On the Shores of the Mediterranean (8 page)

To the left of St Mark’s Basilica the new Campanile, surmounted by a pyramidical steeple panelled in green copper and a gilded figure of the Archangel Gabriel, soars 322 feet into the air, far above anything else in the city, even the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore. On 14 July 1902, the 113th anniversary of the sacking of the Bastille, at ten in the morning and with scarcely any warning, the original Campanile telescoped into itself and fell into the Piazza, having previously successfully withstood being struck by lightning, shaken by earthquakes, and being insidiously undermined by the
acque alte
. In doing so it damaged the corner of the Libreria Sansoviniana, initiated by Jacopo Sansovino, completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi and described by Palladio, in the sixteenth century, as ‘the richest and most decorated building ever perhaps created from ancient times until now’. It also completely destroyed Sansovino’s Loggetta, which was used as a guardroom when it was built; missed his magnificent bronze statues of Minerva, Apollo, Mercury and Peace, but smashed his terracotta group of The Virgin and Child (later repaired) and the Child John the Baptist. It also wrenched from its position at the south-east corner of the Basilica the Pietra del Bando, the stump of porphyry column brought by the Venetians from Acre in 1256 and set up here at the place from which the laws of Venice were promulgated, but sparing the fabric from damage. In falling, four of its five bells were broken, but the biggest, the Marangona, so called because one of its functions was to tell the craftsmen of the
Marangoni
, the guilds of the city, when to begin and stop work, was undamaged and was found protruding from the mountain of rubble which filled the eastern end of the Piazza. Also shattered was the beaten copper figure of the Archangel Gabriel which came plummeting down from above.

And behind the Campanile in the Piazzetta di San Marco, but visible from the Piazza, part of the west front of the Palazzo Ducale
can be seen, luminously beautiful, its body clad with pink and white marble in the form of Gothic arcades one above the other, a wonder of lightness and beauty. Altogether the finest enclosed spaces to be found anywhere in all the Mediterranean lands, finer than St Peter’s Square in Rome. Perhaps, as Napoleon said, the finest in all the world.

All that was visible of this wonder of the world on this particular night in January were the enfilades of lights which hang in elegant glass globes under the arches of the long arcades of the
procuratie
, once the offices and residences of the Procurators of Venice, who were the most important dignitaries after the Doge, vanishing away into the fog towards the far western end of the Piazza where the wing known as the Ala Napoleonica, built to replace a church torn down by his orders, was completely invisible. Beneath the arcades there were some amorphous, will-o’-the-wispish smudges of light, which emanated from the windows of expensive shops and cafés. There were also some blurs of light from the elegant lamp standards in the Piazzetta di San Marco, where the fog was even thicker. All that could be seen of the Basilica were the outlines of a couple of bronze doors, one of them sixth-century Byzantine work: nothing at all of the great quadriga of bronze horses overhead in front of the magnificent west window, copies of those looted from the Hippodrome at Constantinople by Doge Dandolo after he had taken the city, plunging ever onwards, stripped of their bridles by the Venetians as a symbol of liberty, on their endless journey from their first known setting-off place, the Island of Chios, through what were now the ruins of the world in which they had been created.

Now the giants on top of the Torre dell’Orologio began banging away with their hammers on the big bell, as they had done ever since they were cast by a man named Ambrosio dalle Anchore in 1494, some 489 years ago, the year Columbus discovered Jamaica,
a slice of the action the Venetians would like to have been in on, the year Savonarola restored popular government in Florence, something they themselves were already badly in need of. They made things to last in those days. No question of replacing the unit if something went wrong.

