MAY in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the
days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than
the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, and more
golden than ever as the day descends. It seems to expand and evaporate,
to multiply all it's reflections and iridescences. Then the life of
it's people and the strangeness of it's constitution becomes a
perpetual comedy, or, at least, a perpetual drama. Then the gondola
becomes your habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go
to the Lido, though the Lido has been spoiled. When I was first in
Venice, in 1869, it was a very natural place, and there was only a
rough lane across the little island, from the landing-place to the
beach. There was a bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, which
was very bad, but where, in the warm evenings, your dinner did not much
matter as you sat letting it cool upon the wooden terrace that
stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of United Italy,
and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. A little
cockney village has sprung up in it's rural bosom, and a third-rate
Boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are
bitumen walls and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops, and a day theatre.
The bathing establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant as
well; but it is a compensation, perhaps, that the cuisine is no better.
Such as it is, however, you will not scorn occasionally to partake of
it on the breezy platform under which bathers dart and splash, and
which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and
crimson, wander along the darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is
still lovely and beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the
cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is classical and
indispensable, and those who, at that glowing hour, have floated toward
the towers that rise out of the lagoon, will not easily part with the
impression. But you indulge in larger excursions—you go to Burano and
Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the Lido, has been
improved; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the eighth
century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching in it's
ruin, with it's grassy threshold and it's primitive mosaics, as the
bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now
been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, it's
strange and suggestive desolation, has wellnigh departed. It will still
serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, especially as
you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful fisher-folk,
whose good looks—and bad manners, I am sorry to say—can scarcely be
exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of it's women and the
rapacity of it's children, and it is a fact that though some of the
ladies are rather bold about it, every one of them shows you a handsome
face. The children assail you for coppers, and, in their desire to be
satisfied, pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger
Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical,
but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-coloured
hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a
delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of
hair, and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that
hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as
they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked
matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased
with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional
defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice are almost as
handsome as the women; I have never seen so many good-looking fellows.
At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their nets, or lounge at the
street-corners, where conversation is always high-pitched, or clamour
to you to take a boat; and everywhere they decorate the scene with
their splendid colour—cheeks and throats as richly brown as the sails
of their fishing-smacks—their sea-faded tatters, which are always a
“costume”—their soft Venetian jargon, and the gallantry with which
they wear their hats—an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass
of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy, you will find yourself,
after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on a balcony that
overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad ledge, a
cigarette in your teeth, and a little good company beside you. The
gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from
their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously
in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too
many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the
hotels. The serenading (in particular) is overdone; but on such a
balcony as I speak of you needn't suffer from it, for in the apartment
behind you,—an accessible refuge,—there is more good company, there
are more cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there
presently.