Letters from Italy/Chapter 1

If what follows is a trifle confused and lacks conciseness I cannot help it, since I have in no way set down what I saw in regular order. There is a little of a great deal: I shall arrange it in order subsequently, but in such a way that I shall forget it all again, but at present I can merely set it out after a fashion in two divisions under two summary headings: what pleased me and what displeased me.

(A) What displeased me.—(1) First and foremost Czechoslovakia, because her frontier officials took away my credit note on an Italian bank, and benevolently gave me the choice of returning home or proceeding to Italy penniless. I am a stubborn personage, and continued my journey, taking chances without the credit note, bestowing maledictions on the Republic, old Austria, and that clean-shaven gentleman on the frontier. (2) Next Vienna displeased me, since it gives one a mathematically stupid sensation to have to pay something like thirty thousand in some monetary denomination for a supper; besides, it is a dead city and the people are, so to speak, straitened. (3) The terrific mass of tourists here ​in Venice. Germans mostly carry rucksacks or wear coarse woollen clothes; the English sport photographic apparatus; Americans are recognised by their shoulders; and Czechs because they almost resemble Germans and speak in remarkably loud tones, perhaps because the air is rarer with us. (4) St. Mark’s. This is not architecture but an orchestrion: one looks for a chink to throw in a sixpence so that the whole machine may give out O Venezia. I did not find the chink, so the orchestrion did not function. (5) Newly-married couples, without stating any reasons. (6) Venetian women, because they are Russians. One, swarthy as the deuce, with eyes of an eel, in the traditional costume with a fringe an ell in length and a comb in her rolled-up hair, of the purest Venetian type, who fascinated me directly, said to her cavalier, Da, da, jasny moj^[1]; so I was poorer by an illusion. I might record at least a dozen things that displeased me, but I hasten on joyful wing to—

(B) What pleased me.—(1) First and perhaps foremost the sleeping-car, a handsome carriage for slumber, complete with fine brass levers, buttons, knobs, latches, handles, and all kinds of apparatus. If you press or pull one, immediately there appears some convenience for slumber, an invention or an acquisition. I amused myself in this way the whole night, pushing or pulling everything around in turn: ​sometimes, for example, at some odd-looking rack without any result, clearly in consequence of my clumsiness. Perhaps in this way they can produce dreams of paradise or something similar. (2) Italian gendarmes from the frontier onwards. They patrol everywhere in couples, in skirts embroidered with a flaming bomb and on their heads a kind of boat, like those formerly worn by grammar-school professors, but set crossways. They are immeasurably sympathetic and comical, and remind me—I know not why—of the Brothers Čapek. (3) The alleys of Venice, in which one does not exactly find canals or palaces. So tortuous are they, that so far they have not all been thoroughly investigated; perhaps some have never been trodden by foot of man. The best are a whole metre broad, and so long that a cat can find room even with his tail. There is a labyrinth in which the past roams about and can in no wise issue forth. I, who flatter myself that I have the sense of direction, strolled round a circle for two hours yesterday. I left St. Mark’s Square for the Rialto, a good ten minutes’ walk after two hours I finally reached St. Mark’s Square. These Venetian streets decidedly remind me of the East, clearly because I have never been in the East, or of the Middle Ages for perhaps the same reason. But on pictures by Carpaccio, Venice appears to a hair precisely as to-day, except for the absence of tourists. (4) It is uncommonly agreeable that one cannot ​see a single motor-car, bicycle, cab, wagon, or excursion car; but for this reason there is (5) a very large number of cats, more than the pigeons of St. Mark’s, gigantic cats, mysterious and bright-eyed, which gaze ironically from the footpaths on the tourists and at night mew on surprisingly high notes. (6) Very fine are the royal Italian sailors, also the little boys in blue, and fine also are the war vessels and the shipping generally sailing vessels, steamboats, barks with saffron-coloured sails, grey torpedo-boats with handsome guns, laden transport vessels; every vessel is fine and deserves a feminine name. Perhaps this accounted for my wish as a youngster to be a sailor, and only to-day on the Lido I followed a disappearing white sail floating somewhere eastwards, and those white sails allured me far, endlessly farther than this white paper, upon which moreover I shall not discover a new country.

I had no desire to write much about Venice, and think it is familiar to everyone. It is actually as unsettling as the different souvenirs de Venise; when I stood for the first time on St. Mark’s Square I was utterly bewildered, and for a long time could not get rid of the oppressive feeling that this was not real, but a kind of Luna park where a Venetian night might be represented. I only waited for guitars to begin to coo and a gondolier to sing at least like our opera tenor Mr. Schütz. Fortunately the gondolier was mysteriously silent and at last turned to me in an unchristian manner, ​waving a tariff before my eyes. Well then, this man was certainly straight and unvarnished.

On the other hand the Grand Canal will certainly take you in. Some are in raptures over the splendour of its palaces and others over its dying melancholy; I found there, for the most part, bad enough Gothic which only brought to the Venetian nobility the renowned “stone lacework,” with which they hung their façades as with a breast ornament. Unhappily I am lacking in appreciation of this architectonic gold lacework and all this mercantile frippery of old Venice. Certain wares have been imported: Greek columns, oriental cinnamon, Persian carpets, Byzantine influences, brocade, Gothic, Renaissance; all was correct for these merchants, provided it was sufficiently ostentatious. And then, just look at Venetian Renaissance, which begins directly from the Corinthian order, with balustrades, balconies, marble and all this pompous stucco-work! Nothing has been thought out here: let us take for example that open loggia in the middle of the façade, which is certainly pretty but a little too small for good architecture. Venice has one single talent of its own, and that is to become Baroque. Its Orientalism, its decorative Gothic, its heavy Renaissance—all these have predestined it to be the most Baroque city of our planet; but when real Baroque arrived Venice was already overcome, if my history is not at fault.

​And now I know why I am so inept to discuss the beauty of Venice. Venice has only palaces and churches, the house of a plain man is simply nothing at all. Bare, narrow, and dark, unprovided with a cornice, or a little portal, or a little column, having the odour of a decayed tooth, artistic only through its rabbit-hutch straitness, it does not display the least necessary quality of beauty; you will not, in your rambles, be cheered by the pretty little profile of a cornice or a frame-work entry to greet you with a welcome; poverty, with no trace of virtue. Now then, these one or two hundred palaces do not represent culture but only wealth; no life in beauty but ostentation. And do not tell me that this is due to exceptional lack of space it is due to excessive indifference. The atmosphere of Venice to-day is lazy and, so to say, demoralising, since it incites to reverie and dalliance.

But for all that it has its charm: you saunter through the streets as in a dream; the canals purl along, the band plays at St. Mark’s, twenty languages blend in ceaseless hum; and you feel as though you had wadding in the ears or were surrounded by stupefying unreality. Then all at once you come upon the Lido; suddenly a little tramway bell tinkles in your ear, wheels rattle, there is a clatter of hoofs, and the spell is broken. O goodness, in all Venice there is not a single live horse. The principal charm of Venice is olfactory and acoustic: the heavy odour of the lagoons and the unique hum of human voices.