Pictures From Italy

by Dickens, Chales

  shining out of the water, as the boat approached towards them by a

  dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.

  We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I

  heard it rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at

  hand. Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a

  something black and massive - like a shore, but lying close and

  flat upon the water, like a raft - which we were gliding past. The

  chief of the two rowers said it was a burial-place.

  Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there,

  in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should

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  recede in our path, when it was quickly shut out from my view.

  Before I knew by what, or how, I found that we were gliding up a

  street - a phantom street; the houses rising on both sides, from

  the water, and the black boat gliding on beneath their windows.

  Lights were shining from some of these casements, plumbing the

  depth of the black stream with their reflected rays, but all was

  profoundly silent.

  So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our

  course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing

  with water. Some of the corners where our way branched off, were

  so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long slender

  boat to turn them; but the rowers, with a low melodious cry of

  warning, sent it skimming on without a pause. Sometimes, the

  rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed the cry, and

  slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours) would come

  flitting past us like a dark shadow. Other boats, of the same

  sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near

  to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some

  of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I

  saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of

  a palace: gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was

  but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon

  the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us: one of

  the many bridges that perplexed the Dream: blotted them out,

  instantly. On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange

  place - with water all about us where never water was elsewhere -

  clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings growing

  out of it - and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.

  Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as

  I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps

  with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and

  pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light

  to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer - and where, for

  the first time, I saw people walking - arrived at a flight of steps

  leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed

  through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest;

  listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window

  on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.

  The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its

  freshness, motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its

  clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words can tell. But,

  from my window, I looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails,

  cordage, flags; on groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes

  of these vessels; on wide quays, strewn with bales, casks,

  merchandise of many kinds; on great ships, lying near at hand in

  stately indolence; on islands, crowned with gorgeous domes and

  turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the light, atop of

  wondrous churches, springing from the sea! Going down upon the

  margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling

  all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and

  such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison

  with its absorbing loveliness.

  It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest,

  in the deep ocean. On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic

  and magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the

  earth, in the high prime and fulness of their youth. Cloisters and

  galleries: so light, they might have been the work of fairy hands:

  so strong that centuries had battered them in vain: wound round

  and round this palace, and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous

  in the wild luxuriant fancies of the East. At no great distance

  from its porch, a lofty tower, standing by itself, and rearing its

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  proud head, alone, into the sky, looked out upon the Adriatic Sea.

  Near to the margin of the stream, were two ill-omened pillars of

  red granite; one having on its top, a figure with a sword and

  shield; the other, a winged lion. Not far from these again, a

  second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even

  here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming

  with gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a

  mimic sun revolving in its course around them: while above, two

  bronze giants hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell. An

  oblong square of lofty houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a

  light and beautiful arcade, formed part of this enchanted scene;

  and, here and there, gay masts for flags rose, tapering, from the

  pavement of the unsubstantial ground.

  I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its

  many arches: traversing its whole extent. A grand and dreamy

  structure, of immense proportions; golden with old mosaics;

  redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense; costly in

  treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron

  bars; holy with the bodies of deceased saints; rainbow-hued with

  windows of stained glass; dark with carved woods and coloured

  marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened distances;

  shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal, fantastic,

  solemn, inconceivable throughout. I thought I entered the old

  palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old

  rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in

  pictures, from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still

  victorious on canvas, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I

  wandered through its halls of state and triumph - bare and empty

  now! - and musing on its pride and might, extinct: for that was

  past; all past: heard a voice say, 'Some tokens of its ancient

  rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall, may be traced

  here, yet!'

  I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms,

  communicating with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a

  lofty bridge crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The

  Bridge of Sighs.

  But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions'

  mouths - now toothless - wh
ere, in the distempered horror of my

  sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked

  Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was

  dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were

  taken for examination, and the door by which they passed out, when

  they were condemned - a door that never closed upon a man with life

  and hope before him - my heart appeared to die within me.

  It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from

  the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal,

  awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a

  loop-hole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a

  torch was placed - I dreamed - to light the prisoner within, for

  half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays,

  had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw

  them. For their labour with a rusty nail's point, had outlived

  their agony and them, through many generations.

