Twenty years ago, Padua was an ancient university city, drowsing over its degrees; today, she has come to life again and the surrounding marshland has been dried out; the Paduans are learning their good manners from the walls: “Well brought-up people do not swear.” (I immediately make up a list of all the swear-words I can remember.) I also read: “Spitting is a custom of the past”; instantly, this leads me to wonder: why did our forebears spit? Is salivating any more unhealthy? Does expectorating get rid of phlegm any more effectively?
The education of the masses; ten years earlier, in Moscow, I watched schoolchildren being taught to brush their teeth up and down, and not from side to side.
1935
KILL THE FLIES!” (One of Mussolini’s recommendations.)21
1935
FOR THE FASCISTS, Othello was not a coloured man; he was a More, which does not mean a Moor, but a native of Morea. The original Othello was the Doge Gristoforo Moro.
On the Piazzetta, every male nowadays has the chin of Colleone and the look of a Guatamelata.
1937
RAIMONDO, the maître d’hôtel at the Splendid, has watched Europe parade along the Grand Canal for half a century; his stories would fill ten novels, with interruptions for seating new arrivals, distributing menus and taking orders.
Here is his plat du jour.
“I’m about to snuff it, Raimondo,” the Duke of N… said to me. “When you have closed my eyes, you must go down to the campo; you will sit down by the well; you will wait until a pretty woman goes by; I want her to be very, very pretty… You will accost her civilly: ‘Madame, the Duke, my master, has just yielded up his soul to God… a few steps away from here… His last wish: that a very pretty woman who was passing by should come and say a little prayer for him… before he is taken away to San Michele…’
“I did not have to wait long, Monsieur. A beautiful girl walks past, eighteen years old, with good firm breasts, just as the Duke liked. I go up to her. She hesitates. ‘No one should disobey the wishes of a dead man, signorina… Povero! The Duke said to me: ‘One of my family, my brother, my sister-in-law, I don’t mind… A stranger would do the thing best.’
“She followed me. We went upstairs. The letto matrimoniale, the curtains drawn, the lamps… The girl, tear drops in her eyes… it was worth all the family’s lamentations… It was the Bygone face to face with Today. It was il giorno vivente e la notte eterna.
“When she was about to leave, I presented her with a little casket… ‘The Duke lived only for ladies; my master wanted his last thought to be for one of them. I have been asked to give you this…’
“In the casket, Monsieur, was an emerald worthy of the treasure in St Mark’s, worthy of the Pala d’Oro.”
1937
SHOULD VENICE be illuminated with neon lights? Those who look to the past say no; the futurists reply: “Despite what you say, St Mark’s glistens in the light of our projectors; it’s a great success; the tourists love it.” The romantics hold firm; this morning they are parading on the square beneath a white banner: “WE WANT THE MOON.”
1937
MILITARY PLANES bearing the lion of St Mark on their wings. After the sea, the sky. The future of dictators is in the sky, the Duce has said so.
A procession of little girls, hundreds of ribbons streaming from their shoulders; the arditi surround the well-booted townsfolk; their black, silken tassels gleam in the sunlight. It is the summoning of civilians, the adunata that takes place at five o’clock in the afternoon; avant-gardists and balillas take their places in squares marked out in chalk upon the ground of the campi, like pawns on a chessboard. Drivers stop in the middle of the Paduan countryside to don their black shirts before returning to Venice.
1937
ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS were carved in stone; with their backs to the wall they confronted oblivion; they took eternity as their witness; they penetrated the heart of the countryside and were an integral part of the architecture; slight but immortal shadows, they kept pace with glory, victory or death. Nowadays, we no longer devote much time to the fact, we bring it about; we don’t accredit the result, we call it up, we don’t inscribe it, we just write it down, hurriedly, preferably on the least durable materials.
In Italy the Ethiopian war exacerbated that academic passion for combining inscriptions with belles-lettres. No one race has left behind more marks upon walls than the Latin people; they covered everything with them; on catacombs, barracks, circuses, in streets and alleyways you can still make out election announcements, mortgage deeds, appeals to some famous gladiator or renowned retiarius; Ovid and Propertius are quoted on the walls of Pompeii, between a couple of caricatures or lovers’ dates; everywhere columns, tombs, aqueducts and statues still speak meaningfully to us over the centuries.
In our own time, one is scarcely past the Italian border than one is surprised to see that this remarkable dialogue between the State and its citizens continues. Who is it who writes? Who dictates? When did they cover the towns with the lapidary, heroic or familiar thoughts, which the Communists brought back into fashion here in about 1920?22
They are there, everywhere, those official phrases, daubed black on white, white on black. On the garage door of my hotel I read: Fascism is an army on the march. Above the municipal fountain: Fascism is a global development. At the entrance to the village: Fascism is politeness. The most current assertion is: We shall be proved right; and the death-head is seen everywhere, together with these simple words, which are hard to translate: Me ne frego (something like: Who the hell cares… but more obscene).
The statements are most frequently aimed at Britain: We shall not accept sanctions from anyone, or: British courtesy reeks of Abyssinian oil. The slogan: A noi, Duce! defaces the most venerable of monuments, the walls of the Procuraties, stained grey by pigeon droppings, that old scraped bone that is Milan Cathedral, the sombre palazzi of Genoa and the mellow Signoria in Florence. And there’s this one, which dates from the time of the call up: Better to live the life of a lion for one day than live as a sheep for a hundred years!
“Great poets need large audiences.” No square, no esplanade, not even St Mark’s would be able to contain the immense numbers of the public that Carlyle demanded. People stream past like water and the man in the street is obliged, however unwillingly, to listen to the strident, motionless cries that emanate from the walls of Venice, those talking walls of 1937. Of what interest are the bland affirmations, with their cold roman lettering, that are pasted up outside our town halls when compared to these exclamations? Their “no billstickers” doesn’t frighten a soul.
The entire life of a country can be read either on the front of houses, which for foreigners have become more instructive than a book, or at the rear, where they are transformed into notepads. It is readers who file past ideas, and not the reverse.
15 MAY 1938
AT THE NEWSPAPER KIOSK, Venice’s Il Gazzettino illustrato is advertising an article entitled: “The Fatal Heroes”. On the same page there is a photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at Stra. I buy the paper; the “fatal heroes”: a series of historical pieces; the hero for that day: Byron.