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Our gondoliers told us of some places where the murazzi were broken in a gale, or sciroccale, not very long ago. Lying awake in Venice, when the wind blows hard, one hears the sea thundering upon its sandy barrier, and blesses God for the murazzi. On such a night it happened once to me to dream a dream of Venice overwhelmed by water.
The very existence of Venice may be said to depend sometimes on these murazzi, which were finished at an immense cost by the Republic in the days of its decadence. The enormous monoliths which compose them had to be brought across the Adriatic in sailing vessels. Of all the Lidi, that of Malamocco is the weakest; and here, if anywhere, the sea might effect an entrance into the lagoon.
These descendants of the kinsfolk of Attila were the Ottomans, and but for the barrier which, like their own murazzi against the waves, the Venetians interposed against the Ottomans, it is scarcely too much to say that half Europe would have undergone the misery of subjection to the organized anarchy of the Turkish pachas.
They had been wandering in the lagoons all day, in order to escape from Venice and observers first at Torcello, then at San Francesco, and now they were ostensibly coming home in a wide sweep along the northern lidi and murazzi, that Cliffe might show his companion, from near by, the Porto del Lido, that exit from the lagoons where the salt lakes grow into the sea.
Cliffe raised himself impatiently. They were nearing a point where the line of murazzi they had been following low breakwaters of great strength swept away from them outward and eastward towards a distant opening.
The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea.
The Canal of Fasana, between the Brioni Islands and the mainland, a little to the south, was the scene of the crushing defeat of the Venetians by the Genoese in 1379. The quarries in these islands, together with those of Rovigno, provided stone for the ducal and other palaces, the Procuratie at Venice, the murazzi at Chioggia, and the mole at Malamocco.
Kitty sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the barca which held the coffin under its pall. Her mind was the scene of an infinite number of floating and fragmentary recollections; of the day when she and Cliffe had followed the murazzi towards the open sea; of the meeting at Verona; of the long winter, with its hardship and its horror; and that hatred and contempt which had sprung up between them.
The very existence of Venice may be said to depend sometimes on these murazzi, which were finished at an immense cost by the Republic in the days of its decadence. The enormous monoliths which compose them had to be brought across the Adriatic in sailing vessels. Of all the Lidi, that of Malamocco is the weakest; and here, if anywhere, the sea might effect an entrance into the lagoon.
Our gondoliers told us of some places where the murazzi were broken in a gale, or sciroccale, not very long ago. Lying awake in Venice, when the wind blows hard, one hears the sea thundering upon its sandy barrier, and blesses God for the murazzi. On such a night it happened once to me to dream a dream of Venice overwhelmed by water.
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