(1990)
Venice, An Interior
The Venetians
Let us begin with what you don’t see, perhaps the only thing that isn’t on show, whose existence seems improbable and, to the visitor, almost impossible. People who live in Venice! Men and women who have nothing to do with the tourist machine and who live there permanently! Human beings who spend the whole year in that Great Museum, throughout the city’s four long seasons! Individuals who are not content with the mere three or five or seven days that every mortal should set aside in the vast diary of his or her biography to be spent in the one place in the world that, if left unvisited, could tarnish the worthy portrait of someone who throughout his life – however decent or dissolute – has always done his aesthetic duty!
Only this threat to the perfection of our lived experience can explain why it is that, along with younger tourists (the dreaded backpackers who muddy the waters in summer), vast groups of ancient, even decrepit, visitors appear in St Mark’s Square with eyes protected by cameras with dioptre lenses or else fixed firmly on the ground, as if they were afraid to look up and straight ahead and finally see what it is deemed vital that every human being on the planet should see at least once, as if looking up might bring about their own immediate departure to that other paradise from which there is no return. Indeed, sometimes the crews on the planes that land at Marco Polo Airport – with its distinctly Central American feel – won’t allow the able-bodied passengers off for a good half-hour because of the large number of ‘wheelchairs’ (as a stewardess with a utilitarian mindset insists on calling the people occupying them) who have to be deposited on terra firma first and by the not entirely risk-free means of rudimentary cranes and plastic toboggans. An hour later, of course, the ‘wheelchairs’ will have to tackle the insoluble problem of climbing innumerable steps and bridges, but at least they will not have to add to their other misfortunes the ignominy of never having seen Venice. You simply have to see it.
Venetians are aware of this, and the knowledge that their city is the key destination in the rest of humanity’s dream geography has forged their character and determined how they view themselves in relation to the world. It’s hardly surprising then that Venetians, even now, consider themselves to be the centre of that world so hell-bent on visiting them that it is prepared, if necessary, to do so on its knees. Some of the more arrogant Venetians can still be heard to say that the campo – the country – begins on the other side of the Ponte della Libertà, the only connection (apart from the railway bridge) between the mainland and the group of islands that make up the city. That two-mile-long bridge, the brainchild of Mussolini, Vittorio Cini and Count Volpi de Misurata, has attached the city to the peninsula for well over fifty years now, allowing cars to lay siege to Venice, at its very gates, like some new form of dragon, and the bridge is perceived by Venetians as an impertinent umbilical cord, which they have no option but to accept. For Venetians, Venice is the City par excellence. The rest of the world is merely campo. The harshest and most belligerent version of this idea has a racist variant: ‘Blacks begin on the other side of the Ponte della Libertà.’
But these inhabitants – the only true Whites in their opinion, the only civilized people in all humanity, which they consider barbarous by comparison – are not easy to spot. Invaded, harassed, plundered, driven out and slowly deprived of their White customs and urban traditions, there are ever fewer of those who stubbornly refuse to give any more ground. Throughout the twentieth century Venetians emigrated in steadily growing numbers to Mestre, which started out as a working-class district a few miles from the city and is now the secret envy of those treacherous Venetians who have grown frail and unsteady on their feet, because it has discotheques, cinemas, young people, department stores, supermarkets, things to do, life. In the days of the Republic, Venice had almost three hundred thousand inhabitants. Now there are only seventy thousand, and the desertions are not over yet.
Venetians are not easy to spot; largely because they don’t go out very much. Entrenched behind their watermelon-green shutters, they watch the rest of the world – the periphery of the world – in their pyjamas and via their twenty TV channels. Their indifference and lack of curiosity about anything other than themselves and their ancestors has no equivalent in even the most inward-turning of villages in the northern hemisphere. Venice’s three cinemas tend to be languid, half-empty places, as do the Teatro Goldoni, the bars and the streets as darkness falls, the lecture theatres and even the concert halls, although, as I will explain later, these are often the exceptions. Almost nothing will drag Venetians from their houses; almost nothing will shift them from their city. They avoid anywhere that has been developed with tourists in mind or that has in some way been contaminated by tourism, which means nearly everywhere. Their space is shrinking fast, but of course you won’t see them sitting on café terraces listening to an anachronistic orchestra (clarinet, violin, double bass, grand piano and accordion) in St Mark’s Square, nor in the nearby restaurants and trattorie, nor along the shrill, fairground-like Riva degli Schiavoni facing the lagoon, nor, needless to say, in a gondola. And they will only be seen in the ineluctable Caffè Florian at ungodly hours when any visitors are likely to be sleeping the deep sleep of the exhausted tourist. On the other hand, you might find them in places that seem unalluring to the traveller, but which are the last redoubt of the Venetians’ circumscribed habits, places about which travel agents neglect to inform their already overwhelmed clientele: at midday, the Venetian ladies and gentlemen drink their aperitif in Paolin, an unassuming ice-cream-parlour-cum-bar; they take their evening stroll along the sublime Zattere; and after dark, night-owls and music-lovers can be found in the old-fashioned, hidden-away Salone Campiello, one of the few places that stays open after ten o’clock. On opera nights, of course, the locals can be found at the eighteenth-century Teatro La Fenice, the favourite meeting place of the whitest and most urbane of Venetians, that is, the proudest, most exclusive, most scornful and influential. Not that La Fenice is a particularly important theatre, nor can the operatic tradition of Venice be compared with that of Milan, but it is there, in the orchestra stalls, that the gente per bene, the true Venetians, go to see and be seen.
