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Updated: June 5, 2025
Then follows a huge wooden cross, garlanded with golden ivy-leaves, and also upheld by the confraternita, who stagger under its weight. This figure is of life-size, carved in wood, surrounded by gilt angels, and so heavy that sixteen stout facchini, whose shabby trousers show under their improvised costume, are required to bear it along. With this the procession comes to its climax.
I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places.
I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops of ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over their work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed my progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent and have my boots blacked.
But in a few minutes the facchini seized their hand-luggage, and they alighted as at any commonplace railway-station. But oh! the revelation when they went out upon the platform, up to which, not carriages, but gondolas were drawn, and from which stretched, not a dusty pavement, but the same gold and crimson and purple of sky reflected in the waters at their feet.
At last, on the festive morning, the dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the apparition of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes, and bearing banners, painted candles, and other movable elements of devotion, with which they pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St. Mark's.
The first is a masquerade, an amusing sight, because the men go as facchini, or porters; there was also a barca filled with people, and a great number on foot besides; and five or six sets of trumpets and kettledrums, besides several bands of violins and other instruments. The chiccherata is also a masquerade. What the people of Milan call chicchere, we call petits maitres, or fops.
A facchino came in, and we four sat down and regarded the situation judicially. "Was there any other train?" "No." "Could we stay at the Albergo del Sole?" A forefinger drawn across the throat by the Capo Stazione with a significant "cluck" closed that question. "Then we must stay with you here at the station." "But, Signori, I am not married. I live here only with the facchini.
They go and stand beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
Before the clergy went a company of Austrian soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long array of religious societies, charity-school boys in uniforms, old paupers in holiday dress, little naked urchins with shepherds' crooks and bits of fleece about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness, little girls with angels' wings and crowns, the monks of the various orders, and civilian penitents of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats, hooded or bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper.
During the night a light colonnade of wood, roofed with blue cloth, had been put up around the inside of the Piazza, and under this now paused the long pomp of the ecclesiastical procession the priests of all the Venetian churches in their richest vestments, followed in their order by facchini, in white sandals and gay robes, with caps of scarlet, white, green, and blue, who bore huge painted candles and silken banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the titular saints of the several churches, and supported the canopies under which the host of each was elevated.
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