“Streets Flooded, Please Advise”
(American humorist Robert Benchley’s telegram to a friend on arriving in Venice)
The Servant of 2 Masters by Carlo Goldoni
Theatr Clwyd, 1997
La Serenissima
“I went out to pursue my business,” wrote Casanova in his diary, “by which I mean my pleasures.”
Uproarious and beautiful, Venice in the 18th century, her halcyon days of empire-building over, decided to ignore the political turmoil of the mainland and give herself over instead to riotous assembly. There were 150,000 inhabitants in the city in the 18th century, and half as many tourists again, all thronging the streets as thickly by night as by day. There was plenty to do, and even more to lose if you weren’t careful.
They worked only when their leisure pursuits permitted. They sang songs about the pleasures of toil but had to give up the toil in order to find the time to sing the songs. Everyone played jokes on everyone else, and each was expected to give as good as they got. “Being bored is the worst thing in the world,” they sighed, “I’d rather die miserable.” They believed that a studious man made a poor lover, and it was obvious which one they would all rather be. And those pleasures were not to be taken lightly. One host greeted his party guests with a face of bottomless woe: “It wrings my heart to tell you, but I’m clean out of Spanish snuff.”
Love was just another of the pastimes to be pursued, along with the sweetmeats and the wines and the card games and the moonlit gondola rides across the lagoon. Colourful by day, La Serenissima belied her nickname by becoming even more clamorous by night. As one visitor remarked, the Venetians were dressing for their evening’s entertainment when the rest of Europe was going to bed. During all-night bouts of conversazione in the teeming palazzi, they chose to smile and greet every sign of seriousness with an earthy chuckle and a ribald joke. Laughter was the common currency, though it had cost at least one distinguished visitor dear: it is said that in the 16th century the poet Aretino laughed so hard at a dirty story he heard about his own sister that he fell off his stool and fatally cracked his skull open.
Gambling
But if life was a game to the Venetians, gambling was a passion. The first official gaming house, or ridotto, had been opened in a private palace in 1638, but by 1774 so many famous families had become ruined that it was closed down again. The city briefly came to a standstill: “Shops are deserted, the mask-makers are starving, and gentlemen who have been used to dealing cards ten hours a day find their hands withering away.”
However, the nobles quickly rallied by opening unofficial ridotti in their palazzi. The rooms were packed most hours of the day and night and games went on in a reverential silence. Many women too had been bitten so hard by the bug that some would repair briefly into one of the private rooms with a companion in order to earn enough funds to get back to the tables. The poor gambled as hard as the rich, betting rings, trinkets, everything they owned. One Nicolo Grioni once had to run home in the dark stark naked having bet everything including his shirt on the turn of a card.
For those who refused to gamble on principle, there was always the lottery. Five numbers were drawn, and if the three numbers you had picked appeared in the order you listed them, you won 5,000 times your stake. Systems for choosing these numbers became as Byzantine as those any modern Lottery player could devise, and the ticket sellers themselves were free with their advice, based on years of experience. Many punters took them at their word, neglecting to inquire why, if they knew so much, they were still selling the tickets. There were the occasional lucky winners who celebrated appropriately, but few Venetians held their breath for the seven days between draws. For one thing, they were too busy gambling… or going to the carnival.
Carnival
Half of each year was devoted to carnivals. The longest began on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December, and lasted until Shrove Tuesday. Carnival was the excuse for everyone to go about masked in order to get up to all the skulduggery they would not have had the nerve to attempt in propria persona, and as street parties went, carnival time provided the gayest, gaudiest spectacle in Christendom.
The obligatory carnival mask – as opposed to the normal everyday mask that people wore to the theatre or when merely visiting – were all-encompassing. Called a baùtta, it covered not only the face but the head and shoulders as well, like a mantle, and it was worn by people of all classes, from Doge to drudge, belted earl to babe in arms. Servants did their shopping in them and barristers addressed the court wearing them. Disguise was the name of the game the better to oil the wheels of intrigue, and it was considered bad form to recognise anybody. One man, piercing the disguise of the Papal Nuncio, knelt down for a blessing and was roughly hustled away by his bodyguards. Masks dissolved all distinctions of class and background, and made anything possible – except, obviously, a blessing in the street.