Precisely because the strictly musical function of those seats is even more reduced or attenuated than it is in most such places, they become a showcase for dresses, shoes, fur coats and jewels; and the Venetians’ own ignorance of the outside world leads them to misjudge how much to display or, to be more exact, to show no judgement at all. Singers at the theatre sometimes complain that their voices cannot be heard above the rattle of jewellery and that their eyes are dazzled by the glint of gold in the darkness, because some ladies do rather over-adorn hands, ears and neck in their eagerness to outshine, well, themselves principally.
Indeed, that is one of the identifying features of the Venetians, by which I mean their need to get dressed up and put on fine clothes, shoes and jewellery. In fact, the curious traveller will probably be able to identify the few natives he may come across in his wanderings fairly easily because, just as tourists go around looking shabby, not to say downright grubby, Venetians seem always to be on their way to some elegant party at any time of the day or year, even when the heat and humidity join forces to leave the most dapper dripping with sweat. You can recognize Venetian women in particular by three things: their lovely carved, chiselled, angular faces are always heavily made-up like the women in Egon Schiele paintings; they walk very fast; and they have beautiful, toned legs from a lifetime of going up and down steps and crossing bridges.
Nevertheless they’re not that easy to spot. They don’t even take the same streets as tourists. Driven out of the bright main thoroughfares, where the continuous flow of people occasionally causes human traffic jams that are frustrating in the extreme to those with appointments to keep, Venetians seek out short cuts and set off down byways that no foreigner would venture into for fear of becoming lost for ever in the unfathom
able labyrinth that is Venice: alleys barely wide enough for one person, narrow passageways between two buildings, arcades that appear to lead nowhere, back lanes that look as if they will end up in the canal. The Venetians have been obliged to surrender their streets to incomers, to people from the campo, and they traverse instead a hidden Venice, parallel to that of the tourist itineraries signed with yellow arrows. In fact, they don’t often get to enjoy the loveliest parts of their city, the ones that everyone else dreams of seeing: they see instead chipped and crumbling walls, tiny bridges over anonymous dwarfish canals, cracked and peeling stucco, the reverse side of the city, its shadow-self, in which there are no shops or hotels, restaurants or bars, only the essential elements, stone and water. They also avoid the crowded vaporetti, or waterbuses, and so are forced to walk miles whenever they leave the house. At most, they might allow themselves to take the traghetto, or gondola, which, for a few pence, carries them from one side of the Grand Canal to the other. This, however, also turns out to be one of the city’s most thrilling experiences, for while the traghetto offers only a brief crossing, avoiding the vaporetti and the motorboats travelling up and down the canal, it affords its passengers a glimpse of the palaces from the height at which they were intended to be seen.
The archipelago
Venetians, as well as those who, though not born in Venice, live here, and, indeed, even those visitors who dare to stay longer than the period stipulated by most conventional biographies, all end up losing the desire or will to leave the city. We can discuss later the real reason for this strange fixity, for the total engagement with the city felt by those who linger too long in Venice, this mixture of contentment and resignation. The fact is, though, that Venetians rarely leave their city, and when they do, it is only in order to travel somewhere that has always belonged to them anyway.
The large island of the Lido, whose beaches Visconti immortalized in that collection of picture postcards for maritime aesthetes entitled Death in Venice, is today, in contrast to what we were shown in the film, a totally domestic place, and not in the least international. It’s a family beach to which Venetians travel daily during the month of July, making the twenty-minute crossing over the grey waters of the lagoon. Awaiting them will be a beach hut, which, for the season, will have cost them five million lira to rent, and which they will use for that one month and the first week of September only, because in August they will be holidaying in ‘their’ mountains, the Dolomites. These are probably the greatest distances they will cover in the whole of their reclusive existences. The Venetians’ fugitive nature even obliges them to avoid the beach of the Hotel des Bains on which Dirk Bogarde’s drowsy eyes lingered so interminably. Not only do they fear that it might attract the occasional tourist made up to look like Aschenbach or coiffed à la Tadzio, they also consider it second-rate. The really good beach, they say, belongs to the Hotel Excelsior.
The Lido, in other respects, is a summer version of the orchestra stalls at La Fenice. Venetian society is so inbred that, just as its members despise all foreigners (not to mention their compatriots, especially if they’re terroni, people who come from any city south of Rome), they admire each other immensely, and in places where they know that they’re likely to meet, they do their utmost to arouse the boundless admiration of their mirror images. This is why the ladies arrive at the beach wearing designer silk dresses, strappy gold stilettos and all the diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, pearls and aquamarines they have at their disposal. The silks and the shoes will be left in the beach hut, but the jewellery and the gold will remain even when the lady decides to take a break from social chit-chat for a moment and bathe in the warm, pale waters of the sea.
