Chapter I: HAVE made no attempt in these pages to review the splendors of the (1)

past, or to probe the many vital questions which concern the present, of this wondrous City of the Sea. Neither have I ventured to discuss the marvels of her architecture, the wealth of her literature and art, nor the growing importance of her commerce and manufactures.

I have contented myself rather with the Venice that you see in the sunlight of a summer’s day--the Venice that bewilders with her glory when you land at her water-gate; that delights with her color when you idle along the Riva; that intoxicates with her music as you lie in your gondola adrift on the bosom of some breathless lagoon--the Venice of mould-stained palace, quaint caffè and arching bridge; of fragrant incense, cool, dim-lighted church, and noiseless priest; of strong-armed men and graceful women--the Venice of light and life, of sea and sky and melody.

No pen alone can tell this story. The pencil and the palette must lend their touch when one would picture the wide sweep of her piazzas, the abandon of her gardens, the charm of her canal and street life, the happy indolence of her people, the faded sumptuousness of her homes.

If I have given to Venice a prominent place among the cities of the earth it is because in this selfish, materialistic, money-getting age, it is a joy to live, if only for a day, where a song is more prized than a soldo; where the poorest pauper laughingly shares his scanty crust; where to be kind to a child is a habit, to be neglectful of old age a shame; a city the relics of whose past are the lessons of our future; whose every canvas, stone, and bronze bear witness to a grandeur, luxury, and taste that took a thousand years of energy to perfect, and will take a thousand years of neglect to destroy.

To every one of my art-loving countrymen this city should be a Mecca; to know her thoroughly is to know all the beauty and romance of five centuries.

F. H. S.

CONTENTS

An Arrival 1

Gondola Days 8

Along the Riva 28

The Piazza of San Marco 42

In an Old Garden 58

Among the Fishermen 85

A Gondola Race 101

Some Venetian Caffès 116

On the Hotel Steps 126

Open-Air Markets 136

On Rainy Days 145

Legacies of the Past 155

Life in the Streets 176

Night in Venice 197

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Back of the Rialto (see page 87) _Frontispiece_

The Gateless Posts of the Piazzetta 14

The One Whistler etched 26

Beyond San Rosario 58

The Catch of the Morning 90

A Little Hole in the Wall on the Via Garibaldi 116

Ponte Paglia ... next the Bridge of Sighs 136

The Fruit Market above the Rialto 140

Wide Palatial Staircases 160

Narrow Slits of Canals 186

San Giorgio stands on Tip-toe 198

AN ARRIVAL

YOU really begin to arrive in Venice when you leave Milan. Your train is hardly out of the station before you have conjured up all the visions and traditions of your childhood: great rows of white palaces running sheer into the water; picture-book galleys reflected upside down in red lagoons; domes and minarets, kiosks, towers, and steeples, queer-arched temples, and the like.

As you speed on in the dusty train, your memory-fed imagination takes new flights. You expect gold-encrusted barges, hung with Persian carpets, rowed by slaves double-banked, and trailing rare brocades in a sea of China-blue, to meet you at the water landing.

By the time you reach Verona your mental panorama makes another turn. The very name suggests the gay lover of the _bal masque_, the poisoned vial, and the calcium moonlight illuminating the wooden tomb of the stage-set graveyard. You instinctively look around for the fair Juliet and her nurse. There are half a dozen as pretty Veronese, attended by their watchful duennas, going down by train to the City by the Sea; but they do not satisfy you. You want one in a tight-fitting white satin gown with flowing train, a diamond-studded girdle, and an ostrich-plume fan. The nurse, too, must be stouter, and have a high-keyed voice; be bent a little in the back, and shake her finger in a threatening way, as in the old mezzotints you have seen of Mrs. Siddons or Peg Woffington. This pair of Dulcineas on the seat in front, in silk dusters, with a lunch-basket and a box of sweets, are too modern and commonplace for you, and will not do.

When you roll into Padua, and neither doge nor inquisitor in ermine or black gown boards the train, you grow restless. A deadening suspicion enters your mind. What if, after all, there should be no Venice? Just as there is no Robinson Crusoe nor man Friday; no stockade, nor little garden; no Shahrazad telling her stories far into the Arabian night; no Santa Claus with reindeer; no Rip Van Winkle haunted by queer little gnomes in fur caps. As this suspicion deepens, the blood clogs in your veins, and a thousand shivers go down your spine. You begin to fear that all these traditions of your childhood, all these dreams and fancies, are like the thousand and one other lies that have been told to and believed by you since the days when you spelled out words in two syllables.

Upon leaving Mestre--the last station--you smell the salt air of the Adriatic through the open car window. Instantly your hopes revive. Craning your head far out, you catch a glimpse of a long, low, monotonous bridge, and away off in the purple haze, the dreary outline of a distant city. You sink back into your seat exhausted. Yes, you knew it all the time. The whole thing is a swindle and a sham!

“All out for Venice,” says the guard, in French.

Half a dozen porters--well-dressed, civil-spoken porters, flat-capped and numbered--seize your traps and help you from the train. You look up. It is like all the rest of the depots since you left Paris--high, dingy, besmoked, beraftered, beglazed, and be----! No, you are past all that. You are not angry. You are merely broken-hearted. Another idol of your childhood shattered; another coin that your soul coveted, nailed to the wall of your experience--a counterfeit!

