CHAPTER 18
Within hours of the fall of the Republic of Venice, cannons were mounted on the Rialto Bridge and orders given to fire on anyone found looting or otherwise acting lawlessly. The precaution was hardly necessary. So accustomed were the Venetians to orderly government that even the death of that government could not break them of the habit. A few Venetian patriots chased down Jacobins or others suspected of pro-French sympathies, but order was quickly restored, and with a minimum of casualties. The transition from ancient republic to modern municipality took all of three days.
The crisis of Venetian identity would endure much longer. The extinction of the Venetian state had a profound and lasting effect on the Venetian people. Venice was no longer an actor on the world stage. Quite the contrary, it had become an object to be manipulated, observed, even defined by outsiders. Venice ceased to be the master of its own fate, but quickly became a curiosity or bauble in the hands of world powers. This is not to say that the Venetian people became helpless pawns; as we will see, they acted in the interest of their city when they thought it was possible. But their range of activity had been severely curtailed, their agency taken from them along with their republic. After 1797 it was no longer even clear what it meant to be a Venetian, since citizens in that state no longer existed. For this reason throughout the remainder of this book the emphasis will necessarily shift somewhat from the people living in Venice to the foreigners who interacted with it. It was the foreigners—the generals, statesmen, authors, and artists—who would craft a new modern Venetian identity, one very different from that of the medieval Republic of St. Mark.
The sixty members of the new Municipal government approved by the French, which included nobles as well as non-nobles, met in the Great Council Chamber on May 16, 1797. All were Venetian Liberals who believed that Venice’s future lay with the revolutions of a new age. Few of their fellow Venetians agreed with them, but for the moment that did not matter. They viewed the new Municipality not as a break with the past, but simply as a reformed continuation of the old government. The presence of French soldiers garrisoned throughout Venice suggested otherwise.
So did the Municipality’s actions. It ordered that every image of the winged lion of St. Mark was to be destroyed, including even those on the exterior of the Ducal Palace depicting Doge Andrea Gritti and Doge Francesco Foscari kneeling before the lion. (The sculptures there today are modern reproductions.) Merely to utter “Viva San Marco” was punishable by death. The new government outlawed the famous Venetian festivals, Carnevale and Sensa. A Liberty Tree—the symbol of the French Revolution—was placed in the center of the Piazza San Marco, where a relatively small group of French supporters danced and celebrated the “liberation” of the Venetian people. Not far away a bonfire consumed the Book of Gold, which for four centuries had recorded the names of Venetian patrician families, as well as the doge’s corno and vestments. Most Venetians watched the ceremony with incredulous disdain. For more than a millennium they had been the freest people in the world. They had no need of liberation. Still, given the circumstances, it was much better to let the French have their party and say nothing. One Venetian onlooker, who quietly jeered at a woman who kissed the leaves of the Liberty Tree, was immediately arrested and jailed. Now, at least, Venice had the political prisoners that Napoleon had sought.
The absurdity of events only grew during the next few months as the zeal of the Venetian “revolutionaries” reached new heights. In June the Municipality issued a proclamation praising Bajamonte Tiepolo, the would-be tyrant who in 1309 had attempted to overthrow the republic and replace it with his own despotic rule. The members of the Municipality claimed that Bajamonte had, in reality, been a freedom fighter who had died trying to topple the closed ruling aristocracy led by the evil doge Pietro Gradenigo. Of course, in truth, Gradenigo had actually expanded participation in the republic. No matter. The Municipality proclaimed him the author of the hereditary nobility. Having thus manufactured both a hero and a villain, it sent a delegation to Murano, where a Liberty Tree was planted and the mortal remains of Doge Gradenigo scattered to the winds.
The Venetian supporters of the Municipality were not traitors. They truly believed that Venice would rise again as a democratic city. As nationalism spread across Europe, it kindled the dream of a united Italy in Italians across the shattered peninsula. Venice’s democrats had every reason to believe that a new Venice, remade in the image of the Enlightenment and supported by the French, would rise to become the leader of a new Italy. They were, however, badly deceived. The French brought words of Liberal revolution, but in truth they remained in Venice only to safeguard it as diplomatic currency. In the Treaty of Campoformio, signed on October 18, 1797, Napoleon handed over all the former Venetian mainland territories to the Hapsburgs, just as he had promised in the Preliminaries of Leoben some months earlier. He now threw in the city of Venice for good measure. When news of the treaty reached Venice, the sense of betrayal among Venetian democrats was intense. Their champion, Napoleon, the great dispenser of liberty, had abandoned them to the medieval, aristocratic, and absolutist monarchs, the Hapsburgs. How could he topple the Republic of Venice, they asked, only to deliver it into the hands of a Conservative monarchy? In truth, Napoleon had never really given the matter much thought. The Venetian terra firma was simply the price he paid for peace with Austria. As for Venice, it had angered him. It deserved its fate.
