The History of Venice: Doges, Gondolas and Golden Domes

Hello, and welcome. Tonight, we are going to spend a long and quiet evening in Venice, the city that stands in the water, in a lagoon at the very top of the Adriatic Sea.

Our story tonight is a long one. It begins before there was any city at all, among sandbanks and salt marshes, reeds and mud. It passes through fishermen and refugees, bishops and doges, merchants and shipwrights, glassmakers and painters and musicians. And it comes to an end in the early years of the twentieth century.

There is nothing you need to remember tonight, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story drift past, the way a boat drifts on slow water. If you fall asleep before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this evening is for.

Venice is built on more than a hundred small islands, with about a hundred and fifty canals between them, and some four hundred bridges. It lies about four kilometres from the mainland, and about two kilometres from the open sea. Through the middle of the city winds the Grand Canal, in the shape of a great letter S, dividing it in two. In some places the water laps at the very walls of the houses. In others, a narrow path runs between the canal and the door.

There are no carriages here, and no horses in the streets. People go on foot, along narrow lanes and over the bridges, or they go by boat. Around the year twelve forty, a writer called Boncompagno da Signa described the city in words that translate roughly as: its pavement is the sea, its roof is the sky, and its walls are the flowing waters.

It is hard to imagine a less likely place for a great city. The ground was soft mud, which could carry buildings only on wooden piles. There was no land for farming, and no pasture for cattle. Fish from the lagoon was the only food close at hand, and the only fresh water was the rain that people could catch and store. And yet, on these low banks of mud, one of the most beautiful cities in the world slowly grew. Tonight we will see how its builders made that soft mud carry stone, on thousands of wooden stakes driven close together.

For about eleven centuries, Venice had a doge at its head. Its ships sailed to Constantinople and to Alexandria, and its merchants carried goods between the East and the West. Its wealth went into palaces and churches, into gold mosaic and coloured marble, and into great festivals on the water.

As evening falls, the water of the lagoon turns from blue to grey, and then to silver. The domes and towers stand dark against the sky. Boats move slowly along the canals, and the sound of oars carries a long way across the water.

Tonight, we will meet many people along the way. Families from the mainland, who came out to the islands for safety, and stayed. The doges, the dukes of Venice, each chosen for life. Two merchants who, as an old story tells, brought home the body of a saint. An old and nearly blind doge, who sailed with a great fleet. A young Venetian who travelled all the way to the court of Kublai Khan, and later told of its marvels in a famous book.

The shipwrights of the Arsenal, the glassmakers of Murano, and the lacemakers of Burano. Painters of light and colour. A red-haired priest who wrote music for the girls of a home for foundlings. Masked figures in the long seasons of Carnival. The last of the doges. And travellers and poets from all over Europe, who came to see the city on the water, and wrote about what they saw.

Many of the pictures you will see tonight are old. Some are paintings by the painters of Venice themselves. Some are soft coloured photographs called photochroms, made around eighteen ninety to nineteen hundred. Others are old photographs and prints from a great museum in Amsterdam. And some are photographs I took myself, on winter and summer visits to Venice.

So, make yourself comfortable. Let your shoulders soften, and let your breathing slow down. Somewhere out on the water, a bell is ringing for the evening. And let's begin, a very long time ago, before there was any city at all, in a wide and shallow lagoon of water, mud and reeds.

Long before there was a city here, there was only water, sand and mud. Many rivers come down from the Alps to the wide plain of the Veneto. Over long ages, they carried gravel and fine silt down from the mountains, and slowly built the whole of that flat plain. The land is still creeping out into the sea, by about three miles in a thousand years. Ravenna, Adria and Aquileia were once seaports. Now they lie inland.

A current sweeps around the head of the Adriatic, from east to west. It caught the silt of the rivers and laid it out in long, low banks of sand, parallel to the shore. These banks are called the lidi. Behind them, the lagoons were formed. Rivers such as the Brenta, the Sile and the Piave carried silt into the shallow sea. And some six or seven thousand years ago, as the sea rose after the last Ice Age, the water spread in over the low land, and the lagoon of Venice was born.

The lidi are narrow, never more than half a mile wide. Here and there the line of sand is broken by a few narrow openings in the sandbanks, called porti. Through them the sea comes in, and goes out again, twice every day. Where the tides from two openings meet inside the lagoon, a hidden ridge of mud slowly builds up beneath the water.