“This door to the gondolas,” says the porter. He is very polite. If he were less so, you might make excuse to brain him on the way out.

The depot ends in a narrow passageway. It is the same old fraud--custom-house officers on each side; man with a punch mutilating tickets; rows of other men with brass medals on their arms the size of apothecaries’ scales--hackmen, you think, with their whips outside--licensed runners for the gondoliers, you learn afterward. They are all shouting--all intent on carrying you off bodily. The vulgar modern horde!

Soon you begin to breathe more easily. There is another door ahead, framing a bit of blue sky. “At least, the sun shines here,” you say to yourself. “Thank God for that much!”

“This way, Signore.”

One step, and you stand in the light. Now look! Below, at your very feet, a great flight of marble steps drops down to the water’s edge. Crowding these steps is a throng of gondoliers, porters, women with fans and gay-colored gowns, priests, fruit-sellers, water-carriers, and peddlers. At the edge, and away over as far as the beautiful marble church, a flock of gondolas like black swans curve in and out. Beyond stretches the double line of church and palace, bordering the glistening highway. Over all is the soft golden haze, the shimmer, the translucence of the Venetian summer sunset.

With your head in a whirl,--so intense is the surprise, so foreign to your traditions and dreams the actuality,--you throw yourself on the yielding cushions of a waiting gondola. A turn of the gondolier’s wrist, and you dart into a narrow canal. Now the smells greet you--damp, cool, low-tide smells. The palaces and warehouses shut out the sky. On you go--under low bridges of marble, fringed with people leaning listlessly over; around sharp corners, their red and yellow bricks worn into ridges by thousands of rounding boats; past open plazas crowded with the teeming life of the city. The shadows deepen; the waters glint like flakes of broken gold-leaf. High up in an opening you catch a glimpse of a tower, rose-pink in the fading light; it is the Campanile. Farther on, you slip beneath an arch caught between two palaces and held in mid-air. You look up, shuddering as you trace the outlines of the fatal Bridge of Sighs. For a moment all is dark. Then you glide into a sea of opal, of amethyst and sapphire.

The gondola stops near a small flight of stone steps protected by huge poles striped with blue and red. Other gondolas are debarking. A stout porter in gold lace steadies yours as you alight.

“Monsieur’s rooms are quite ready. They are over the garden; the one with the balcony overhanging the water.”

The hall is full of people (it is the Britannia, the best hotel in Venice), grouped about the tables, chatting or reading, sipping coffee or eating ices. Beyond, from an open door, comes the perfume of flowers. You pass out, cross a garden, cool and fresh in the darkening shadows, and enter a small room opening on a staircase. You walk up and through the cosy apartments, push back a folding glass door, and step out upon a balcony of marble.

How still it all is! Only the plash of the water about the bows of the gondolas, and the little waves snapping at the water-steps. Even the groups of people around the small iron tables below, partly hidden by the bloom of oleanders, talk in half-heard whispers.

You look about you,--the stillness filling your soul, the soft air embracing you,--out over the blossoms of the oleanders, across the shimmering water, beyond the beautiful dome of the Salute, glowing like a huge pearl in the clear evening light. No, it is not the Venice of your childhood; not the dream of your youth. It is softer, more mellow, more restful, more exquisite in its harmonies.

Suddenly a strain of music breaks upon your ear--a soft, low strain. Nearer it comes, nearer. You lean forward over the marble rail to catch its meaning. Far away across the surface of the beautiful sea floats a tiny boat. Every swing of the oar leaves in its wake a quivering thread of gold. Now it rounds the great red buoy, and is lost behind the sails of a lazy lugger drifting with the tide. Then the whole broad water rings with the melody. In another instant it is beneath you--the singer standing, holding his hat for your pennies; the chorus seated, with upturned, expectant faces.

Into the empty hat you pour all your store of small coins, your eyes full of tears.

GONDOLA DAYS

THAT first morning in Venice! It is the summer, of course--never the winter. This beautiful bride of the sea is loveliest when bright skies bend tenderly over her, when white mists fall softly around her, and the lagoons about her feet are sheets of burnished silver: when the red oleanders thrust their blossoms exultingly above the low, crumbling walls: when the black hoods of winter _felsi_ are laid by at the _traghetti_, and gondolas flaunt their white awnings: when the melon-boats, with lifeless sails, drift lazily by, and the shrill cry of the fruit vender floats over the water: when the air is steeped, permeated, soaked through and through with floods of sunlight--quivering, brilliant, radiant; sunlight that blazes from out a sky of pearl and opal and sapphire; sunlight that drenches every old palace with liquid amber, kissing every moulding awake, and soothing every shadow to sleep; sunlight that caresses and does not scorch, that dazzles and does not blind, that illumines, irradiates, makes glorious, every sail and tower and dome, from the instant the great god of the east shakes the dripping waters of the Adriatic from his face until he sinks behind the purple hills of Padua.

These mornings, then! How your heart warms and your blood tingles when you remember that first one in Venice--your first day in a gondola!

You recall that you were leaning upon your balcony overlooking the garden when you caught sight of your gondolier; the gondolier whom Joseph, prince among porters, had engaged for you the night of your arrival.

