The Complete Travel Books of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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search for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their priests must have been deplorably small.
Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by the historian of a “Hundred Palaces of Venice,”—a work for which I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below,—a green-mouldy little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately sala was traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal, and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another court, with another cistern, from which the painter’s family drew water with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a noise little less alarming than thunder.
Altogether the most surprising object in the great sala was a sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful, but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian friends.
The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying, that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood, two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of Æsculapius; when this was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of Æsculapiuses) which no one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?
For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier ménage may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house, for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from a cook’s who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always took that at the Caffè Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.
Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous (as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors, and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian’s, and listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of the palaces.
We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnabà, and the campo before the ugly façade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights when they returned from an evening’s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive, and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day, whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of sea-bathing from one’s own threshold. From the beginning of June till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, against the façades of empty palaces, where they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge. It