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A youthful poet, descendant of the Doges of Genoa, Goffredo Mameli, whose 'Fratelli d'Italia' was the battle-hymn to which Italy marched, wrote these three words to Mazzini: 'Roma, Repubblica, Venite. So Mazzini came to Rome, which confided her destinies to him, as she had once confided them to the Brescian Arnold and to Cola di Rienzi.
There was a grandmother's armchair; white chairs; and on the table painted cups and Venetian glasses. In all the corners were screens of colored paper, whereon were masks, grotesque figures, the light soul of Florence, of Bologna, and of Venice in the time of the Grand Dukes and of the last Doges. A mirror and a carpet completed the furnishings. He closed the window and lighted the fire.
It produces a marked sensation in the minds of our Italian companions in this sad tour of inspection, when we tell them, through our guide Antonio, that these cells are the counterpart of the dungeons of the condemned in the prison of the Doges of Venice, as we had seen them a few days before, save that the latter were better, in their day, in so far as in them the cold stone was originally lined and concealed by wooden casings, while in those before us the helpless prisoner in his gropings could touch only the hard rock, significant of the relentless despotism which enchained him.
Behind the speechless sentinels, leading into the narrow corridor, stretched a red carpet bordered by rows of palms and evergreens and hung about with Chinese lanterns. At the end of this carpet opened a door that looked into a banquet hall as rich in color and as sumptuous in its interior fittings as an audience- chamber of the Doges at a time when Venice ruled the world.
But Elena could not now give herself up without a care to the sense of her happiness; her heart could not regain its calm after the emotions that had so lately shaken it; and Insarov, as he walked by the palace of the Doges, pointed without speaking to the mouths of the Austrian cannons, peeping out from the lower arches, and pulled his hat down over his eyes.
"It was, and there isn't a tramp or a stranded girl within half a mile of where we sit that he doesn't know and take care of. So I say you can have your money kings and your popes and your doges; as for me, I'll take Father Cruse every time, and there's dozens just like him."
Uningratiating splendour Doges and Heaven Venetian pride The most beautiful picture of all A non-scriptural Tintoretto The Sala del Collegio The Sala del Senato More Doges and Heaven The Council of Ten Anonymous charges Tintoretto's "Last Judgment" An immense room Tintoretto's "Paradiso" Sebastiano Ziani and his exploits Pope Alexander III and Barbarossa Old blind Dandolo The Crusades Zara The Fall of Constantinople Marino Faliero and his fall The first Doge in the room The last Doge in the room The Sala dello Scrutinio Palma's "Last Judgment" A short way with mistresses The rest of the Doges Two battle pictures The Doges' suites The Archæological Museum The Bridge of Sighs The dungeons.
No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute the mighty doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
An Austrian captain having struck a workman, the passengers in the streets threw themselves upon him and upon his comrades who came to his assistance; the insurrection spread rapidly in all quarters of Genoa; there was a pillage of the weapons lying heaped in the palace of the Doges; the senators put themselves at the head of the movement; the peasants in the country flew to arms.
As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobnobbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months. Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school.
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