VENICE

Italian Tours

yourself obliged to form new ones of an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola (or you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have visited the antiquity-mongers whose horrible sign-boards dishonor some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a shipboard-feeling to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and encaged, your desire for space is unsatisfied ;you miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked

repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetian who sell bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the same cafés - the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself unto a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act with fatal! rashness. The loss is your own, moreover, it is not  with all deference to your personal attractions that of your companions who remain behind for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous

woman, whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty.She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, gray or pink, cold or warm, fresh or warm, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad; but she has thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go, as me ,author of these lines ,on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded from the moment of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; that she exists one as a battered peep-show and bazaar.There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar The English and Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Café Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favorable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-deplace had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession

of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the cafés. In saying just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal.

The peddlers' and commissioners ply their trade - often a very unclean one - at the very door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling with each other for customers.

There is a great deal of dishonor about St. Mark's altogether and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.

Henry James in 1882