Adding insult to injury, Napoleon ordered his men to confiscate twenty paintings and five hundred rare manuscripts in Venice before departing. The paintings, which included masterpieces such as Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, were shipped to Paris, where they still hang in the Louvre. But Napoleon meant to claim even more impressive souvenirs. He ordered the four bronze horses of San Marco, a symbol of Venice since their capture in Constantinople in 1204, to be removed from the facade of the church and sent to Paris. On December 13, 1797, amid a grand parade of French soldiers, the deed was done. The ancient bronze horses were lowered by pulleys to the Piazza, crated up, and sent to France. When they arrived in Paris, Napoleon mounted them above his Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel with the caption “Brought from Corinth to Rome and from Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice, from Venice to France: they are at last in a free country!”
And that was by no means the end of the looting. The ancient winged lion, which had perched on its column in the Piazzetta since the twelfth century, was taken down, only to follow the horses to Paris. The lion was placed on a column near the Hôpital des Invalides with its tail between its legs. The Arsenale, once the greatest shipbuilding factory in the Western world, was systematically stripped down to the bare walls. A regiment of French soldiers took axes to the lavish bucintoro, a symbol of Venetian pomp and spectacle for centuries. And, of course, there was the famed Treasury of San Marco. Dozens of priceless works of medieval art, including Golden Roses bestowed on Venice for centuries of faithful service to popes, were broken apart for their diamonds, pearls, and precious metals. Astonishingly, the French spared the nine-hundred-year-old Pala d’Oro only because it was thought to have little value.
On January 18, 1798, Austrian general Oliver von Wallis formally took possession of Venice, entering via the Grand Canal. The democrats and Jacobins fled, while the rest of the Venetians dutifully cheered. As a Conservative state, the Hapsburg empire was the mortal enemy of Liberalism. Monarchy and nobility had ruled Europe for centuries. Conservatives believed that Liberalism, while it might sound good on paper, had overturned the old order only to replace it with bloodshed and chaos. The new Austrian masters “restored” the Venetian republic by reimplementing its legal code and placing patricians back into the Great Council, but these changes were merely cosmetic. In fact, Venice was a city-state under Austrian rule. Now shorn of its empire and without tourism or much trade, Venice had very few ways in which to support itself. Its economy quickly declined. Venetians petitioned the Hapsburgs to return Trieste and Dalmatia to them, but without success.
Six years later Venice changed hands again. Napoleon’s victories over the Hapsburgs led to the Treaty of Pressburg, in which the Austrian emperor ceded back to France all of the Veneto, Venice, Istria, and Dalmatia. In January 1806 the Austrians evacuated the city and the French once again returned. But there was no return of the Liberty Tree or any proud speeches extolling freedom and democracy. The Venetian supporters of the Municipality had long since fled. Besides, Napoleon had outgrown the rhetoric of his earlier conquest. Having dispensed with the Directory and its constitution, he had become emperor of France—a more absolute ruler than any of the old French kings. Venice was thus incorporated into the new kingdom of Italy, with its capital in Milan. The king of Italy was, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte. His viceroy was his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, later given the title Prince of Venice. Napoleon planned to use Venice as a naval base to support his Mediterranean operations. As for the city itself, he meant to treat it as his own property. Venice, Napoleon insisted, was “a country of conquest. How have I obtained it other than by victory? The right of victory established, I will treat it as a good sovereign if they are good subjects.” He declared the Ducal Palace the home of the viceroy, although when that proved too small, the “Royal Palace” was moved to the Procuratie Nuove on the south side of the Piazza San Marco.
French revolutionaries had always targeted the Catholic Church, and Napoleon was no exception. He recognized the necessity of the Church—indeed, he was himself a practicing Catholic. But he believed that the Church must be smaller, weaker, and out of his way. In Venice and the islands the new royal government ordered the closure of nearly sixty monasteries and convents. It reduced more than a hundred Venetian parishes to just thirty-four. Large numbers of churches were shuttered, demolished, or converted to other purposes. Sant’Anna, for example, was emptied of its art and transformed into a gymnasium. The monastery of Santa Maria delle Vergini became a military prison. Every year more churches were closed and the artwork warehoused or sent elsewhere—much of it to Paris or Milan. Hundreds of scuole were abolished, their buildings confiscated or destroyed, and their artistic treasures looted. The six Scuole Grandi buildings survived, but they, too, were given more useful occupations. The Scuola Grande di San Marco, for example, was turned into a hospital, as it still remains today. The French government also moved the cathedral of Venice from San Pietro di Castello, where it had been for more than a thousand years, to the church of San Marco. Thus was the doge’s chapel transformed into the seat of the patriarch of Venice, as it, too, still remains today.
All these changes had a profound effect on religion and piety in Venice. Modern Venice is a place where one sees on every calle (narrow street) and campo the floppy hats, short pants, and fanny packs of the tourist. For a millennium those areas were filled with religious habits. Priests in cassocks, Dominicans and Franciscans in their distinctive robes, and religious processions could be seen almost everywhere. The bells of Venice’s campaniles rang to call the faithful to Mass. They heard and they came. It was the French who began the work of stripping the richly vibrant religious life of Venetians from the fabric of their city. Worship and prayer, once so vital to the life and identity of the Venetian people, had been replaced with a secular devotion to the state.
