TRAVEL '70: A SPECIAL SURVEY A Venetian diary
SIMON RAVEN
A bad start. One of our party had a passport photograph which was taken ten years ago, and the passport official at Venice airport opined that it no longer bore a valid resemblance. Although the official did have some kind of case, he could have made it politely, we felt, instead of snapping and snarling like an ill-conditioned pye-dog. After all, as one of us remarked, we had come to spend our money in the man's country. No doubt, I reflected; but then none of it was destined for him.
This was only the first of a number of pet- ty incidents which in aggregate incline me to believe that Italians, in their present mood, are becoming increasingly hostile to tourists. Of course, they have always resented the patronage of foreigners, but hitherto they have regarded us as a necessary evil to be ex- ploited, whereas now many of them seem to think that they can do without us altogether, that Italy is, or soon will be, quite rich enough to tell us to go to hell. Mind you, this is only my impression. If I'm right, however, the Italians would do well to meditate on the fable of Daedalus the artificer, who incurred all his hideous misfortunes by giving himself airs and disobliging an old customer.
Torcello in mid-winter. Totally deserted, but the cathedral open, and in it a tiny old lady in black, patiently selling tickets and shiver- ing. Near the cathedral a little meadow with headstones; a bleak inlet with reedy banks; and the campanile from which Ruskin surveyed the view : 'Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen grey; not like our northern moors, with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the colour of sackcloth with the corrupted sea-water soak- ing through the roots of its arid reeds ...'
Surely a dubious participal con- struction—but how the old Rusker could do it! Torcello, of course, was his favourite spot; for to him this distressing and (in his day) malarial sandbank, with its simple 'island church . . . a shelter for earnest and sorrowful worship', symbolised the virtues of the early settlers from Altinuin—virtues which vanished fast enough when they moved to more comfortable quarters in Venice proper and started to become rich.
And so Ruskin's Stones of Venice, matchless as a guidebook, is also in large part a lament for the lost faith and purity of the Venetians. To Ruskin the Renaissance (here at least) was a pollution, the coming of the Baroque a damnation. 'A head . . . leer- ing in bestial degradation, too foul either to be pictured or described'—this of a late ex- ample of the grotesque. What made Rusker so cross was that in Venice the grotesques were not, on the whole, moral or disciplinary, castigating the vileness of fleshly appetites as grotesques are meant to, but were merely there to make people giggle. The Venetians liked the grotesque for its own sake; they were amused by the disgusting. Reprehensible, doubtless, yet a
great help in staying sane when things get difficult. Thus the Venetians have remained sane throughout all the vicissitudes of their history; but when things got difficult for poor Ruskin, he simply went off his head.
Sansovino's Old Library, always hard of access, is closed (or so I am told) until April. The minor official who told me was quite delighted: Wiente tourism,' he gloated, 'nothing till Avrile.' Clearly, if he had his way there would be nothing then either. Another straw in the wind.
The winter gaming rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin are much preferable to the summer ones on the Lido (gaudy and scab- by). The Palazzo Vendramin has a decayed grandeur that is ideal for gambling, and also a certain ghostly wickedness in the air, as though fascinating deeds of evil were once performed there. I was reminded of that pic- ture, in the National Gallery, of The Ven- dramin Family in Adoration. Without ex- ception, they look ugly, boring and mean; so I very much fear, after all, that any evil which went on in their palace would have been petty and unspectacular.
Because it is the Christmas season, the minimum stakes have been raised to 1,000 lire at roulette and 20,000 (to start the bank) at chemin-de-fer. The Italian casinos always raise the stakes during Feasts of the Church, and their clients always respond manfully. Italians are cheerful players at any time; they seem to have more fun, and they cer- tainly exhibit less overt greed, than gamblers of any other nationality. But they cannot bear incompetence or delay; and woe betide the chemmy banker who gets into a hassle about whether or not he should draw a third card. In most countries the croupiers will tell him—and so they will here, but not before they have made faces of quite venomous contempt.
The New Ghetto is as forlorn as ever and a great deal dirtier than anywhere else in Venice. A canal which passes through it is positively septic with filth. I am told—and I believe—that the Jews are among the most hygienic people on earth; why, then, have they let their canal get into such a state? True, Venetian Jews tend to be very poor these days, but that explains nothing. It is my pride that I can usually find an instant and plausible theory to account for such phenomena; on this occasion, words fail me.
To lunch with an old acquaintance, who is something or other in the Venetian art world. He is rather depressed, and tells me that living in Venice is unreal—it is like liv- ing in a city of marzipan. I remark (as earlier in this letter) on the sanity of the Venetians. He tells me it is not so much their sanity that has enabled them to survive as their low cun- ning. In support of this assertion, he shows me a white half mask (of the kind people sport in those pictures by Longhi) and ex- plains that these were worn by Venetians, not only when their pursuits were scandalous, but even when they went about their every- day business . . . in order to frustrate the
spies and tax narks of the Inquisition and the Council. I manage to depress him still more by observing that if the socialists win the next election we shall all be needing such masks in England.
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