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As may be imagined, the traghetti vary greatly in the amount and quality of their custom. By far the best are those in the neighbourhood of the hotels upon the Grand Canal. At any one of these a gondolier during the season is sure of picking up some foreigner or other who will pay him handsomely for comparatively light service. A traghetto on the Giudecca, on the contrary, depends upon Venetian traffic. The work is more monotonous, and the pay is reduced to its tariffed minimum. So far as I can gather, an industrious gondolier, with a good boat, belonging to a good traghetto, may make as much as ten or fifteen francs in a single day. But this cannot be relied on. They therefore prefer a fixed appointment with a private family, for which they receive by tariff five francs a day, or by arrangement for long periods perhaps four francs a day, with certain perquisites and small advantages. It is great luck to get such an engagement for the winter. The heaviest anxieties which beset a gondolier are then disposed of. Having entered private service, they are not allowed to ply their trade on the traghetto, except by stipulation with their masters. Then they may take their place one night out of every six in the rank and file. The gondoliers have two proverbs, which show how desirable it is, while taking a fixed engagement, to keep their hold on the traghetto. One is to this effect: il traghetto è un buon padrone. The other satirises the meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility: pompa di servitù, misera insegna. When they combine the traghetto with private service, the municipality insists on their retaining the number painted on their gondola; and against this their employers frequently object. It is, therefore, a great point for a gondolier to make such an arrangement with his master as will leave him free to show his number. The reason for this regulation is obvious. Gondoliers are known more by their numbers and their traghetti than their names. They tell me that though there are upwards of a thousand registered in Venice, each man of the trade knows the whole confraternity by face and number. Taking all things into consideration, I think four francs a day the whole year round are very good earnings for a gondolier. On this he will marry and rear a family, and put a little money by. A young unmarried man, working at two and a half or three francs a day, is proportionately well-to-do. If he is economical, he ought upon these wages to save enough in two or three years to buy himself a gondola. A boy from fifteen to nineteen is called a mezz'uomo, and gets about one franc a day. A new gondola with all its fittings is worth about a thousand francs. It does not last in good condition more than six or seven years. At the end of that time the hull will fetch eighty francs. A new hull can be had for three hundred francs. The old fittings brass sea-horses or cavalli, steel prow or ferro, covered cabin or felze, cushions and leather-covered back-board or stramazetto, may be transferred to it. When a man wants to start a gondola, he will begin by buying one already half past service a gondola da traghetto or di mezza et
The pompa and ceremonies of the Coronation had, I may say, dazzled me, and deterred me from presenting myself at the Imperial Palace, where I should have been annoyed by the etiquette which had been observed since the Coronation. I cannot describe what a disagreeable impression this parade always produced on me.
Considering withal that the Romans, in their most solemn processions, as in that called the Pompa, which I have before mentioned, in which not only the Pirrhic dance was processionally executed, but other dances, in masquerade, by men who, in their habits, by leaping and by feats of agility, represented satirs, the Sileni, and Fauni, and were attended by minstrels playing on the flute and guitar; besides which, there were Salian priests, and Salian virgins, who followed, in their order, and executed their respective religious dances; it may bear a question whether not an unpleasing use might not be made, on the theatres, of processional dances properly introduced, and connected, especially in the burlesque way. In every country, and particularly in this, processions are esteemed an agreeable amusement to the eye; and certainly they must receive more life and animation from a proper intermixture of dances, than what a mere solemn march can represent, where there is nothing to amuse but a long train of personages in various habits, walking in parade. I
In the meanwhile it is not considered, that mentes humanae mirificae capiuntur et facinantur, ceremoniarum splendore et pompa. Videmus siquidem, saith Bucer, vulgus delectari actionibus scaenicis, et multis uti signis. Chemnitius marks of the cumulating of ceremonies in the ancient church, that it drew to this, ut tandem in theatricum ferme apparatum ceremoniae illae abierint.
History of the Invasion of Charles VIII, fol. 470. These dates are from the Diary of Marino Sanuto, vol. i. fol. 55, 58, 85. Il di de S. Laurentio il Duca de Gandia figliuolo del Papa, intrò in Roma accompagnato dal Card. de Valentia, et tutta la corte con grandissima pompa. Despatch of Ludovico Carissimi to the Duke of Ferrara, Rome, August 15, 1496. Archives of Modena.
"Maju torna, maju veni Cu li belli soi ciureri; Oh chi pompa chi nni fa; Maju torna, maju è cc
And by him that spake only as a philosopher and natural man, it was well said, Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa. Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible.
The solemn moment had come; the pompa was about to begin. In the merchant's ward slaves hung red and green bunting from roof to roof which shaded the streets. The windows and terraces were draped with multicolored tapestries of complicated design, and slave women placed censers in the doorways for burning perfumes.
They had especially an anniversary ceremony or procession, called, from its pre-eminence, singly, POMPA, or the Pomp.
I was a contributor to its little-read pages, and I came one day upon an article entitled 'Pompa Mortis. This article was written in such astonishingly good English, so clean, so hardbitten and terse, and yet so graceful, that I could not resist the temptation to ask its author's name.
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