Today the lagoon is the largest in the Mediterranean, about five hundred and fifty square kilometres. Yet it is very shallow, on average only a little more than a metre deep. Most of it is mudflat, tidal shallows and salt marsh.

Near the mainland lies the laguna morta, the dead lagoon, where the tide is hardly felt. Its still pools lie among little islands of sea grass, tamarisk and sea lavender, which spreads a faint blue over them in summer, and a rich purple in autumn. Further out lies the laguna viva, the living lagoon, which floods at every tide. At high water it looks like a great lake. But in many places only about three inches of water cover the shoals.

The lagoon has its own words. The barene are low islands of salt marsh, covered only by the higher tides, where glasswort, cordgrass and sea lavender grow. Little creeks called ghebi wind through them. And the velme are mudflats, which appear when the tide goes out.

Out on the mudbanks, the fishermen wade, gathering cockles, crabs and periwinkles. In eighteen eighty-four, the writer Horatio Brown described them as "solitary figures, erect or stooping, relieved against the grey of water or the blue of sky." The main channels are marked by groups of wooden posts, driven into the mud.

In Roman times, the edge of the lagoon was already busy. On the mainland shore stood Altinum, a port and trading town which, at its height, has been compared in size with Pompeii. The poet Martial compared the villas on its shore to those of Baiae, near Naples. A road called the Via Annia ran past it, from Adria through Padua and along the lagoon shore near Mestre, all the way to Aquileia.

Travellers often took ship from Ravenna to Altinum. The Romans spoke of the Seven Seas, the chain of lagoons and canals along this coast from Ravenna to Altinum. The ancient geographer Strabo wrote of this country: "All commerce is carried on by boats; and these boats are built with flat bottoms, to enable them to pass over the shoals."

In twenty twenty-one, researchers using sonar found the remains of a Roman road, and structures like docks, lying on the floor of the lagoon. Since Roman times, the sea here has risen by up to nearly two and a half metres. Long before Venice, it seems, there were Roman settlements out in the lagoon itself, linked to Altinum on the shore.

Even in Roman times, there were probably people living out on the little islands of the lagoon. They were poor but hardy fisherfolk, and pilots who knew every channel and every shoal.

When danger came to the mainland, people from the towns fled out across the water to join them. They came when the Marcomanni and the Quadi invaded, in the year one hundred and seventy. They came again when the Goths came, in three seventy-eight, and when Alaric came, in the year four hundred. Each time, when the danger had passed, most of them went home again, and rebuilt their houses.

An old tradition says the first great flight came in Attila's time. In the year four hundred and fifty-two, Attila's Huns came into north-eastern Italy, and the great Roman city of Aquileia fell. Altinum was sacked in Attila's time, and slowly emptied over the following centuries. Later Venetians remembered this as the great flight to the lagoon.

These were not always frightened crowds. Often, as one historian wrote, whole towns moved together, with their officers and their craftsmen, their tools, their sacred vessels, and even the stones of their churches.

According to the chroniclers, in four sixty-six the island people met at Grado and chose tribunes, to govern the affairs of each island. For the first time, the people of the lagoon were choosing their own officers.

Around five thirty-seven or five thirty-eight, a letter was written to these islanders. Its writer was Cassiodorus, a high official of the Gothic kings, who held their court at Ravenna. He addressed it to the Tribunes of the Maritime Population, and he asked them to carry wine and oil from Istria to the royal residence. But he could not resist describing their home, as he himself had seen it.

When storms closed the sea, he wrote, their boats could still travel by the rivers, drawn along by ropes, so that from a distance they seemed to glide through the meadows. The tide, he said, now uncovered and now hid the face of the fields. And then came the line for which his letter is best remembered: "Here after the manner of water-fowl have you fixed your home." He compared their homes to the nests of water-birds, and their scattered houses to the Cyclades, spread over the surface of the water.

The ground beneath their houses, he wrote, was held firm by woven willow branches, twisted and knotted together, a fragile wall against the waves. The people lived on fish, rich and poor alike. "One kind of food refreshes all; the same sort of dwelling shelters all; no one can envy his neighbour's home."