On that first morning you were just out of your bed. In fact, you had hardly been in it all night. You had fallen asleep in a whirl of contending emotions. Half a dozen times you had been up and out on this balcony, suddenly aroused by the passing of some music-boat filling the night with a melody that seemed a thousand fold more enchanting because of your sudden awakening,--the radiant moon, and the glistening water beneath. I say you were out again upon this same balcony overlooking the oleanders, the magnolias, and the palms. You heard the tinkling of spoons in the cups below, and knew that some earlier riser was taking his coffee in the dense shrubbery; but it made no impression upon you. Your eye was fixed on the beautiful dome of the Salute opposite; on the bronze goddess of the Dogana waving her veil in the soft air; on the group of lighters moored to the quay, their red and yellow sails aglow; on the noble tower of San Giorgio, sharp-cut against the glory of the east.

Now you catch a waving hand and the lifting of a cap on the gravel walk below. “At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”

You remember the face, brown and sunny, the eyes laughing, the curve of the black mustache, and how the wavy short hair curled about his neck and struggled out from under his cap. He has on another suit, newly starched and snow-white; a loose shirt, a wide collar trimmed with blue, and duck trousers. Around his waist is a wide blue sash, the ends hanging to his knees. About his throat is a loose silk scarf--so loose that you note the broad, manly chest, the muscles of the neck half concealed by the cross-barred boating-shirt covering the brown skin.

There is a cheeriness, a breeziness, a spring about this young fellow that inspires you. As you look down into his face you feel that he is part of the air, of the sunshine, of the perfume of the oleanders. He belongs to everything about him, and everything belongs to him. His costume, his manner, the very way he holds his hat, show you at a glance that while for the time being he is your servant, he is, in many things deeply coveted by you, greatly your master. If you had his chest and his forearm, his sunny temper, his perfect digestion and contentment, you could easily spare one half of your world’s belongings in payment. When you have lived a month with him and have caught the spirit of the man, you will forget all about these several relations of servant and master. The six francs a day that you pay him will seem only your own contribution to the support of the gondola; his share being his services. When you have spent half the night at the Lido, he swimming at your side, or have rowed all the way to Torcello, or have heard early mass at San Rosario, away up the Giudecca, he kneeling before you, his hat on the cool pavement next your own, you will begin to lose sight even of the francs, and want to own gondola and all yourself, that you may make _him_ guest and thus discharge somewhat the ever-increasing obligation of hospitality under which he places you. Soon you will begin to realize that despite your belongings--wealth to this gondolier beyond his wildest dreams--he in reality is the richer of the two. He has inherited all this glory of palace, sea, and sky, from the day of his birth, and can live in it every hour in the year, with no fast-ebbing letter-of-credit nor near-approaching sailing day to sadden his soul or poison the cup of his pleasure. When your fatal day comes and your trunk is packed, he will stand at the water-stairs of the station, hat in hand, the tears in his eyes, and when one of the demons of the master-spirit of the age--Hurry--has tightened its grip upon you and you are whirled out and across the great iron bridge, and you begin once more the life that now you loathe, even before you have reached Mestre--if your gondolier is like my own gondolier, Espero--my Espero Gorgoni, whom I love--you would find him on his knees in the church next the station, whispering a prayer for your safe journey across the sea, and spending one of your miserable francs for some blessed candles to burn until you reached home.

But you have not answered your gondolier, who stands with upturned eyes on the graveled walk below.

“At what hour will the Signore want the gondola?”

You awake from your reverie. Now! as soon as you swallow your coffee. Ten minutes later you bear your weight on Giorgio’s bent elbow and step into his boat.

It is like nothing else of its kind your feet have ever touched--so yielding and yet so firm; so shallow and yet so stanch; so light, so buoyant, and so welcoming to peace and rest and comfort.

How daintily it sits the water! How like a knowing swan it bends its head, the iron blade of the bow, and glides out upon the bosom of the Grand Canal! You stop for a moment, noting the long, narrow body, blue-black and silver in the morning light, as graceful in its curves as a bird; the white awning amidships draped at sides and back, the softly-yielding, morocco-covered seat, all cushions and silk fringes, and the silken cords curbing quaint lions of polished brass. Beyond and aft stands your gondolier, with easy, graceful swing bending to his oar. You stoop down, part the curtains, and sink into the cushions. Suddenly an air of dignified importance steals over you. Never in your whole life have you been so magnificently carried about. Four-in-hands, commodores’ gigs, landaus in triumphant processions with white horses and plumes, seem tame and commonplace. Here is a whole barge, galleon, Bucentaur, all to yourself; noiseless, alert, subservient to your airiest whim, obedient to the lightest touch. You float between earth and sky. You feel like a potentate out for an airing, housed like a Rajah, served like Cleopatra, and rowed like a Doge. You command space and dominate the elements.

But Giorgio is leaning on his oar, millions of diamonds dripping from its blade.

“Where now, Signore?”

Anywhere, so he keeps in the sunlight. To the Piazza, perhaps, and then around San Giorgio with its red tower and noble façade, and later, when the shadows lengthen, away down to the Public Garden, and home again in the twilight by way of the Giudecca.

