Venice: Byron Goes Swimming (extract)

Byron Goes Swimming

Like lime (or linden) blossoms, Venice tends to relax the mind, or at least the logical centres; this is especially true in the minds of those who, like the rascally Aretino, ‘live by the sweat of their ink’. Many have written their worst books about the city (the most recent culprits are Hemingway and Muriel Spark). Legions of other writers have been unable to resist the challenge of describing Venice; they strive to leave their mark on the city with the persistence of spraying tomcats. Some are mercifully content to settle for vignettes or epigrams.

DH Lawrence, who loved the dry desert of Arizona, called Venice ‘an abhorrent, green, slippery city’; for Boris Pasternak Venice was ‘swelling like a biscuit soaked in tea’. In the end perhaps all descriptions meet in a soft centre, as Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo commented to Kublai Khan in a lovely book called Invisible Cities: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’

But, on certain metabolisms, linden blossoms have the opposite effect, stimulating rather than relaxing the brain. Doctors of literature could call it the ‘Byron syndrome’ and can study the symptoms from the poet’s arrival in 1816, his heart full of romance as he rented a villa on the Brenta to compose the last canto of his Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage. Venice checks in here with a rather tepid ‘fairy city of the heart’. Its canals at least afforded him the personal advantage of being able to swim anywhere (his limp made him shy); on one occasion he swam a race from the Lido to the Rialto bridge and was the only man to finish.

It wasn’t long before the emotional polish of Childe Harolde began to crack. To Byron’s surprise, romantic Venice didn’t aggravate his romantic temperament, but cured him of it; the ironic detachment and mock heroics of the city’s own ottava rima tradition made him question all his previous assumptions. He went to live in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, in the company of 14 servants, a dog, a monkey, a wolf, a fox and a passionate, garlicky baker’s daughter who stabbed him in the thumb with a table fork (which so angered Byron that he ordered her out, whereupon she threw herself off the balcony into the Grand Canal). Under such circumstances, all that had been breathless passion reeked of the ridiculous, as he himself admitted:

Venice and its women and its noble Armenian monks and its love of liberty galvanized Byron and set his mind free to write first Beppo: A Venetian Story, spoofing Venice’s cavalieri serventi (escort/lovers – even the nuns had them), balls, and Titians and its gondolas, while celebrating the freedom of its people. He wrote two bookish plays on Venetian themes, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, and most importantly began his satirical masterpiece, Don Juan.

Meanwhile too much sex was beginning to take a toll: an English acquaintance in 1818 wrote home: ‘His face had become pale, bloated, and sallow, and the knuckles on his hands were lost in fat’. Byron became infatuated with the Contessa Teresa Guiccioli and left Venice to move in with her and her husband in Ravenna. But, having tasted freedom in Venice, Byron began to chafe; the Contessa was ‘taming’ him. He bundled up the manuscript of Don Juan and left for Greece, only to die of fever at the age of 36 in its war of independence. His last moments were soothed by his faithful gondolier Tita Falsieri, who for love had followed him to Greece.

Black Death in Venice

Whenever the 21st century leaves a bad taste in your mouth, give some consideration to the 14th. Things were bad all over Europe then, but in Italy they were so rotten that historians speak of a collective death wish in the 1340s. Calamities of every kind befell the peninsula – earthquakes, floods and some of the worst weather on record; wars raged everywhere (Venice was locked in its death struggle with Genoa) and upheavals and disorder were a constant threat. Bankruptcies wrecked the economy; in 1346–7 the crops were so poor that thousands of people died of starvation. Even the wine went off.

The Italians were exhausted, and resigned to disaster. As if on cue, the worst epidemic of all, the Black Death, arrived on the scene in October 1347 – brought from the Crimea on Venetian galleys (though the Venetians blame it on the Genoese). As usual Venice suffered the most: as the densely populated chief port of entry from the East, the city had a dire record of 70 major epidemics in 700 years. No wonder the Venetians lived so intensely, when life itself was so precarious.

On 20 March 1348, Doge Andrea Dandolo set up a council to deal with the plague. The dead were taken on special barges to be buried at San Erasmo on the Lido and at a new cemetery at the long-lost San Marco Boccacalme, or simply sunk into the waters of the Lagoon. Beggars were forbidden to exhibit corpses (an old custom) to raise alms. Strict immigration controls were ordered, and all travellers were obliged to spend 40 days in quarantine at Nazarethum Island (its name, later elided to Lazzaretto, became widely used for all such places).

All the measures were too late. At its worst the Black Death killed 600 Venetians a day; the total dead numbered an almost incredible 100,000 (about half the population). Helpless against the epidemic, most doctors in Venice either died or fled in horror. There was one exception, a health officer named Francesco da Roma, who received an annuity of 25 gold ducats as a reward for remaining in Venice during the Black Death. When asked why he stayed when everyone else fled, he replied: ‘I would rather die here than live anywhere else.’

© Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls