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The city might be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds, the world of the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb, the world as man is making it to-day.
Mark's Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of course vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who lounges at the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites the Inglesi to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type from the weather-beaten barcaiuolo, who croaks "Barca!" at the promenaders on the Zattere.
Bare necessities are marvellously cheap, and the pinch of real bad weather such frost as locked the lagoons in ice two years ago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement floors of all the houses on the Zattere is rare and does not last long. On the other hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them to the savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni.
Rather would I lead them to a certain humble tavern on the Zattere. It is a quaint, low-built, unpretending little place, near a bridge, with a garden hard by which sends a cataract of honeysuckles sunward over a too-jealous wall. In front lies a Mediterranean steamer, which all day long has been discharging cargo.
Rather would I lead them to a certain humble tavern on the Zattere. It is a quaint, low-built, unpretending little place, near a bridge, with a garden hard by which sends a cataract of honeysuckles sunward over a too-jealous wall. In front lies a Mediterranean steamer, which all day long has been discharging cargo.
As for the Royal Palace, it is quite unworthy and a blot on the Venetian panorama as seen from the Customs House or S. Giorgio Maggiore, or as one sees it from the little Zattere steamboat as the Riva opens up on rounding the Punta di Dogana. Amid architecture that is almost or quite magical it is just a common utilitarian façade.
"A few days after this I was painting up the Zattere near San Rosario I was making the sketch for that big Giudeeca picture the one that went to Munich that year you remember it? lot of figures around a fruit-stand, with the church on the right and the Giudeeca and Lagoon beyond and had my gondolier Marco posing some twenty feet away with his back turned toward me, when my mysterious friend walked out from a little calle tins side of the church, looked at Marco for a moment without turning his head he didn't see me and stopped at a door next to old Pietro Varni's wine-shop.
There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no ahurissement of tourists. And when dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the night invites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a giro in the gondola. Night in Venice! Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be winter among the high Alps.
It is a long way round to my canal through San Trovaso to the Zattere and across the Giudecca to Ponte Lungo, and then along the edge of the lagoon to this garden and dovecote, but that is the precise route Luigi, who lived within a stone's throw of the couple, selected morning after morning.
Every year, on the third Sunday in July, a bridge of boats crosses the Grand Canal at the Campo S. Zobenigo, and then from the Zattere it crosses the Giudecca canal to this church. That day and night the island is en fête. Originally these bridges were constructed in order that the Doges might attend a solemn service; but to-day the occasion is chiefly one of high spirits.
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