This gondola-landing of the Piazza, the most important of the cab-stands in Venice, is the stepping-stone--a wet and ooze-covered stone--to the heart of the city. Really the heart, for the very life of every canal, _campo_, and street, courses through it in unending flow all the livelong day and night, from the earliest blush of dawn to the earliest blush of dawn again; no one ever seems to go to bed in Venice. Along and near the edge of this landing stand the richest examples of Venetian architecture. First, the Royal Gardens of the king’s palace, with its balustrade of marble and broad flight of water-steps; then the Library, with its cresting of statues, white against the sky; then the two noble columns, the gateless posts of the Piazzetta, bearing Saint Theodore and the Lion of Venice; and beyond, past the edge of San Marco, the clock tower and the three great flag-staffs; then the Palace of the Doges, that masterwork of the fifteenth century; then the Prison, with a glimpse of the Bridge of Sighs, caught in mid-air; then the great cimeter-sweep of the Riva, its point lost in the fringe of trees shading the Public Garden; and then, over all, as you look up, the noble Campanile, the wonderful bell-tower of San Marco, unadorned, simple, majestic--up, up, into the still air, its gilded angel, life-size, with outstretched wings flashing in the morning sun, a mere dot of gold against the blue.

Before you touch the lower steps of the water-stairs, your eye falls upon an old man with bared head. He holds a long staff studded with bad coins, having a hook at one end. With this in one hand he steadies your gondola, with the other he holds out his hat. He is an aged gondolier, too old now to row. He knows you, the poor fellow, and he knows your kind. How many such enthusiasts has he helped to alight! And he knows Giorgio too, and remembers when, like him, he bent his oar with the best. You drop a penny into his wrinkled hand, catch his grateful thanks, and join the throng. The arcades under the Library are full of people smoking and sipping coffee. How delicious the aroma and the pungent smell of tobacco! In the shadow of the Doges’ Palace groups idle and talk--a little denser in spots where some artist has his easel up, or some pretty, dainty child is feeding the pigeons.

A moment more and you are in the Piazza of San Marco; the grand piazza of the doges, with its thousands of square feet of white pavement blazing in the sun, framed on three sides by marble palaces, dominated by the noblest campanile on the globe, and enriched, glorified, made inexpressibly precious and unique by that jewel in marble, in porphyry, in verd antique and bronze, that despair of architects of to-day, that delight of the artists of all time--the most sacred, the Church of San Marco.

In and out this great quadrangle whirl the pigeons, the pigeons of Dandolo, up into the soft clouds, the light flashing from their throats; sifting down in showers on gilded cross and rounded dome; clinging to intricate carvings, over and under the gold-crowned heads of saints in stone and bronze; across the baking plaza in flurries of gray and black; resting like a swarm of flies, only to startle, mass, and swirl again. Pets of the state, these birds, since the siege of Candia, when the great Admiral Dandolo’s chief bearer of dispatches, the ancestor of one of these same white-throated doves, brought the good news to Venice the day the admiral’s victorious banner was thrown to the breeze, and the Grand Council, sitting in state, first learned the tidings from the soft plumage of its wings.

At one end, fronting the church, stand the three great flag-poles, the same you saw at the landing, socketed in bronze, exquisitely modeled and chased, bearing the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the Morea--kingdoms conquered by the state--all three in a row, presenting arms to the power that overthrew them, and forever dipping their colors to the glory of its past.

Here, too, in this noble square, under your very feet, what solemnities, what historic fêtes, what conspiracies! Here for centuries has been held the priestly pageant of Corpus Christi, aflame with lanterns and flambeaux. Here eleven centuries ago blind old Dandolo received the Crusader chiefs of France. Here the splendid nuptials of Francesco Foscari were celebrated by a tournament, witnessed by thirty thousand people, and lasting ten days. Here the conspiracies of Tiepolo and Faliero were crushed--Venetian against Venetian the only time in a thousand years. And here Italy suffered her crowning indignity, the occupation by the French under the newly-fledged warrior who unlimbered his cannon at the door of the holy church, pushed the four bronze horses from their pedestals over the sacred entrance--the horses of Constantine, wrought by Lysippus the Greek,--despoiled the noble church of its silver lamps, robbed the ancient column of its winged lion, and then, after a campaign unprecedented in its brilliancy, unexampled in the humiliation and degradation it entailed upon a people who for ten centuries had known no power outside of Venice, planted in the centre of this same noble square, with an irony as bitter as it was cruel, the “Tree of Liberty,” at which was burned, on the 4th of June, 1797, the insignia of the ancient republic.

And yet, notwithstanding all her vicissitudes, the Venice of to-day is still the Venice of her glorious past, the Venice of Dandolo, Foscari, and Faliero. The actors are long since dead, but the stage-setting is the same; the same sun, the same air, the same sky over all. The beautiful dome of the Salute still dominates the Grand Canal. The great plaza is still perfect in all its proportions and in all that made up its beauty and splendor. The Campanile still raises its head, glistening in the morning light. High over all still flash and swoop the pigeons of Venice--the pigeons of Dandolo--now black as cinders, now flakes of gold in the yellow light. The doors of the sacred church are still open; the people pass in and out. Under the marble arcades, where the soldiers of the army of France stacked their arms, to-day sit hundreds of free Venetians, with their wives and sweethearts, sipping their ices and coffee; the great orchestra, the king’s band, filling the air with its music.

When you ask what magician has wrought this change, let the old guide answer as once he answered me when, crossing the Piazza and uncovering his head, he pointed to a stone and said, in his soft Italian:--

“Here, Signore,--just here, where the great Napoleon burnt our flag,--the noble republic of our fathers, under our good King and his royal spouse, was born anew.”

