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A luggage-train comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains.
And now for the most north-westerly point of the city that I have reached the church of S. Giobbe, off the squalid Cannaregio which leads to Mestre and Treviso. This church, which has, I suppose, the poorest congregation of all, is dedicated to one of whom I had never before thought as a saint, although his merits are unmistakable Job.
It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom.
Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century.
A luggage-train comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains.
The great palace a little way down the canal which branches off here the Cannaregio is the Labia, interesting chiefly as containing the masterpiece of Tiepolo, unless one agrees with Symonds that his picture of S. Agnes in SS. Apostoli is his greatest effort. So far as I am concerned, Tiepolo painted largely in vain.
The frescoes, still in fair preservation, are masterly and aristocratic; but they have left on my mind no impressions that it is a pleasure to revive. Brilliant execution is not enough. Crossing the mouth of the Cannaregio we come to the Querini Palace, now yellow, plain, and ugly.
Then the Scuola dei Morti with its memento mori on the wall, and then S. Geremia: outside, a fine mass of yellow brick with a commanding campanile; inside, all Palladian coolness. Against the church a little house has been built, and at the corner of the Grand Canal and the Cannaregio is the figure of the Virgin.
There are plenty of Jews left in Venice; in fact, I have been told that they are gradually getting possession of the city, and judging by their ability in that direction elsewhere, I can readily believe it; but I saw none in the least like the Shylock of the English stage, although I spent some time both in the New Ghetto and the Old by the Cannaregio.
Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the Castilian, which, I had read, was still used in the families of the Jewish fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which distinguishes the race's utterance, no matter what language its children are born to.
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