Venice (17 page)

Into their hugger-mugger city the Venetians have had to insert all the paraphernalia of modern urban life. Industry has generally been kept at arm's length, on the perimeters or on the mainland, but within the city proper a couple of hundred thousand people live, vote and pay their dues – and it is disconcerting how often the Venetian tax-collector seems to come around, shuffling with his receipt book among the buttressed alleys. Venice must be policed, lit, watered, cleaned, like any other city, adapting all the techniques to fit its strange and antique setting.

The old Venetians used to drink rain-water, supplemented by water from the Brenta river. It was channelled into elaborate cisterns and purified through sand-filters: the carved well-heads that you see in Venetian squares are often only the outlets of great underground storage tanks, sometimes almost filling the area of the
campo
. (The cisterns are sometimes still full of water, and sustain the struggling green foliage that persistently presses through the paving-stones.) Since 1884 drinking water has come by pipe from artesian wells at Trebaseleghe, on the mainland. It is stored in reservoirs near Sant' Andrea, and is so good that even Baedeker was prepared to commend it. During the First World War the aqueduct burst somewhere underground, and only swift engineering action, kept secret from the people, prevented a calamity: today the supply is plentiful even in drought, and some of the public drinking fountains splash away merrily all day.

Electric power marches across the lagoon on pylons from its mountain sources. Petrol comes in barges, ships and tanker-trucks –
there are several petrol stations in Venice, including one near St Mark's and one on the Grand Canal. The city gasometer is tucked discreetly away near the northern church of San Francesco della Vigna, far from railing purists. The municipal slaughter-house is near the station: the cattle are driven there from the railway track, two mornings a week, by way of the Square of the Pork Butcher and the Alley of Butchers, and the waters around the building are stained with their blood. The radio station shares with the Municipal Casino the great Palazzo Vendramin, giving rise to a piquant juxtaposition of sound-proof walls, florid fireplaces, gaming tables, marble pillars, ermine and jazz.

The telephone department occupies a beautiful cloister near San Salvatore. The prison stands bleakly, guarded by lions of St Mark, in the shambled warehouse area near the car park, and if you pass by on visiting day you may look between its open doors and see the poor inmates talking gravely with their women-folk through the grilles. The lunatic asylum, isolation hospital, old people's home and consumptive sanatorium are all on islands in the lagoon. The fire brigade stands, its old red motor boats warily shining, beneath a shady arcade near Caʼ Foscari, just off the Grand Canal: when they are summoned to a fire the engines are launched with such fierce momentum that one boat, recently misjudging a manoeuvre in the heat of its enthusiasm, struck the side of a palace and knocked its entire corner askew. The milk comes by truck from the mainland and is distributed by barge, with a tinny clanking of bottles in the half-light – though sixty years ago there were, besides the English herd, cows in sheds at Campo Angelo Raffaele and Santa Margherita. The Conservatoire of Music lives in a vast Renaissance palace near the Accademia bridge, from where the strains of its not very elfin horns emanate relentlessly across the waters. The tax department works in the cloister of Santo Stefano: always a place of controversy, for here Pordenone, commissioned to paint a series of Biblical frescoes, is said to have worn his sword and buckler on the job, in case his ferocious rival Titian came storming through the archway.

Several different kinds of policemen keep Venice safe and on the move. There are the extravagantly accoutred
Carabinieri
, whose
faces, between their cocked hats and their gleaming sword-hilts, are often disconcertingly young and vacuous. There are the State police, drab in workaday grey, who cope with crime. There are the civic police, handsomely dressed in blue, who are responsible for traffic control, and are often to be seen vigilantly patrolling the Grand Canal in tiny speedboats, like toys. You do not need a driving licence in Venice, but your engine must be registered and taxed, if it generates more than three horse-power, and you must have permission to drive mooring stakes into the canal beside your door; so that the city police spend a great deal of time examining credentials and distributing documents, and generally leave the traffic to look after itself. The stringent regulations announced before every ceremonial begin strictly enough, but always peter away as the hours pass, until in the end the policemen, succumbing to the invariable geniality of the occasion, take very little notice at all, and allow the festival boats to swirl about in delightful but sometimes inextricable confusion.

