CHAPTER 16
Venice has always welcomed foreigners. During the Middle Ages the hostels, markets, and wharves of the teeming city echoed with a babel of tongues. From across the known world travelers came to Venice to do business or find passage to faraway destinations. That changed in the seventeenth century. As Venice slipped into political obscurity, it arose as a destination in its own right. Increasingly secular in outlook, Europeans no longer made the religious pilgrimages that had brought them to Venice on their way to Constantinople or Jerusalem. Rather than relics to venerate, the new travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought the unusual, the interesting, and the beautiful. Venice fit that bill. It became something altogether new—a tourist attraction.
By 1700 Venice looked much as it does today. It presented the visitor with an artificial beauty of stunning structures mirrored by water and light. The stone-paved Piazza San Marco stretched between the classical structures of the Procuratie to the Byzantine splendor of the church of San Marco to the Gothic ambience of the rich Ducal Palace. Gondolas and barges filled waterways, rowed by expert oarsmen and carrying passengers and goods from one part of the city to another. The lavish palazzi echoed with laughter as masked revelers danced and feasted the nights away. From the imposing Salute to the bustling Rialto to the towering columns of the Molo, Venice was not only a vibrant city, it was a museum. And many people came to marvel at its exhibits.
The arrival of European tourists was warmly welcomed by a city that had lost revenue from its traditional venues. The visitors, after all, were not common gawkers. Before the nineteenth century only the very wealthy could afford the expense and time that foreign travel demanded. Venice’s tourists were—for the most part—well dressed, well educated, and well supplied with funds. Most came from England, France, and Austria. They brought with them servants, guides, sometimes whole retinues. It did not take long for Venetian entrepreneurs to realize the worth of these new visitors and to devise new ways to attract more of them.
The most obvious attraction in seventeenth-century Venice was Venetian art. Visitors poked their heads into the city’s two hundred churches, marveling at the rich canvases and sculptures. They rented rooms in the grand palazzi and gaped at the beauty of the canals reflecting the diversity of architecture, Gothic, Palladian, and baroque. And they came to see the Venetian festivals, set against so glorious a civic space.
By 1600 the Venetians had discovered that the number of foreign visitors swelled during two festivals in particular—Carnevale and Sensa. The latter was the uniquely Venetian spectacle of marrying the sea, which dated back to the twelfth century and took place on Ascension Day. Amid much pageantry the doge and leading government officials would board the bucintoro, a richly decorated, multilevel galley used only for state ceremonies. Joined by myriad other vessels, they then rowed out to the edge of the Lido, where the Venetian lagoon met the Adriatic Sea. There the doge would cast a golden ring into the water and shout, “Desponsamus te Mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii” (We espouse thee, O Sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion). The late spring–early summer ceremony became so popular with foreigners that the Venetians purposely enhanced both its duration and its lavish decoration in an attempt to attract more of them. A new bucintoro was put into service in 1606, festooned with images and statues of gilded sirens riding sea horses, leaping dolphins, fierce Hydras, the god Mars, and, of course, a pride of lions of St. Mark.
Even more foreign visitors came to Venice for the annual Carnevale celebrations. Meaning “good-bye to meat,” Carnevale was the traditional festival that culminated on Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of the rigors of Lent. Almost every city in Europe had some sort of pre-Lenten celebration. At some point in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, Venetians began wearing masks during their Carnevale revels—a custom already popular in other large Italian cities. The mask allowed greater freedom from social conventions and responsibilities, and generally added to the merriment. As a by-product, it also allowed foreigners to join in the festivities as natives. Why Venice’s Carnevale became so popular with tourists is still not clear, but there is no denying that it did.
As with the Sensa, the Venetians and their government began to devise ways to extend the size and duration of Carnevale. This was not terribly difficult. Although the Sensa occurred on one day, the Carnevale was simply a period of time before Lent. It could reasonably be extended for days, weeks, even months. To keep the paying customers in Venice longer, new diversions were developed and offered during Carnevale.
The most famous of these was opera. Although it was once thought that opera was invented in Venice, it probably originated around 1600 in Florence or Mantua, where it was performed privately in aristocratic courts. It was the Venetians, though, who capitalized on the idea and established opera as a popular art form. Indeed, the very character of Venice quickly democratized the aristocratic pastime. During the 1630s public opera houses appeared in Venice, selling tickets that almost anyone could afford (at least for standing room). The great composer Claudio Monteverdi came to Venice in 1613 and later produced acclaimed operas for the Venetian public, including Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1641) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642).
