The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (27 page)

When they reached the Black Mountain, the bride was shown her real husband Stanicha, ugly from the smallpox. ‘Here is your real husband, my son Stanicha,’ said Ivo the Black: but she was very angry at the deception, for half the costly presents that the Doge had given must stay with Djuro, and she had embroidered with her own hands the tunics of gold. ‘If I must be Stanicha’s wife,’ said she, ‘then Stanicha must fight Djuro to recover the last tunic of gold. If not, I will pluck a thorn, I will scratch my face with it, and with the blood I will write a letter which my falcon will carry swiftly to great Venice.’

So Stanicha killed Djuro with a javelin through the head. War followed in the Black Mountain and Ivo could see the whole plain covered afar with horses and riders cut in pieces. The young men rose so furiously on behalf of the murdered Djuro that Stanicha was forced to leave the mountains for a foreign country far away; and his bride went home to Venice a virgin.

A particular aesthetic governs the Dalmatian coast, corroded though it is in many parts by the stain of tourism. It lies partly of course in the splendour of the landscape, that incomparable combination of sea, island and limestone barrier. It is partly the climate too, generally so benign, shifting suddenly to seething seas and scudding clouds when the bora falls upon the Adriatic like the breath of fate. Perhaps it is partly the nature of the inhabitants, almost all Slavs now even in the towns, tough and stocky people, made a little more drab by the exigencies of Communism and given to particular violence in war, who slump themselves opposite
you at the dining-table grim and unresponsive, but can be coaxed with patience into true bonhomie.

But what chiefly gives the coast its tang, and makes it like no other shore, is the particular blend of the Latin and the Slav which is the gift of Venice to Dalmatia. History has expunged some of it: hardly a trace of the Italian cuisine is noticeable now and the Italian language has been systematically eradicated even in those places like Zadar, Rijeka and the ports of Istria which became Italian again between the two world wars. But in the long string of towns which graces this shore one can detect a particular sinewy allure which could arise, I think, only from this particular association of temperaments. I accept absolutely the theory that Vittore Carpaccio was from Koper in Istria, for the cool spareness of his vision, so different from the exclamatory style of a Titian or a Tintoretto, or the gentle mysteries of a Giorgione, perfectly reflects the Dalmatian mix of ornate and naive, sea and karst.

There is a similarity but not a sameness to all the towns. Each has its piazza, recognizable still as the centre of Venetian power. Each is likely to have one of those elegant little loggias, pillared, tile-roofed and possibly en-lioned, which were sometimes used as lesser courts of justice and sometimes as lodging-places for travellers. There is probably a handful of patrician houses still standing, distant cousins to the
palazzi
of the Grand Canal, escutcheoned as often as not though long since divided into flats or handed over to People’s Consultative Syndicates. There is also certain to be, proudly in the middle of town and still an active centre of Christian devotion, a cathedral.

One cannot really call the cathedrals of Dalmatia Venetian buildings. Most of them were built, or rebuilt, under the aegis of Venice, and Venetian architects frequently worked upon them, sometimes modelling them upon Venetian originals. But their particular magic comes, nearly always, from the touch of the Slav upon the Italianate. They are very sensual buildings, almost always, made of glowing marble or soft sandstone, intimate with little side-chapels and dark chancels, curiously embellished with images sacred and profane, instructive or merely frivolous. If spiritually they sometimes seem, like the one at Korčula, miniatures of the Basilica San Marco, physically they are often boldly
individualistic or even eccentric, marked by the preferences of some local artist, or conceived by local circumstance.

The cathedral of San Lorenzo at Trogir, for instance, seems at first just a singularly beautiful example of medieval Venetian architecture, from the period when Romanesque dovetailed into Gothic. Set in a neat ensemble of piazza, loggia and patrician house, like a close, it is not too hard to imagine it transferred to some
campo
of Venice itself. But within its heavily arched narthex, shaded deeply against the sun, an altogether alien marvel reveals itself: an elaborately, almost violently carved great porch, of a style so roughly vigorous that no Venetian artist could ever have made it. It was the work of the thirteenth-century Croatian sculptor Radovan, and it is guarded by two of the burliest-and most truculent lions of the Venetian Empire – Slav lions through and through, on guard like mercenaries.