Their whole wealth, he said, came from the salt-works. Instead of driving the plough or swinging the sickle, they rolled their cylinders, and from them came their whole harvest. And their boats were kept tied up at the walls of their homes.

Then, in five sixty-eight, the Lombards invaded Italy under their king, Alboin. This time, the refugees stayed. As one historian put it, Attila had begun the work, and Alboin finished it. The bishops moved with their people, to Malamocco and to Heraclea, to Caorle and to Grado. And the people of Altino, as we will hear, went to Torcello.

Little by little, a chain of island townships grew up, twelve of them in the old lists, from Grado to Chioggia. One of them was called Rialto.

Long afterwards, the Venetians liked to tell a more exact story. They later said that their city was founded on the twenty-fifth of March, four twenty-one, at about midday, when the first stone of the church of San Giacomo di Rialto was laid. That day, the story adds, was a Friday, the very day on which Adam was created. It is a legend. But it became the city's official birthday, and the Venetians kept it for centuries.

Some seven miles north of Venice, across the lagoon, lies the island of Torcello. Today it is a quiet place of grass and water and a few old buildings. But once it was a busy little town of some thousands of people. No one knows how many.

The Venetians told a story about how it began. When the Lombards threatened the city of Altino, on the mainland, its people prayed and fasted. Then they saw doves and other birds flying out from their nests in the city walls, carrying their young in their beaks.

After three days of fasting, a voice told them to climb the tower and look at the stars. Their bishop, Paul, climbed up, and he saw the stars arranged in the sky like islands in the lagoon. So the people followed their bishop across the water. They called their new home Torcello, it is said, in memory of the many towers of Altino.

Torcello became the home of the bishop of Altino. Beside the high altar of its cathedral there is a Latin inscription. It records the founding of a church of Saint Mary, Mother of God, in the year six thirty-nine. It names the exarch Isaac, who ruled in the emperor's name from Ravenna, and Maurice, master of the soldiers in the province, who saw the work done. It is one of the oldest written records of the lagoon.

The church was rebuilt in the ninth century, and again in the year ten-oh-eight, under a bishop who was the son of a doge. Its windows have massive shutters of stone, which turn on huge stone rings. John Ruskin, writing in eighteen fifty-three, thought it looked more like a refuge from an Alpine storm than the cathedral of a busy city.

In the curve of the apse, a tall Madonna holds her Child against a ground of gold, with the twelve Apostles standing in a row beneath her. Ruskin wrote that she seems to weep, even as she lifts her hands in blessing. On the great west wall, a mosaic of the Last Judgment is laid out in long bands, one above another, with the Crucifixion at the top.

Around the curve of the apse, the seats of the priests rise in tiers, with the bishop's marble throne in the centre, high above them. It is an arrangement rarely seen in Italy. Ruskin imagined the whole church as a ship, with the bishop as its pilot.

Next to the cathedral stands the little church of Santa Fosca. It is eight-sided on the outside, with a portico round five of its sides, carried on sixteen columns. Its builders meant to give it a dome, but the dome was never built. Its columns are of pure Greek marble, and yet its roof, Ruskin thought, rose no higher than a cattle-shed. On the grass nearby, there is a stone seat that people call Attila's chair, though it probably belonged to the town's magistrates.

Slowly, over the centuries, Torcello faded. By the fourteenth century the marshes around it had grown. Boats found it harder to reach the island, and the fever grew worse. Families moved away, to Murano, to Burano, and to Rialto. The bishops stayed on for a long time, until their seat moved to Murano in sixteen eighty-nine. The little square of the town, Ruskin found, had become a meadow hardly larger than an English farmyard, with hedges of honeysuckle and briar.

Ruskin wrote of climbing the old brick bell tower towards evening. All around stretched a grey and lonely moor of salt marsh, the colour of sackcloth. To the east came the roar of the Adriatic, and to the south lay the calm lagoon, and beyond it, the towers of Venice. Just beneath him, on a green field, the cathedral, Santa Fosca and two small buildings, little larger than cottages, stood alone. "They lie like a little company of ships becalmed on a far-away sea."

As the island townships grew, so did their quarrels. Each had brought old rivalries with it from the mainland. In time, Christopher, the Patriarch of Grado, called the people of the lagoon to a great assembly at Heraclea. He told them that their quarrels made them weak in the face of their enemies. Instead of twelve tribunes, he said, they should choose one leader, for life.