  One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-andtwenty

  hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by,

  another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came

  - a monk brown-robed, and hooded - ghastly in the day, and free

  bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's

  extinguisher, and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot,

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  where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled;

  and struck my hand upon the guilty door - low-browed and stealthy -

  through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and

  rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.

  Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking

  the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime

  within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices,

  as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a

  smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of

  the State - a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran

  before them, like a cruel officer - flowed the same water that

  filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.

  Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the

  Giant's - I had some imaginary recollection of an old man

  abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he

  heard the bell, proclaiming his successor - I glided off, in one of

  the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal guarded by four

  marble lions. To make my Dream more monstrous and unlikely, one of

  these had words and sentences upon its body, inscribed there, at an

  unknown time, and in an unknown language; so that their purport was

  a mystery to all men.

  There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships,

  and little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no

  more, as I have said. Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found

  drifting on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its honourable

  stations, and strangers standing at its helm. A splendid barge in

  which its ancient chief had gone forth, pompously, at certain

  periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no more; but, in

  its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection like the

  city's greatness; and it told of what had been (so are the strong

  and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the

  massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships

  that had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth.

  An armoury was there yet. Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury.

  With a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull

  air of its cage. Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were

  hoarded there; crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears;

  swords, daggers, maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes. Plates of

  wrought steel and iron, to make the gallant horse a monster cased

  in metal scales; and one spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the

  breast) designed to do its office noiselessly, and made for

  shooting men with poisoned darts.

  One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture

  horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men's

  bones, and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand

  deaths. Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces:

  made to close up tight and smooth upon the heads of living

  sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small knob or anvil,

  where the directing devil could repose his elbow at his ease, and

  listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and confessions

  of the wretch within. There was that grim resemblance in them to

  the human shape - they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained

  and cramped - that it was difficult to think them empty; and

  terrible distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me,

  when, taking to my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or

  public walk in the sea, where there were grass and trees. But I

  forgot them when I stood upon its farthest brink - I stood there,

  in my dream - and looked, along the ripple, to the setting sun;

  before me, in the sky and on the deep, a crimson flush; and behind

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  me the whole city resolving into streaks of red and purple, on the

  water.

  In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed

  of time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there

  were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the

  rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still

  afloat, I thought: plashing the slippery walls and houses with the

  cleavings of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed

  along the streets.

  Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I

  wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through

  labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments

  where the furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering

  away. Pictures were there, replete with such enduring beauty and

  expression: with such passion, truth and power: that they seemed

  so many young and fresh realities among a host of spectres. I

  thought these, often intermingled with the old days of the city:

  with its beauties, tyrants, captains, patriots, merchants,

  counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and bricks, and

  public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the walls.

  Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped and

  oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and

  went on in my dream.

  Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane

  and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon

  the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a

  tangled heap. Past open doors, decayed and rotten from long

  steeping in the wet, through which some scanty patc
h of vine shone

  green and bright, making unusual shadows on the pavement with its

  trembling leaves. Past quays and terraces, where women, gracefully

  veiled, were passing and repassing, and where idlers were reclining

  in the sun-shine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps. Past

  bridges, where there were idlers too; loitering and looking over.

  Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the

  loftiest windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of garden,

  theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of architecture - Gothic -

  Saracenic - fanciful with all the fancies of all times and

  countries. Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and

  white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.

  Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out

  at last into a Grand Canal! There, in the errant fancy of my

  dream, I saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all

  built upon with shops and humming with the tongues of men; a form I

  seemed to know for Desdemona's, leaned down through a latticed

  blind to pluck a flower. And, in the dream, I thought that

  Shakespeare's spirit was abroad upon the water somewhere: stealing

  through the city.

  At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the

  Virgin, in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I

  fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of

  cheerful light, and that its whole arcade was thronged with people;

  while crowds were diverting themselves in splendid coffee-houses

  opening from it - which were never shut, I thought, but open all

  night long. When the bronze giants struck the hour of midnight on

  the bell, I thought the life and animation of the city were all

  centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent quays, I only

  saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen wrapped up

  in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.

  But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking

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  at their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town:

  crept the water always. Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and

  round it, in its many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the

  time, I thought, when people should look down into its depths for

  any stone of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress.