy and upper-crust convents flourished there; rows of stylish palaces lined the canals of the place; a comfortable society of patricians and merchants made it one of the liveliest social centres of the lagoon. My oldest Venetian guide book, published in 1740, depicts the island dignified by eight campaniles, and still rich in gardens and palaces.
But long before that the rot had set in. Malaria had enervated the citizens of Mazzorbo, the rise of the Rialto had ruined its commerce, its thoroughfares were blocked with sludge and water-weed. By the eleventh century most of the people of Mazzorbo had decided to emigrate. Taking their houses carefully to pieces, as peripatetic Americans sometimes still do, they loaded the bricks and stones into barges and sailed away to Venice – many of the little houses still standing around the Rialto bridge, once the vortex of the Venetian stews, are immigrants from old Mazzorbo. Today there is almost nothing left, and Mazzorbo is only a market garden, the cemetery of Burano, and a staging-post on the ferry-boat route to Torcello (splendidly do the vaporetti churn their way down the long straight stretch of its Grand Canal, the waves of their wake rippling along the towpaths, like stern-wheelers sweeping past Natchez on their way to New Orleans).
But if you look through the window of the trattoria, shifting your eye past the red Coca-Cola sticker, you will see a small square house across the canal that still retains some distant suggestion of grandeur. It has Gothic windows and a solid square doorway. A rotting wall protects it from the water, and a sandolo is tied up beside its landing-stage. In the garden, among some stunted fruit trees, one or two defaced statues moulder the decades away. This is a house out of the past, like a coelacanth among fishes. Today it is all alone. Once it stood bravely among a line of peers, gleaming with life and luxury, padded boats at its steps and pampered courtesans in its salons. It is the Ca’ d’Oro – the House of Gold, a last defiant relic of Mazzorbo’s forgotten hey-day.
And far off in the northern lagoon there lies the loneliest and saddest of all the Venetian islets, Sant’ Ariano. It was originally a suburb-island of Torcello, forming with the neighbouring Constanziac
a yet another famous and flourishing community. Now it is inhabited only by the dead, for in the seventeenth century, when its living glories had long vanished, it became the bone-house of Venice, and thus it is coldly marked on the map: Osseria, with a small black cross. They no longer take the bones there from Venice, preferring to tip them into a common grave upon San Michele: but it is only a few years since the monthly bone-barge ploughed its slow way to Sant’ Ariano, freighted with anonymous remains, and a guide book to the lagoon published in 1904 observes darkly that ‘modern industry makes use of its unnamed skeletons, without scruple, for the refining of sugar’.
They do not, I think, make sugar from its bones nowadays, but it remains a queer and curdling place. I went there once from Mazzorbo, threading my boat through the treacherous channels behind Torcello, in a landscape that seemed uneasily deserted. A few sea-birds flew furtively above me. Far, far away across the marshes I could see a solitary fishing-boat. Torcello looked lifeless, and beyond it the swamps stretched away in dejection towards Altino. The channel to Sant’ Ariano twists and winds incessantly through the flats, so that for half an hour or more you can see the distant white rectangular wall of the bone-yard, all alone among the grass: and when at last I reached it the sun was high, the wind had dropped, the lagoon was deathly calm, and all was sunk in heat and silence. There were lizards on the water-steps of the island. As I disembarked a rat jumped from the mud and dived into the water with a splash. The white gate of the osseria shone cruelly in the sunlight, and looking through its grille I could see in the shadows of the porch a stark staring head of Christ, unsmiling and emaciated.
The gate was locked, but walking around the corner I jumped up to the top of the wall, and peered into the enclosure. There was nothing to be seen but a mass of tangled bushes, entirely filling the place, and growing thickly to the very walls. Not a memorial was there, not a bunch of flowers, not a touch of humanity, only this dense green jungle of shrubbery. I scrambled down the wall into the enclosure, slithering through the spiky foliage, and pushing aside the brambles I looked down at my feet to see what I was standing on.