The Venetians remembered Paoluccio Anafesto as their first doge, chosen, so the story goes, in six ninety-seven. The word doge comes from the Latin dux, a leader. A Venetian chronicler, writing around the year one thousand, said that the people had decided it would be "more honourable henceforth to be under dukes than under tribunes."

The doge lived in great state. When he went out, a ceremonial umbrella was held over him, lighted candles were carried at his side, and trumpets sounded among the banners. He sat on an ivory chair, with a sceptre in his hand. He wore a silk mantle fringed with gold, red hose, and a tall cap set with jewels. Over time that cap changed its shape, and became the horned cap of the later doges, the corno, worn over a little cap of fine linen.

Yet the doge also rose before dawn, heard Mass, and went out to judge the people. A new doge was carried shoulder-high to the church, and entered it barefoot.

Orso, in the seven-twenties, is the first doge we know well. He sent a fleet to help the emperor's exarch return to Ravenna, and the emperor gave him a Byzantine title, hypatos, or consul. After him, for some years, the lagoon was ruled instead by a Master of the Soldiers, chosen for one year at a time.

All this while, the townships pulled in different directions. Heraclea leaned towards the emperor in Constantinople, while Jesolo and Malamocco leaned towards the Franks and the Pope. In the end, as a compromise, the seat of government moved to Malamocco.

Then, in eight hundred and ten, came Pepin, King of Italy, and son of Charlemagne. He gathered a fleet at Ravenna. He took Cavarzere, Brondolo and Chioggia, and pressed up along the Lido towards Malamocco. The Venetians blocked the channels with chains and sunken hulls, and pulled up the posts that marked the way. The women and children, and the goods of the town, were carried to Rialto, the midmost island of the lagoons.

Pepin, so the story goes, called to the islanders that they were his subjects, since they came from his lands. The Venetians answered that they would be subjects of the Roman Emperor, and not of him. The Frankish ships ran aground in the maze of shallows, and the heat of summer did the rest. With rumours of a Greek fleet on its way, Pepin withdrew. A few years later the two empires made peace, and Venice stayed free to trade.

Around the year eight hundred and ten, the seat of government moved to the Rialto islands, the Rivo Alto, or high bank, in the middle of the lagoon. It was a place halfway between the dangers of the mainland and the dangers of the sea.

The first doge chosen at Rialto was Agnello Participazio, from a family of Heraclea. He named three men to make the new capital. One, Pietro Tradonico, was to look after the new buildings. Another, Lorenzo, was to dig the canals and make firm ground to build on. And the third, Nicolo Ardisonio, was to guard the lidi against the sea.

Agnello built the first palace of the doges, close by the little church of Saint Theodore, on part of the ground where the Doge's Palace stands today. Nothing of it remains. The convent church of San Zaccaria was founded, paid for by the Byzantine emperor, Leo the Fifth, who sent builders of his own. Dykes were raised, rivers turned aside, and canals bridged. And slowly, on the islands of the Rialto, the city of Venice began to take shape.

There was an old tradition in the lagoon about Saint Mark, the Evangelist. Long ago, it was said, he had preached at Aquileia. Once, sailing through these waters, he was caught by a storm and driven to the islands of the Rialto. As he stepped from his boat, an angel greeted him with words of peace, and told him that one day his body would rest here.

In about eight twenty-eight, the Venetians believed, the angel's words came true. Two merchants, Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello, with their companions, were at Alexandria in Egypt, where the body of the saint lay in its tomb.

According to the old Venetian story, they made friends with the guardian of the tomb, a man called Theodore. At first he was afraid, but at last he agreed to help them. By night they took the body from its tomb, laid it in a basket, and covered it with cabbages and pork. In its place they left another body, wrapped in the saint's own shroud, and sealed the tomb again as it had been before.

At that very moment, the story says, a sweet scent spread through the whole city, sweeter than all the spice shops in the world could have made it. The people said: Mark is stirring. Some came to search the ship. But when they saw the pork hanging from the mast, they fled, crying, as the old chronicle tells it, "Kanzir! Kanzir! which is to say, Pork! Pork!"

So the merchants sailed for home. One night, as the crew slept, the ship was driving towards the shore. But the saint, it is said, woke the master and told him to lower the sails. And so the ship came safely into Venice.

