Venice: A Literary Companion by Ian Littlewood

Author:Ian Littlewood [Littlewood, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0719547873
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

A quarter of a century later Mark Twain was still getting some mileage out of the instruments of torture shown to tourists, among them

a devilish contrivance of steel, which enclosed a prisoner’s head like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a screw. It bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the torturer rested his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to catch the moanings of the sufferer perishing within.30

No doubt there is a residue of truth behind these frightening tales. The scars and scratchings on the walls were not all put there by holiday-makers and Romantic poets – though in 1833 Bulwer Lytton’s wife wrote home that ‘the guide told us they were nearly effaced till Lord Byron had spent two days re-cutting them into the walls.’31 Perhaps Byron was right. It would have been a pity to lose them. Even refurbished, they carry forward a tenuous memory of the hands that originally carved them. Molmenti tells us that in the Torreselle, above the name Luchinus de Cremona 1458 31 Jan., were scratched merely the words ‘Disce pati’ (‘Learn to endure’).

BROGLIO

The strange and grand exterior of the palace, begun in the fourteenth century and partially reconstructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth in the wake of a couple of devastating fires, has been described in too many guide-books to warrant attention here. For a brief and knowledgeable account the reader can do no better than turn to J. G. Links’s Venice for Pleasure.

Looking up at the lovely capitals today, we might sometimes get nudged aside by an impatient photographer, but on the whole we have a pleasant time of it compared with our eighteenth-century ancestor. The area round the Ducal Palace, known formerly as the broglio or meadow, was a public meeting-place, but also, it seems, an unofficial public lavatory. Alfonso Lowe quotes the remarks of an eighteenth-century traveller on the ‘nasty fellows’ who ‘let down their breeches wherever and before whomsoever they please, so that many open parts, including the Piazza and outside the ducal palace, are dedicated to Cloacina, and you may see the votaries at their devotions every hour of the day.’32

At about the same time Hester Piozzi, who during her first marriage, as Mrs Thrale, had been the friend of Dr Johnson, also found her enjoyment of the palace seriously overshadowed by the state of its surroundings:

The truth is, our dear Venetians are nothing less than cleanly. St Mark’s Place is all covered over in a morning with chicken-coops, which stink one to death, as nobody, I believe, thinks of changing their baskets; and all about the ducal palace is made so very offensive by the resort of human creatures for every purpose most unworthy of so charming a place, that all enjoyment of its beauties is rendered difficult to a person of any delicacy, and poisoned so provokingly, that I do never cease to wonder that so

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