There are a few traffic notices in Venice, reminding boatmen of the speed limit. There is one familiar intersection sign, marking the crossing of two canals. There are many one-way signs. There are even two sets of traffic lights, very popular amongst tourist guides. The novice boatman, like a suburban housewife up for the day's shopping, must learn where he can park his craft with impunity – difficult at St Mark's, dangerous on the Riva (because of the swell), impossible on the Grand Canal, simple in the poor, friendly, good-natured districts that stretch away beyond Rialto to the Fondamenta Nuove. Mostly, though, the Venetian policemen will not bother him, and I am told they are much sought after as sons-in-law.

Much less full of circumstance are the garbage men, who supplement the natural emetic of the sea-tides with a fleet of some twenty grey motor barges. Under the Republic the refuse men formed an influential guild, and a plaque in their honour was mounted above the church door of Santʼ Andrea, behind the car park. They were so grand, indeed, that once they had established family monopolies of the business, they employed other people to do the work for them, and lived comfortably at home on the profits. Today they are not usually proud of their calling, and do not much like to be
photographed at work: but very efficient and impressive they are, all the same, as their barges swirl in convoy into the Grand Canal, cluttered with obscure equipment, blasting their horns and roaring their engines, like warships of advanced and experimental design.

The fleet is run by private enterprise, under municipal contract. A small army of uniformed men, pushing neat metal trolleys, collects the plastic bags each morning from the houses of Venice, and hurries them through the alley-ways towards a rendezvous with their barges. The engines whirr; the rubbish is stacked automatically deep in the hold; and away the barge chugs, no dirtier than a vegetable boat, or smellier than a fish-cart. Ruskin caustically described Venice as a City In The Mud, but she is also a City Upon The Garbage: for they take that rubbish to the islet of Sacca Fisola, at the western tip of Giudecca, and eventually, mixing it hideously with sand, silt and seaweed, use it as the basis of new artificial islands.

The municipal hospital of Venice is a vast and rambling structure near the church of San Zanipolo, occupying the cloister of the church as well as the former building of the Scuola di San Marco. Going into hospital is thus a queer experience, for the way to the wards passes through one of the quaintest façades in Venice, a marvellous
trompe
-
l'oeil
creation of the fifteenth century, replete with lions, grotesqueries, tricks of craftsmanship and superimpositions. The reception hall is a tall dark chamber of pillars, and the offices, operating theatres and wards run away like a warren to the distant melancholy quayside of the Fondamenta Nuove, looking directly across to the cemetery. If you happen to take a wrong turning, on your way to the dispensary, you may find yourself in the fabulous chapter room of the Great School of St Mark, now a medical library, with the most magnificently opulent ceiling I have ever seen. If you should chance to die, they will wheel you at once into the old church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, which now forms part of the hospital, and is only opened for funerals: it is remarkable partly for its manner of ingrained despair, and partly for a monument to a seventeenth-century worthy so hugely domineering that it faces two ways, one supervising the entire chancel of the church, the other demanding instant obeisance from anyone entering the vestibule. And in an
arched boatyard beneath the hospital stand the duty ambulances, powerful blue motor boats which, summoned to an emergency, race off through the canals with a scream of sirens and a fine humanitarian disregard of the traffic rules.

Other city services cannot be wholly mechanized, and retain rituals and conventions passed down from the Middle Ages. The water scavengers, for example, do their work in the old way, scooping up floating scum in baskets, or pottering grimly about in boats with nets and buckets: the man who cleans our side-canal also carries a bottle of wine among his tackle – in case, he once cheerfully told me, his zest should momentarily fail him. The postal service, too, has changed slowly down the centuries. The central post office occupies the enormous Fondaco dei Tedeschi near the Rialto bridge, once the headquarters of the German mercantile community – it contained their offices, their warehouses, their chapel, and even hotel accommodation for visiting traders. This building was once decorated with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione, after those two young geniuses had prudently helped to extinguish a fire there. Today the place is gloomy and echoing, and from it nearly 100 postpersons go out each day in their smart blue uniforms, slung with satchels. They take the
vaporetto
to their allotted quarters, and then walk swiftly from house to house, popping the mail into baskets lowered from upstairs floors on long strings, and sometimes singing out a name in a rich and vibrant baritone.