The doge and the clergy received the body with great honour. The merchants were forgiven for trading where the emperor had forbidden it. And Saint Mark took the place of Saint Theodore as the patron of the city. Saint Theodore was not quite forgotten. High on a column by the water, his statue, standing on a crocodile, still faces the winged lion of Saint Mark on another.

Where the great square of Saint Mark now lies, there was then a quiet green field, crossed by a little canal and lined with trees, between two small churches. On land from the nuns of San Zaccaria, beside the doge's palace, a chapel was begun for the saint. One of the merchants' companions, Stauracio, became its first head. In time the little church was finished and consecrated, and the winged lion of Saint Mark became the sign of Venice.

In nine seventy-six, a revolt broke out against the doge of the day, Pietro the Fourth Candiano. Fires were set, and in a city built mainly of wood, they spread quickly. The church of Saint Mark burned, with the church of Saint Theodore, the doge's palace, and many houses and workshops. The next doge, Pietro Orseolo, the first of that name, rebuilt the church and the palace, with craftsmen brought from Constantinople.

After the rebuilding, so the story goes, no one could remember where the body of the saint had been laid. The Venetians told how, in ten ninety-four, the lost relics were found again. A fast was held, and a solemn procession, on the twenty-fifth of June. As the people prayed, a pillar of the church opened, and there was the chest that held the saint. Later tellings added a great light, and a hand reaching out with a gold ring on one finger, a ring that only one councillor of the doge could draw off.

A mosaic inside the basilica shows the scene: the people at prayer, the pillar standing open, and the doge among them in his crimson cap, with the word Dux written above his head. And over the left-hand door on the front of the church, an old mosaic still shows the body of the saint being carried into his church.

The first houses on the islands of the Rialto were made of wood. Some stood on platforms of larch, and some on wooden piles, because the ground was soft mud, clay, peat and watery sand.

As the city grew, its builders learned how to make soft ground carry stone. First they dug a trench down through the mud. Then they drove in thousands of sharpened wooden stakes, close together, down towards the firmer clay below the mud. The wood was oak and larch from the forests of the mainland. Across the heads of the piles they laid a platform of squared oak beams, in two layers. And on that platform they built the foundations.

The firm layer the builders hoped to find is called the caranto. It is a hard, almost watertight clay, light brown or grey with streaks of ochre, an ancient soil from the end of the last Ice Age. The ground above it still settles, very slowly, by about nine centimetres in a century, by one estimate. The oldest pavements of the city lie about two metres below the pavements of today. The great church of Santa Maria della Salute is said to stand on about a million wooden piles.

In the Middle Ages, walls were built of brick. Some were built a sacco, like a sack: two thin walls, with rubble packed between them. The pale, creamy Istrian stone, so much a part of Venice today, came into common use only after the eleventh century.

The houses of the old city were low, with a few narrow windows behind iron grilles. Their upper floors jutted out over the lanes on wooden brackets, so far that some lanes were almost roofed over, and the light hardly reached the ground. Some houses could be reached only by water. Many had a liago, a roofed loggia, often facing south to catch the sun. On the roofs stood the altane, wooden platforms where the washing was hung to dry. The floors were of terrazzo.

Every kitchen had its hood and flue and chimney, and the chimney-stacks were built in many shapes. The historian Pompeo Molmenti listed some of them: "inverted cones, bell-shaped, supported on corbels". Old paintings show tall, funnel-shaped chimneys rising above the roofs.

Fire was always a danger in a city of wood. A great fire in eleven-oh-five spread from the house of the Dandolo family at Santi Apostoli all the way to Santo Stefano, and others followed in the years after. In the Rialto, no lights were allowed after the first hour of the night.

And then there was water. Venice stands in salt water, and it had no springs. So the Venetians caught the rain. It fell on the roofs and on the paved squares, and ran through holes in the paving stones into a pit some three and a half to five metres deep, lined with clay and filled with clean, washed sand. Slowly it filtered through the sand into a brick shaft in the middle. As an old encyclopaedia put it, the water "percolated into the shaft of the well, whence it was drawn in copper buckets."

At the top stood the carved well-head, the vera da pozzo, often made from an old capital, an altar, or the drum of a Roman column. The heads of each district opened the public wells twice a day, and kept the keys.