Others went beyond masks alone and used the pretext of carnival to disport themselves as completely different characters. Casanova invented a kind of beggar’s get-up in which prosperous citizens good-naturedly badgered the populace for alms. Unfortunately, these were soon replaced by real beggars whose demands were more forceful, and the authorities eventually had to step into the middle of this turf war to ban the costume. In time, others also faced censure, including those who blasphemously adopted the garb of clerics, spraying everyone with holy water; the bernardoni, who added fake sores to their mendicants’ disguise; and the teatini, who lurched about pretending to be overgrown idiot children. Eventually masks were allowed all year round to protect the identities of those nobles too impecunious to take their holidays at their villas on the mainland. If they had been recognised in the vicinity of the Rialto in the summer months their canal cred would have sink like a stone.
Women
As a breed, Venetian women were considered the handsomest in Europe. They liked to bathe, and used face packs made of veal soaked in milk. A fashionable beauty could spend seven hours a day at her toilette before admitting her hairdresser to sculpt the crowning glory. Dark golden hair was the colour to aim for, but it took so long to apply that travel of any distance took twice as long as it might; every other day the signora was obliged to remain immobile while her hair dye dried. Wigs for both sexes dwindled at carnival times since they wouldn’t fit under the baùtta.
While famously décolletée below the neck, women put their best efforts into their headdress. A visiting professor of meteorology from Padua suggested that they would be well advised to wear lightning rods, so vertiginous were the heights these could attain. Wigs were powdered and topped off with elaborate hats which were decorated with fruit and flowers, butterflies, or even stuffed birds. One commentator said they looked like greengrocers carrying trays of produce to market. Their own hair was further sculpted into all manner of fantastic styles and treated with pomade, dye, scent and powder, hung with jewels, locks of the hair of others (father or sweetheart), and even portraits of their children or pets. Rarely washed, such beehives made excellent homes for numerous varieties of insects including, no doubt, bees.
Men
The men of mode dressed as brightly and fashionably as their mistresses, and above all a wig was the accepted sign of seriousness of character. By the middle of the century, wigs were deemed so much a part of the ensemble that to persist in wearing one’s own hair was seen as the height of eccentricity. One young noble of the Rossi family nearly lost a high-ranking post because of it: “We’re looking for a serious and responsible man for this position,” he was told, “and we shall not find him among that rank of men who insist on wearing their own hair.” The young Rossi duly submitted to having his head shaved in order to accommodate the obligatory ringleted periwig, an act which, while it repelled his fiancée, at least secured him the job.
Sex
Not surprisingly in such a laissez-faire atmosphere, amatory dalliance was so commonplace that numerous casini, or those rooms in private houses previously given over to the gambling habit, replaced their gaming tables with beds in order to facilitate its pursuit. In his memoirs Casanova called them “temples of luxury and love” which allowed you to take your pleasure on sumptuous couches beneath erotic paintings. For the married noblewoman bent on adultery there was often no need to even leave the house, and only the minimum of discretion was required. One story tells of a husband, returning from the arms of his lover, walking in on his wife in the arms of hers. “You really should have locked the door you know,” he admonished them. “What if I’d been one of the servants?”
Courtesans
As for the professionals, “Venice has no brothel. It is one,” wrote one French visitor. For those who could afford them, ladies of easy virtue from courtesans to common whores proliferated, and although a foundling hospital was set up to care for any offspring they bore as a side product of their trade, it was never full – as the old proverb says, “the best carpenters make the fewest chips.” Some women remained prostitutes only for as long as it took to earn an attractive dowry, but their reputation abroad was good – the whores of Venice were believed to be the most alluring and beautiful in Europe. Casanova even said the same of the nuns, one of whom once fought a duel with her abbess over a man they had both set their wimples at. The church was never taken too seriously in Venice anyway – Gregory XIII once complained that he was Pope everywhere except in Venice – and the services were as musically exciting as any opera. Women were as likely to drop a love letter into the collection plate as cash.
Courtesans often floated about the waterways in the absolute privacy of a gondola with the man of their choice, or disported themselves en masse on the beach at the Lido where the libidinous cavortings provided amusement to others drifting past offshore. Love was nowhere in the equation; this kind of dalliance was but a shallow, passing fancy played out to the sound of a serenade, and about as long-lasting.