The emperor/king Napoleon Bonaparte personally visited Venice in 1807, and the French-controlled government spared no expense on welcoming its ruler. The pomp and slavish obsequiousness showered on “the hero of the century” measured beyond anything that republican Venice had ever witnessed. An enormous floating arc de triomphe was placed at the north entrance of the Grand Canal to welcome the savior. Napoleon lodged in the Royal Palace (the Procuratie Nuove) and made many sightseeing tours in the city and lagoon. Spectacles such as a regatta, acrobats, and lavish banquets and receptions were held daily. Of course, the emperor also took in an opera at La Fenice, which had to abandon its boxes of democratically equal sizes to make room for the construction of an enormous imperial box at the very center of the theater.
Yet for all the pomp, the city that had transfixed generations of poets and artists left Napoleon cold. It was, he believed, a hodgepodge of old and new without character or discipline. Shortly after his departure, the royal government announced a plan to reform and renew its cityscape. Napoleon wanted to introduce to Venice the modern style of urban planning, which included classical forms, geometric simplicity, manicured public parks, and broad avenues. These were the principles on which Paris was being rebuilt, as were other cities such as Washington, D.C., across the ocean. In an urban environment as thoroughly built up as Venice, though, this necessarily meant demolitions.
The Riva degli Schiavoni was cleared, widened, and extended all the way to Castello. This provided a pleasant walking area along the Bacino from which the San Marco area could be seen at all times. Today this still remains the most-walked street in Venice, filled with tourists, restaurants, and souvenir carts. The wide Rio di Castello was filled in and paved over to produce a new boulevard, originally named the Via Eugenia (for the prince). It is today called Via Garibaldi. Farther east lay the densely populated Motta di Sant’Antonio, a poor district for fishermen, day laborers, and lace makers. The French cleared the entire area, including several churches. There they built the Giardini Pubblica. Although Venice had (and has) hundreds of gardens, they were private affairs tucked away in courtyards behind large walls. The Giardini were public and visible from anywhere on the Bacino, thus bringing a bit of nature to the artificial world of the common Venetian.
On the north side of Venice, Napoleon had a new gate placed in the Arsenale, giving it direct access to the lagoon. He also insisted on a proper cemetery. The island of San Cristoforo, on which Pietro Lombardo’s fifteenth-century church had stood, was cleared for the purpose. The new cemetery filled up quickly, so it was extended onto the adjacent island of San Michele, by which name it is known today.
One place that Napoleon did admire was the magnificent Piazza San Marco. A thousand guidebooks notwithstanding, Napoleon never did call the Piazza “the finest drawing room in Europe.” But he still found much to commend it. Like the great squares in Paris and London, the Piazza provided a pleasant area for citizens to meet, promenade, and generally enjoy each other’s company. As today, the Caffè Quadri and Caffè Florian did a brisk trade and the orchestras played most of the day and night. It was a pleasant backdrop for the Royal Palace, which had expanded to occupy all of the Procuratie Nuove and the Biblioteca Marciana, and even reached all the way to the church of San Geminiano, designed by Sansovino in 1557. The church was splendid, of course, but the palace needed a proper entrance, complete with grand staircase. Despite strong protests, San Geminiano was demolished and the “Napoleonic wing,” as it is often referred to today, was completed along the west side of the Piazza. The demolition of San Geminiano struck a nerve, for it had always been associated with the center of Venetian civic life. Today one can still see both a commemorative marker of the lost church as well as the stairway that took its place.
To the south of the Royal Palace stood a host of buildings and tents along the waterfront in which commerce was still conducted. Napoleon planned to make this area the new front yard of the palace. The malodorous fish markets were quickly cleared away. So, too, was the grain warehouse, the Granari de Terra Nova, one of the oldest buildings in Venice. In their place was planted the Royal Gardens—a pleasant refuge that, surprisingly, is hardly visited today by the legions of tourists in the nearby Piazzetta. With these last demolitions the Molo had finally ceased to be a commercial location. It had been refashioned as a facade for a city of the French Empire. To underscore that point, on Napoleon’s birthday, August 15, 1811, a colossal statue of the emperor, clad as Adonis and carrying an orb signifying his domination of the world, was unveiled on the Molo. Napoleon had thus obtained what no doge, and not even the condottiere Colleoni, could. His statue had been erected in the plaza of the people.
It did not remain there long. In 1812 Napoleon began his disastrous invasion of Russia, culminating in the devastation of his army by the cruel Russian winter. Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria seized the opportunity, marching on France. Paris fell in March 1814 and the captured Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba. Venice, the Veneto, Istria, and Dalmatia were returned once more to Austrian rule. No one, not even the Venetians, entertained the idea of restoring the republic. It was, nonetheless, deeply humiliating for a people who prided themselves on their long history of political stability to be passed back and forth between Europe’s grasping powers.
The Austrians returned to Venice in April 1814 and announced their firm intention to restore everything that had been taken by the criminal Bonaparte. They did not, but they made a good start. The horses of San Marco were removed from Napoleon’s triumphal arch and shipped back to Venice, where they arrived on December 7, 1815. Greeted by a descendant of Doge Enrico Dandolo, they were placed back on the porch of the church of San Marco with much ceremony and celebration. The Austrians also sent back the ancient bronze winged lion for the column on the Molo. Although it was badly damaged in transit, the Venetians worked diligently to repair and replace this symbol of their city, if no longer their state.
