United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels.
Two immense barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the display, though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official, has been seen in the procession.
The boatman who pulls an oar in the harbor for hire is obliged to pay the government for the simple privilege. A writer in a popular magazine lately compared these harbor boats of Havana to Venetian gondolas; but even poetical license will not admit of this.
I run away, while I was in Venice, and went ashore if you can call it ashore; it's all water, and you got to go round in boats: gondolas they call 'em there and went to see the American counsul, and told him I was an American boy, and tried to get him to get me off. But he couldn't do anything. If you ship under the Swedish flag you're a Swede, and the whole United States couldn't get you off.
"Both gondolas are gone," was the answer; "that with the musicians is already entering the great canal, but that of the cavalier hath unaccountably disappeared!" "Nay, look again; he cannot be in such haste to quit us." "I had not sought him in the right direction. Here is his gondola, by the bridge of our own canal." "And the cavalier?
In the midst of this marine picture was seen the bare head of Antonio, borne along in the floating multitude, without any effort of his own. The general impulsion was received from the vigorous arms of some thirty or forty of their number, who towed those in the rear by applying their force to three or four large gondolas in advance.
I have said nothing yet about the gondolas, which every body knows are black, and give an air of melancholy at first sight, yet are nothing less than sorrowful; it is like painting the lively Mrs. Cholmondeley in the character of Milton's Pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure
Arriving at the station, our luggage was quickly carried to the canal-side, where there were numbers of gondoliers awaiting us with their hearse-like gondolas, which, as Byron describes in one of his letters, "glide along the water, looking blackly just like a coffin clapt in a canoe, where none can make out what you say or do."
And that was why the girl in her long black shawl stopped, and why Luigi immediately changed gondolas and made for the quay, and why they all talked together for a moment, the girl flashing and the boy beaming, and that was why, too, they all three disappeared a moment later in the direction of the high rookery where lived the baffled, love-sick Francesco, his anxious father, the much-talked-about mother, and the Rose of the Shipyards.
As this friar, unattended and on foot, turned out of the narrow calle from San Samuele into the Campo San Stefano, the Giustiniani, father and son, were just landing from their gondolas in the midst of a gay retinue, on the steps of the palazzo Morosini; other gondolas of other nobles were floating in full moonlight before the quay; and to Fra Paolo, who did not share the Venetian love of color and of art, the elaborately frescoed façade of an opposite palace an extravagant freak of the Veronese's which the Venetians were already beginning to cherish as the work of their great artist who would paint no more seemed an impertinence unworthy of that dazzling illumination.
Word Of The Day