Venetian opera was in every way larger than life. Composers such as Francesco Cavalli and Antonio Cesti produced powerful works with stunning orchestral arrangements, amazing arias, and spectacular scenes. Venetians loved special effects—magic spells, shipwrecks, storms, and anything else that went boom. Within just a few decades opera houses could be found across the city. The first was the Teatro Tron, not far from Rialto. It was followed by the Teatro di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the Teatro San Moise, and the Teatro Novissimo. By 1700 there were seventeen opera houses in Venice. The opera season was attached directly to the Carnevale; as one grew, so did the other. By the mid-1600s the two seasons began in early January or, when Lent came early, even the day after Christmas. The cultured elite from across Europe rushed to Venice to take in the music and attend the numerous masked balls, each more lavish than the last.
Venice had become a pleasure not only to the eyes but also to the ears. And although opera was Venice’s most popular musical form in the seventeenth century, it was by no means the only one. Venetian craftsmen constructed the best organs in the world, and crowds packed into Venice’s churches to hear them played. Even the foundling hospitals became a source of new music. These charitable organizations housed orphaned or abandoned children. The boys were trained in a craft and released when they turned fifteen. Girls’ hospitals, however, educated their children in a variety of arts to help them find a husband, or at least employment in a noble household. Chief among those arts was music. Girls’ choirs singing richly varied sacred music at the hospitals became highly accomplished and their well-attended concerts a welcome source of revenue. Girls with extraordinary musical talent were even paid to continue to sing for the choruses after they came of age.
The most famous of the Venetian composers for girls’ choirs was Father Antonio Vivaldi—known as the Red Priest because of his brightly colored hair. Vivaldi was a violin virtuoso at the Ospedale della Pietà for girls. Between 1703 and 1733 he wrote dozens of concertos, cantatas, and other religious vocal arrangements for the hospital’s renowned choir. He also composed operas—more than ninety by his own count—which were performed at a variety of theaters in Venice and abroad. His best-known work, though, was his series of violin concertos, The Four Seasons. Like other Venetian composers, Vivaldi was in high demand in the courts of Europe. At various times he composed pieces for King Louis XV of France and Emperor Charles VI of Austria.
Vivaldi seemed to have mastered every form of Venetian music. Yet like the forms themselves, his popularity eventually waned. By the 1730s opera had spread beyond Venice, and new styles were being performed in Naples, Paris, and Vienna. Venetian opera did not disappear, but it was no longer the cutting edge of musical entertainment. Vivaldi traveled to Vienna to find work, but found his services no longer required. He died there penniless in 1741.
In 1650 Venice had a near monopoly on opera. But in 1750 it could be found in every big city in Europe. Responding to the diminishing market, theaters in Venice began switching to spoken-word plays, which had flourished in Paris thanks to Molière. Here again, the Venetian emphasis was on the loud and fantastic. Theater audiences were encouraged to boo and cheer the characters. Indeed, gondoliers often received free admission simply to elevate the boisterousness of the event. Tragedies were the natural direction for indoor theater. Venetians enjoyed comedies, too, but these were thought to be the fare of the lower classes, performed on outdoor stages. Fifteenth-century Venice had seen the invention of the commedia dell’arte, a decidedly lowbrow entertainment in which a troupe of actors performed an improvisational comedy using stock characters that the audience knew well. Most such comedies revolved around a pair of lovers thwarted by an old man who eventually married with the help of a wise and witty servant. The actors wore masks that clearly defined their roles: Harlequin, a clever, humorous rake; Pantalone, a greedy, hook-nosed old miser; Columbine, the beautiful love interest; and so on. The story was, in any case, unimportant. The crowds gathered to see the acrobatic slapstick, hear the music, and laugh at the dirty jokes. And since the entire play was improvised, it was worth attending more than once. Beginning in 1738 the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni cleaned up the commedia dell’arte and brought it into the theaters for the amusement of the tourists and Venetian nobles. A few of the stock characters remained, but the improvisation was abandoned. Goldoni’s plays drew large audiences, but they were always considered somewhat un-Venetian by locals, who saw spoken-word plays of any sort to be inherently French. Like Vivaldi, Goldoni finally left Venice, taking up a position in Paris in 1762.
