Venice: Pure City

14c. Galleria dell’Accademia/Cameraphoto/Bridgeman

i3.13 Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, The Coronation of the Virgin, late 15c. Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice/Cameraphoto/Bridgeman

i3.14 Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco), The Tempest, c.1506–8. Galleria dell’Accademia/Cameraphoto/Bridgeman

i3.15 Giovanni Bellini, Young Woman at Her Toilet, 1515. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/akg-images/Erich Lessing

i3.16 Titian (Tizian Vecellio), Venus of Urbino (detail), before 1538. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Bridgeman

Section Four

i4.1 Paolo Veronese, The Marriage Feast at Cana (detail), c. 1562. Musee du Louvre/Giraudon/Bridgeman

i4.2 Gabriele Bella, Concert by the girls of the hospital music societies in the Procuratie, Venice, 18c. Galleria Querini-Stampalia/Bridgeman

i4.3 Francesco Guardi, The Parlour of the San Zaccaria Convent, 18c. Ca’Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento, Venice/Bridgeman

i4.4 Pietro Bianchi, Cross-section of a theatre on the Grand Canal, 1787

i4.5 Alessandro Longhi, Carlo Goldoni, 18c. Casa Goldoni, Venice/Bridgeman

i4.6 Jan van Grevenbroeck, Venetian Noblemen in a Cafe, 18c. Museo Correr/Bridgeman

i4.7 Giandomenico Tiepolo, Pulcinella with Acrobats, fresco 1793. Ca’Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento/Alinari/Bridgeman

i4.8 Francesco Guardi, Three Masked Figures in Carnival Costume, c.1765. Museo Correr/Bridgeman

i4.9 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Regatta on the Grand Canal, 1735–40. Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham/Bridgeman

i4.10 V. Ponga, Masked Ball in Saint Mark’s Square, 19c. Caffe Quadri, Venice/Bridgeman

i4.11 Gabriele Bella, Battle with Sticks on the Ponte Santa Fosca, 18c. Galleria Querini-Stampalia/Giraudon/Bridgeman

i4.12 Gabriele Bella, Game of Bowls in the Campo dei Gesuiti, 18c. Galleria Querini-Stampalia/Bridgeman

i4.13 Sir Claude Francis Barry Bart., RBA, The Bridge of Sighs, etching, c.1930. Private collection/Bridgeman/www.sirfrancisbarry.com

i4.14 Cover of Rene Jeanne, Casanova, 1927, with photographs from Andre Volkoff 1926 film. Private collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman

i4.15 Hugo d’Alesi, travel poster for the Chemin de fer de l’Est, Paris to Venice, 19c. Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman

Part Titles. The vignettes, engraved by Dionisio Moretti, are taken from Antonio Quadri, Il Canal Grande di Venezia (1831)

I City from the Sea

1 Origins

They voyaged into the remote and secluded waters. They came in flat-bottomed boats, moving over the shallows. They were exiles, far from their own cities or farms, fleeing from the marauding tribes of the North and the East. And they had come to this wild place, a wide and flat lagoon in which fresh water from the rivers on the mainland and salt water from the Adriatic mingled. At low tide there were mud-flats all around, cut through with streams and rivulets and small channels; at high tide there were small islands of silt and marsh-grass. There were shoals covered with reeds and wild grasses, rising just a little way above the waters. There were patches of land that were generally submerged but, at certain low tides, rose above the water. There were desolate marshes that the water only rarely covered. The salt marshes and the shore seemed from a distance to make up the same wide expanse, marked with ponds and islets. There were swamps here, too, as dark and uninviting as the waters that the tide did not reach. A line of islands, made up of sand and river debris, helped to protect the lagoon from the sea; these were covered with pine woods.

Although the lagoon was not far from the once great centres of Roman civilisation, it was remote and secluded. This was a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of the seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea and the sound of the wind soughing in the rushes. At night it was the setting of a vast darkness, except in those patches where the moon illumined the restless waters. Yet in the daylight of the exiles’ approach the silver sea stretched out into a line of mist, and the cloudy sky seemed to reflect the silvery motions of the water. They were drawn into a womb of light. They found an island. And a voice, like the sound of many waters, told them to build a church on the ground they had found. This is one of the stories of origin that the Venetians told.

The lagoon itself is an ambiguous area that is neither land nor sea. It is approximately thirty-five miles (56 km) in length and seven miles (11 km) in width, taking a crescent shape along part of the coast of north-eastern Italy. It was created some six thousand years ago, emerging from the mud and silt and debris that came down into the Adriatic from seven rivers. The principal among them—the rivers Brenta, Sile and Piave—carried material from the Alps and the Apennines; a city of stone would one day rise on the minute debris of mountains. The swamps and marshes and mud-flats are protected from the sea by a long and narrow bank of sand, divided into islands by several channels; the longest of those islands is now known as the Lido. The channels make openings in the barrier, entrances known as porti, through which the sea rushes into the lagoon. There are now three such porti at the Lido, at Malamocco and at Chioggia. These tides breathe life into Venice.

It is a continually various and unsettled scene, part mud and part sand and part clay; it is changed by tides, always shifting and unstable. There is a current in the Adriatic that flows up and down from the Mediterranean, and each of the porti creates its own distinct basin or force of water. That is why the appearance of the lagoon has altered over the centuries. There is one theory that, as late as the sixth and seventh centuries, the lagoon was essentially a marsh covered by water at high tide. In the nineteenth century, according to John Ruskin, there were times at low tide when it seemed that Venice was marooned on a vast plain of dark green seaweed. The whole lagoon in fact would have become dry land five hundred years ago, were it not for the intervention of the Venetians themselves. The lagoon is now simply another part of Venice, another quarter that happens to be neither land nor sea. But it is slowly returning to the sea. The waters are growing deeper, and more salty. It is a precarious place. Saint Christopher, carrying the infant Christ across the water, was once a popular saint of the city.

There have always been inhabitants of the lagoon. The wilderness could, after all, be fruitful. From the earliest times there were small pockets of people—fishermen and fowlers ready to take advantage of the abundance of wildfowl and marine life as well as the autumnal migration of the fish from the rivers to the sea. The