Venice: Pure City полностью

Anyone who has seen the film Don’t Look Now will recall the hearse being carried across the water in a dark gondola. When the cemetery island was first in use there grew up a tradition of almost triumphal processions to the centre of the dead; there were funereal gondolas, designed for that purpose, with five gondoliers in gilded uniforms. One of them stood at the front of the hearse and coffin with a staff of office, while at the prow and stern were the sculpted images of saints and prophets. Even for the more modest funerals the gondoliers wore scarves and sashes of black, while the hearse and coffin were heaped with bright flowers.

There is a genuine morbidity in the folk tales and superstitions of the city. Louis XII of France said that the Venetians were too afraid of death to succeed in war; they had a merchant fear of violence and insecurity. The city is surrounded by islands to which the mad and the dangerous have always been expelled. In Venice Jan Morris wrote that “Venetians are fascinated by dead things, horrors, prisons, freaks and malformations.” That is perhaps because the city itself is a freak and a prison. There is also a suspicion abroad that it is already a dead city.

There are people who seem physically to feel the onset of disease on their arrival in Venice. The French writer, Maurice Barrès, declared that as soon as he had stepped out of the railway station and walked to the gondola stand—feeling the wind of the lagoon upon his face—he knew that “I have taken quinine in vain to protect me. I believe that I can feel within me the re-emergence of millions of bacteria … One sees everywhere in Venice the conquests of death.” Wagner glimpsed this, too, when he stepped into a gondola.

Wagner died in Venice. Browning died here, too. Diaghilev died here. There are some who expire here by proxy; Dante died in Ravenna from a fever he contracted in Venice. Byron had decided to end his days in the city, but events elsewhere overtook him. It is presumably a matter of statistical probability that a certain amount of artists would die in this most artistic of cities, but the truth is that many people come to Venice precisely in order to die. Henry James intuited the fatal appeal of the city in the character of the suffering Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. “I think I should like,” she said, “to die here.” There is something consoling about death near water, in a city that is itself in the throes of decay. To die in a grand Venetian house, as did Wagner and Browning, is to inhabit a vast funerary monument without the expense of building one. The perpetual sound of bells is a rehearsal for death.

It can be a melancholy and enervating place. It is not a city for the old, or for the ill, or for the mournful. The atmosphere can induce lassitude and depression. When the French painter Léopold Robert committed suicide in Venice his compatriot, George Sand, blamed it on the atmosphere. On hearing the music and the singing, during a Venetian evening, Anton Chekhov wished to weep. It has been a city of tears. Wagner was thrown into a mood of “extreme melancholy” when he first arrived in Venice. When the Irish balladeer, Tom Moore, visited Byron he instantly hated the city and declared it to be a “sad place.” That is the reaction of many travellers who become afflicted by a strange and sudden gloom. Even in the carnival air of the eighteenth century the underlying mood was declared to be one of melancholy. Why else would you want to make so much show of gaiety? In the nineteenth century the English residents of Venice warned their compatriots, on their arrival, not to spend too much time in the city. It was supposed that a long residence would lead to a morbid depression of spirits. There is a cultural, as well as a psychological, explanation for this mournfulness. The English travellers believed at the time that the whole history of Venice was one of loss and decay—that the city had lost its purpose, had become hopeless and aimless. It was a way, perhaps, of anticipating the decline of England and of the British Empire.

There is melancholy, too, induced by the presence of water. Water represents memory and passing time. Water is an emblem of oblivion. So it attracts those who wish to hide from the world. It attracts those who wish to forget and be forgotten. There is something about the broken state of Venice that acts as a refuge and consolation for those who have failed in the struggle for life. The vast and often silent lagoon still broods over the city. For those departing for the East, merchant or pilgrim, this place was the last port on the western shore. All those farewells, perhaps, have left a tangible sense of nostalgia in the air. Those of an atavistic turn of mind may even regret the loss of the life of the past, so painfully apparent in the sometimes garish streets of contemporary Venice.