Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume VII Part 12

BY JOHN RUSKIN

Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and hoist themselves at last into fields of salt mora.s.s, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and interrupted by narrow creeks of sea.

One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburned weeds whitened with webs of fucas, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool beside a plot of greener gra.s.s covered with ground-ivy and violets. On this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which if we ascend toward evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours.

Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen-gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of s.p.a.ce in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom. To the very horizon, on the northeast; but to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it, and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched with snow.

To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bar of sand; to the south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same field which sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them little larger than cottages (tho built of stone, and one adorned by a quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing ma.s.s from the green field beneath and gray moor beyond.

There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie like a little company of ships becalmed on a faraway sea.

Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there are a mult.i.tude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of cl.u.s.tered palaces, a long irregular line fretting the southern sky.

Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood--Torcello and Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the mult.i.tude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of the city that they built, and the swathes of soft gra.s.s are now sending up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the temple of their ancient worship.

CADORE, t.i.tIAN'S BIRTHPLACE[57]

BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS

We reached Pieve di Cadore about half-past eleven A.M., delays included. The quaint old piazza with its gloomy arcades, its antique houses with Venetian windows, its cafes, its fountain, and its loungers, is just like the piazzas of Serravalle, Longarone, and other provincial towns of the same epoch. With its picturesque Prefettura and belfry-tower one is already familiar in the pages of Gilbert's "Cadore."

There, too, is the fine old double flight of steps leading up to the princ.i.p.al entrance on the first floor, as in the town-hall at Heilbronn--a feature by no means Italian; and there, about midway up the shaft of the campanile, is the great, gaudy, well-remembered fresco, better meant than painted, wherein t.i.tian, some twelve feet in height, robed and bearded, stands out against an ultramarine background, looking very like the portrait of a caravan giant at a fair....

Turning aside from the glowing piazza and following the downward slope of a hill to the left of the Prefettura, we come, at the distance of only a few yards, upon another open s.p.a.ce, gra.s.sy and solitary, surrounded on three sides by rambling, dilapidated-looking houses, and opening on the fourth to a vista of woods and mountains. In this little piazza stands a ma.s.sive stone fountain, time-worn and water-worn, surmounted by a statue of Saint Tiziano in the robes and square cap of an ecclesiastic. The water trickling through two metal pipes in the pedestal beneath Saint Tiziano's feet, makes a pleasant murmuring in the old stone basin; while, half hidden behind this fountain, and leaning up as if for shelter against a larger house adjoining, stands-a small whitewashed cottage upon the side-wall of which an incised tablet bears the following record:

"Nel MCCCCLXXVII Fra Queste Vmili Mura Tiziano Vecellio Vene a celebre Vita Donde vsciva gia presso a cento Anni In Venezia Addi XXVII Agosto MDLXXVI."

A poor, mean-looking, low-roofed dwelling, disfigured by external chimney-shafts and a built-out oven; lit with tiny, blinking, medieval windows; altogether unlovely; altogether unnoticeable; but--the birthplace of t.i.tian!

It looked different, no doubt, when he was a boy and played outside here on the gra.s.s. It had probably a high, steep roof, like the homesteads in his own landscape drawings; but the present old brown tiles have been over it long enough to get mottled with yellow lichens. One would like to know if the fountain and the statue were there in his time; and if the water trickled ever to the same low tune; and if the women came there to wash their linen and fill their brazen water jars, as they do now. This lovely green hill, at all events, sheltered the home from the east winds; and Monte Duranno lifted his strange crest yonder against the southern horizon; and the woods dipt down to the valley, then as now, where the bridle-path slopes away to join the road to Venice.

We went up to the house, and knocked. The door was opened by a sickly, hunchbacked lad who begged us to walk in, and who seemed to be quite alone there. The house was very dark, and looked much older inside than from without. A long, low, gloomy upstairs chamber with a huge penthouse fire-place jutting into the room, was evidently as old as the days of t.i.tian's grandfather, to whom the house originally belonged; while a very small and very dark adjoining closet, with a porthole of window sunk in a slope of ma.s.sive wall, was pointed out as the room in which the great painter was born.

"But how do you know that he was born here?" I asked. The hunchback lifted his wasted hand with a deprecating gesture. "They have always said so, Signora," he replied. "They have said so for more than four hundred years."

"They?" I repeated, doubtfully. "The Vecelli, Signora." "I had understood that the Vecellio family was extinct." "Scusate, Signora,"

said the hunchback. "The last direct descendant of 'Il Tiziano' died not long ago--a few years before I was born; and the collateral Vecelli are citizens of Cadore to this day. If the Signora will be pleased to look for it, she will see the name of Vecellio over a shop on the right-hand side, as she returns to the Piazza."

I did look for it; and there, sure enough, over a small shop-window I found it. It gave one an odd sort of shock, as if time were for the moment annihilated; and I remember how, with something of the same feeling, I once saw the name of Rubens over a shop-front in the market-place at Cologne.

I left the house less incredulous than I entered it. Of the ident.i.ty of the building there has never been any kind of doubt; and I am inclined to accept with the house the ident.i.ty of the room. t.i.tian, it should be remembered, lived long enough to become, long before he died, the glory of his family. He became rich; he became n.o.ble; his fame filled Italy.

Hence the room in which he was born may well have acquired, half a century before his death--perhaps even during the lifetime of his mother--that sort of sacredness which is generally of post-mortem growth. The legend, handed down from Vecellio to Vecellio in uninterrupted succession, lays claim, therefore, to a more reliable pedigree than most traditions of a similar character.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] From "Travels in Italy." Translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet. Goethe's visit to Italy was made in 1786. He was then only thirty-seven years of age. The visit had important influence on his subsequent career. The greatest of his works were still to be written.

It was not until after 1794 that Goethe devoted himself entirely to literature.

[2] Goethe at this time had published several short plays besides "The Sorrows of Werthe," "Wilhelm Meister," and a few other works less important.

[3] By that name Italians know the Pantheon.

[4] From "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the years 1701, 1702, 1703." At the time of his departure for Italy, Addison was twenty-nine years old. None of his important works had then been written.

[5] Addison's belief has been amply justified by the extensive excavations made since his time.

[6] From "Ancient Rome, In the Light of Recent Discoveries." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1888.

[7] Lanciani here has referred to the Catholic Church, in which historians have seen, in the spiritual sense, a survival of imperial Rome.

[8] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin CO.

[9] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[10] Mr. Hillard was writing in 1853.

[11] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[12] This mausoleum, built by Augustus on the bank of the Tiber for himself and his family, had long been used as the imperial sepulcher.

[13] From "Rome." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897.

[14] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868.

Translated by John Durand.

[15] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[16] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[17] From "Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe." Mrs. Lippincott's visit was made in 1852.

[18] From "Recollections of the Last Four Popes, and of Rome in their Times." Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (1802-1865), an English cardinal, was famous during his lifetime for intellectual vigor and scholarly attainments. In presenting an intimate view of a papal election it was his unusual privilege to describe not only "the things he saw," but also, as his later destiny revealed, to tell of the things of which he formed a part. The election pictured is that of Leo XII.

[19] From "Six Novices on the Grand Tour, by One of Them." Privately printed. (1911.) By permission of the author.

[20] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[21] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868.

Translated by John Durand.

[22] From "Pictures from Italy."