A MENACE TO THE LANDSCAPE OF VENICE.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Venice, like most other cities, and more than most others owing to the nature of her site, is feeling the pinch of the housing problem. In spite of the building activities which are rapidly turning Mestre and the Lido into huge suburbs, there are schemes on foot for building inside the town itself, which may, perhaps, find support on the plea of necessity, but which must inevitably tend to destroy the aesthetic patrimony of the place unless a more careful selection of the ground of operation should intervene to save it. The trees— so rare and precious a possession in Venice—which once adorned the great garden of the Gradenigo Palace at St. Simeone have all been felled to make room for tenements ; and now a plan is under discussion for the creation of a new Quarter on the Sacca della Misericordia, near the Madonna dell'Orto. It is impossible not to contemplate with alarm and anxiety, from the picturesque point of view, any such modi- fication of one of the great exits and approaches to the city. All those—Venetians and foreigners alike—who walk the city will lament the disappearance of that amazing and incomparable view from the Ponte di Sacca, and all those who have gone by gondola or sandolo, or vaporetto even, to Murano, Burano and Torcello, will recall their sensation when, on emerging from the canal by the Misericordia, that noble landscape of the northern lagoon is suddenly unrolled before them, with the cypresses of S. Michele in the immediate foreground, Murano and San Francesco del Deserto and the more distant Tower of Torcello in the middle plane, the whole enclosed and framed by that superb sweep of the Julian Alps. It is to be feared that this unique scenic impression cannot fail to suffer irreparable loss through the present scheme. The wood merchants, who own immemorial rights in the Sacca for the storage of their timber rafts that come down from Cadore, are protesting from their point of view, while the artists of Venice and the Amici dei Monumenti have raised their voice against this menace to the beauty of their city.—
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