It was five o’clock. Soon, if it was not raining, or snowing, or there was no
acqua alta
to turn it into a paddling pool, and there was none of this damn fog, the better-off inhabitants, those who wanted to be thought better-off and those who really were badly-off but looked almost as well-dressed as the rest, which is what you aim at if you are a Venetian, having changed out of their working clothes would begin that ritual of the Christian Mediterranean lands, something that you will not see in a devout, Muslim one, the
passeggiata
, the evening promenade, in Piazza San Marco and in the Piazzetta, in pairs and groups, young and old, the old usually in pairs, the young ones often giving up promenading after a bit and congregating on the shallow steps that lead up from the Piazza into the arcades, the ones that in summer have long drapes hanging in them to keep off the sun, which gives them a dim, pleasantly mysterious air. So the Venetians add themselves to the visitors who swarm in the Piazza at every season of the year, costing one another’s clothes, casting beady, impassive eyes on the often unsuitable clothes of the visitors, as their predecessors must have done on various stray Lombards and other barbarians down on a visit, and on the uncouth Slavs and Albanians who came ashore at the Riva degli Schiavoni. Those on whom they had not looked so impassively had been the Austrians who filled the Piazza in the years between 1815 and 1866, the period when, apart from a few months of brave but abortive revolution in the winter of 1848–49, the Venetian States were under the domination of Austria, to whom they had originally been sold by Napoleon in 1797. (He got them back again in 1805,
only to lose them when Austria received them yet again at the Congress of Vienna, a couple of months before Waterloo.) In those years the Austrian flag flew in the Piazza in place of what had been that of the Republic of St Mark, an Austrian band played, which it is said no true Venetians opened their ears to, let alone applauded, and one of the two fashionable cafés that still face one another across its width, the one which was frequented by Austrians, was left to them.

Meanwhile other, less elegant but equally ritualistic
passeggiate
would be taking place in the principal
calli, campi
and
salizzadi
, in other parts of the city, and there the younger ones would probably flock to some monument and drape themselves around the base of it. There would also be crowds in the Merceria dell’Orologio,
merceria
being a haberdashery, which is still, as it always was, filled with rich stuffs which the Veneziani love, a narrow street which leads from the clock tower into Merceria di San Giuliano and from that into Merceria di San Salvatore, once the shortest route from San Marco to the other most important centre of the city, the Rialto. This was the way the Procurators and other important officials used to follow on their way in procession to enter the Basilica, and the one followed by persons on their way from the Rialto to be publicly flogged.

Then, quite suddenly, after an hour or so, except at weekends or on days of
festa
, old and young suddenly disappear indoors, many of them having to get up what is in winter horribly early in order to get to work on the terra firma, leaving the Piazza and other places of
passeggio
to visitors and to those making a living by catering to their needs.

Tonight the
passeggiata
was definitely off. The pigeons had long since given up and gone to bed – that is if they had ever bothered to get up in the first place, and the only other people on view were a few dark figures with mufflers wrapped round their mouths,
hurrying presumably homewards, some of them coughing as they went. The only people, besides ourselves, who were not on the move were a lunatic who was sitting at the feet of the Campanile gabbling away happily to himself, and a pretty young girl, dressed in a smart, bright red skiing outfit, to which even the Venetians could not have taken exception, and those après-ski boots with the hair on the outside, that make the occupants look as if they have forgotten to shave their legs. She was leaning against a pile of the duckboards the municipality puts down in various parts of the city when an
acqua alta
is expected, listening in on her earphones and reading
Fodor’s Guide
with the aid of a pocket torch.

‘Hi!’ she said, removing her earphones and switching off, at the same time displaying a mouthful of pearly white teeth that had not been near a capper’s. ‘Would you mind repeating that? I didn’t get it.’

‘We said, “Good evening, it’s a rotten night”.’

‘Yes, it certainly is a lousy night. This is my first time in Venice. What an introductory offer! My sister and I came down this afternoon from Cortina. The son of the guy who runs our hotel there gave us a lift but once we got out of the mountains we couldn’t see a thing, not even Treviso. It was like being out in the boondocks. It’s brilliant in Cortina. My sister’s back where we’re staying, not feeling so good. I guess we should have checked out on the weather. We’ve got to go back tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow. I haven’t even seen a gondola yet.’