The return of the Austrians restored stability to Venice and a measure of self-respect to Venetians, but it only slowed the continued economic decline of the city. The population had dwindled to fewer than a hundred thousand people, and many of them were poor. Struggling old patrician families started selling off their villas and even renting out their crumbling palazzi to foreigners. The English had stopped coming during the Napoleonic Wars, yet even after Napoleon was safely imprisoned, the extinction of the ridotti,Carnevale, Sensa, and, of course, the prostitutes made Venice a much less desirable stop on the Grand Tour. This is not to say that the English did not return to Venice, but they did so in much fewer numbers and spent considerably less money.
An absence of Englishmen was precisely what Lord Byron sought when he arrived in Venice in 1816. One of England’s greatest poets and a giant of the Romantic movement, Byron had come on a self-imposed exile to escape the infamy of his actions back home. Larger than life, he had much in common with Venice’s own Casanova. Strikingly attractive, robustly athletic, and extremely intelligent, Byron was also brash, violent, mercurial, and sexually insatiable. There is no doubt that he suffered severe bouts of depression and anxiety, and he may have been bipolar. As his popularity grew, the English public was both scandalized and titillated by his escapades, which included a string of affairs with married women such as Lady Caroline Lamb. In 1815, at the age of twenty-seven, Byron married. But his wealthy wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, would not abide his infidelities. After one year she took their infant daughter, Ada, and left him. Assisted by a string of Lord Byron’s jilted lovers, Lady Byron accused her husband of serial adultery, an affair with his half sister, and homosexuality. And so, the great English lover decided to follow the example of his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and seek greener pastures elsewhere.
For the next three years, Lord Byron lived in Venice, becoming just as much a sensation in the lagoon as he had been back home. As a study of decline amid a physical backdrop of greatness, Venice embodied the majestic ruin that the Romantics so loved. The descendants of a great empire, the people of Venice lived amid an imperial beauty that they inherited, but could not maintain. While there he composed the Venice canto of Childe Harold as well as Beppo, Don Juan, and two plays about medieval Venetian doges:Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. In all these works, Byron popularized for the English-speaking world the old myth of Venice as a state that had mixed beauty and culture with intrigue, treachery, and oppression. This Romantic, yet largely false, image was further bolstered by one of Napoleon’s former generals, Pierre Darù, who published an extensive history of Venice based on the newly available state archives. Although Venetian scholars strongly rejected Darù’s characterization of the republic, it stuck nonetheless. As for Byron, he simply loved it all. The decayed beauty of the city, striving to hold its head up as it sank beneath the waves of history, appealed instantly to his Romantic tastes. He wrote to his publisher, “I like the gloomy gaiety of their gondolas and the silence of their canals. I do not even dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the singularity of its vanished costume.” It was Byron who coined the name “Bridge of Sighs” for the ornate baroque bridge stretching from the Ducal Palace to the prisons. He imagined, wrongly, that prisoners condemned to death by the Council of Ten crossed the bridge and, having caught their last glimpse of Venice, could not help but sigh.
Byron resided at several places in Venice, but eventually settled in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. It was a magnificent building with a large and ornate main portal and an entrance with a beautiful, if not always strictly maintained, garden. Its majestic staircase ascended to the piano nobile (principal floor) with rich art, stunning mosaics, and a breathtaking view of the Grand Canal. Then, as now, the Palazzo Mocenigo was a fashionable address available for rent to those with the money. Within a few months of his arrival, he began an affair with Marianna, the twenty-two-year-old wife of a Venetian shop owner. “I have passed a great deal of my time with her since my arrival at Venice,” he wrote, “and never a twenty-four hours without giving and receiving from one to three (and occasionally an extra or so) pretty unequivocal proofs of mutual good contentment.” When not amusing himself with Marianna, Byron studied Armenian with Father Pasquale Aucher on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni. Fascinated by Armenian culture, he began learning the language, but did not stick with it long enough to gain proficiency. There were also, of course, the dinners, coffeehouses, salons, and the Rossini operas at La Fenice to amuse Byron.
Because he had a foot deformity that caused him to limp, Byron favored athletic activities that did not require walking or running. He became an expert swimmer, having successfully crossed the Hellespont from Europe to Asia. In Venice he was notorious for jumping out of his gondola fully clothed and swimming home. During a prolonged period of boredom in June 1818, he staged a much-publicized swimming race from the Lido to the Molo. The lone challenger gave up before reaching halfway, while Lord Byron not only swam to San Marco but then the length of the Grand Canal as well.
Byron was also a lover of horseback riding, which he did daily on the Lido—sometimes accompanied by his friend, the poet Percy Shelley. It was on one of these rides that he met his new infatuation, Margarita Cogni, another fiery twenty-two-year-old, this one the wife of a Venetian baker. Margarita “said she had no objection to make love with me, as she was married and all married women did it.” He did not, of course, give up his romance with Marianna, but Margarita did not object. She took the fact of Byron’s other lovers casually, for, as she put it, “it don’t matter—he may have five hundred but he will always come back to me.” The same could not be said of Marianna. When she learned of Margarita and confronted her, the latter replied in fierce Venetian: “You are not his wife; I am not his wife. You are his donna, and I am his donna. Your husband is a cuckold, and mine is another; for the rest, what right have you to reproach me? If he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault?” Margarita later moved into the Palazzo Mocenigo, but Byron eventually tired of her and asked her to leave. Although she threatened him with a knife, and even drew blood, he refused to change his mind. Like Marianna before her, Margarita was sent back to her husband.
