The train clanked softly over the lagoon, where a dim February sun was trying to lift the mist. The air was damp but warmer than Paris. The vaporetto was half-full. In the Campo San Barnaba, the aluminium café chairs were tilted against an impending shower, the vegetable man swaddled to the chin beneath his awning in the boat.
By the time we reached our rented flat, a light drizzle was pattering on the canal and the view from the upstairs window was bleached and grey. I thought it was perfect.
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| Ghetto Canal evokes the shades of poverty of 1840s Venice |
Venetian melancholy isn’t hard to find, with the mist over the lagoon and the water slapping dispiritingly against the pilings. Wealthy Venice, too, appears in the arrogant motoscafi, with their sleek lines and white leather upholstery, darting from the Cipriani to Harry’s Bar; in a dazzling display of light in a grand palazzo, or the sounds of Vivaldi and chatter wafting over the canal. Sinister and hedonistic Venice is commemorated in shops selling creepy masks and tricorn hats that seem to spread further out from San Marco every year, recalling the idle centuries when Venice whirled and partied towards nemesis. But authentic 1840s grunge is a harder call.
You find it best in the lonely, long fondamente north of the Ghetto, with a few feral cats and laundry strung between the houses: it’s just possible, up here, to imagine a world in which people rubbed their polenta with an anchovy, suspended over the table on a string. It was this air of destitution, perhaps, that encouraged visitors to imagine themselves already in the Orient. Poverty went hand in hand with dank, dark rooms: the old photographs show that people took every opportunity to eat and drink and work out of doors.
Plenty of eastern echoes still linger in the streets of Venice. My detective is an Ottoman from Istanbul, Venice’s alter ego in the eastern Mediterranean. The relationship between the two cities was umbilical, but forever switching from tutelage to parricide, between trade and war. Many palaces on the Grand Canal were built by men who grew rich on the Constantinople trade. From the Ghetto, Sephardic financiers had shuttled to Antwerp and Istanbul. There is a relief of Mehmed II besieging Scutari in 1472, and a statue of a turbaned Moor leading his camel across the wall of a faded palazzo. The great Dominican church of Zanipolo is full of funeral monuments, some of them enjoyably grotesque – including the sombre monument to Bragadino, an unfortunate Venetian commander flayed alive by the Turks at the siege of Candia, which actually contains his skin, in an urn.
The building that most attracted my imagination was the Ottoman caravanserai on the Grand Canal, the Fondaco dei Turchi. This former Byzantine palace became an alien compound in which the Ottoman merchants stored their goods, prayed, bathed and ate. Ruskin, inevitably, has a spine-tingling description of the Fondaco as it was in the 1840s. By then, the last merchant had gone, and the place was rudely partitioned, cropped, and swarming with vermin, on the strength of which I laid a number of scenes of the novel there. He made an exquisite watercolour of the detailing, too, which showed a tiny window let into its yellowing façade: the old photographs, significantly, scarcely do it justice.
Nor, as it turned out, did its restorers. In the 1860s they set about annihilating it, sweeping away crumbling frescoes and lop-tilted windows to reinstate their vision of a Byzantine palace, geometrically precise, sheathed in thin sheets of grey marble as dull as the museum of natural history it now contains. Did Venetian carracks never grapple with giant squid, you wonder? Never bring home mermaids? If they did, the museum won’t tell. Inside and out, the Fondaco is the dreariest building on the Grand Canal. Thank God I reached it earlier, at least in fiction.
It’s in the galleries that the scent of the east remains most pungent. Venetian masters drew on contemporary oriental models for their Biblical scenes – and if sailors and ambassadors back from Istanbul ever failed in their accounts, a painter could observe costume first-hand at the Fondaco. Gentile Bellini certainly travelled in 1479 to the city itself, to paint the sultan’s portrait – a portrait whose disappearance and mysterious reappearance in Venice, 400 years later, prompted the plot of The Bellini Card.
Twenty-first-century visitors avoid the Piazza San Marco, except at night, but in the 1840s everyone went there to smoke and talk; the patriotic Venetians only retreated beneath the arcades when the Habsburg military band began to play. Venetians always liked Florian’s, the fanciest café in the world; the Austrians hung out at Quadri’s, across the Piazza. Florian’s décor is a little late for my purposes, the clientele nondescript, and the bills exorbitant – but I sent my characters there anyway, when it was still lively and cheap.
The crustiest, most gem-bedizened grotto of eastern plunder is the cathedral itself, built and adorned by Byzantine craftsmen, graced by the body of Mark the Evangelist rifled from Alexandria, and then further enriched by loot from Constantinople in 1204. Outside, by the main entrance, is the homely statue of three emperors huddling together against the tourist wave: inside, we looked at hundreds of tiny enamelled Byzantine figures embedded in the Golden Screen, which escaped destruction because the French assumed it was plate. Did the soldiers not see the treasury, with its mouthwatering display of golden reliquaries and Byzantine loot? Napoleon snatched, instead, the famous horses of Lysippos, thieved from Byzantium in their turn. Under their hooves we climbed, for a view of the piazza, the Doge’s Palace and the Basin beyond. San Giorgio was shrouded in mist, the lagoon veiled. My turbaned investigator, I sensed, was only just around the corner.
‘The Bellini Card’ (Faber), Jason Goodwin’s third novel featuring his Ottoman detective Yashim, is set in Venice