The cathedral of Šibenik, Sebenico to the Venetians, is another declaration of independence. The principal architect of this famous building was a Dalmatian who had studied at Venice and is known by his Italian name of Giorgio Orsini; he married a Venetian and possessed houses in several Venetian territories. But his cathedral turns out to be, despite a certain initial impact of
déjà vu,
very un-Venetian after all. Its interior, especially, is like nothing in Venice. It rises in a series of steps from narthex to altar, but not in the graceful manner of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice: the dark nave does not glide upwards to the high altar, but rather stumps there, step by step through the twilight. Outside, too, the posture of the church, when you look at it longer, is strangely bold and muscular, a little piratical perhaps, and around the back seventy sculpted heads, said to be those of citizens too stingy to contribute to the cost of the building, gaze out at the passers-by astonishingly like the decapitated heads of captured enemies, some moustachio’d and unrepentant, some innocent and aghast.

But the most startling expression of this hybrid aesthetic is to be found in the island-town of Rab, Arbe to the Venetians, some fifty miles north of Zadar and reached by ferry from the old Uskok nest of Senj. Rab is a tiny place on a promontory, perhaps half a mile long and three narrow streets wide, but its silhouette was familiar to every Venetian mariner along this coast, and is unmistakable now. Four tall campaniles are its emblems, all in a row along its western shore, and they give the place an oddly eerie effect, even when the tourists crowd its beaches.

Wherever you walk down the spine of the town, pine-scented from the woods that edge it, those four tall towers seem to beckon you on, like markers – down the flagged and wheel-less lanes, under the old stone arches wreathed in creeper, past the dark little loggia in the middle of town, past quaint crested palaces and high-walled gardens, until at the end of your walk, near the tip of the promontory, you discover before you the ribbed Italianate façade of the little cathedral, on its own piazzetta beside the sea.

There is a little belvedere beside it, pleasantly shaded, where you may lean over the water and watch the boats go by; but your eye is not likely to wander for long, because above the main door of the church is the true focus of the whole island, the object to which, you realize now, those four grave towers have been guiding you all along. It is the starkest and saddest, perhaps the truest of Pietas, in which a grief-stricken Virgin cherishes a Christ still writhing from the pain of the cross. Nothing could be further from the ample and confident faith of Venetian Christian art. It is a chunk of the karst that is mounted there, carved with a bitter vision.

Northward through the off-shore islands, as the coast with its indentations unfolds itself to starboard: the treacherous gulf called Boiling Bay, where indeed when the wind gusts from the north the waves do seem to bubble, hiss and steam, as though there is fire beneath them; Rijeka, which used to be Fiume, where the Venetians built themselves, in the church of San Guido, a remarkably inaccurate copy of their beloved Salute; Pula, a naval base all its life, Roman, Hungarian, Austrian, Italian and now Yugoslav; until there stands to the north the bumpy peninsula of Istria. This was the nearest to home of all the possessions of the
Stato da Mar,
separated from Venice itself only by Trieste and the lagoon-shore of Venezia Giulia.

This is where Dalmatia ends, and now the little seaside towns are more exactly Venetian. They gave to the Doge one of the earliest of his ancillary titles,
dux totius istriae
, and they remained Italian until the end of World War II. They were confirmed irrevocably as Yugoslav only in 1975, when their future was settled with that of Trieste, and they have powerful sizable Italian populations still. Even today it is hard to remember that Capodistria is Koper now, Parenzo Poreč, Rovigno Rovinj. A powerful sense of nostalgia informs them, dingy as they are with Communism’s patina, and every weekend their inhabitants pour in their thousands over the frontier to Italy, to stock up not just with jeans, confectionery and spare parts, but also no doubt with the sense of style and colour to which so many centuries of Venetian rule accustomed them.

This rather melancholy peninsula – for centuries it was repeatedly ravaged by plague – was always familiar to Venice. It was only a day and night’s sailing to the lagoon, even in the Middle Ages, and more than any other imperial settlements, the Istrian seaports feel like illusions of Venice herself. Sometimes their appearance now in this still alien setting, with a splash of authentic Venetian red, perhaps, and a pattern of real Venetian machicolation on the skyline, and a perfect little replica of St Mark’s Campanile rising above the rooftops, backed by such sober hills and pine forests, and often hemmed in by modern office blocks, tourist hotels and Corbusian apartments, can be sadly unsettling.