Byron and his proclivities quickly became well known across Venice. Since he had a great deal of money to spend, they were cordially tolerated. He went from woman to woman nightly. “Some of them are countesses,” he admitted, “and some of them are cobblers’ wives; some noble, some middling, some low, and all whores. . . . I have had them all and thrice as many to boot.” Finally, in April 1819, Lord Byron met the nineteen-year-old Contessa Teresa Guicciolo of Ravenna, who was visiting Venice with her fifty-eight-year-old husband. Once again, he fell hopelessly in love. For the remainder of the year in Venice, and for another three years elsewhere, the contessa would be the center of his life. The aged Count Guicciolo soon learned of the love affair, about which the entire city buzzed. Nevertheless, he largely ignored it and even occasionally boasted of it, happy to have a man with the wealth and connections of Lord Byron as a virtual member of the family. Yet by the end of 1819 Lord Byron’s time in Venice was nearing an end. He would spend several years elsewhere in Italy, always near Teresa, advocating for Italian independence. In 1823 he left to fight for Greek independence and died at Missolonghi the following year.
Byron’s raucous adventures in Venice came during a low point in the city’s history, although this hardly troubled him. Like all Romantics, who extolled crumbling ruins and echoes of medieval grandeur, Byron found Venetian decay quite suitable. But time marched on and the city, ever so slowly, began to recover. By the 1820s the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to parts of Europe and North America. “Progress” was the new virtue, and would remain so for the rest of the century. Newly wealthy bourgeois began turning up in Venice, eager to see the sights that had previously been reserved exclusively for the gentry. To cater to the new arrivals, Venetian entrepreneurs transformed old palazzi into new hotels. The Palazzo Dandolo on the Riva degli Schiavoni, for example, was purchased by Giuseppe Dal Niel and converted into a hotel in 1824. The Hotel Danieli (named for its new owner) quickly acquired a reputation as the finest hotel in the city—a reputation it retains to this day.
Tourism, which was still well below its pre-Napoleonic levels, was insufficient to revive Venice’s ailing economy. To its credit, the Austrian government initiated a number of projects to modernize Venice. During the 1830s gas lines were run into the city, providing light for the streets and homes. Thereafter, the Piazza San Marco shone nightly with ninety-eight gas lamps. The Austrians finally granted Venice free port status and even built new salt warehouses, the Magazzini del Sale on the Dogana, not far from the church of Santa Maria della Salute. The most controversial of the modernization plans, though, was the proposed railroad bridge connecting Venice to the terra firma. The railroad had revolutionized Western society, making long-distance travel widely available and the transportation of goods much less expensive. The Austrians promoted a plan by Italian businessmen to build a railroad link between Milan and Venice, the two capitals of the Austrian province of Lombardy-Venetia. Milan had profited mightily from the Industrial Revolution, becoming an economic powerhouse in its own right. The hope was that the railroad would bring similar prosperity to Venice.
Most cities longed for a railroad link. In Venice, though, the very idea seemed a dagger to the heart. Venice was founded on the sea. Its history, its identity, its whole raison d’être had been its separation from the mainland. Now the modern industrial world sought to invade its isolation with a mile-and-a-half-long bridge and the steam-belching monster known as the locomotive. Venetians were divided into two factions on the matter: the pontisti and the antipontisti. The latter insisted that Venice must remain unchanged, for it was only in preservation that it could retain its dignity and continue to attract visitors. This group would establish the principle of dov’era, com’era (where it was, as it was) when dealing with restoration and repair of the city. When La Fenice burned down in 1836, for example, it was promptly rebuilt with only minimal alterations. The pontisti, on the other hand, insisted that the railroad would bring “blood to the heart” of Venice. The most radical of the pontisti wanted the railroad to wind its way through the Giudecca Canal and disgorge its contents right onto the Piazzetta San Marco. In the end, though, a compromise was struck. The bridge, completed in 1846, connected Mestre, on the mainland, with the far northwest corner of Venice—in other words, its back door. The great facade of Venice remained unspoiled by “progress.”
Ironically, the railroad killed the ailing Grand Tour, for now a trip to Rome, Florence, or Venice was not the exclusive enjoyment of the elite, but was available to a whole new class of commoners. And, indeed, they came. In the 1840s guidebooks for Venice appeared in a variety of languages, each advising its readers where to stay, eat, and shop. Specialty glassmaking was revived on Murano, thus establishing a new and indispensable class of souvenir for tourists. During the summer months the Piazza San Marco began once again to fill with tourists, who packed into the Florian and the Quadri seeking coffee and ambience. In 1845, just before the railroad opened, the population of Venice equaled the annual number of tourists: about 122,000. The latter number would only increase as the century unfolded.
