On the Shores of the Mediterranean

In 1825, the murazzi, neglected since the fall of the Republic in 1797, were breached during an enormous storm, but were made good again. On a day in 1967, the first year in which accurate measurements were kept, the water rose five feet above the average sea level. In the forty-seven years between 1867 and 1914, only seven exceptionally high waters, those more than three and a half feet above the normal level, submerged the city; but in the fifty years between 1917 and 1967 Venice sank beneath the waves more than forty times, an extraordinary increase, so that looking at a vertical graph of these high waters during the period from 1867 to 1967 the lines representing them appear as eight more or less isolated trees between 1867 and 1920, some thick clumps in the thirties, late forties and early fifties, and a dense, soaring forest in the late fifties and sixties. The longest line of all is the one showing the acqua alta of 4 November 1966.

During the night of 3–4 November, the sirocco blew Force 8, the barometer fell to around 750 mm, there was continual heavy rain and waves twelve feet high roared in over the Litorali, submerging Cavallino, the northernmost one, smashing the elegant bathing establishments on the Lido and hurling aside the outerworks of the murazzi on Pellestrina, the great boulders piled fifteen feet high, then breaching, in ten different places, the walls themselves, composed of huge blocks of marble six feet long, but on which no proper repair work had been done for more than thirty years. This time the water at Venice rose six and a half feet above the average sea level, and the result was spectacular.

It poured under the 450 or so bridges (scarcely any Venetians, let alone outsiders, agree about the number of bridges in the city, or any other of the following figures), overflowing the 177 – some say 150 – canals, the rii, 46 of which are branches off the Canalazzo, the Grand Canal, inundating the 117, or 122, or whatever number of shoals or islands on which the city is said to be built, the 15,000 houses in which large numbers of people were living on the ground floors in the six sestieri, or wards, into which it is divided, and the majority of the 107 churches, of which 80 were still in use. It also inundated 3000 miles of streets and alleys, the various open spaces, the campi, so called because they were once expanses of grass, the campielli and the piazzette, not to speak of the only Piazza, St Mark’s, with an unimaginably vile compound of all the various effluents mentioned previously in connection with the Lagoon. To which was added diesel oil and gas oil which had escaped from the storage tanks, leaving the city without electric light, means of cooking or heating, or any communication with the outside world, not to speak of the awful, immense, much of it irreparable, damage done to innumerable works of art.

The acqua alta persisted for more than twenty hours. The most dangerous moment came at six in the evening, when the water reached the highest level ever recorded. This was the moment that the Venetians call the acqua morta, when it should begin to go down but doesn’t. By this time the glass was down to 744 mm and if at this moment a fresh impulse had been given to the waters by the sirocco, forcing it to yet higher levels, Venice might well have collapsed. As it was, a miracle occurred. The wind changed. It began to blow from the south-west, a wind the people of Venice and the Lagoon call the vento Garbin, and by nine o’clock that night the waters began to fall and the city was saved, at least for the time being.

Long before we stepped ashore from the steamer on to Riva degli Schiavoni, the great expanse of marble quay off which Slavs from the Dalmatian coast used to moor their vessels in St Mark’s Basin, darkness had added itself to the fog, creating the sort of conditions that even Jack the Ripper would have found a bit thick for his work down in nineteenth-century Whitechapel.

The fog dissipated what had seemed a romantic possibility when we left Chioggia but now seemed a crazy dream, that we might sweep into Venice from the Lido on the No. 11 steamer up the Canale di San Marco and see the domes and campanili of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute not as we had seen them once, coming in from the sea in the heat of the day, liquefying in the mirage, then reconstituting themselves again, something that would be impossible at this season, but sharply silhouetted, appearing larger than life, against the afterglow of what could equally well be a winter or summer sunset, with what would be equally black gondolas bobbing on the wine-coloured waters in the foreground. This was a spectacle we had enjoyed often, usually in summer, coming back after a long afternoon by the lifeless waters of the Lido with sand between our toes and stupefied with sun, our only preoccupation whether we would be able to extract enough hot water from the erratic hot water system in our equally decrepit hotel to allow us to share a shallow bath; and whether we could find another place to eat, in addition to the few we already knew, which was not infested with, although we hated to admit it, people like ourselves, fellow visitors to Venice who on any day in the high season, July and August, probably outnumber the inhabitants.