Since the twelfth century the city has been divided into six
sestieri
or wards: to the north and east of the Grand Canal, the
sestieri
of Cannaregio, San Marco and Castello; to the south and west, San Polo, Santa Croce and Dorsoduro (which includes Giudecca and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore). Within each of these sections the houses are numbered consecutively from beginning to end, regardless of corners, cross-roads or culs-de-sac. The
sestiere
of San Marco, for example, begins at No.1 (the Doge's Palace) and ends at No. 5562 (beside the Rialto bridge). There are 29,254 house numbers in the city of Venice, and within the limits of each sector their numbering is inexorable. Through all the quivering crannies of the place, the endless blind alleys and cramped courtyards, the bridges and arches
and shuttered squares – through them all, coldly and dispassionately, the house numbers march with awful logic. The postman's task thus retains a Gothic simplicity and severity. He begins at No. 1, and goes on till he finishes.

Away down the Grand Canal stands the superb Palazzo Corner della Regina. This now houses the archives of the Biennale, Venice's international art festival, but not so long ago it was the Monte di Pietà, the municipal pawnshop. Nothing could have been more tactfully organized than this institution was. On the ground floor, to be sure, there was a sale room of a certain ragbag ebullience, haunted by fierce-eyed bargain hunters and eager dealers: but upstairs, where you deposited your treasures and drew your cash, all was propriety. The atmosphere was hushed. The counters were discreet and sombre, as in an old-fashioned bank. The attendants were courteous. There was none of the flavour of old clothes, rusty trinkets and embarrassment that pervades an English pawnbroker's. The Monte di Pietà used to suggest to me a modest but eminent Wall Street finance house, or perhaps a College of Heraldry.

A pawnshop is a pawnshop, though, however kindly disguised; and if you hung around the lane beside that great building you would often encounter the sad people of the hock-shop world, broken old men with sacks of junk, or wispy ladies, hopefully hurrying bent-backed with their mattresses and disjointed sewing-tables.

Everybody dies in Venice. The Venetians die in the normal course of events, and the visitors die as a matter of convention. In the Middle Ages the population was periodically decimated by the plague, which was often brought to Venice by way of the Levantine trade routes, and was only checked, on repeated occasions, by lavish votive offerings and prayers. Immense doses of Teriaca failed to keep the plague at bay. A single fifteenth-century epidemic reduced the population by two-thirds: nearly 50,000 people died in the city, it is said, and another 94,000 in the lagoon settlements. So concerned were the old Venetians with these perennial horrors that they even stole, from Montpellier in France, the body of St Roch, then considered the most effective champion against bacterial demons,
and they built five churches in thanksgiving for the ends of plagues – the Salute, the Redentore, San Rocco, San Sebastiano and San Giobe (Job was locally canonized, in the plague areas of the Adriatic shores, because of his affinity with sufferers).

Many a precious fresco has been lost because the Venetians whitewashed a wall to stifle the plague germs; and the whole floor of the church of San Simeone Grande was once laboriously rebuilt and elevated, owing to the presence of plague corpses beneath its flagstones. When Titian died of the plague, in 1576, only he among the 70,000 victims of that particular epidemic was allowed burial in a church. Nor is this all very ancient history. A silver lamp in the Salute was placed there as recently as 1836, to mark the end of a cholera plague: and there were ghastly scenes of suffering – corpses lowered from windows into barges, mass burials in the lagoon – when cholera attacked Venice during the 1848 revolution.

Malaria, too, has killed or debilitated thousands of Venetians down the centuries, and is only now checked by the new chemicals (mosquitoes are still pestilential in the late summer); and the harsh Venetian winters, with their rasping winds and interminable rains, have been fatal to innumerable sickly pensioners. For all its glorious spring idylls, the climate is treacherous – if balanced nowadays by the relative peacefulness of a city without cars. Often the days feel mysteriously depressing and enervating, as though the sadness of Venice has impregnated its air; and it is said that Eleanora Duse suffered all her life from the moods induced by these moments of climatic hopelessness.