Venice also has many alleys and lanes. The city is a maze of secluded courtyards, bridges, archways, tortuous passageways, dead ends, quaysides, and dark overhung back streets made doubly confusing by the system of street numbering. The city is divided into six districts, and each district numbers its houses from 1 to 5,000. Only locals know where one district ends and another begins. There is only one true piazza (square) in Venice, the Piazza San Marco. All other squares in Venice bear a less-distinguished term, campo. The Piazza San Marco fronts the Grand Canal, the Doges’ Palace, and St. Mark’s Basilica, this last arguably the wealthiest and most ornate cathedral in Europe.
Venice contains many magnificent libraries and museums. The Biblioteca Marciana, for example, houses over 550,000 printed volumes and 13,000 manuscripts, many rare and valuable. The architecture of this edifice, the former mint, echoes Constantinople but is also built in high gothic style with gargoyles at every corner and waterspout. The archives of the Republic, though damaged by fire, are held in good order at the Franciscan monastery at the Frari. The cultural tangibles of her past glory are everywhere manifest; the living city is also a living museum.
Venice is eternal. The layout of the central city has not changed in centuries. The gondola rules here, as no automobile can traverse the narrow paths by the canals. Their empire long gone, the Venetians first yielded their city to Napoleon, and then to the tourists.
Local tensions exist between Communists and Fascists, as they do across Italy. A pitched battle took place in Peana near Venice on 27 December 1922, after Communists tore down Fascist manifestos. Fascist supporters gathered and surrounded a house containing the Communists and set fire to it. Many were wounded in the fracas and several killed.
The Character of Venice
“Venice in winter is cold, still, and vaporous. Days of rain, rain, rain, and fog alternate with spells of sunny brilliance, when ice crackles on the fringes of the canals. Nights are tomb-like, the houses wrapped in shrouds of mist, lit only by occasional somber pools of lamplight. You can walk for miles at night and hear nothing but the echo of your own footsteps, the sad slapping of water on a tethered boat, the distant clang of a fog-bell, or the deep boom of a steamer at sea. In Venice, on a foggy winter’s night, it feels like day will never come.”
(From E.V. Lucas, A Wanderer in Venice, Methuen and Co. April 1914)