‘There are some over there,’ I said, ‘moored by the Molo. But you have to watch your step. We nearly fell in.’

‘I’ll check on the gondolas on the way back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘I was just boning up on the Piazza San Marco, about it being beautiful at all times of day and night and all seasons of the year, one of the only great squares which retains a feeling of animation
when there are very few people in it. Personally, I don’t think this Fodor person was ever here in a fog. He says bring plenty of color films. What a laugh! Personally, I think it’s kinda spooky, what with that poor old guy over there hollering away to himself and that bell going on all the time. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old Doge.’

It wouldn’t have surprised me either, standing where we were in the heart of Doge-land in freezing fog listening to a bell on a buoy making a melancholy noise somewhere out in St Mark’s Basin.

What is strange, if not spooky, about Venice is the feeling of impermanence brought on by the thought that not only are the waters constantly rising in it because of the general increase in the levels of the oceans brought about by the melting of the polar ice, but that the city is at the same time sinking because the re-routing of rivers has deprived it of alluvium and because of the enormous amount of water and methane gas that until recently was being drawn out of the subsoil in the Industrial Zones. So that one day, quite suddenly, without warning, just as the Campanile collapsed, so too will the wooden piles that support the buildings of the city, of which there are said to be more than a million beneath Santa Maria della Salute alone, suddenly give up supporting them and allow the city to disappear for ever.

Much of the city is crumbling as well as sinking. Everywhere leprous walls and rotting brickwork proclaim the fact. Much of it is also abandoned, empty. Great palazzi on the Grand Canal – many of them built as warehouses in which the merchants lived, as it were over the shop, some of them big enough, now that there is no merchandise, to house a hundred persons – have watergates through which the merchandise used to pass which look as if they have not been opened for a hundred years. The steps leading up to them are covered with long green weed which sways in the
wash of motor boats and water buses. Inside, the vast room on the
piano nobile
is lit, if at all, by a 40-watt bulb. Sometimes another, equally feeble light in a room high up under the eaves proclaims that there is a resident caretaker. This feeling of emptiness extends far beyond the confines of the Grand Canal. You can feel it up in the Quartiere Grimani, in the territory around the Arsenale, in the Ghetto with its enclave of the Venetian equivalent to skyscrapers hemmed in on all sides by water, and in the alleys of San Tomà where the cats of Venice reign supreme and there is scarcely a dog to be seen.

But then, just when you begin to experience a sense of horror at being alone in this dead city, you are treated to a series of glimpses – through windows that are invariably barred – of a family sitting around a table to eat
risotto alle vongole
, risotto with clams, which is being brought to it in a cloud of steam, of children doing their homework, of someone working late in an archive, of a man and a girl kissing, of an old couple watching television, like a series of realistic pictures hung in the open air on walls of crumbling brick and flaking stone.

Deciding that we needed a drink, we walked to Florian, which is under the arcade of the Procuratie Nuove on the south side of the square.

Florian is the oldest café in Venice, opened by someone called Floriano Francesconi in 1720, and it has a faded and beautiful elegance all of its own which if once destroyed one feels could never be repeated, but perhaps it has been restored: Venetian craftsmen are wonderfully adept at making copies of the antique and then ‘distressing’ them, which is the expression used in the trade for making things look older than they are.

Tonight, the rooms in Florian overlooking the Piazza, with the innumerable mirrors, the painted panelling and the alcoves barely
large enough to contain one of the little cast iron tables, were empty. The Venetian dowagers, ample or emaciated and certainly rheumaticky, rheumatism being an endemic Venetian disease among the aged, who would normally be here at this hour sipping tea or hot chocolate and talking about death and money, sometimes with equally ancient male contemporaries, were all at home, being cosseted by equally ancient maids, fearing if they went out
prendere un raffredore
, to catch a cold, or worse. The majority of visitors who come to Venice in the hot weather rarely enter these rooms, preferring to sit outside in the Piazza, where there is more action.