Never at the best of times a very substantial-looking city – even the largest buildings having something impermanent about them, due perhaps to the fact that they have not only risen from the water but, however imperceptibly to the human eye, are now in the process of sinking back into it – on this particular evening the fog had succeeded in doing what the mirage could only accomplish for a matter of moments – caused it, apart from its lights, to disappear from view almost completely.

Disembarking from the steamer, we turned left on Riva degli Schiavoni, passing the entrances to the narrow calli which lead off from it, Calle delle Rasse, where the Serbian material used for furnishing the interiors of the felzi, the now largely extinct cabins of the closed gondolas, used to be sold, and Calle Albanesi, the Street of the Albanians, down which some of our fellow passengers had already vanished. While walking along the Riva we just missed falling into what is, because it is spanned by the Bridge of Sighs, the best known and most photographed canal in Venice after the Grand Canal, the Rio Palazzo. This would have been a bore because besides contracting pneumonia (our luggage was already at the railway station), if we had inadvertently drunk any of it we would have had to rush off to the Ospedale Civile, San Giovanni e Paolo, in order to have pumped out of us a mixture the smallest ingredient of which was water. Then we crossed the Rio by the Ponte di Paglia, passing on our right hand the Palazzo delle Prigioni, from which the magistrates known as the Signori di Notte al Criminale used to look out at night for evil-doers, malviventi, arrest and try them, and if they were sufficiently low and common and criminal, sentence them to the Pozzi, otherwise the Wells, the cells at the lowest level of the Prigioni, which were reserved for the worst sort of common criminals.

Then on along the Molo, the furthest point pirates ever reached when attacking Venice, back in the ninth century when it was young, past the forest of piles where the gondolas were moored, now, in this weather, all covered with tarpaulins, as they would be in the Bacino Orseolo, the basin behind the Piazza San Marco where there is another big fleet of them moored. For no one on a day like this would have used a gondola, unless they were sposi, newly married, or were dead and being conveyed in a funeral gondola to Isola San Michele from one of the undertakers’ establishments on the Fondamenta Nuove. In fact, today, scarcely anyone goes to the cemetery in one of the old funeral gondolas, which were picturesquely decorated with a pair of St Mark’s lions in polished brass; now the undertakers’ boats are almost all big, powered vessels.

Then we turned right into Piazzetta San Marco, with the Palazzo Ducale on one hand and the Mint and the Library designed by Jacopo Sansovino on the other, passing between the feet of the two immense grey and red granite columns that someone had brought here from Syria or Constantinople. Somewhere overhead, invisible in the fog, the grey column supported the bronze lion, really a chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent, whether Etruscan, Persian or Chinese no one really knows, to which some inspired innovator has added wings. The other bears a marble figure poised on a crocodile, said to be that of Theodore, the Greek saint who was the patron of the Veneto until the body of St Mark arrived in such a dramatic fashion in the city (having been hastily cleared through customs in Alexandria by Muslim officials who had been told he was a consignment of pork). In fact the statue is not one of St Theodore at all, but is made up of several pieces from the ancient world, the topmost part being a magnificent head of Mithridates, King of Pontus. The statue is a copy. The original is in the Palazzo Ducale.

We entered the Piazza, described by Napoleon, in a rare lighthearted mood, and with reason, as the ‘finest open-air drawing room in the world’, an immense open space, originally paved with bricks, now covered with black trachyte, a fine-grained volcanic rock of rough texture, from the Euganean Hills near Padua, ornamented with narrow inserts of white Istrian marble. The design, made by Andrea Tirali in 1723, forms a pattern of interconnecting squares and rectangles, punctuated by white dots on the black background, so that from the belfry of the Campanile high overhead, the Piazza looks as if two parallel rows of black and white carpets have been laid end to end in it on top of a large, black, fitted carpet, for the reception of some distinguished personage.

Although a superficial glance gives one the impression that it is rectangular, the Piazza is a trapezoid, a quadrilateral having neither pair of sides parallel, and is more than thirty yards wider at its eastern than at its western end.

Three sides of it are occupied by what appears to be one enormous, soot-blackened palace of what are, to all but the most pernickety, irreproachable dimensions. The fourth side is occupied by what is arguably the most fantastic basilica in Christendom, San Marco, a building surmounted by Islamic domes, embellished with cupolas and gilded crosses on top of them, that look more like extra-terrestrial vehicles sent to bear the building away to another world than the work of an architect.

