University of Virginia Library

31. LETTER XXXI.

You will excuse me at present from a description of
Venice. It is a matter not to be hastily undertaken.
It has also been already done a thousand times; and
I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the public
prints of the United States. I proceed with my letters.

The Venetian festa is a gay affair, as you may imagine.
If not so beautiful and fanciful as the revels
by moonlight, it was more satisfactory, for we could
see and be seen, those important circumstances to
one's individual share in the amusement. At four
o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge
of boats across the Gindecca were cut away, and the
broad canal left clear for a mile up and down. It was
covered in a few minutes with gondolas, and all the
gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad promenade
between the city and the festal island. I should
think five hundred were quite within the number of
gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and
agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was
busy work for the eyes to the right and left, with the
great proportion of beauty, and the rapid glide of their
fairy-like boats. And the quietness of the thing was
so delightful—no crowding, no dust, no noise but the
dash of oars and the ring of merry voices; and we
sat so luxuriously upon our deep cushions the while,
thridding the busy crowd rapidly and silently, without
a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element
that sustained us.

Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their
prows, and these had won the first and second prizes
at the last year's regatta. The private gondolas fell
away from the middle of the canal, and left them free
space for a trial of their speed. They were the most
airy things I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and
as slender and light as they could well be, and hold
together. Each boat had six oars, and the crews
stood with their faces to the beak of their craft;
slight, but muscular men, and with a skill and quickness
at their oars which I had never conceived. I realized
the truth and force of Cooper's inimitable description
of the race in the Brayo. The whole of his
book gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and
one thanks him constantly for the lively interest which
he has thrown over everything in this bewitching city.
The races of the rival boats to-day were not a regular
part of the festa, and were not regularly contested.
The gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely,
and the people soon ceased to be interested in them.

We rowed up and down till dark, following here
and there the boats whose freights attracted us, and
exclaiming every moment at some new glimpse of
beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of
loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, probably
from never walking, and other indolent habits
consequent upon want of exercise: and an oriental air,
sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the whole
race. One feels that he has come among an entirely
new class of women, and hence, probably, the far-famed
fascination of Venice to foreigners.

The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar
to Italy, and which are richer and more enchanting in
Venice than in any other part of it, from the character

of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud;
but at the horizon the sky was died of a deep orange,
which softened away toward the zenith almost imperceptibly,
the whole west like a wall of burning gold.
The mingled softness and splendor of these skies is
indescribable. Everything is touched with the same
hue. A mild, yellow glow is all over the canals and
buildings. The air seems filled with glittering golden
dust, and the lines of the architecture, and the outlines
of the distant islands, and the whole landscape
about you is mellowed and enriched with a new and
glorious light. I have seen one or two such sunsets
in America; but there the sunsets are bolder and
clearer, and with much more sublimity—they have
rarely the voluptuous coloring of those in Italy.

It was delightful to glide along over a sea of light
so richly teinted, among those graceful gondolas, with
their freights of gayety and beauty. As the glow on
the sky began to fade, they all turned their prows toward
San Marc, and dropping into a slower motion,
the whole procession moved on together to the stairs
of the piazzetta; and by the time the twilight was perceptible,
the cafés were crowded, and the square was
like one great fête. We passed the evening in wandering
up and down, never for an instant feeling like strangers,
and excited and amused till long after midnight.

After several days delay, we received an answer this
morning from the authorities, with permission to see
the bridge of sighs, and the prisons of the ducal palace.
We landed at the broad stairs, and passing the desolate
court, with its marble pillars and statues green
with damp and neglect, ascended the “giant's steps,”
and found the warder waiting for us, with his enormous
keys, at the door of a private passage. At the
bottom of a staircase we entered a close gallery, from
which the first range of cells opened. The doors
were broken down, and the guide holding his torch in
them for a moment in passing, showed us the same
dismal interior in each—a mere cave, in which you
would hardly think it possible to breathe, with a raised
platform for a bed, and a small hole in the front wall
to admit food and what air could find its way through
from the narrow passage. There were eight of these;
and descending another flight of damp steps, we came
to a second range, differing only from the first in their
slimy dampness. These are the cells of which Lord
Byron gives a description in the notes to the fourth
canto of Childe Harold. He has transcribed, if you
remember, the inscription from the ceilings and walls
of one which was occupied successively by the victims
of the inquisition. The letters are cut rudely enough,
and must have been done entirely by feeling, as there
is no possibility of the penetration of a ray of light.
I copied them with some difficulty, forgetting that
they were in print, and comparing them afterward
with my copy of Childe Harold, I found them exactly
the same, and I refer you, therefore, to his notes.