The railroad had brought something else to Europe, something that would change the world: nationalism. Rapid travel combined with high rates of literacy and instantaneous communications created a new consciousness among national groups. Despite centuries of warfare among themselves, Italians knew that they were different from the French and the Austrians. They longed to forge an independent Italian state. Similar desires motivated nationalists across Europe. Conservatives like Prince Metternich of Austria opposed nationalism just as vehemently as they fought against Liberalism. The Austrian Empire, after all, was a patchwork of ethnicities. Poles, Hungarians, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and, of course, Italians had awakened in themselves a new identity and a desire for self-government. Nationalism threatened to rend the Austrian Empire to shreds.
Talk of nationalism filled the salons and coffeehouses of Venice. Although Venice was rebounding under Austrian rule, Venetians still chafed under the strict censorship laws of the empire. Some suggested joining Venice to other Italian nationalists in Naples or Piedmont, while others simply wanted the restoration of the Republic of St. Mark. In any case, both groups wanted the Austrians out. The de facto leader of the nationalists in Venice was Daniele Manin, a modest, well-respected lawyer who had been jailed for his efforts to establish an autonomous government answerable only to the Austrian emperor. A quiet, educated man with thick spectacles and an infectious smile, he hardly seemed the sort to inspire a revolution.
In 1848 a cocktail of nationalism, liberalism, and socialism mixed liberally with food shortages and high prices led to violent revolutions across Europe. In Italy, armed rebellions temporarily toppled governments in Naples and Rome. Because Austrian forces in Lombardy-Venetia were numerous, Milan and Venice remained calm. That changed, however, in March when news arrived that Vienna itself was in flames and that the Austrian emperor had fled. Now, it seemed to the revolutionaries, was the time to strike. Crowds of excited Venetians formed, as they had for centuries, in the Piazza San Marco. Sensing the winds of history at their backs, they rushed to the prisons near the Ducal Palace, broke open the doors, and carried Manin out on their shoulders, hailing him as their new leader. The Venetian revolution had begun.
Manin formed a Civil Guard of several thousand men, identified by a simple white sash. On March 22, 1848—a day that would remain hallowed among Venetians—they stormed the Arsenale, which was loaded with Austrian munitions and a few warships. On the same day, King Charles Albert of Piedmont, on the advice of the nationalist Count Camillo Cavour, declared war on Austria and, joining Milan, declared its independence. Badly beaten and uncertain of events back home, Austrian forces retreated, evacuating Venice completely. The city was at last free. In an emotional gathering in the Piazza San Marco, Manin declared the restoration of the Republic of Venice to the cheering crowds. Once again the forbidden chant rose from the people: “Viva San Marco! Viva San Marco!”
But the old order was not so easily put away. All of Europe’s 1848 revolutions were soon crushed or made irrelevant. Emperor Ferdinand returned to Vienna in June, promising a new constitution and the restoration of order. Among his first acts was to send Austrian troops to restore Lombardy-Venetia. By August the Austrians had secured the countryside and put down the rebellions in the cities, including the one in Milan. Venice alone stood defiant. The new Venetian Assembly voted Manin full powers to deal with the emergency. He organized a wide conscription of Venetian men into the Civil Guard and prepared for the worst. The Austrians planned to starve Venice, setting up a land and sea blockade. But continued unrest in Vienna made the blockade occasionally porous, which in turn allowed the republic to survive. In the Great Council Chamber of the Ducal Palace the assembly announced to the world that “Venice will resist Austria at all costs.”
And she did. In January 1849 the new emperor, Francis Joseph, crushed the remnants of rebellion in Vienna and established military rule over rebellious Hungary. His adviser Prince Felix Schwarzenberg meant to put down the Venetian revolution just as quickly. The blockade of the lagoon was tightened, leading to massive food shortages and rationing of almost everything. On May 29 the Austrians began what the French had only threatened: They fired on the city of Venice. Over the next several weeks, round-the-clock bombardment battered the city. And if that was not bad enough, in August a cholera outbreak brought on by acqua alta (high water) and the unsanitary conditions of the siege struck the city. Thousands of Venetians died. Conjuring up images of the old plagues, bodies were stacked high in the open grassy campo outside the church of San Pietro di Castello.
The “Year of Revolutions” had ended in Europe, yet only Venice continued to wage its hopeless fight. At last the Venetians realized that it was over for them as well. On August 19 a small boat waving white flags rowed out to the terra firma and surrendered to the Austrians. Daniele Manin and the other republican leaders fled or were exiled. Yet in all other respects the Austrians left Venice unpunished. Although Manin died in Paris, his remains were returned to Venice in 1868 after his dream of independence was finally realized. In an unprecedented move, the Campo San Paternian, where Manin had lived, was renamed in his honor. The campanile and ruined church were demolished and a statue of the hero was erected in their place. It, and the outlines of the old church, are still there.
