Venice, June 16th, 1830
We crossed the Po, and afterwards the Adige, in boats. The country is flat, and reminded me of the Netherlands. I was asleep all night, but awoke in time to see some of the villas on the banks of the Brenta. Of Padua I was unconscious. Embarked in a gondola at Fusina, and arrived at this remarkable city under the bad auspices of a dark, gloomy, and very cold day. It is Venice, but living Venice no more. In my progress to the inn I saw nothing but signs of ruin and blasted grandeur, palaces half decayed, and the windows boarded up. The approach to the city is certainly as curious as possible, so totally unlike everything else, and on entering the Great Canal, and finding
The death-like silence and the dread repose of a place which was once the gayest and most brilliant in the world, a little pang shoots across the imagination, recollecting its strange and romantic history and its poetical associations.
Two o’clock.—I am just driven in by a regular rainy day, and have the prospect of shivering through the rest of it in a room with marble floor and hardly any furniture. However, it is the only bad day there has been since the beginning of my expedition. The most striking thing in Venice (at least in such weather as this) is the unbroken silence. The gondolas glide along without noise or motion, and, except other gondolas, one may traverse the city without perceiving a sign of life. I went first to the Church of Santa Maria dei Frati, which is fine, old, and adorned with painting and sculpture. At Santa Maria dei Frati Titian was buried. Canova intended a monument for him, but after his death his design was executed and put up in this church, but for him, and not for Titian, the reverse of ‘sic vos non vobis.’ Here are tombs of several Doges, of Francis Foscari, with a pompous inscription. The body of Carmagnola lies here in a wooden coffin; his head is under the stone on which it was cut off in the Piazza di San Marco. He was beheaded by one of those pieces of iniquity and treachery which the Venetian Government never scrupled to use when it suited them. Then to the Scuola di San Rocco, containing a splendid apartment and staircase, all richly gilded, painted by Tintoret, and with bronze doors. To the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, containing a very rich altar-piece of precious stones, which is locked up, and produced on great occasions; and in the sacristy three fine pictures by Titian. To the Church of St. Mark and the Doge’s Palace—all very interesting, antique, and splendid. But the Austrians have modernised some of the rooms, and consequently spoilt them. They VENICE have also blocked up the Bridge of Sighs, and the reason (they told me) is that all the foreigners who come here are so curious to walk over it, which seems an odd one for shutting it up. The halls of audience and of the different councils are magnificently gilded, and contain some very fine pictures.
The Hall of the Council of Ten (the most powerful and the most abominable tribunal that ever existed) has been partly modernised. In the Chamber of the Inquisitors of State is still the hole in the wall which was called the ‘Lion’s Mouth,’ through which written communications were made; and the box into which they fell, which the Inquisitors alone could open. There were ‘Bocche di Lioni’ in several places at the head of the Giant’s Staircase, and in others. The mouths are gone, but the holes remain. Though the interior of the Ponte di Sospiri is no longer visible, the prisons are horrible places, twenty-four in number, besides three others under water which the French had closed up. They are about fourteen feet long, seven wide, and seven high, with one hole to admit air, a wooden bed, which was covered with straw, and a shelf. In one of the prisons are several inscriptions, scrawled on the wall and ceiling.
Di chi mi fido, mi guardi Iddio,
Di chi non mi fido, mi guardo io.
Un parlar pocho, un negar pronto,
Un pensar in fine può dar la vita
A noi altri meschini.
Non fida d’alcuno, pensi e tacci
Se fuggir vuoi di spioni, insidie e lacci.
Il pentirti, il pentirti, nulla giova
Ma ben del valor tuo far vera prova.
There are two places in which criminals, or prisoners, were secretly executed; they were strangled, and without seeing their executioner, for a cord was passed through an opening, which he twisted till the victim was dead. This was the mode pursued with the prisoners of the Inquisitors; those of the Council were often placed in a cell to which there was a thickly grated window, through which the executioner did his office, and if they resisted he stabbed them in the throat. The wall is still covered with the blood of those who have thus suffered. From the time of their erection, 800 years ago, to the destruction of the Republic nobody was ever allowed to see these prisons, till the French came and threw them open, when the people set fire to them and burnt all the woodwork; the stone was too solid to be destroyed. One or two escaped, and they remain as memorials of the horrors that were perpetrated in them.