Venetian Life | Page 3

Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much better than I have said in
many, the same thing of sentimental errors about Venice:--
"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a
mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of
daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth
remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that

Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no
great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler
now pauses with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes
Faliero address at one of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of
fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death."--Stories of
Venice.]
Political offenders were not confined in the "prison on each hand" of
the poet, but in the famous pozzi (literally, wells) or dungeons under the
Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their
exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some
foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be
afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say
now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
prison- life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped.
They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants
could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick
wooden casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of
the state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was
difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay. I began
with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to languish in
these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the apartments of
state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged
nearly as fast as taken.
Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political prisoners
of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a man, they
struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped
from the pozzi by every artifice of fact and figure.
The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it was
not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel taking-
off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at the top of the
palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli, Memorie Venete.] It

is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have been confined in
the pozzi at different times about the middle of the fifteenth century.
With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these cells be satisfactorily
associated by those who relish the dark romance of Venetian annals; for
it is not to be expected that the less tragic fortunes of Carlo Zeno and
Vittore Pisani, who may also have been imprisoned in the pozzi, can
move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly, there has been anguish
enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we know little of it by
name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great historic presence.
Touching the Giant's Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
the traitor's death to the people from between the two red columns in
the southern gallery of the palace;--that façade was not built till nearly
a century later.
I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that
besides these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up
scenes of brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the
brightest picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight,
romantic adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the
old merry- making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this
way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is
become as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of
which I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social
dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole
world's civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the