The bodies had been buried, but Venetian antipathy for the Austrians had not. Austrian military bands that played daily in the Piazza San Marco received only sneers from the Venetians in the coffee shops and never a trace of applause. And yet, although the city remained tense, there was little violence. Slowly the foreign visitors returned, now whisked across the causeway in a matter of minutes rather than the hours of a gondola trip. Among the first to arrive was the English art critic John Ruskin. He had visited the city when he was a young man and was amazed at its ruinous beauty. Now he returned on a mission—to preserve in drawings and daguerreotype (a primitive photographic process) every aspect of Venice’s medieval architectural glory. Like most Romantics of his time, Ruskin detested the revival of classical architecture during the Renaissance, and thought the baroque embellishment of it was even worse. What he sought was the beauty of the medieval Gothic—in particular the uniquely Venetian Gothic, a melding of East and West unknown elsewhere. Over the course of several years during the late 1840s and early 1850s Ruskin spent countless hours perched on ladders, balanced on gondolas, and crouched beneath the black cloth of his camera. He meant to record Venice’s beauty before it was lost forever.
Like Byron, Ruskin would change the way that the English-speaking world thought about Venice. However, in form, style, and temperament Ruskin was the very opposite of Byron. Thin, sensitive, and a trifle effeminate, Ruskin made no advances on the married women of Venice—indeed, not even on his own wife, Effie. Years later their marriage was annulled on the basis of his “incurable impotency.” He denied the charge, but admitted that he found his wife’s naked body repugnant and therefore had never consummated their marriage.
In 1851 and 1853, Ruskin published the three volumes of his great work, The Stones of Venice. It considered in precise detail the three periods of Venetian architecture: Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance. Ruskin provided a selective history of Venice, interspersed among the measurements, drawings, and rhapsodic elegies on form, conforming this history closely to the architectural styles themselves. For Ruskin, Venice rose to power during its Byzantine period and then, after the Serrata of 1297, arrived at the peak of its glory while producing Gothic structures. After the fifteenth century, he believed, the city declined rapidly. Grasping the fad of Renaissance classicalism, men like Sansovino and Palladio had marred the face of Venice with bland and soulless reason.
The Stones of Venice is much discussed today, but little read. Although a font of information, it is by modern standards overwritten. Venetian Gothic, for example, is
prickly independence and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets and freezing into pinnacles; here starting up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom, anon knitting itself into a branch, alternately thorny, bossy, and bristly, or writhed into every form of nervous entanglement.
And so on. But Ruskin was important not merely because he popularized and catalogued the crumbling city, but because he warned the world of Venice’s peril. Loud and clear in The Stones of Venice Ruskin sounded the alarm. Unless something was done soon, an irreplaceable jewel would be lost. Venice was “uniquely precious—a miracle that could not be reworked, a dream that could not be redreamt.” For Ruskin, the Venetians themselves did not understand the danger. Instead they undertook restorations that were in reality just demolitions. Venice, he believed, was more than the Venetians—indeed, it existed independently of them. Venice was a treasure that belonged to all of humanity. Ruskin gave voice to a profoundly changed identity of Venice. It had become the physical city of crumbling beauty, a work of art, a world heritage. Those who read Ruskin, including thousands who traveled to Venice on package tours, began to feel that the city truly did belong to them, indeed to everyone. And they meant to take care of it. After the unveiling of an extremely poor restoration of San Marco’s southern facade in 1875, concerned people in Great Britain formed the St. Mark’s Committee of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, the first international organization formed to make certain that Venice was preserved just as it was. It would not be the last.
Nationalism in Italy, as everywhere else, continued to erode borders that did not agree with it. In Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi and his republican fighters waged guerrilla war against the Austrians. To the French under Napoleon III, Garibaldi and his ilk seemed too wild and unstable to form a government on their southern border. Instead, they supported Piedmont and its liberal king, Victor Emmanuel II. In 1861 Garibaldi conquered the medieval kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its capital at Naples. With French help, Victor Emmanuel captured the Austrian territories in Lombardy. On March 17, 1861, the two met and formed a unified Italy. Only Rome—still ruled by the pope and defended by French troops—and Venice remained outside the new Italian state. Five tense years followed, as the Austrians continued to rule the Veneto. Most Venetians wanted unification. The feeling was palpable to tourists, who wrote home about the stigma Venetians attached to even speaking cordially to an Austrian, let alone befriending or marrying one. Arrests were made, bombs exploded, and general unrest occasionally erupted. Finally, in 1866, after the Third Italian War of Independence, Austria ceded Venice and the Veneto to Napoleon III, who in turn ceded it to Italy. On October 19, after ruling the city for more than half a century, the Austrians left Venice. With some cause they felt ill-used by the Venetians. Their empire had sunk enormous resources into Venice in an attempt to restore, modernize, and preserve it. For their efforts, they received only jeers at their backsides as they marched back home.
Ecstatic cheers greeted the Italian forces when they arrived in Venice on October 19. That Venetians could applaud a foreign army—even one that spoke Italian—as liberators only demonstrates how much the world had changed since the days of the republic. The people of Venice celebrated their independence because they were no longer just Venetians. They were Italians. On November 7 they welcomed their new king, Victor Emmanuel, with a ceremony that rivaled any staged before. The Venetians had greeted their French and Austrian conquerors with fanfare, but the celebration of 1866 conveyed true feeling. Indeed, they soon decided to place a bronze equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel riding triumphantly into the future on the Riva degli Schiavoni. This work of Ettore Ferrari was completed in 1887 and remains there today. Although the main statue is unremarkable, the bronze groups at its base vividly express the feelings Venetians had for their unification with Italy. Behind the king a woman, depicting a weary Venice, bears a broken standard, while the lion of St. Mark lies chained and defeated. Before the king, thanks to the creation of the Italian state, the lion and the woman have awoken and enthusiastically look forward to a bright future.