But you cannot stay. You will return and study the Piazza to-morrow; not now. The air intoxicates you. The sunlight is in your blood; your cheeks burn; you look out and over the Grand Canal--molten silver in the shimmer of the morning. Below, near the Public Garden, beyond San Giorgio, like a cluster of butterflies, hovers a fleet of Chioggia fishing-boats, becalmed in the channel. Off the Riva, near Danieli’s, lies the Trieste steamer, just arrived, a swarm of gondolas and _barcos_ about her landing-ladders; the yellow smoke of her funnel drifting lazily. Farther away, on the golden ball of the Dogana, the bronze Goddess of the Wind poises light as air, her face aflame, her whirling sail bent with the passing breeze.

You resolve to stop no more; only to float, loll on your cushions, watch the gulls circle, and the slow sweep of the oars of the luggers. You would throw open--wide open--the great swinging gates of your soul. You not only would enjoy, you would absorb, drink in, fill yourself to the brim.

For hours you drift about. There is plenty of time to-morrow for the churches and palaces and caffès. To-day you want only the salt air in your face, the splash and gurgle of the water at the bow, and the low song that Giorgio sings to himself as he bends to his blade.

Soon you dart into a cool canal, skirt along an old wall, water stained and worn, and rest at a low step. Giorgio springs out, twists a cord around an iron ring, and disappears through an archway framing a garden abloom with flowering vines.

It is high noon. Now for your midday luncheon!

You have had all sorts of breakfasts offered you in your wanderings: On white-winged yachts, with the decks scoured clean, the brass glistening, the awning overhead. In the wilderness, lying on balsam boughs, the smell of the bacon and crisping trout filling the bark slant, the blue smoke wreathing the tall pines. In the gardens of Sunny Spain--one you remember at Granada, hugging the great wall of the Alhambra--you see the table now with its heap of fruit and flowers, and can hear the guitar of the gypsy behind the pomegranate. Along the shore of the beautiful bay of Matanzas, where the hidalgo who had watched you paint swept down in his _volante_ and carried you off to his oranges and omelette. At St. Cloud, along the Seine, with the noiseless waiter in the seedy dress suit and necktie of the night before. But the _filet_ and melon! Yes, you would go again. I say you have had all sorts of breakfasts out of doors in your time, but never yet in a gondola.

A few minutes later Giorgio pushes aside the vines. He carries a basket covered with a white cloth. This he lays at your feet on the floor of the boat. You catch sight of the top of a siphon and a flagon of wine: do not hurry, wait till he serves it. But not here, where anybody might come; farther down, where the oleanders hang over the wall, their blossoms in the water, and where the air blows cool between the overhanging palaces.

Later Giorgio draws all the curtains except the side next the oleanders, steps aft and fetches a board, which he rests on the little side seats in front of your lounging-cushions. On this board he spreads the cloth, and then the seltzer and Chianti, the big glass of powdered ice and the little hard Venetian rolls. (By the bye, do you know that there is only one form of primitive roll, the world over?) Then come the cheese, the Gorgonzola--active, alert Gorgonzola, all green spots--wrapped in a leaf; a rough-jacketed melon, with some figs and peaches. Last of all, away down in the bottom of the basket, there is a dish of macaroni garnished with peppers. You do not want any meat. If you did you would not get it. Some time when you are out on the canal, or up the Giudecca, you might get a fish freshly broiled from a passing cook-boat serving the watermen--a sort of floating kitchen for those who are too poor for a fire of their own--but never meat.

Giorgio serves you as daintily as would a woman; unfolding the cheese, splitting the rolls, parting the melon into crescents, flecking off each seed with his knife: and last, the coffee from the little copper coffee-pot, and the thin cakes of sugar, in the thick, unbreakable, dumpy little cups.

There are no courses in this repast. You light a cigarette with your first mouthful and smoke straight through: it is that kind of a breakfast.

Then you spread yourself over space, flat on your back, the smoke curling out through the half-drawn curtains. Soon your gondolier gathers up the fragments, half a melon and the rest,--there is always enough for two,--moves aft, and you hear the clink of the glass and the swish of the siphon. Later you note the closely-eaten crescents floating by, and the empty leaf. Giorgio was hungry too.

But the garden!--there is time for that. You soon discover that it is unlike any other you know. There are no flower-beds and gravel walks, and no brick fountains with the scantily dressed cast-iron boy struggling with the green-painted dolphin, the water spurting from its open mouth. There is water, of course, but it is down a deep well with a great coping of marble, encircled by exquisite carvings and mellow with mould; and there are low trellises of grapes, and a tangle of climbing roses half concealing a weather-stained Cupid with a broken arm. And there is an old-fashioned sun-dial, and sweet smelling box cut into fantastic shapes, and a nest of an arbor so thickly matted with leaves and interlaced branches that you think of your Dulcinea at once. And there are marble benches and stone steps, and at the farther end an old rusty gate through which Giorgio brought the luncheon.

It is all so new to you, and so cool and restful! For the first time you begin to realize that you are breathing the air of a City of Silence. No hum of busy loom, no tramp of horse or rumble of wheel, no jar or shock; only the voices that come over the water, and the plash of the ripples as you pass. But the day is waning; into the sunlight once more.

Giorgio is fast asleep; his arm across his face, his great broad chest bared to the sky.

“_Si, Signore!_”

He is up in an instant, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, catching his oar as he springs.