To the right of the Basilica, facing the square, is the smallest of the two squares that lead into the Piazza, the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, furnished with a fountain and red marble lions. At the far end of this little piazza is what was once the splendid banqueting hall which used to be linked with the Ducal Palace by a corridor; and at the point where it ceases to be the Piazzetta and becomes the Piazza, an archway leads out of it into the street of shops called the Merceria dell’Orologio under the Torre dell’Orologio, a very pretty building with two bronze giants on top of it, who together strike the hours for the clock below on a great bell. Hidden within the tower are the Magi who, in Ascension week, emerge from a little side door, preceded by an angel, and pass before the Virgin in her niche above the gilt and blue enamelled clock face to vanish through a similar door on the far side, a procession they make every hour.

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.

Tonight, what action there was was in the bar, which is about as comfortable as most bars have become in Italy, which means that there is hardly anything to sit on. In it three men and three girls were standing at the bar drinking Louis Roederer, which is a terrible price in a shop in Italy and an unimaginable price in such a place as Florian, where anything, even a beer, costs at least twice as much as it would in a more modest establishment.

The men were dressed in tweed and grey flannel. Two of them had camel-hair coats draped over their shoulders and the third wore a double-breasted herring-bone coat. All three of them wore Rolex watches and beautifully polished black or brown moccasins with tassels, one of the badges of the well-off, or those who want to be thought well-off, everywhere. All were over forty, possibly nearer fifty, with dark hair so uniformly and stylishly grizzled that I was tempted to ask them if they had barbers who grizzled it for them. They had typical Venetian faces: prominent, rather Semitic noses, the calculating eyes of shopkeepers, which in fact was probably what they were, shopkeepers who looked as if they might be involved in slightly questionable activities but nothing that would normally lead to actual prosecution, and if it did, and was successful, would only involve a fine which they could afford. Hard faces, softened for the drinks with the girls; the faces of men not easily amused, or much given to laughter, unless in the form of some carefully controlled internal convulsion; the faces of men who were by nature slightly condescending, omniscient – to put it bluntly – know-alls, courteous, suspicious, contemptuous of outsiders, enjoying being in the position of being able to observe others, but not enjoying being scrutinized themselves.

The girls were in their middle twenties. All three wore wedding rings, in addition to other loot, on their fingers. What were they, we both wondered. These men’s mistresses, other men’s wives? They might, just conceivably, be their daughters, or their nieces. No one was giving anything away, not even the barman whom they all called by his first name. Uniformly well-formed, longhaired, long-legged, the sort of girls who can wear flat heels and still look as if they are wearing high heels, not particularly beautiful but so well-groomed that most men would not notice the fact, the product of female emancipation in post-war Italy where, until well into the sixties, girls stayed at home with their mothers in the evening, were chaperoned if they went out, and it was exceptional to find one who could drive a car. These girls looked not only as if they drove cars, but drove fast ones.

They did not look like typical Venetians, although, like the men, they interpolated whole paragraphs in Venetian dialect into their conversation, that strange amalgam which has strains of French, Arabic and Greek overlaying the Italian, blurring and contracting it. Perhaps girls do not become typical Venetians until they become older. Their mothers would look as Venetian as the men they were drinking with; their grandmothers would be the dies from which typical Venetians are pressed. These girls just looked like girls. Whether they were well-off or not, they were giving a convincing display of being so. It was difficult to imagine a band of such overtly conspicuous consumers, dressed like this and loaded with expensive ephemera, sallying out into the fog from some drinking place in SW1 and walking home without being mugged, for this is what they were going to have to do when they did leave, in a city without motor cars, that is unless they slept over the premises or had bodyguards waiting for them.

One of the girls, who was wearing a Loden cape, announced that she had just inherited an eighteenth-century villa, in the country somewhere west of Treviso, destroying, in her case, the theory that she might be either daughter or mistress – perhaps they were assistants to the shopkeepers. Apparently it was in a very bad condition, having been used as a farmhouse for more than fifty years.

‘What should I do with it?’ she asked. ‘It could be very beautiful.’

‘I would insure it for a lot of money,’ one of the men said. ‘Say four hundred and fifty milioni [about £190,000 or $266,000]. And then I would pay someone to burn it down.’ It was difficult to know if he was joking.