Much of that future would rely on tourism. With Venice safely part of a united Italy, new waves of foreigners began to arrive in the lagoon. Most came on package tours offered by Cook’s tours, Wagons-Lits railroads, and Lloyd Triestino shipping. The end of the American Civil War and the rise of oceangoing steamships had also opened Venice to an increasing number of Americans. Some, like Henry James, brought a new perspective, but one not too unlike that of the elite elsewhere. During his first visit in 1869, James appreciated the beauty of Venice, but was shocked at its poverty and poor condition, writing, “The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle.” Like millions of tourists after him, he decried the tourists who descended on Venice and noted with displeasure “a horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza,” who “treat the place as an orifice in a peep show.”
But the starkest meeting between American and Venetian culture must surely have occurred in July 1867, with the arrival of Mark Twain. A Missouri native and former Mississippi riverboat pilot, Twain could not help but have a keen interest in the “Queen of the Adriatic.” He was, of course, paid to be irreverent, but his view of Venice from the perspective of the common American was unprecedented. Like James, Twain was struck by the decay of the great city.
She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,—a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children. The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for flippant speech or the idle gossiping of tourists.
Upon arriving in Venice, Twain boarded a hotel gondola. Yet it failed to match his tourist’s expectation for grandeur and musical bliss.
This the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier!—the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned a corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to the tradition of his race. I stood it a little while. Then I said: “Now, look here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I’m a pilgrim, and I’m a stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such caterwauling as that. If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.”
Despite his disappointment in the musical talent of the gondoliers, Twain the boatman found their skill on the water absolutely fascinating. Indeed, he is perhaps the earliest traveler to remark in detail on the gondolier’s craft.
[A]nd how in the world he can back and fill, shoot straight ahead, or flirt suddenly around a corner, and make the oar stay in those insignificant notches, is a problem to me and a never diminishing matter of interest. I am afraid I study the gondolier’s marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we glide among. He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself “scrooching,” as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel grazes his elbow. But he makes all his calculations with the nicest precision, and goes darting in and out among a Broadway confusion of busy craft with the easy confidence of the educated hackman. He never makes a mistake.
Twain, of course, saw all the major sights, including a large number of paintings. He was not, however, as rapturous in his praises of Venetian art as most visitors. “We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate the world. . . . [T]o me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all.” Nevertheless, Twain, like almost every other tourist, could not help but be struck by Venice’s beauty. For him, the greatest delight was the Redentore celebration, in which people boarded hundreds of gondolas with colored lanterns that floated out on the mirrorlike water to watch the evening fireworks. They were “like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out. . . . The fete was magnificent. They kept it up the whole night long and I never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.”
Along with the tourists came the artists. Venice had become the city that must be painted. Edouard Manet visited in 1875, James McNeill Whistler in 1879, Auguste Renoir in 1881, and Claude Monet in 1908. And these were but the most famous. The growing crowds were eager to purchase paintings from lesser-known practitioners; almost anyone with an easel and a bit of talent could find a ready customer. More tourists meant more business for the growing number of hotels and restaurants. However, for Venice’s hundreds of gondoliers, the bonanza was ending. In the 1880s the first steam-powered water buses—the vaporetti—were introduced to the city, forever changing the face of Venice. Tourists and common Venetians no longer needed to hire a gondola to get from place to place, but simply loaded aboard the noisy, but speedy, vaporetti. The gondola soon ceased to be a form of transportation and became instead just a ride.
Progress found yet other ways to intrude into late-nineteenth-century Venice. Iron bridges were built across the Grand Canal at two new locations, the Accademia and the train station, thus significantly opening up the city to foot traffic. A cholera outbreak in 1867 led to modifications in water flow so as to allow sewage to more easily be flushed out to sea. Water lines were run into Venice from the Brenta Valley, providing indoor plumbing and bringing to an end the rich culture of campo gossip at the pozzo. The Industrial Revolution came to Venice in the form of the Stucky mill on the end of Giudecca. Giovanni Stucky, the son of a Swiss father and a Venetian mother, built the giant flour mill and granary in a classic industrial mode that stylistically defied the city across the canal. The local government only allowed it because the factory provided much-needed jobs for its citizens. A similar kind of monumental building was constructed (by the same architect, Ernst Wullekopf) out on the Lido. The European craze for saltwater bathing fit Venice like a glove and led to the construction of new luxury hotels on the largely empty sandbar facing the Adriatic. Where Byron and Shelley had once raced their horses, the Hotel Excelsior Palace and the Hotel des Bains soon opened their doors.
By the turn of the century the city of Venice had in many ways come full circle. Passed from one foreign power to another, it had at last returned to Italian, if not Venetian, control. Searching for purpose in a modern world, it had come back to the tourism that had sustained it before the fall of the republic. And yet, the tourists who arrived no longer came to see the operas, or the prostitutes, or the ridotti. They came, instead, to see Venice.