The Mentor: Venice, the Island City, Vol. 1, Num. 27, Serial No. 27

VENICE
The Campanile and Doge’s Palace

TWO

On July 14, 1902, the Campanile or bell tower of St. Mark’s Cathedral fell to earth with a crash. Earthquakes and a rotting foundation at length worked its ruin. But its reconstruction was begun in 1905, and the new tower was completed in 1911, nine years after the fall. The Campanile stands, as is usually the case in Italy, detached from the church. The first bell tower on this site was built in 900. The one that fell in 1992 was probably erected in 1329.

The Campanile signified to the Venetians the greatness of Venice. It was used as a watch tower before the year 1000. Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it became a bell tower also. Its bells rang out at the first hint of danger to warn the citizens of the republic. During later times these bells announced the taking of Constantinople by Dandolo to a waiting and expectant crowd; the victory of Lepanto, which made Venice master of the East; the establishment of her fights of sovereignty against Rome. They clanged when Martin Paliero, the traitor Doge, was beheaded. They tolled a dirge when the peace of Campoformio ended the Venetian republic forever. When the lagoons were united to the Italian mainland they rang out in announcement.

When the Campanile fell the Venetians were shocked and broken-hearted. There was some question as to whether it could be reconstructed; but the Italians were determined that it should be. In its fall the bell tower inclined toward the north and open piazza. If it had fallen in any other direction, either the Library of Sansovino, or the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Cathedral, or the royal palace would have been destroyed. In fact, some of the debris fell very near St. Mark’s; but did not disfigure it in the least.

The old foundations of the Campanile were used as a nucleus for the new. The shaft outside is a perfect model of the old bell tower; but by modifying the inside the weight has been reduced 20,000 tons.

The nucleus of the first Venice, before it was made the seat of government of the republic, is said to have been the little district about the great bridge over the Grand Canal, which still retains the name Rialto. But as soon as the island group of Rivo Alto became the capital of the Venetian republic a palace for the Doge was erected near the open mouth, on the site that its successor still occupies. This earliest palace was probably built about the year 800. It was burned down in 976 and again in 1106. The present magnificent building was a slow growth over three centuries.

As a whole, the Doge’s Palace as it now stands may be regarded externally as the characteristic typical example of fully developed Venetian Gothic. It is built of brick, and is lined or incrusted with small lozenge-like slabs of variously colored marble.

The interior of the Doge’s Palace is of much later date than is the exterior. On the walls of the chief council chambers are oil paintings by many Venetians, among them Tintoretto’s masterpiece “Bacchus and Ariadne,” and the huge picture of Paradise, the largest oil painting in the world.

VENICE
The Bridge of Sighs

THREE

Everyone probably has heard of the Ponte de Sospiri or Bridge of Sighs. It is said that over this bridge walked political prisoners in the days of Venice’s greatness, and these men were never seen again. This bridge, however, is, as W. D. Howells says, “A pathetic swindle.” The Bridge of Sighs dates only from the sixteenth century, and since that time there has been only a single instance (Antonio Foscarini) of political imprisonment. The bridge led from the criminal courts in the palace to the criminal prisons on the other side of the Rio Canal.

The prisons really used for political offenders were the Pozzi, often wrongly described as being beneath the level of the canal. A thick wooden casing to the walls protected the inmates from damp, and the romantic accounts of the horrors of these prisons are probably all imaginary. The best known is that of Charles Dickens:

“I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed, to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had cut and scratched inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them; for their labor with the rusty nail’s point had outlived their agony and them through many generations. One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than twenty-four hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by, another, and a dismal one, whereto at midnight the confessor came, – a monk brown-robed and hooded, – ghastly in the day and free, bright air, but in the midnight of the murky prison Hope’s extinguisher and Murder’s herald. I had my foot upon the spot where at the same dread hour the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door – low-browed and stealthy – through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.”

The Council of Ten which ruled Venice for many years had its place of assembly during the sixteenth century in one of the smaller apartments of the ducal palace on the second floor, a circular room with large windows, looking on the canal spanned by the Bridge of Sighs. This council had absolute power in administering justice and in governing the Venetian State.