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Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed.
Or, again, after a fair day, a change of weather approaches, and high, infinitely high, the skies are woven over with a web of half-transparent cirrus-clouds. These in the afterglow blush crimson, and through their rifts the depth of heaven is of a hard and gemlike blue, and all the water turns to rose beneath them. I remember one such evening on the way back from Torcello.
Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, crumbling cathedral.
Yet the Torcello base resembles these Gothic ones both in expansion beneath and in depth of cavetto above. § VIII. There can be no question of the ineffable superiority of these Gothic bases, in grace of profile, to any ever invented by the ancients.
She had the room to herself this afternoon, for Pauline had gone again to Torcello, this time with a party of old friends who had recently made their appearance in Venice, and whose claims upon her sister May was somewhat inclined to question. To-day, however, their exactions fell in most opportunely with a certain plan of her own, which had come to her in the shape of a great inspiration.
Istrians rose to high ecclesiastical honours in Ravenna, Grado, and Torcello. Justinian granted an appeal from the provincial judge to the bishop, who had also jurisdiction over secular and regular clergy, except in criminal cases.
Beyond the widening branches of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of clustered palaces, a long irregular line fretting the southern sky. Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood Torcello and Venice.
SECTION III. The inlet which runs nearest to the base of the campanile is not that by which Torcello is commonly approached.
As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna's children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat and took possession of land and water.
We have been to Torcello to-day your sister, M. de Châteauvieux, Miss Bretherton, and I. The expedition itself was delightful, but that I have no time to describe. I only want to tell you what happened when we got to Torcello.
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