In a few days’ time we shall celebrate the fiftieth anniver sary of this astonishing enterprise; in this very place, at the Doges’ Palace, the first Venice is to pay homage to the founder of the second, il signor conte Volpi di Misurata.
Having climbed the Giants’ Staircase, then the Scala d’Oro, I enter the Great Council room, and I stand beside the woman who was the constant and kindly shadow of the celebrated Venetian.
Seventy-two doges look down upon us, lined up between the victories won by la Serenissima that are painted on the walls. Facing one another are the Gothic bays giving on to San Giorgio Maggiore, bathed in the setting sun, and Tintoretto’s Paradise. Above our heads, as if sculpted from a massive piece of gold, the immense oval of the ceiling painted by Veronese pierces the joists that seem to be pushed upwards by the brushwork of the clouds towards a sky that is higher than the actual one; the structural details disappear beneath the golden profusion of this floating Bucentaurus.
The last time I had seen Volpi was in Paris, in his hotel bedroom, in 1943; I discovered a man who was worn out by events, and whose gigantic creation was being called into question from the Adriatic to Libya; within a quarter of a century everything had been lost. I thought again about what Philippe Berthelot had frequently told me, by way of justifying the long anti-Italian tradition of the Quai d’Orsay: “They’re a mediocre instrument, we shall never do anything with the Italians.” (That’s true of war, which is Death, but it’s not true of industry, buildings, agriculture, which are Life.)
The Venetians are made of stern stuff and are proof against the deluge. They always extricate themselves; their houses all have two exits, one on the water, the other on land.
A victory in Venice is worth a hundred victories anywhere else.
Tonight is very much a final victory for Volpi the Venetian. The whole of Venice is here: the Cardinal Patriarch brings the Pope’s blessing; Andreotti, that of the government; he reads a telegram from Saragat celebrating the “genius of the man”; the Under-Secretary of State to the Treasury pays tribute to someone who, as Mussolini’s Minister of Finance, and with the backing of the Bank of England and loans from Morgan, saved his country; the Syndic and the whole Municipality of Venice listen to an account of Volpi’s life over many reigns, not one of which witnessed an undertaking that could not be ruined: what Volpi wanted, fifty years ago, exists; the 100,000-ton and more oil tankers enter by Malamocco and arrive at Mestre. At home, nobody would mention his name; here, they think only of the glory of the very serene Serenissima; politics are forgotten; we are among Venetians; Italy is but one century old, Venice fifteen, and the old adage remains true: Veneziani, poi Cristiani! (Venetians first, then Christians).
OCTOBER 1970
YESTERDAY I WAS at the Venice Courthouse. A photographer from Chioggia was being tried, accused of holding arty parties, which were attended by young Venetian boys. Alerted by the number of cars with Treviso, Padua and Trieste numberplates that were being parked there at night, the Chioggia police burst into his studio; the guests fled through the windows. The man’s lawyer pleaded not guilty, Merlin’s law on prostitution not being applicable, according to him, to male prostitution.
8 OCTOBER 1970
AT THE FENICE, the first performance of Aretino’s Cortigiana, by the Teatro stabile, at the “Festival of Prose”. Two parallel “witticisms”: a man from Siena, a candidate for the cardinalate, is learning the art of becoming a courtier; he is brought on in a curious piece of machinery, a sort of oven for shaping courtiers; an amorous Neapolitan braggart (gran vantatore) arrives; a procuress, who is meant to smooth his path, substitutes the baker’s wife for the woman he idolizes. There were a great many secondary characters, the most successful being the caricature of a man of letters, attired in manuscripts, the pages of which were sewn on to his costume and hung down, making him look like a bookstall.
The performance was “perishingly” boring, as Lucien Daudet used to say. Dialogue in regional dialect, obscene allusions and anti-clericalism in the worst possible taste: “Here come the Turks! For fear of being impaled, everyone has fled, apart from the priests”; incomprehensible and ignorant comments on literature or contemporary politics. The actors declaimed for five acts, abusando del registro urlato; dramatic art nowadays consists of nothing but exaggerated and bawled-out aggression; actors, whose job it is to “look as though” they are doing something, ought to be taught that they should look as if they are shouting, without actually doing so. If only they would give us Aristophanes, Calderón or Shakespeare, instead of constant Brecht. The result was the following, from this morning’s Corriere: “The audience, which to begin with was very large, disappeared during the interval.” “Il pubblico, molto numeroso all’inizio, ha calato durante l’intervallo.”
AUGUST 1969
THIS EXTREMITY of the Adriatic is a real lobster pot… All the refugees throughout History; within the arms of her lagoons the sea cradles a never-ending exodus: confronted with swamps that are impassable, Goths, Avars, Lombards have had to relinquish their prey; it was here that Philip-Augustus watched the Jews slip through his fingers, and where the Pope gave up trying to track down Aretino. Today, it is still Venice, rather than Crete and Istanbul, that the hippies, those scavengers after the Absolute, opt for before they set off from “foul” Europe.
I was coming out of one of those little delicatessens that are hidden away behind the Danieli, among the narrow streets at right angles to the quayside, where bedrooms as big as trunks can be rented by the day. Beneath the span of the Bridge of Sighs my eyes were dazzled by the setting sun which had transformed the entrance to the Giudecca, to the west of San Giorgio Maggiore, into a pool of rose essence.
I had just caught a whiff of a stench of goat: I was to leeward of three young men whose bare torsos had been scorched in the furnaces of the travelling life; they wore gold crosses around their necks, naturally. Their beauty was more offensive than ugliness. A protesting Valkyrie, her hair spread across shoulders gnawed by salt, appeared to be keeping them on a tight rein, reminiscent of some stone-age matriarchy; their armpits smelt of leeks, their buttocks of venison; their sleeping-bags rolled beneath their necks, they were stretched out, looking as if they had been shot, on the floor of a money-changer’s shop, against a background of international gold coins. They had let themselves go to such a degree that they seemed to have forgotten how to use chairs and they squatted down nimbly and naturally. Their fingers, the colour of iodine, rolled forbidden cigarettes; the chewing gum in the mouth of the third of them, an American, incorporated the national pastime of masticating with a naturally bovine brutishness. What could possibly restrain these creatures: some Bonaparte who had mistaken the century, a Chateaubriand who would never write a word, a Guatamelata without a destiny, a Lope de Vega without a manuscript? To imagine them at the age of eighty sent a shiver down the spine.
I came across them again on my way back from the Lido the following evening, seated Buddha-like with their life-belts on, at the back of a vaporetto; these spineless young things did not know how to stand vertically.