The ranks of Venice’s foreign visitors grew even larger in the eighteenth century, thanks to swarms of young English gentlemen on the Grand Tour—itself a remarkable cultural phenomenon. During the 1700s England experienced a dramatic increase in wealth, fueled by an expanding global empire and technological advances that would culminate in the Industrial Revolution. In short, a great many English were not just rich, but distinguished citizens of a vast empire. It became conventional wisdom, as Edward Gibbon put it, that “foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.” According to John Locke, the reasons for this “may be reduced to these Two, first Language, secondly an Improvement in Wisdom and Prudence, by seeing men, and conversing with People of Tempers, Customs, and Ways of living, different from one another, and especially from those of his Parish and Neighbourhood.” And so, after finishing their basic education, a great many young English gentry would leave their country, traveling with a tutor and servants, to spend several years seeing the sights on the Continent. It became a defining feature of their class—so much so that the practice even traveled to North America. An eighteenth-century gentleman who could not speak with knowledge of Rome, Milan, Venice, or Paris was simply no gentleman.
Rome was always the primary destination of the Grand Tourists. There one could walk among the ruins of antiquity, marveling at the artistic treasures of the Renaissance papacy. It was the Eternal City, the capital of the last great world empire. Aside from Rome, the English tourist had many other destination options, although Naples, Florence, and Milan would naturally figure highly on any Italian tour. It was also expected that one would spend some time in the countryside, learning the customs of the quaint common folk.
Next to Rome, Venice was the most popular destination on the Grand Tour. It was scarcely conceivable that a young Englishman would miss it. Venice, after all, held a special place in the English consciousness, being the setting of numerous English novels and plays, including two by Shakespeare. The English had also come to see in the island republic a kindred spirit. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the English had established a constitutional government that strictly limited the powers of their monarch. Venice’s “mixed” system of government, in which there were large and small councils presided over by an executive, seemed very similar. Just as the English had a king, House of Lords, and House of Commons, the Venetians had a doge, Senate, and Great Council. More importantly, the Venetians had maintained this government for more than a millennium. Clearly it worked, which was a comforting validation of the new English system. English observers never failed to mention that the doge, for all his pageantry, had very little power. Like the English, Venetians pursued commerce and industry and had once ruled a scattered overseas empire. As Protestants, the English did not warm to Venice’s Catholicism, but even there they found something to praise. The English had cheered the Venetians in 1606, when they withstood a long papal interdict, refusing to bow to Rome’s will. The hero of the defiance, Fra Paolo Sarpi, was widely read in England. The centuries-old Venetian custom of separating ecclesiastical and secular authority now seemed both new and enlightened. In short, English visitors were usually well disposed to Venice even before they arrived.
The milordi (as the traveling Englishmen were called) stayed in hostels or rented accommodations in palazzi, depending on their circumstances. Like other travelers, they often timed their arrival with Venice’s festivals and the theater season. An English set of travel instructions advised, “Go from Rome by way of Loretto to Venice, so as to be there the beginning of May, at which time the Ascension begins, which is a better sight than the Carneval at Venice.” Thousands of tourists took this advice, filling the city in the days before the celebration. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who stayed briefly in Venice during the Sensa, wrote, “I cannot absolutely set the day of my departure, though I very sincerely wish for it, and have reason more than usual: this town being at present infested with English, who torment me as much as the frogs and lice did the palace of Pharaoh.”
On Ascension Day the Bacino would fill with gondolas, many now carrying Grand Tourists eager for a close-up view. The English divine Richard Pococke, who saw the spectacle in 1734, sent home a long description of the doge’s galley, the bucintoro, which was yet another new and more lavish model put into service only seven years earlier. It was, he believed, “the finest ship in the world. . . . The floor is wood laid in handsom figures, every thing else you see in side and out is finely carv’d and gilt all over in the most beautifull manner . . . at the helm is the Doges gilt throne the Nobles being rangd all down.” The German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attended the Sensa in 1786, and wrote of the bucintoro: “The ship is itself an ornament; therefore one may not say that it is overloaded with ornaments, and only a mass of gilded carvings that are otherwise useless. In reality it is a monstrance, in order to show the people that their leaders are indeed wonderful.”