The city has its own words. A square is a campo, and a little square a campiello. A street is a calle, a canal is a rio, and a street that runs beside a canal is a fondamenta, or a riva. A covered passage under a building is a sotoportego. And after the middle of the twelfth century, the city was divided into six districts, the sestieri: Castello, San Marco and Cannaregio on one side of the Grand Canal, and San Polo, Santa Croce and Dorsoduro on the other.

In nine ninety-one, a new doge was chosen, Pietro Orseolo, the second of that name. Venice had long paid a yearly tribute to the pirates of the Dalmatian coast, to keep them away from its ships. The new doge stopped paying. Before long, the little towns of Dalmatia, Zara, Trau, Spalato and Ragusa, troubled by the pirates, turned to Venice for protection.

On Ascension Day in the spring of the year one thousand, the doge heard Mass in the church of San Pietro di Castello, and the bishop gave him a consecrated banner. That same day, with a fair west wind, the whole fleet sailed out through the Lido port, and by evening it had come to Grado. There the Patriarch came down in procession to meet him, and gave him a second banner.

From Grado the fleet sailed on, by Parenzo to Zara, and then among the islands, to Curzola and to Lagosta, the stronghold of the pirates. The stronghold yielded, and the towns along the coast recognised the doge as Duke of Dalmatia. The young emperor Otto the Third heard of these deeds. He came secretly to Venice to see the doge, and became godfather to one of his sons.

From that time a ceremony was held on Ascension Day, which the Venetians called the Sensa. On that morning, a barge hung with cloth of gold carried the clergy of Saint Mark's across the lagoon towards San Nicolo del Lido, with a vessel of water, a vase of salt, and a sprinkler made of olive branches. There the bishop prayed: "Deign, O Lord, to grant that this sea be calm and peaceful to us and to all that sail upon it." Then he sprinkled the doge with the water, and poured what was left into the sea. At first, it was a blessing.

Nearly two centuries later, Venice welcomed two great guests. Pope Alexander the Third and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa had long been enemies. Venice was chosen as their meeting place, and the doge, Sebastiano Ziani, promised not to let the emperor in without the Pope's consent.

On a Sunday in late July, eleven seventy-seven, the emperor crossed the lagoon in the doge's own barge, seated between the doge and the patriarch. Two tall masts stood at the landing place, flying the banners of Saint Mark. In front of the basilica, the Pope sat waiting on his throne. The emperor laid aside his purple cloak and knelt at the Pope's feet, and the Pope raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace.

Bells rang, and the Te Deum was sung. The next day, after Mass, he held the Pope's stirrup. In the porch of Saint Mark's, three slabs of red marble still mark the place where they met.

Later Venetians added legends of their own. They said that the Pope had first come to Venice in disguise, and slept one night on the bare ground near the church of San Apollinare, where an inscription still marks the spot.

And the Venetians said that the Pope gave the doge a ring, as a pledge that he and those who came after him would rule over the sea for ever. In later centuries the blessing became a wedding.

Every Ascension Day, the doge went out in the Bucintoro, the great gilded barge of the state, rowed by a hundred and sixty shipwrights, four to each oar, with galleys and gondolas following behind. At the island of Sant'Elena, the bishop offered peeled chestnuts and red wine, and the doge gave damask roses in a silver cup. Then the Bucintoro passed out through the Lido port into the open sea. The patriarch blessed a ring, and the doge dropped it into the water, with the old Latin words, "Desponsamus te, mare", which mean, "Sea, we wed thee."

Music played from the barge, and afterwards there were banquets, and a fair that lasted a week. Year after year the wedding was held again, for as long as the Republic lasted.

The church of Saint Mark that stands today is the third on its site. It was rebuilt from ten sixty-three and consecrated in the year ten ninety-four, under three doges in turn: Domenico Contarini, Domenico Selvo, and Vitale Falier.

Domenico Selvo was chosen in ten seventy-one. The people gathered in their boats near the church of San Pietro di Castello, and while the clergy prayed, a great shout went up, naming Selvo as the doge they wanted. He was carried on the shoulders of the crowd down to his barge, and rowed to the Piazza, while the Te Deum was sung and a thousand oars beat the water into foam. He took off his shoes, and entered Saint Mark's barefoot, as the bells of all the churches rang.