In a range of cells still below these, and almost suffocating
from their closeness, one was shown us in which
prisoners were strangled. The rope was passed through
an iron grating of four bars, the executioner standing
outside the cell. The prisoner within sat upon a
stone, with his back to the grating, and the cord was
passed round his neck, and drawn till he was choked.
The wall of the cell was covered with blood, which
had spattered against it with some violence. The
guide explained it by saying, that owing to the narrowness
of the passage the executioner had no room
to draw the cord, and to expedite his business his assistant
at the same time plunged a dagger into the
neck of the victim. The blood had flowed widely
over the wall, and ran to the floor in streams. With
the darkness of the place, the difficulty I found in
breathing, and the frightful reality of the scenes before
me, I never had in my life a comparable sensation of
horror.

At the end of the passage a door was walled up. It
led in the times of the republic, to dungeons under the
canal, in which the prisoner died in eight days from
his incarceration at the farthest, from the noisome
dampness and unwholesome vapors of the place. The
guide gave us a harrowing description of the swelling
of their bodies, and the various agonics of their slow
death. I hurried away from the place with a sickness
at my heart. In returning by the same way I passed
the turning, and stumbled over a raised stone across
the passage. It was the groove of a secret guillotine.
Here many of the state and inquisition victims were
put to death in the darkness of a narrow passage, shut
out even in their last moment from the light and
breath of heaven. The frame of the instrument had
been taken away; but the pits in the wall, which had
sustained the axe, were still there; and the sink on
the other side, where the head fell, to carry off the
blood. And these shocking executions took place directly
before the cells of the other prisoners, within
twenty feet from the farthest. In a cell close to this
guillotine had been confined a state criminal for sixteen
years. He was released at last by the arrival of
the French, and on coming to the light in the square
of San Marc was struck blind, and died into a few days.
In another cell we stopped to look at the attempts of
a prisoner upon its walls, interrupted, happily, by his
release. He had sawed several inches into the front
wall, with some miserable instrument, probably a nail.
He had afterward abandoned this, and had, with prodigious
strength, taken up a block from the floor;
and, the guide assured us, had descended into the cell
below. It was curious to look around his pent prison,
and see the patient labor of years upon those rough
walls, and imagine the workings of the human mind in
such a miserable lapse of existence.

We ascended to the light again, and the guide led us
to a massive door, with two locks, secured by heavy
iron bars. It swung open with a scream, and we
mounted a winding stair, and

Two windows of close grating looked on either side
upon the long canal below, and let in the only light
to the covered passage. It is a gloomy place within,
beautifully as its light arch hangs in the air from without.
It was easy to employ the imagination as we
stood on the stone where Childe Harold had stood before
us, and conjured up in fancy the despair and agony
that must have been pressed into the last glance
at light and life that had been sent through those barred
windows. Across this bridge the condemned were
brought to receive their sentence in the chamber of
the ten, or to be confronted with bloody inquisitors,
and then were led back over it to die. The last light
that ever gladdened their eyes came through those
close bars, and the gay Gindecca in the distance, with
its lively waters covered with boats, must have made
that farewell glance to a Venetian bitter indeed. The
side next the prison is now massively walled up. We
stayed, silently musing at the windows, till the old cicerone
ventured to remind us that his time was precious.

Ordering the gondola round to the stairs of the
piazzetta, we strolled for the first time into the church
of San Marc. The four famous bronze horses stood
with their dilated nostrils and fine action over the
porch, bringing back to us Andrea Doria, and his
threat; and as I remembered the ruined palace of the
old admiral at Genoa, and glanced at the Austrian soldier
upon guard, in the very shadow of the winged
lion, I could not but feel most impressively the moral
of the contrast. The lesson was not attractive enough,
however, to keep us in a burning sun, and we put
aside the heavy folds of the drapery and entered.
How deliciously cool are these churches in Italy!
We walked slowly up toward the distant altar. An

old man rose from the base of one of the pillars, and
put out his hand for charity. It is an incident that
meets one at every step, and with half a glance at his
face I passed on. I was looking at the rich mosaic on
the roof, but his features lingered in my mind. They
grew upon me still more strongly; and as I became
aware of the full expression of misery and pride upon
them, I turned about to see what had become of him.
My two friends had done each the very same thing,
with the same feeling of regret, and were talking of
the old man when I came back to them. We went
to the door, and looked all about the square, but he
was nowhere to be seen. It is singular that he should
have made the same impression upon all of us, of an
old Venetian nobleman in poverty. Slight as my
glance was, the noble expression of sadness about his
fine white head and strong features, are still indelible
in my memory. The prophecy which Byron puts into
the mouth of the condemned doge, is still true in
every particular:—

The church of San Marc is rich to excess, and its
splendid mosaic pavement is sunk into deep pits with
age and the yielding foundations on which its heavy
pile is built. Its pictures are not so fine as those of
the other churches of Venice, but its age and historic
associations make it by far the most interesting.