In a chapter upon “Literary Residences,” among The Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli said: “No foreigners, men of letters, lovers of the arts, or even princes, would pass through Antwerp without visiting the House of Rubens, to witness the animated residence of genius, and the great man who conceived the idea.” This volume is intended to be a record of the Animated Residences of Genius which are still existing in Venice; and it is written for the foreigners, for the Men of Letters, for the lovers of art, and even for the princes who pass through the town, and who care to make such houses a visit.
It is the result of many weeks of patient but pleasant study of Venice itself. Everything here set down has been verified by personal observation, and is based upon the reading of scores of works of travel and biography. It is the Venice I know in the real life of the present and in the literature of the past; and to me it is Venice from its best and most interesting side.
The Queen of the Adriatic is peculiarly poor in local guide-books and in local maps. In the former are to be found but slight reference to that part of Venice which is most dear to the lovers of bookmen and to the lovers of books; and the latter contain the names of none but the larger of the squares, streets, and canals, leaving, in many instances, the searcher after the smaller thoroughfares entirely afloat in the Adriatic, with no compass by which to steer.
The stranger in Venice, accustomed to the nomenclature of the streets and the avenues, the alleys and the courts, of the cities and towns with which he is familiar in other parts of the world, may be interested to learn that here a large canal is called a Rio, or a Canale; that a Calle is a street open at both ends; that a Rio Terrà is a street which was once a canal; that a Ramo is a small, narrow street, branching out of a larger one; that a Salizzada is a wide, paved street; that a Ruga is just a street; that a Rughetta, or a Piscina, is a little street; that a Riva is a narrow footway along the bank of a canal; that a Fondamenta is a longer and a broader passage-way, a quay, or an embankment; that a Corte is a court-yard; that a Sottoportico is an entrance into a court, through, or under, a house—that which in Edinburgh is called a Pend, and in Paris a Cité; that a large square is a Piazza; that a small square is a Piazzetta, or a Campo; that a small campo is a Campiello; that a plain, commonplace house is a Casa; that a mansion is a Palazzo; that an island is an Isola; that a bridge is a Ponte; that a tower is a Campanile; that a ferry is a Traghetto; that a parish is a Parrochia; and that a district is a Contrada, or a Sistiere.
Armed with this information, the readers must do the rest for themselves.
To Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement, to Miss Henrietta Macy, to Mrs. Walter F. Brown, to Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, to Dr. Alexander Robertson, to Mr. William Logsdail, I owe my thanks for much valuable information given me while I was enlarging, elaborating, and revising the article, printed in Harper’s Magazine for July, 1896, upon which this volume is based.
Laurence Hutton.
Casa Frolo,
50 Giudecca.
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It is almost impossible for any one who is at all familiar with the voluminous amount of literature relating to the history and to the art of Venice, to refrain from quoting, voluntarily or involuntarily, what he has read and absorbed concerning “the dangerous and sweet-charmed town,” which Ruskin calls a golden city paved with emerald, and which Goethe said is a city which can only be compared with itself. Comparisons in Venice are certainly as odorous as are some of its canals, while many of its streets are not only paved with emerald, but are frescoed now with glaring End-of-the-Nineteenth-Century advertisements of dentifrice and sewing-machines.
That which first strikes the observant stranger in Venice, to-day, is the fact that the Venetians have absolutely and entirely lost their grip upon the beautiful. Nothing on earth can be finer than the art of its glory; nothing in the world can be viler than the so-called art of its decadence. That the descendants of the men who decorated the palaces of five or six hundred years ago could have conceived, or endured, the wall-papers, the stair-carpets, and the hat-racks in the Venetian hotels of the present, is beyond belief. Whatever is old is magnificent, from the madonnas of Gian Bellini to the window of the Cicogna Palace on the Fondamenta Briati. Whatever is new is ugly, from the railway-station at one end of the Grand Canal to the gas-house at the other. And the iron bridges, and the steamboats, and the drop-curtain in the Malibran Theatre are the worst of all.
When the English-speaking and the English-reading visitors in Venice, for whom this volume is written, overcome the feeling that they are predestined to fall into one of the canals before they leave the city; when they become accustomed to being driven about in a hearse-shaped, one-manned row-boat; when they have been shown all the traditional sights, have bought the regulation old brass and old glass, have learned to draw smoke out of the long, thin, black, rat-tailed straw-covering things the Venetians call cigars—when they have seen and have done all these, they will find themselves much more interested in the house in which Byron lived, and in the perfectly restored palace in which Browning died, than in the half-ruined, wholly decayed mansions of all the Doges who were ever Lord Mayors of Venice. The guide-books tell us where Faliero plotted and where Foscari fell, where Desdemona suffered and where Shylock traded; but they give us no hint as to where Sir Walter Scott lodged or where Rogers breakfasted, or what was done here by the many English-speaking Men of Letters who have made Venice known to us, and properly understood. Upon these chiefly it is my purpose here to dwell.
Venice, with all her literature, has brought forth but few literary men of her own. There are but few poets among her legitimate sons, and few were the poets she adopted. The early annalists and the later historians were almost the only writers of importance who were entitled to call her mother; and to most of these she has been, though kindly, little more than a step-mother or a mother-in-law.
Shakspere, who wrote much about Venice, and who probably never saw it, remarked once that all the world’s a stage. Venice, even now, is a grand spectacular show; and no drama ever written is more dramatic than is Venice itself. Mr. Howells prefaces his Venetian Life