The Sensa, a long-treasured civic ritual for Venetians, had become a giant spectacle for tourists. And that is precisely why it became more elaborate as time went on and the power of Venice waned. The irony was not lost on many foreigners—especially the English, who knew well enough that the Republic of Venice could no longer claim dominion over her bride, the Adriatic. The English churchman John Moore, who made the tour in the 1770s, described the marriage ceremony, saying, “The sea, like a modest bride, assents by her silence, and the marriage is deemed valid and secure to all intents and purposes. Certain it is the time has been, when the Doge had entire possession of, and dominion over, his spouse; but for a considerable time past her favours have been shared by several other lovers.” The English poet Thomas Gray put it more succinctly: “Next to Venice by the 11th of May, there to see the old Doge wed the Adriatic Whore.”
Carnevale events were less spectacular, but drew greater crowds—nearly fifty thousand by 1700. Dressing up in costumes was, of course, part of the fun. In the seventeenth century almost any costume would serve, although there was a fondness for commedia dell’arte characters. The problem with inventiveness, though, was that revelers were expected to act the part of their costumes. Dressing as a Roman, for example, obligated one to speak Latin or else risk a thrashing from masked commoners. After 1700, guidebooks advised tourists to dress as the Venetian nobility did, with abauta (cape), a tabarro (cloak), a white mask, and a tricornered hat. This soon became the unofficial costume of Carnevale.
Aside from masks and opera, a multitude of other activities awaited those who visited Venice for Carnevale. In the eighteenth century more than seventy casinos, called ridotti, would open their doors during the weeks before Lent. Most were small affairs, set up in various palazzi near San Marco. Some, however, like the Ridotto Grande, were lavish baroque salons. The only game played in the ridotti was bassetta (Basset), which held a mystique and association with wealth similar to baccarat today. Both games, in fact, are extremely simple with almost no place for strategy or skill. Bassetta was essentially a lottery, with a press-your-luck element that made it both addictive and extremely costly. Players placed bets on individual cards, hoping that the dealer would reveal the same card as a winner from his own deck. Winning cards (as in baccarat) could be bent in order to let a successful bet ride. Theoretically, it was possible for a single wager to pay off sixty-seven times its value, yet the odds against that were extraordinary. In fact, the game very consciously favored the dealer, who by law had to be a noble and who was often the owner of the establishment. In short, it was the perfect casino game—one that seemed winnable to the player, but in fact was a bonanza for the house.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel books almost invariably urged visitors to skip Venice’s ridotti, which they claimed were both dangerous and crooked. But the tourists flocked there nonetheless. Part of the allure was the requirement that all players be masked, allowing the game and the subterfuge to extend to both friends and lovers. Indeed, many young foreign aristocrats went to the ridotti hoping to meet beautiful masked noblewomen, released from the cloistered captivity of their palazzi only during Carnevale. It was widely rumored that Venice’s miserly old husbands hated the season, but “the Venetian Ladies are impatient for these Occasions, and their Husbands equally watchful to preserve the Honour of the Marriage Bed.” Travel books advised their readers to resist the temptation, since the husbands often hired men to watch their wives and physically beat anyone who became too familiar.
Although sex-starved Venetian noblewomen may have been scarce, the same could not be said of Venetian prostitutes. As a port city, Venice had always boasted a vibrant sex trade. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance common prostitutes did business in the Rialto district, close to the merchants and sailors. High-class courtesans, known as cortigiane oneste, could also be found. These were well-educated consorts, much coveted by the nobility, both in Venice and abroad. Veronica Franco, the famous sixteenth-century Venetian courtesan, had her portrait painted by Veronese and even counted King Henry III of France among her clients. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both forms of prostitution were still active in Venice—indeed, the practitioners had greatly expanded to meet the new foreign demand. It is no exaggeration to say that Grand Tourists who headed to Venice did so as much for the sex as they did for the culture. Almost every traveler’s account of Venice published during these centuries devoted significant portions to prostitution.
In 1608 the English traveler Thomas Coryat estimated that some twelve thousand prostitutes worked in Venice, and that number only increased. No longer confined to Rialto, they had spread throughout the city. According to writer Fynes Moryson, they were “free to dwell in any house they can hyre, and in any streete whatsoever, and to weare what they list.” Travelers strolling through the narrow streets of Venice were presented with a wide selection of prostitutes doing business at all hours. In his 1749 tour book, Thomas Nugent noted:
Of these [prostitutes] there are whole streets full, who receive all comers; and as the habits of other people are black and dismal, these dress in the gayest colours, with their breasts open, and their faces all bedaubed with paint, standing by dozens at the doors and windows to invite their Customers.