There is an easy cure, though. You must do as the Venetians did. Climb the high ground behind Koper, say, on a fine spring day, when the sea is flecked only with little curls of foam, and the long line of coast is clear as pen-and-ink. Settle up there among the conifers with a picnic and a pair of binoculars and presently, when the sun is just beginning to set, you may make out through the glasses an indistinct grey blur upon the horizon to the west, faintly picked out perhaps, in fancy if not in fact, with a shimmer of gold. There is a stack of buildings on a waterfront, surely. There is a suspicion of a tower. Isn’t that a gilded angel there, that faint spot on the lens, that golden dust-flake?

It is no nostalgic copy this time, no extension of style, faith or strategy. It is the real thing out there. We have reached the end of our sea voyage, and we are looking at Venice.

Back the imperial way – effects of empire –
falling into place – ethnics – out of the sun
at last

S
o we sail across
the bay of Trieste to that glistening destination over the water, guided now if not by the actual flash of the sun on the summit of the great Campanile, as seafarers used to be, at least by the shining knowledge of its presence there. Many ships still sail up the Gulf of Venice to
La Dominante:
tankers taking oil to the refineries of the lagoon, freighters for the busy docks of the city itself, cruise-liners booming disco music, hydrofoils from Trieste, and now and then warships of the Italian navy, whose vessels are still the most beautiful of all, streaking lean and elegant, like the galleys before them, to anchor tonight off the Riva degli Schiavoni, the Quay of the Slavs, only a stone’s throw from the Arsenal.

We will return the imperial way too, through the sea-gate of the Lido, as the Crusaders did, and the bravos of the Cyclades, and Petrarch’s courier-ship from Crete trailing its captured banner, and poor Caterina Cornaro, and Morosini home from defeat and from victory, and all the countless argosies, galleasses, pilgrim galleys and troopships that returned, at one time or another during the long story of the Venetian Empire, triumphant or humiliated to the lagoon.

An abandoned but still glowering fortress greets us as we pass through the sea-gate, emblazoned of course with a gigantic lion of St Mark – the fortress of San Andrea, which was designed by that same Sanmicheli who built the walls of Zadar and Iraklion, and whose guns, by injudiciously firing on a French frigate in 1797,
gave Napoleon the
casus belli
he wanted to end the Venetian Republic. Round the point we sail, into the calm waters of the lagoon, sheltered against the open sea by the long line of the Lido islands, and there before us resplendent in the morning, the sun glinting from its golden domes and baubles, from its forest of campaniles, from the periwigged presence of the Salute and the grand mass of the Doge’s Palace – there before us is the Serenissima once more. More than ever, now that we have travelled her lost dominions, does she seem an imperial city, stashed and gilded with the spoils, memorials and attitudes of the long adventure. She rules nothing in fact, being only one of twenty Italian regional centres, but she retains the charisma of command, and has hung on to the booty.

We disembark where Dandolo set sail, nearly eight hundred years ago, and the sense of permanent occasion is as exciting now as it was when we started. The Piazzetta remains a quay fit for princes or Crusaders. The chimerical winged lion, St Theodore with his despondent amphibian, welcome us back from their column-heads above the sea. Dandolo never came home from Constantinople, except perhaps as a bag of bones, but if he were to be resurrected now he would easily recognize the scene about him, and doubtless rejoice at the evident success of the imperial enterprise he launched. He was a terrible old man, but he loved his city and the city still loves him: there is a monument to him, in Latin, on his modest house near the Rialto bridge, No. 4172 San Marco, and from his day to our own there have always been Dandolos in Venice eager to claim him as an ancestor.

We are back where our journey began, but now we recognize the effects of empire all around us. Venice has not, like London, shrugged off the memory of its mighty mission. In an aesthetic sense at least, this city still holds the east in fee, as the place where orient and Occident seem most naturally to meet: where the tower of Gothic meets the dome of Byzantine, the pointed arch confronts the rounded, where hints and traces of Islam ornament Christian structures, where basilisks and camels stalk the statuary, and all the scented suggestion of the east is mated with the colder diligence of the north. Augsburg met Alexandria in these
streets long ago, and nobody fits the Venetian
mis-en-scène
better than the burnoused sheikhs so often to be seen these days feeding the pigeons in the Piazza, leading their veiled wives stately through the Merceria, or training their Japanese cameras upon St Theodore like that contorted sightseer in the old picture.