You glide in and out again, under marble bridges thronged with people; along quays lined with boats; by caffè, church, and palace, and so on to the broad water of the Public Garden.

But you do not land; some other day for that. You want the row back up the canal, with the glory of the setting sun in your face. Suddenly, as you turn, the sun is shut out: it is the great warship Stromboli, lying at anchor off the garden wall; huge, solid as a fort, fine-lined as a yacht, with exquisite detail of rail, mast, yard-arms, and gun mountings, the light flashing from her polished brasses.

In a moment you are under her stern, and beyond, skirting the old shipyard with the curious arch,--the one Whistler etched,--sheering to avoid the little steamers puffing with modern pride, their noses high in air at the gondolas; past the long quay of the Riva, where the torpedo-boats lie tethered in a row, like swift horses eager for a dash; past the fruit-boats dropping their sails for a short cut to the market next the Rialto; past the long, low, ugly bath-house anchored off the Dogana; past the wonderful, the matchless, the never-to-be-unloved or forgotten, the most blessed, the _Santa Maria della Salute_.

Oh! this drift back, square in the face of the royal sun, attended by all the pomp and glory of a departing day! What shall be said of this reveling, rioting, dominant god of the west, clothed in purple and fine gold; strewing his path with rose-leaves thrown broadcast on azure fields; rolling on beds of violet; saturated, steeped, drunken with color; every steeple, tower, and dome ablaze; the whole world on tip-toe, kissing its hands good-night!

Giorgio loves it, too. His cap is off, lying on the narrow deck; his cravat loosened, his white shirt, as he turns up the Giudecca, flashing like burning gold.

Somehow you cannot sit and take your ease in the fullness of all this beauty and grandeur. You spring to your feet. You must see behind and on both sides, your eye roving eagerly away out to the lagoon beyond the great flour-mill and the gardens.

Suddenly a delicate violet light falls about you; the lines of palaces grow purple; the water is dulled to a soft gray, broken by long, undulating waves of blue; the hulls of the fishing-boats become inky black, their listless sails deepening in the falling shadows. Only the little cupola high up on the dome of the Redentore still burns pink and gold. Then it fades and is gone. The day is done!

ALONG THE RIVA

THE afternoon hours are always the best. In the morning the great sweep of dazzling pavement is a blaze of white light, spotted with moving dots of color. These dots carry gay-colored parasols and fans, or shield their eyes with aprons, hugging, as they scurry along, the half-shadows of a bridge-rail or caffè awning. Here and there, farther down along the Riva, are larger dots--fruit-sellers crouching under huge umbrellas, or groups of gondoliers under improvised awnings of sailcloth and boat oars. Once in a while one of these water-cabmen darts out from his shelter like an old spider, waylays a bright fly as she hurries past, and carries her off bodily to his gondola. Should she escape he crawls back again lazily and is merged once more in the larger dot. In the noonday glare even these disappear; the fruit-sellers seeking some shaded _calle_, the gondoliers the cool coverings of their boats.

Now that the Sun God has chosen to hide his face behind the trees of the King’s Garden, this blaze of white is toned to a cool gray. Only San Giorgio’s tower across the Grand Canal is aflame, and that but half way down its bright red length. The people, too, who have been all day behind closed blinds and doors, are astir. The awnings of the caffès are thrown back and the windows of the balconies opened. The waiters bring out little tables, arranging the chairs in rows like those in a concert hall. The boatmen who have been asleep under cool bridges, curled up on the decks of their boats, stretch themselves awake, rubbing their eyes. The churches swing back their huge doors--even the red curtains of the _Chiesa della Pietà_ are caught to one side, so that you can see the sickly yellow glow of the candles far back on the altars and smell the incense as you pass.

Soon the current from away up near the Piazza begins to flow down towards the Public Garden, which lies at the end of this Grand Promenade of Venice. Priests come, and students; sailors on a half day’s leave; stevedores from the salt warehouses; fishermen; peddlers, with knick-knacks and sweetmeats; throngs from the hotels; and slender, graceful Venetians, out for their afternoon stroll in twos and threes, with high combs and gay shawls, worn as a Spanish Donna would her mantilla--bewitching creatures in cool muslin dresses and wide sashes of silk, with restless butterfly fans, and restless, wicked eyes too, that flash and coax as they saunter along.

Watch those officers wheel and turn. See how they laugh when they meet. What confidences under mustachios and fans! Half an hour from now you will find the four at Florian’s, as happy over a little cherry juice and water as if it were the dryest of all the Extras. Later on, away out beyond San Giorgio, four cigarettes could light for you their happy faces, the low plash of their gondolier’s oar keeping time to the soft notes of a guitar.

Yes, one must know the Riva in the afternoon. I know it every hour in the day; though I love it most in the cool of its shadows. And I know every caffè, church, and palace along its whole length, from the Molo to the garden. And I know the bridges, too; best of all the one below the Arsenal, the _Veneta Marina_, and the one you cross before reaching the little church that stands aside as if to let you pass, and the queer-shaped Piazzetta beyond, with the flag-pole and marble balustrade. And I know that old wine-shop where the chairs and tables are drawn close up to the very bridge itself, its awnings half over the last step.

My own gondolier, Espero--bless his sunny face!--knows the owner of this shop and has known her for years; a great, superb creature, with eyes that flash and smoulder under heaps of tangled black hair. He first presented me to this grand duchess of the Riva years ago, when I wanted a dish of macaroni browned on a shallow plate. Whenever I turn in now out of the heat for a glass of crushed ice and orange juice, she mentions the fact and points with pride to the old earthen platter. It is nearly burnt through with my many toastings.

