After the battle of Lepanto, the Venetians recaptured the city. Today, Bragadin lies in this beautiful Gothic nave of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
In the seventeenth century, another Bragadin was caught slipping a note intended for the Spanish ambassador into a crack in a church bench and was hanged between two columns in the Piazzetta. A third and no less unfortunate Bragadin, an alchemist, had tried to sell the Doge a recipe for making gold; he was imprisoned, but escaped and fled to Bavaria, where he hoodwinked thousands of people and lived like a king. In Munich, the executioner decapitated him with a two-handed sword.
A century later, it was yet another Bragadin, a former Inquisitor, who became the young Casanova’s first guardian; on the pretext of teaching him the cabbala, Casanova used to hoodwink him.
From the corner of my little Zanipolo café I can see Colleone; at whom is this piercingly defiant gaze directed, at his contemporaries or posterity? How could such a resolute, well-established captain have managed to possess such unpredictable supporters that he exchanged them as often as he changed his shirt? (Even in his own time, it was said of the condottieri that they were splendid fighters, but that “they never got much blood on their shirts.”) The whole of this great rascal’s life was spent fighting for Venice against Milan, or for Sforza against the Council of Ten; they do not appear to have held this against him, because every time he deserted them the condottiere came back to renew his offers. It is hard to put oneself into the fifteenth-century frame of mind; (even in our age of mercenaries): how can those fine heads, whose images Donatello, Uccello, Antonello da Messina, La Francesca and Vinci have bequeathed to us, have been those of ordinary military leaders, without any of them being killed? Do they lie, this terrible face of the Bergamask, this supercilious head, these hawk’s eyes, this unforgiving mouth, this sly expression? Should the credit go to Colleone himself, or to his band of adventurers who were all the more loyal to him because he looked after his men and paid them well; better than he was himself; we can see from his accounts which survive that the Senate of Venice quibbled over his pay, ducat for ducat, only discharging their obligations after long delays, having first tried to obtain a reduction (each did his best to swindle the other).
These condottieri, whose fame has endured for three centuries, were worth their wages; in Northern Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a veritable market in bands, milizie who could be bought, gangs of adventurers that could be hired by the hour or at a flat rate and who priced themselves very highly, even abroad. Louis XI and Charles le Téméraire spent a long time fighting for Colleone’s assistance, offering more and more money to the doge to sub-contract him to them, which caused embarrassment to the Republic, for they did not want to offend such great princes.
Once upon a time, the Venice Gazzettino published a list of people who had fallen into the water during the day; this column was withdrawn. Are less people falling in?
Everything used to be original and different here: the Serenissima had her own calendar that began on the 1st of March; the days were counted from the time of the sunset.
The real enemy of Venice has not been the Turk, but the Italian from the mainland; the wars against the Infidel enriched the Republic; the wars against Milan or the Pope ruined her.
People rode on horseback in Venice up until the fourteenth century. On the piazza where Colleone gambols, there was once a riding school with seventy-five horses.
So as to ward off the Muslims, the two Christian merchants who stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in Egypt in order to take it back to Venice had the idea of burying the relic in a carcass of salted pork.
That black little canal; at the far end, at the very top of the perspective, there is a house of a dull red colour; as the sun goes down, its beams suddenly alight on the façade and illuminate it just as one lights a candle.
Water lends a depth to the sounds, a silky retentiveness that can last for over a minute; it is as if one was sinking into the depths.
Emerging from the Sansovino Library, where the courtyard has been glazed and turned into a reading room, I go through a door which opens on to the Procuraties, between two giants whose knees are at the height of my face. The sun is setting on the Ponte della Paglia; in the background is San Giorgio Maggiore, which the big liners steaming hurriedly through the channels before nightfall look as if they will sweep away as they pass.
The Paris newspapers have just arrived; it is six o’clock. Caught in the light of the setting sun, the mosaics of St Mark’s glisten like a thousand-year-old set of kitchen utensils.
In Venice, man has discovered a new joy: not having a car, as once at Zermatt, and, once upon a time, in Bermuda, and he is happy in a city without pavements, without traffic lights,18 without whistles, where one walks along as smoothly as the flowing waters: as I set out, I feel just like a ball, without specific gravity.
The houses of Venice are buildings that have a nostalgic longing to be boats: this is why their ground floors are often flooded. They are satisfying their fondness for a permanent home as well as their nomadic instincts.
Venice is the most expensive city in Italy, but the true pleasures she offers cost nothing: one hundred lire for the vaporetto, from the Lido to the station, by the accelerato, that is to say by the slowest service.
Pretentious householders give each other trees here.
The troops of the Directoire planted a tree of Liberty at the entrance to the ghetto.
Midday; everyone stops talking; Venetian mouths are full of spaghetti; so much seafood accompanies it that the noodles turn into seaweed.
The shop selling seashells to collectors, at the corner of rue du Dauphin.
In Venice, una sposa is not a married woman, but the wife to be; they cut corners.
A person’s life frequently resembles those palazzi on the Grand Canal where the lower floors were begun with an array of stones carved in the shapes of diamonds, and whose upper floors were hastily completed with dried mud.
Like an old lady on crutches, Venice is dependent on a forest of posts; a million of them were needed just to underpin the Salute; and that was not enough.
In very bad weather, in St Mark’s Square, the waters rise up through the joints in the paving stones; it reminds me of the Nouveau circus, in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, which, once the show was over, became a swimming-pool.
At Chioggia, the sails of the fishing boats have the same red paintings on red backgrounds as on Inca shrouds…
The palazzi on the Grand Canal, with their belts of blackened seaweed and barnacles.
These Leicas, these Zeiss; do people no longer have eyes?
Of all the traghetti, the most charming is that of Santa Maria del Giglio, with its gondoliers who play cards beneath the red virgin vines in October. You have to wait until a hand of piquet is over before daring to climb on board.
Squeezed into the rii of Venice like a bookmark between the pages; certain streets are so narrow that Browning used to complain that he could not open his umbrella in them.
The finest location for a shoe-shine boy is at the exit from the Mercerie. While he polishes, this is what you see: the flight lines of St Mark’s, lined with the ogives of the Doges’ Palace; in the foreground, the two porphyry lions polished for a thousand years by the stirrup-less trotting of young Venetians; to the right, the Campanile casts its shadow over my foot. At the far end of the perspective, like a backdrop, San Giorgio Maggiore, immense… until an oil tanker interposes itself, reducing the scale to the image of a painting at the bottom of a plate; the bows of the tanker, which is more vast than the church, are already level with the Danieli, whereas the stern has scarcely passed the Dogana.