Selvo's wife was a Greek lady, and the Venetians were shocked by her. The chroniclers told of her perfumes and her baths of dew, and it was even said that she ate with a fork. But Selvo is remembered above all for his church. A chronicler wrote that he began to work in mosaic, and sent to every land for marbles and precious stones. Every ship returning from the East was ordered to bring its share, and a law of the Republic required every merchant trading to the East to bring back something for the church.

Byzantine and Lombard craftsmen worked side by side, and from their two ways of building grew a new style, which has been called Veneto-Byzantine. The plan is a Greek cross, with four equal arms, modelled on the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Over the centre, and over each arm, rises a dome, five domes in all.

There are about five hundred marble columns, inside and out, most of them brought from the East, with capitals carved in every kind of style. Below the mosaics, the walls are faced with thin slices of rare marble, porphyry and alabaster, set in broad bands of colour.

Above them, over all the domes and vaults, shines the mosaic. There are thousands of square metres of gold mosaic, with stories from the Bible, and high in the central dome the figure of Christ. The work began in Selvo's time, and went on for centuries.

Inside, the light is dim. John Ruskin compared the church to a great cave, hewn into the shape of a cross. The daylight comes in only through narrow openings round the domes, like large stars. Silver lamps burn in the chapels, and the gold of the roof gives back a faint gleam at every curve. Underfoot, the marble seems to rise and fall in waves of colour.

The floor covers more than two thousand square metres, with red and green porphyry, marble, and little pieces of glass, and parts of it were laid in the twelfth century. It truly does rise and dip, because the crypts beneath it have slowly sunk, and they are often under water.

Outside, Ruskin saw the front of the church as "a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl." Doves nest among the carved marble leaves of the porches. And there are the four bronze horses, which came later, as we will hear.

Behind the high altar stands the Pala d'Oro, the golden altarpiece. It was begun in Byzantium at the doge's order, and enlarged over two centuries. It is a little over three metres wide and about two metres high, made of gilded silver, set with about two hundred and fifty enamels of Christ, angels and saints, and nearly two thousand precious stones: pearls and garnets, amethysts, sapphires, emeralds and rubies. On most days it was kept closed, behind a painted panel, and opened only on the great feasts.

For about a thousand years, this was the doge's own chapel, the church of the state. It became the cathedral of Venice only in eighteen-oh-seven.

In the first week of Lent, in the year twelve-oh-one, six envoys came across the lagoon to Venice. They had been sent by the great barons of France, who had taken the cross and wished to sail to the Holy Land. One of them was Geoffrey of Villehardouin, the Marshal of Champagne, who later wrote the story down.

They found the doge among his council. His name was Enrico Dandolo. He had been chosen in the early eleven-nineties, and he was already a very old man, perhaps in his eighties. He was also nearly blind. Villehardouin says he had lost his sight through a wound in the head.

The envoys asked for ships. The old doge said that this was a great thing they asked, and that he would need eight days to think it over. Then he gave his answer. Venice would build ships and transports for four thousand five hundred knights and their horses, nine thousand squires and twenty thousand men on foot, with food for nine months, for eighty-five thousand marks. And Venice would add fifty armed galleys of her own, in return for half of all that might be won.

Little by little, the doge brought his people round. First his council of forty agreed, then a hundred, then two hundred, then a thousand. At last some ten thousand people gathered in Saint Mark's to hear Mass. The envoys knelt before them, weeping. And the whole crowd lifted up their hands and cried with one voice, "We consent, we consent!"

The next year the crusaders came, and camped on the Lido. But far fewer had arrived than were expected, and they could not pay. So the doge proposed that they should first help Venice to recover the city of Zara, on the coast of Dalmatia, and the payment could wait. Then, one Sunday, the old doge climbed into the pulpit of Saint Mark's, and asked to take the cross himself. He knelt before the altar, and the cross was sewn onto the front of the great cotton hat he wore, so that everyone could see it.

In early October, twelve-oh-two, the fleet sailed out of the lagoon. Above the great galleys flew the banner of Saint Mark, a golden lion on crimson, and the whole host sang the old hymn, Veni Creator. They came first to Zara, which yielded in November, and there they spent the winter.

Their plans had changed, and in the spring they sailed not to the Holy Land, but to Constantinople. In June twelve-oh-three they came within sight of the great city. "They never thought," Villehardouin wrote, "there could be in all the world so rich a city."