But the bridge is my delight; the arch underneath is so cool, and I have darted under it so often for luncheon and half an hour’s siesta. On these occasions the old burnt-bottomed dish is brought to my gondola sizzling hot, with coffee and rolls, and sometimes a bit of broiled fish as an extra touch.

This bridge has always been the open-air club-room of the entire neighborhood,--everybody who has any lounging to do is a life member. All day long its _habitués_ hang over it, gazing listlessly out upon the lagoon; singly, in bunches, in swarms when the fish-boats round in from Chioggia, or a new P. and O. steamer arrives. Its hand-rail of marble is polished smooth by the arms and legs and blue overalls of two centuries.

There is also a very dear friend of mine living near this bridge, whom you might as well know before I take another step along the Riva. He is attached to my suite. I have a large following quite of his kind, scattered all over Venice. As I am on my way, in this chapter, to the Public Garden, and can never get past this his favorite haunt without his cheer and laugh to greet me; so I cannot, if I would, avoid bringing him in now, knowing full well that he would bring himself in and unannounced whenever it should please his Excellency so to do. He is a happy-hearted, devil-may-care young fellow, who haunts this particular vicinity, and who has his bed and board wherever, at the moment, he may happen to be. The bed problem never troubles him; a bit of sailcloth under the shadow of the hand-rail will do, or a straw mat behind the angle of a wall, or even what shade I can spare from my own white umbrella, with the hard marble flags for feathers. The item of board is a trifle, yet only a trifle, more serious. It may be a fragment of polenta, or a couple of figs, or only a drink from the copper bucket of some passing girl. Quantity, quality, and time of serving are immaterial to him. There will be something to eat before night, and it always comes. One of the pleasures of the neighborhood is to share with him a bite.

This beggar, tramp, _lasagnone_--ragged, barefooted, and sunbrowned, would send a flutter through the hearts of a matinée full of pretty girls, could he step to the footlights just as he is, and with his superb baritone voice ring out one of his own native songs. Lying as he does now under my umbrella, his broad chest burnt almost black, the curls glistening about his forehead, his well-trimmed mustache curving around a mouth half open, shading a row of teeth white as milk, his Leporello hat thrown aside, a broad red sash girding his waist, the fine muscles of his thighs filling his overalls, these same pretty girls might perhaps only draw their skirts aside as they passed: environment plays such curious tricks.

This friend of mine, this royal pauper, Luigi, never in the recollection of any mortal man or woman was known to do a stroke of work. He lives somewhere up a crooked canal, with an old mother who adores him--as, in fact, does every other woman he knows, young or old--and whose needle keeps together the rags that only accentuate more clearly the superb lines of his figure. And yet one cannot call him a burden on society. On the contrary, Luigi has especial duties which he never neglects. Every morning at sunrise he is out on the bridge watching the Chioggia boats as they beat up past the Garden trying to make the red buoy in the channel behind San Giorgio, and enlarging on their seagoing qualities to an admiring group of bystanders. At noon he is plumped down in the midst of a bevy of wives and girls, flat on the pavement, his back against a doorway in some courtyard. The wives mend and patch, the girls string beads, and the children play around on the marble flagging, Luigi monopolizing all the talk and conducting all the gayety, the whole coterie listening. He makes love, and chaffs, and sings, and weaves romances, until the inquisitive sun peeps into the _patio_; then he is up and out on the bridge again, and so down the Riva, with the grace of an Apollo and the air of a thoroughbred.

When I think of all the sour tempers in the world, all the people with weak backs and chests and limbs, all the dyspeptics, all the bad livers and worse hearts, all the mean people and the sordid, all those who pose as philanthropists, professing to ooze sunshine and happiness from their very pores; all the down-trodden and the economical ones; all those on half pay and no work, and those on full pay and too little--and then look at this magnificent condensation of bone, muscle, and sinew; this Greek god of a tramp, unselfish, good-tempered, sunny-hearted, wanting nothing, having everything, envying nobody, happy as a lark, one continuous song all the day long; ready to catch a line, to mind a child, to carry a pail of water for any old woman, from the fountain in the Campo near by to the top of any house, no matter how high--when, I say, I think of this prince of good fellows leading his Adam-before-the-fall sort of existence, I seriously consider the advisability of my pensioning him for the remainder of his life on one _lira_ a day, a fabulous sum to him, merely to be sure that nothing in the future will ever spoil his temper and so rob me of the ecstasy of knowing and of being always able to find one supremely happy human creature on this earth.

But, as I have said, I am on my way to the Public Garden. Everybody else is going too. Step to the marble balustrade of this three-cornered Piazzetta and see if the prows of the gondolas are not all pointed that way. I am afoot, have left the Riva and am strolling down the _Via Garibaldi_, the widest street in Venice. There are no palaces here, only a double row of shops, their upper windows and balconies festooned with drying clothes, their doors choked with piles of fruit and merchandise. A little farther down is a marble bridge, and then the arching trees of the biggest and breeziest sweep of green in all Venice--the _Giardini Pubblici_--many acres in extent, bounded by a great wall surmounted by a marble balustrade more than a mile in length, and thickly planted with sycamores and flowering shrubs. Its water front commands the best view of the glory of a Venetian sunset.

