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Updated: June 20, 2025
Barrymore had told us to look for, grew out of the horizon dim and mysterious, yet not to be mistaken; hyacinth-blue streaks that were pinnacles and campanili, bubbles that were domes, floating between the gold of the sunset and the grey-green of the tall grass, for no water was visible yet. "Venice!" I whispered; but though Beechy and Aunt Kathryn each cried: "Oh, there it is!
After the Punta Planka, the ancient Promontorium Syrtis is passed, where the water is often rough, since there is no protecting screen of islands, the campanili and towers of Traù come into sight, between which and Bua there is a swing bridge across the channel.
The plain beneath it stretched away like a purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white <i>campanili</i> of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse like scattered sails of ships.
They recall those of Soave and Marostica in North Italy, where the houses cluster round the piazza below, and the hillside is covered with olives, through and above which the line of battlements may be traced high above the tops of the campanili. The harbour was once larger than it now is, the Piazza Tartini occupying the site of part of it.
The blue of the sky gives the key to her palette, the breath of the west wind, the salt wind from our own Atlantic, tingles in her campanili; and the Italian sun washes over all with his lazy gold. Habit and inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing and accepts every lovely thing. Nature and Art have worked hand in hand, as they will when, we let them.
But when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us then the wayfarer hastens home; the workingman and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone her son and her master her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.
And the view was magnificent Vallanza below, its red roofs burning in the sun, the purple bay, the olive-mantled hills, with a haze of gold-dust and pearl-dust brooding over them, and white-walled villages shining in twenty improbable situations, with their dark cypresses and slender campanili.
The two great campanili, of Grado which we are nearing, and of Aquileia passing into the distance behind us, each with its cluster of low buildings around, are prominent against the horizon showing dark against the fine cumulus clouds, which are heaped in sharply defined masses against the blue of the upper sky and rise in threatening billows like exhalations from some vast cauldron, soon to fade away innocuously in the late afternoon.
The delicate palaces, already crumbling from age, the marvelous facade of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color, the leaning campanili, the little churches filled with noble monuments to its great ones, all were helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling from warships.
From the terraces of Arqua the eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern slopes to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches and tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over "the foam of perilous seas forlorn."
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