I have as yet said scarcely anything of the ducal palace and church of San Marco, which are the principal and central objects of Venice. The first is a quadrangular building, with a court in the centre; very peculiar antique architecture, with a double row of arcades both outside and in; the whole having a strikingly Oriental character. In front, and at one side, is a pavement, forming the principal open space in Venice; the haunt, of course, of many loungers of all characters; and distinguished by the two well-known pillars, one of which bears the lion of St Mark. The interior of the palace presents a succession of grand old halls, the scene of the court-glories of the ancient doges. One, called the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, is 154 feet long by 74 broad. It has a dais at one end, on which the throne must have been placed; and over this a picture of Paradise by Tintoretto, covering the entire end of the room—of course 74 feet long—being thus the largest picture ever painted on canvas. Around, under the ceiling, are the portraits of the series of doges. The Sala del Senato still exhibits the seats of the senators, each furnished with its candlestick for protracted discussions—a melancholy memorial of departed independence. We gazed, too, on the Hall of the Council of Ten, and the lesser room where the more terrible Council of Three held its sittings; all now reduced to mere show-places, but still strongly suggesting their original destination. The Lion's Mouth, in the outer gallery, to which any accusation could be committed, was not forgotten. After dwelling a due time upon the rooms, and the numerous pictures and other works of art presented in them, we descended into the dungeons or pozzi—narrow stone-chambers destitute of light, where Venetian justice formerly kept its victims—a terrific specimen of the reckless inhumanity of past times. Finally, we passed to the Bridge of Sighs, which is detected to be an afterthought structure, designed to connect the palace with the more modern prison in the rear, a canal intervening. I suspect, after all, that many of the stories told about the pozzi and the bridge are mere myths, the reflection of ideas which the appearance of the places suggests.
The church of San Marco, adjoining the palace, and forming one side of the Piazza or square, is like no other building I ever saw—decidedly Oriental in style—indeed such a building as Aladin might have evoked by his lamp; which reminds me, by the way, that there is a prevalent tinge of the East all over Venice, seen in the architecture particularly. The vaulting and arching of this church are all described as Byzantine in style, and are therefore round; but it has been a custom in Venice to fix up on such a building as this any reliques of antique sculpture which have been taken in the countries with which the Republic was at war: accordingly, the front of San Marco bristles all over with curious pillars and carvings, including, above all, the four celebrated bronze horses which Napoleon took to Paris, and which were restored after his downfall. Walking through one of the low-browed doors, we pass across a vestibule, where a stone is pointed out in the pavement as the spot on which the emperor Barbarossa laid his head beneath the foot of Pope Alexander III. Then proceeding into the interior, you find the dusky atmosphere dimly blazing with a peculiar glitter from the walls and ceilings, the whole being one mass of gold mosaic, on which scripture subjects are inserted in a darker colouring. Think of a huge church, the interior facing of which is composed of pieces of gilt stone, each no bigger than the point of your finger would cover! But this is not all. The wide-extending pavement is seen to be composed in like manner of small pieces of marble and precious stones, set so as to form regular figures, all most exact, and still wonderfully entire, though it has endured the feet of daily thousands for several centuries. Unfortunately, from some infirmity in the vaulting below, this singular floor is thrown into undulations, in some places so great as to require care in walking over them. I spent hours in wandering about and examining the many curious things which are to be seen in this church, including those of its famous treasury. It is truly surprising that, after so many revolutions, so many of these valuables have been preserved. The fidelity of the priesthood to their charge is surely deserving of some admiration, considering how many opportunities there must have been of making away with precious articles, after which no inquiry would probably have ever been made.
A campanile, or bell-tower, has been erected in the square near the church, and is one of the most conspicuous objects in Venice; rising, as it does, above every other building. It seems slender; but I was surprised to find, on a rough measurement, that the sides are not less than fifty feet wide. A paved way, instead of a staircase, conducts to an open loggia near the top, whence you can have a complete view of the city. I remarked that the tops of many of the houses are of use in the same way as gardens and summer-houses are in other countries. People go there to smoke, or to take their coffee—the chimneys being a very slight obstruction to such enjoyments in a country where little fire is used. We here also had a good view of the celebrated orologio of Venice; a tower containing an ancient clock of peculiar elaborateness of construction. On the top stand two metal giants, armed with ponderous hammers, with which to strike the hours and quarters on a huge bell, placed between them. There is something terrible in these automata; and the feeling is not allayed when you hear that one of them once committed a murder, having with his hammer knocked an incautious workman over the battlements! The campanile was begun in 902; and I felt interested in tracing its resemblance, both in architecture and relative situation, to the square tower of St Andrews, which is supposed to be of nearly the same age.
My limits leave me no room to dilate upon our visit to the Accademia. Indeed, in the visit itself, we could do little more than pause here and there as a Titian or Tintoretto cast up in the multitude of pictures, or when we came before some specimen of the very early masters, of whose works there are many dating so far back as the end of the fourteenth century. There were some pictures representing transactions in Venice, of not much later date, which I regarded with interest, as preserving to us the appearance of men and things in that age; particularly one depicting some miracle, in which several grave ecclesiastics are seen swimming about in the Grand Canal, while ladies look on from windows and balconies, which I convinced myself still exist there. I must be equally brief with that place which no countryman of Shakspeare can avoid visiting, though the present Rialto is, after all, later than his time. It is of a curious structure as a bridge; there being three rows of building along it, containing shops, with two roadways for passengers. One crosses backwards and forwards, muttering: 'On the Rialto thou hast rated me,' &c.; goes distractedly into a shop, to purchase a breastpin, as a memorial of the place; and then plunges down the stairs, to resume his place in the gondola. We took a couple of hours to pay a visit to the Armenian monastery, on the island of San Lazzaro—the place to which Byron resorted in order to study the Armenian language. It is a curious old establishment, with some modern activity about it in the diffusion of literature; the monks having a printing-office in tolerable briskness, whence they issue books in various languages. We were delighted with the flush of beautiful flowering, from the oleander bushes in the central court, and the vine-hung alleys in the garden behind. I must not forget, in this hurried close of my adventure, the two moonlight sails we had through those mysterious watery streets, where, the associations of day and of the active world being shut out, we felt as if each light in the old palazzi illumined some scene of mediæval romance. That was like no other thing in our lives. On the third evening, we left this dream-city by a means which we had studiously ignored all the time of our visit—namely, a railway, which crosses from Venice to the mainland. It was something of a wakener to find ourselves at 'the station,' on the bank of one of the canals, and see a range of 'omnibus gondolas,' all duly labelled for their respective courses through the city, and ranked up in front like so many of the terrestrial machines which haunt the ordinary railway termini of this earth. However, we had the consolation of reserving this to the close of our visit, when, of course, we must have awaked out of our Venetian feelings at anyrate. The train brought us to Padua long before bedtime.