Books
As for higher interests, Venice was stiff with books – not only the classics but also titles which had been banned everywhere else. There were also numerous magazines, periodicals and gazetteers as well, mostly churned out by aspiring poets or hopeless hacks under the imprint of countless literary academies whose names sometimes gave the game away with disarming candour – Imperturbabili, Imperfetti, Silenti and Meccanici (specialists in obscenity). There was also the Granelleschi, or ‘Balls Academy’, whose logo depicted an owl clutching a pair of testicles, and the Accademia degli Infecondi, ‘the last refuge of the incompetent’, whose main qualification for joining was not having had anything published before.
Theatres
Another passion was the stage. Venice had sixteen theatres to choose from (in the 18th century, Paris had three dedicated theatres, London only had two). Plays which could offer scenery and spectacle were the best attended, and mere performers were frequently upstaged by their surroundings and given short shrift or simply ignored. The auditorium filled up early, and people strolled, flirted, drank, gambled and chatted whilst awaiting curtain up. In the boxes wine and coffee was drunk, and nobles with their mistresses would hurl orange peel, apple cores and candle ends – or simply spat – onto the heads milling below. Or they would make love. The gondoliers, admitted free, would carry on the ripe badinage of the canals with their mates across the auditorium, drowning out all but the most famous arias or most popular comedians, and since partisanship here was as fierce as in any ancient Roman chariot race, scuffles would frequently break out among rival factions defending the honour of their favourites.
Prisons
Stories of the Republic’s sterner days lingered on to impress visitors, but the Inquisitors’ instruments of torture were now mainly kept on as outmoded and aesthetically curious relics (just because the extraction of confessions from recalcitrant malefactors was a function of the law courts didn’t mean it couldn’t also be a matter of style). In 1717 a clerk at the court did concede there were a few boxes of the famous slow-acting poison left, only they’d mislaid the instructions, and anyway it had probably lost all its potency by now. The foetid pozzi, or dungeons beneath the Doge’s Palace, were no longer used, the Bridge of Sighs was no more than a tourist attraction, and only political prisoners were sent to the piombi (the leads), the cells beneath the Palace roof. Casanova was famously incarcerated here in the middle of the century, but he did not let privation stand in the way of his sybaritic lifestyle: he had furniture, food and the obvious other comforts brought in, and in October 1756 slipped out to freedom. By the end of the century there was only a handful of prisoners left in the Doge’s pozzi, one of whom on his release begged to be allowed back in to see out his remaining years in peace. He was plied with wine and chocolates to help adopt a more optimistic outlook and, unaccustomed to such rich fare, died before he could take any further advantage of his liberation. Considering what was going on in the streets, he might not have lasted five minutes on the outside anyway.
Finita la commedia
In 1797, the Napoleonic Wars finally reached the Piazza San Marco, what the Emperor himself had called “the finest drawing room in Europe”. It was a rude awakening for the Venetians who had enjoyed a century of Saturnalia, and the world and his wife had all been invited – along with their various lovers and hangers-on. By the time the carnival finally came to an end, the whole shooting match had sunk a couple more centimetres into the lagoon, and the waves of mortality finally began to lap the shore of the most famous pleasure dome the west had ever seen.
PS
It was my wife’s idea that we honeymoon in Venice, an early example of the unfailing commonsense and wisdom I have come to rely on from that quarter over the last forty years. It was the furthest we could get in our impecunious youth, but then again, where else would you go? Niagara Falls is wet and old hat. On tropical islands that sand gets everywhere. And the Far East is so far east you can’t understand a word they say.
Besides, where else has half the beauty, a quarter the history, or an eighth the tragedy of a thousand-year-old settlement built on wooden piles on a series of islands in a milky lagoon sinking slowly but inexorably to a watery oblivion? On a hazy day you can practically see the buildings dissolving in front of your eyes, like multi-coloured sugar cubes.
No wonder it’s been a prize for so many ambitious men over the centuries; both Napoleon and Turner captured her for a time but she ultimately eluded and outlived them both. Byron swam up her Grand Canal, so to speak, but eventually had to limp away to expire quixotically in Greece. Thomas Mann fell in love with a prepubescent boy on the Lido there and wrote a book about it, pretending it was really only an aesthetic response to a vision of unearthly beauty, but thankfully Luchino Visconti had the great good sense and taste to score his film version with Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, surely one of the most soul-stirring and plangent pieces of music ever to enrapture the world.
In Casino Royale (2006), Daniel Craig’s James Bond has a shoot-out in a collapsing palazzo and ends up losing the love of his life in its drowned lift. Now he knows what it feels like. Some of us lost our hearts to the place many more years ago than that.