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Updated: June 3, 2025
The representatives of some of these names, Torcello, Mazzorbo, Burano, are familiar sounds to the Venetian at the present day. From Padua came the largest stream of emigrants. They left the tomb of their mythical ancestor, Antenor, and built their humble dwellings upon the islands of the rivers Altus and Methamaucus, better known to us as Rialto and Malamocco.
Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down of men. In the afternoon Lawrence and Severance were dawdling over coffee in the Piazza. A strident band sent up voluminous notes that boomed back and forth between the palace and the stone arches of the procurate. "And Burano?"
At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always high- pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they decorate the scene with their splendid colour cheeks and throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks their sea-faded tatters which are always a "costume," their soft Venetian jargon, and the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls.
And far away, perhaps, in the quainter squares of the more primitive island villages in Burano or Chioggia before the Duomo, some reader lies at full length in the brilliant moonlight under the banner of San Marco, his "Boccaccio" open before him, repeating in a half-chant, monotonous and droning, some favorite tale from the well-worn pages to listeners who pause in groups in their evening stroll and linger until another story is begun; this time it is some strophe from the "Gerusalemme," to which a passing gondolier may chant the answering strain for this is the very poem of the people, echoing familiarly from lip to lip, and tales from the Tasso are not seldom wrought into the ebony carvings of their barks.
"See, then, the holy water is quite safe; I saw our padre cross himself by that first basin. Thou hast done well, hein Luigi, to bring me from Burano, if there are no fish to-morrow at the Ave Maria; for now we can sleep in peace! They told such tales of I Gesuiti, one thought the devils were having a holiday Santa Maria!"
Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it looked out over the lagoon, across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San Michele, across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the bell-towers of her churches, to the long line of the sea-shore on the right and to the main- land on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds.
Goon-dola!" their aim, being to take the visitor either to the cypress-covered island of S. Francesco in Deserto where S. Francis is believed to have taken refuge, or to Torcello, to allow of a longer stay there than this steamer permits; and unless one is enamoured of such foul canals and importunate children as Burano possesses it is well to listen to this lure.
Venice has nothing more beautiful than her coloured sails, both upon the water and reflected in it. The entrance to Burano is by a long winding canal, which at the Campo Santo, with its battered campanile and sentinel cypress at the corner, branches to left and right left to Torcello and right to Burano.
Chioggia is a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright- coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional defiance.
Here and there some gondolier from the islands, sheepishly conscious of the brilliant fazzoletto, or the string of beads he had just bought in the tempting booths of the old, wooden Rialto, hung on the outskirts of the crowd before Sér Gobbo, to catch from the gossip of the more lettered ones about him the details of the morrow's festa which he might not read for himself; for the knowledge would make him the oracle of his little circle in Burano or at least with Giovanna, when he should bestow his silken trifle for the morrow's splendor.
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