English and other European tourists who could afford to visit Venice during Carnevale could also usually afford a cultured, high-quality courtesan. They need not look far. Indeed, competition among the courtesans was so fierce that they adopted a variety of techniques to snare customers. Coryat reported that if one hired a gondola for a ride, the gondolier “presently will carry you to some Curtezans house, who will best pay him for bringing her Customers, as if there were no other recreation but only with women.” In a letter of March 1751, the Grand Tourist Edward Thomas wrote, “Whenever I walkd the Place of St. Mark I observed several Fellows in Cloaks come up to my Servants . . . and importune them to bring me to some of these Ladies; and in the Island of Murano a child not 8 years old came to them on the same errand.” Yet another strategy was for the courtesan to feign interest in the visitor and only reveal that her interest was professional when they had arrived at her chamber. Thomas recorded one such incident:
The next day we went to see a Church and hear a musical Performance, and this young Gallant could not forbear making love to a Lady, richly dress’d and bedeck’d with Jewels tho she was on her knees and thumping her breast. She, to our great surprise, before all the People lifted up her Vail and ogle’d him presenting her hand to him to lead her to her Gondola. The bait took and he handed her into the Gondola and the moment he was in with her she becond to the Gondoleers, who were in handsom liveries, to row off with him in view of all the People, who set up a loud laugh and said she was one of the greatest and most dangerous Strumpets of the City.
Frivolity and debauchery had become major industries in Venice. They were, therefore, an important source of revenue—particularly in an age in which shipping revenues continued to decline. The Venetian government strictly regulated and heavily taxed both prostitution and gambling. By the eighteenth century the vices that were readily available in Venice were so well known that to have outlawed them would have stricken Venice from the Grand Tour. As Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz put it in 1785: “After the great decline of trade at Venice, the visits of travellers became the greatest resource of the nation; it was therefore necessary to adopt milder laws, in order not to deter them from visiting a country which can by no means do without them.”
No figure better defines this period in Venetian history than the famous Giacomo Girolamo Casanova. Born in 1725, the son of an actor and an actress, Casanova moved boldly across the landscape of eighteenth-century Venice. With wit and charm he attracted noble patrons, who paid for his education and his entry into elite society. Above all, Casanova loved love. He moved from one sexual conquest to the next. A regular at the finest balls and the most raucous ridotti, Casanova proclaimed, “Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important.” After abortive careers in the Church, the military, and the theater, he took to gambling as well as cavorting in salons and coffeehouses, discussing the newest ideas of the Enlightenment. His passion for Freemasonry brought him to the attention of the State Inquisition. He was arrested in 1754 and sentenced to five years in the Piombi (the Leads), the old prison in the Ducal Palace directly below the lead roof. After a difficult stay, Casanova staged a daring escape in which he climbed onto the roof, entered a side window, and made his way through the heart of the governmental complex during the deserted hours of the early morning. The remainder of his life was just as exciting. He traveled the length and breadth of Europe, meeting the most powerful and interesting people of his time, including Madame de Pompadour, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin. His numerous adventures included elaborate cons, exciting duels, diplomatic missions, and espionage. He wrote plays, essays, a novel, and, of course, his enormous memoirs, which won him eternal fame and helped define Venice in the modern world as a place of pleasure, culture, and dark designs.
Eighteenth-century Venice was a city of opulence and decadence, and those two themes most strike one in the guidebooks and memoirs of the period. It had become a city of pleasure, the Las Vegas of its day. But for all the frivolous merrymaking, Venice remained true to its ancient heritage. The republic, despite its snarl of checks and balances, remained solid and stable. Although most of the maritime empire had disappeared, Venice continued to govern a sizable chunk of mainland Italy, including important cities like Padua and Verona. And the business of Venice remained business. Much of Venetian wealth was now generated by foreigners flocking to their city of spectacles, but a great deal was also produced by local industries and international trade. The world was changing. And just as their ancestors had done for centuries, Venetians adapted to those changes to secure the honor and profit of Venice.