Each island in the small archipelago of which Venice forms a part seems to have or have had some specific function. Venice itself is made up of a group of islands and, before it took on the identity of a city, it was called the Rialto. Nowadays, seen from above, there appear to be only two islands, separated by the Grand Canal as if by a pair of meticulous, patient, curved scissors. Put together so that they almost fit each other, the islands look rather like a painter’s palette. These two islands are not intended to serve anyone, but to be served by others. Determined that her immutable surface or face should be exposed only to the important things in life, Venice distributes about the lagoon any task or occupation or service that is deemed too specialized or too shameful, anything subsidiary, unpleasant, functional, unsavoury, anything that should not be seen and has no place in the city’s administrative, ecclesiastical, courtly, nautical, commercial self.
So, for example, the island of Sant’Erasmo is the city’s garden. From there and from the islands of Vignole and Mazzorbo come almost all of Venice’s fruit and vegetables. Taking a boat along the canals of Vignole is like plunging into a jungle landscape. The green areas that you don’t see in Venice (they do exist, but are hidden) are to be found on these island-gardens, on these island-warehouses. San Clemente and San Servolo, for their part, were home, respectively, to the insane asylums for men and women, until those institutions were abolished by the Italian state ten or fifteen years ago. San Lazzaro degli Armeni was a leper colony until the eighteenth century, when, as its name indicates, it was handed over to the large and highly cultured Armenian community, just as La Giudecca was the island chosen by the Jews (the ghetto was another matter) as a place to live. Sacca Sessola received TB patients, while on San Francesco del Deserto there is only a monastery (Franciscan of course) with immaculately kept gardens patrolled by peacocks. Burano has its speciality too: the famous merletti, or lace, although most of what is sold there now is made in Hong Kong and Taiwan – as is almost everything sold anywhere in the world. And Murano, where you can find the astonishing apse of Santa Maria e San Donato, dating from the end of the eleventh century, is, otherwise, a succession of shops and factories making and selling hand-blown glass, the business from which the island makes its living. There they create Barovier fruit, Venini vases and Moretti wine goblets. Indeed, the whole island has a glassy stare to it.
However, the most thrilling of the islands is Torcello. There is almost nothing on Torcello: two churches, three restaurants and La Locanda Cipriani. According to Giovanna Cipriani, the grand-daughter of the founder of this exquisite chain of hotels and restaurants, St Hemingway, the patron saint of tourists, used to stay at La Locanda, existing for days on end on a diet of sandwiches and wine, large quantities of which (the wine) were taken up to him in his room. The rest of the island is barely populated and dominated by some curiously unrampant vegetation.
But Torcello is basically where Venice originated, the first island that looked likely to be inhabited permanently by refugees from Aquileia, Altino, Concordia and Padua, who built stilt-houses in the estuary in their temporary flight from the Barbarian invasions of the fifth century. Torcello was the most important of the islands in those early days, yet now only two churches have been left standing, both of which date from that period. It is a place that has returned to its natural state. The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and the small church of Santa Fosca are both unlikely remnants of the Venetian-Byzantine style of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (although the former also contains elements from the seventh century) and of a population that (unlike the Venetians themselves, whose numbers grew and then stopped growing) grew and decayed to the point where the earth swallowed up the palaces and the other churches, the monasteries and the houses, as well as a flourishing wool industry. Venice is not a true ruin, but Torcello is, the victim of its increasingly swampy waters and of malaria. In one of the mosaics inside the cathedral (the one showing the Last Judgement), there is an extraordinary depiction of Lucifer. To his right stand some spear-wielding angels busily flinging into the fires of hell those found guilty of pride, here represented by crowned and mitred heads with ermine collars and bejewelled ears. Those heads are immediately seized upon by small green angels, the fallen ones. Lucifer, seated on a throne the arms of which are the heads of dragons en
gaged in devouring human bodies, has the same face and is making the same gesture as God the Father; he has the same abundant white beard and hair, the same venerable appearance, his right hand raised in a gesture of greeting and of serenely imposed order. On his knees sits a pretty child all dressed in white, who looks like the Infant Redeemer, God the Son. But Lucifer’s face and body are dark green: he is a topsy-turvy version of God the Father, or, rather, a negative version, and the child sitting on his lap is the Antichrist, who also has his right hand raised in greeting – the very same gesture – like a small prince gently beckoning to the dead.
The dead in Venice have their own island too, occupying the whole of San Michele, whose walls – it is the only walled island – can be seen from the vaporetto as you approach. The tops of cypresses wave above the walls, warning the visitor of what awaits them. And the view from the water provides the best perspective from which to see the façade of the Renaissance church, built by that excellent architect Codussi, and made, like so many other Venetian churches, out of white Istrian stone, one of the city’s colours.