This garden, for Venice, is really a very modern kind of public garden, after all. It was built in the beginning of the present century, about 1810, when the young Corsican directed one Giovanni Antonio Selva to demolish a group of monasteries incumbering the ground and from their débris to construct the foundations of this noble park, with its sea-wall, landings, and triumphal gate.

Whenever I stretch myself out under the grateful shade of these splendid trees, I always forgive the Corsican for robbing San Marco of its bronze horses and for riding his own up the incline of the Campanile, and even for leveling the monasteries.

And the Venetians of to-day are grateful too, however much their ancestors may have reviled the conqueror for his vandalism. All over its graveled walks you will find them lolling on the benches, grouped about the pretty caffès, taking their coffee or eating ices; leaning by the hour over the balustrade and watching the boats and little steamers. The children romp and play, the candy man and the sellers of sweet cakes ply their trade, and the vender with cool drinks stands over his curious four-legged tray, studded with bits of brass and old coins, and calls out his several mixtures. The officers are here, too, twisting their mustachios and fingering their cigarettes; fine ladies saunter along, preceded by their babies, half smothered in lace and borne on pillows in the arms of Italian peasants with red cap-ribbons touching the ground; and barefooted, frowzy-headed girls from the rookeries behind the Arsenal idle about, four or five abreast, their arms locked, mocking the sailors and filling the air with laughter.

Then there are a menagerie, or rather some wire-fenced paddocks filled with kangaroos and rabbits, and an aviary of birds, and a big casino where the band plays, and where for half a _lira_, some ten cents, you can see a variety performance without the variety, and hear these light-hearted people laugh to their heart’s content.

And last of all, away down at one end, near the wall fronting the church of San Giuseppe, there lives in miserable solitude the horse--the only horse in Venice. He is not always the same horse. A few years ago, when I first knew him, he was a forlorn, unkempt, lonely-looking quadruped of a dark brown color, and with a threadbare tail. When I saw him last, within the year, he was a hand higher, white, and wore a caudal appendage with a pronounced bang. Still he is the same horse--Venice never affords but one. When not at work (he gathered leaves in the old days; now I am ashamed to say he operates a lawn-mower as well), he leans his poor old tired head listlessly over the rail, refusing the cakes the children offer him. At these times he will ruminate by the hour over his unhappy lot. When the winter comes, and there are no more leaves to rake, no gravel to haul, nor grass to mow, they lead him down to the gate opening on the little side canal and push him aboard a flat scow, and so on up the Grand Canal and across the lagoon to Mestre. As he passes along, looking helplessly from side to side, the gondoliers revile him and the children jeer at him, and those on the little steamboats pelt him with peach pits, cigar ends, and bits of broken coal. Poor old Rosinante, there is no page in the history of Venice which your ancestors helped glorify!

There are two landings along the front of the garden,--one below the west corner, up a narrow canal, and the other midway of the long sea-wall, where all the gondolas load and unload. You know this last landing at once. Ziem has painted it over and over again for a score of years or more, and this master of color is still at it. With him it is a strip of brilliant red, a background of autumn foliage, and a creamy flight of steps running down to a sea of deepest ultramarine. There is generally a mass of fishing-boats, too, in brilliant colorings, moored to the wall, and a black gondola for a centre dark.

When you row up to this landing to-day, you are surprised to find it all sunshine and glitter. The trees are fresh and crisp, the marble is dazzling white, and the water sparkling and limpid with gray-green tints. But please do not criticise Ziem. You do not see it his way, but that is not his fault. Venice is a hundred different Venices to as many different painters. If it were not so, you would not be here to-day, nor love it as you do. Besides, when you think it all over, you will admit that Ziem, of all living painters, has best rendered its sensuous, color-soaked side. And yet, when you land you wonder why the colorist did not bring his easel closer and give you a nearer view of this superb water-landing, with the crowds of gayly dressed people, swarms of gondolas, officers, fine ladies, boatmen, and the hundred other phases of Venetian life.

But I hear Espero’s voice out on the broad water. Now I catch the sunlight on his white shirt and blue sash. He is standing erect, his whole body swaying with that long, graceful, sweeping stroke which is the envy of the young gondoliers and the despair of the old; Espero, as you know, has been twice winner in the gondola races. He sees my signal, runs his bow close in, and the next instant we are swinging back up the Grand Canal, skirting the old boatyard and the edge of the Piazzetta. A puff of smoke from the man-of-war ahead, and the roll of the sunset gun booms over the water. Before the echoes have fairly died away, a long sinuous snake of employees--there are some seven thousand of them--crawls from out the arsenal gates, curves over the arsenal bridge, and heads up the Riva. On we go, abreast of the crowd, past the landing-wharf of the little steamers, past the rear porches of the queer caffès, past the man-of-war, and a moment later are off the wine-shop and my bridge. I part the curtains, and from my cushions can see the Duchess standing in the doorway, her arms akimbo, with all the awnings rolled back tight for the night. The bridge itself is smothered in a swarm of human flies, most of them bareheaded. As we sheer closer, one more ragged than the rest springs up and waves his hat. Then comes the refrain of that loveliest of all the Venetian boat songs:--

“_Jammo, jammo neoppa, jammo ja._”

It is Luigi, bidding me good-night.

THE PIAZZA OF SAN MARCO