Grand Canal Ripples With History, Romance
V E N I C E, Italy, Oct. 28 -- Some travel truths are self-evident. As theGreat Wall of China is great indeed, so Venice's Grand Canal isgrand beyond compare.
For 2½ miles, this watery Champs-Elysees winds downa fantastic architectural canyon lined with rococo palaces andMoorish mansions, past splendid baroque and Gothic churches adornedwith the frescos and paintings of the greatest artists of theRenaissance, and here and there the everyday shops, markets andbanks of this still very vibrant maritime metropolis.
The vaporetto, the colorful, inexpensive but crowded water bus,is Venice's rapid transit system. From its decks one can drink incenturies of glorious history, when Venice ruled the world ofcommerce, and still rub shoulders with a stockbroker bent over hismorning newspaper while commuting to the business district near theRialto bridge. This is Venice's waterlogged Wall Street whereShakespeare's Shylock asked:
"What news on the Rialto?" The question is still used to mean,how is the market doing?
Shaped like a backwards "S," a medieval sign of wonder andmystery, the Grand Canal down the ages has witnessed plenty ofboth.
A Storied Past
Lord Byron swam the length of the canal after a liquid night onthe town. One of his spurned mistresses threw herself into it. Thehusband of George Eliot, the British novelist (alias Mary AnnEvans), fell into it from a hotel window.
The legendary Venetian lover Giacomo Casanova courted contessasand courtesans in his private love boat before winding up in "TheLeads," the attic prison in the Doge's Palace, from where hedramatically escaped through a hole in the roof.
Alighting from a lurching gondola, New Yorker magazine humoristRobert Benchley wired home to the wits at the Algonquin RoundTable: "Streets Full of Water… Please Advise."
Richard Wagner, at his grand piano in the Palazzo Vendramin, nowVenice's winter casino, heard the warning cry of gondoliers makinga quick turn and was inspired to compose the shepherd's pipe songin his opera Tristan.
Gilbert and Sullivan in The Gondoliers made merry lightopera music with these ballad-belting boatmen, but Mark Twaincouldn't abide "their constant caterwauling." Yet the formerMississippi River pilot on a busman's holiday down the Grand Canaldescribed the gondola as "free and graceful as a serpent in itsgliding" and the "gentlest, pleasantest locomotion we have everknown."
The straw-hatted troubadours rowing Venice's venerable and mostpricey transportation used to warble a full repertoire ofNeapolitan love songs. Now they are more inclined to post-Presleyrock, Broadway show tunes — Man From La Mancha resonates nicelyoff the wooden Accademia bridge — and have been known to substitute"O Danny Boy" for "O Sole Mio" when Irish and Americanpassengers recline on their Turkish bordello-style upholstery. Butbe forewarned: A ride in a gondola will cost a lot more than avaporetto — $75 for 50 minutes, compared to just a few dollars aticket.
Tied up to colorfully striped barber poles along the canal, thelocally built, highly lacquered, black gondolas, with their highsteel prows suggesting a seahorse, prance and rear on the tide likea corral of wild stallions.
Muse of Writers and Poets
Fruit and vegetable boats ply their trade near Ca' Rezzonico,the palazzo where Robert Browning polished poetic gems like thelines engraved in a plaque on the moss-draped wall:
"Open my heart and you will see, "Graven inside of it, Italy." Ca' is Venetian dialect for casa or house. "This best of all noble waterways," as Henry James wrote ofthe Grand Canal, "begins in glory" at the magnificent octagonalchurch of Santa Maria della Salute and "ends in abasement at therailway station," an eyesore exceeded in ugliness only by thenearby parking garage.