The villa she was talking about was one of the country houses to which rich Venetians, Trevisans, Paduans and Vicenzans used to escape from the heat and stench of their cities in summer and in the autumn. They began building them in earnest in the sixteenth century, although some date from as early as the fourteenth century, and they built them in the plain between the foothills of the Alps and the lagoons. They continued to build them far into the eighteenth century, by which time they had become almost symbolic of the frivolity and lack of energy for commerce which characterized the last years of the Republic. They lined the banks of the Brenta Canal between Mestre and Padua with them, making of it a watery triumphal way. The best known is the mysterious and withdrawn Villa Malcontenta, one of the masterpieces of Palladio – together with the Villa Capra at Vicenza, the most famous Palladian villas – which stands on its right bank near Mestre under what is now almost invariably a sulphurous sky, with the plants and factories of the Industrial Zone creeping closer to it every year. They built them on the banks of the Sile, which emerges as a pond full of vegetation in the plain west of Treviso and bubbles and seethes its way through this charming little city, apparently unpolluted. And they built them along the Terraglio, now a nightmare road, Strada Statale 13, between Mestre and Treviso, where villas with the sonorous names of past and present owners – Villa Gatterburg ora Volpi, Villa Duodo Malice ora Zoppolate (shades of Villa Newby), some in vast parks full of planes and cedars, with statues on the cornices looming against the sky – are today hemmed in by filling stations and windowless factories painted in bilious colours. And they built them in the depths of the country, miles from anywhere.

The Venetians went to their villas by gondola, or in the large rowing barges called burchielli, which had a sort of miniature villa on top of them in which the passengers could shield themselves from the elements and from the vulgar gaze. When there was no waterway leading to their villas, they travelled by ox-cart, which must have been pretty uncomfortable.

Their movements were as regular as those of migrant birds. The exodus from the city began on the eve of St Anthony’s Day in June and they stayed in the country until the end of July, after which they went back to the city. On October the first they went to the country again and in November, at the end of St Martin’s Summer, the time when the last grapes are picked which were not ripe at the vendemmia in October, they returned to Venice for a round of theatres and masked routs. As Venice declined, so the diversions increased in extravagance.

At night in their villas they gambled until dawn, unless there was some other diversion. They rose late, to watch other people cultivating their gardens and their vines, to visit their labyrinths, contemplate great nature, ponder further improvements and, as time went on, contemplate and ponder their diminished bank balances. For the Venetians were seldom content with one villa. It was not uncommon for a single family to own a dozen. At one time the Pisani owned fifty. More than two thousand villas are still in existence in the Veneto.

Of the great Venetian villas the grandest is the Pisani family’s villa at Stra

(#ulink_7ee04b67-69eb-5462-a58e-7aed7fb2a0b7) on the Brenta Canal east of Padua, which has huge stables, a labyrinth, a fantastic gateway-cum-belvedere flanked by columns encircled by spiral staircases and crowned with statuary; and on the ceiling of the ballroom frescoes of angels blowing trumpets, putti, eighteenth-century gentry, one of them well placed between the thighs of a naked lady who has temporarily landed on a cloud, and what look like Red Indians, all by Giambattista Tiepolo, forever whirling across a pale blue sky. Another huge villa is the Villa Manin, at Passariano, south-west of Udine, which is so large that its outlines actually show up on the 1:200,000 Touring Club Italiano map. This was the villa built for the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, and with its immense all-embracing arcaded wings it resembles a small town rather than a habitation. The smallest of the villas is the exquisite Casa Quaglia – the Quail House – built in the fourteenth century at Paese, west of Treviso, now a shamefully neglected farmhouse, which has Venetian Gothic windows and a facade painted in the form of a tapestry with fabulous animals.

Some, however, like the one inherited by the girl in the bar at Florian’s, are in decay. In a typical one of this sort, if it is big, several families of contadini may live in the barchesse, the curving wings, which spring from a central block in which most of the windows have been bricked up on the lower floor. Inside, the immense salon on the piano nobile, in which the ceiling may be entirely covered with seventeenth-century frescoes of gods and goddesses floating in the air, may also be half full of corn on the cob. There are great cracks in the ceiling, the door openings are covered with tattered sacking, and one day, soon, it will collapse.

‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ I asked, opening my favourite guide book. According to this, the Guide Julliard de l’Europe, there are four intelligent ways to spend an evening in Venice: the first and dearest is to hire a gondola (a closed one if one has improper thoughts and the means to gratify them); the second is to install oneself at a table in the Piazza San Marco; the third to look for adventures in the streets and alleys; the fourth to go to bed with a good book and a bottle of Scotch. ‘When one has tried all these,’ the authors say, ‘there are the night clubs.’

‘I know which one you’d choose,’ Wanda said, ‘but you can’t hire those closed gondolas any more.’