That summer, when the galleys came in to the shore, the old blind doge stood in armour on the prow of his galley, with the banner of Saint Mark before him. And in April twelve-oh-four, the great city was taken, and many of its treasures were carried away to the West.

Dandolo would not take the crown of the new empire, but he became lord of a quarter and half a quarter of it. Venice bought the great island of Crete, and Venetian families took many smaller islands of the Aegean as their own.

Among the treasures that came to Venice were four bronze horses, which had stood in the Hippodrome, the great racecourse of Constantinople. They are made almost entirely of copper, and were once covered in gold. The Venetians set them high on the front of the basilica, above the doors.

There came, too, four emperors carved in porphyry, holding one another in an embrace, the figures known as the Tetrarchs. They were set into a corner of the basilica. One of them had lost part of a foot, and in the nineteen-sixties the missing heel was found in Istanbul.

The old doge never came home. He died in Constantinople in the early summer of twelve-oh-five, and was buried in the great church of Hagia Sophia. His tomb was lost long ago. A marker, set in the nineteenth century, shows where it probably stood.

Marco Polo was born in Venice around the year twelve fifty-four, though no one knows the exact day, or even the exact place. He came from a family of merchants. His father, Nicolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, were in Constantinople in twelve sixty. From there they travelled far into the East, and they did not come home until twelve sixty-nine.

About November twelve seventy-one, the two brothers set out again, and this time they took young Marco with them. They started from Acre, on the coast of the Holy Land, carrying letters from the new Pope, Gregory the Tenth.

The road was very long. They went by Ayas and Sivas, down to Hormuz, and then turned north again, through Kerman to Balkh and Badakhshan. They followed the river Oxus up to the high plateau of the Pamir, came down to Kashgar and Khotan, and crossed the Gobi Desert. At last, in about May twelve seventy-five, they reached the great Kublai Khan, at his summer palace of Shangdu. Marco was then about twenty-one.

Kublai received them kindly, and took a liking to the young Venetian. Marco learned the languages of the court, and the Khan began to send him on missions. Marco noticed that the Khan loved to hear of strange countries and their customs. So wherever he went, he gathered curious things to tell him. For three years he governed the great city of Yangzhou, and once he travelled on a mission to the Indian seas.

Among the marvels he described was a kind of black stone that people dug from the mountains and burned like wood. "If you supply the fire with them at night," he said, "and see that they are well kindled, you will find them still alight in the morning." We would call it coal.

After many years, the Polos began to long for home. At the beginning of twelve ninety-two, they sailed from the port of Zaitun, escorting a princess called Kokachin, seventeen years old, who was to marry the Mongol ruler of Persia. The voyage took more than two years, with long delays in Sumatra and in the south of India. When at last they parted, the princess wept to say goodbye to the kind Venetians. The Polos travelled on by Tabriz, and reached Venice in twelve ninety-five. They had been away for almost a quarter of a century.

An old Venetian story says that when they came home, in coarse, shabby clothes of a Tartar cut, their own relatives did not know them. So the three gave a feast. They came to the table in long robes of crimson satin, then changed into crimson damask, and then into crimson velvet, giving each robe in turn to the servants. Then Marco brought out their old travelling clothes, and they ripped open the seams with sharp knives. Out tumbled rubies and sapphires, diamonds and emeralds, which had been sewn inside. After that, everyone believed them.

Because Marco spoke so often of millions, people called him Messer Marco Millioni. And the courtyard of the family house, near the church of San Giovanni Grisostomo, became known as the Corte del Milion.

A few years later, Marco was taken prisoner in a sea-fight with Genoa. In prison there he met a writer from Pisa called Rustichello, who wrote romances about King Arthur and his knights. Marco told him his story, and Rustichello wrote it down. It is said that the nobles of Genoa came to visit the famous prisoner, and brought him presents. The book was written in twelve ninety-eight. In Italian it is called Il Milione, and one of its early French titles was the Book of the Marvels of the World.

Marco was set free after peace was made in twelve ninety-nine. He came home, married a lady called Donata, and they had three daughters, Fantina, Bellela and Moreta. He died in the winter of thirteen twenty-four, and asked to be buried in the church of San Lorenzo. Most historians believe that his great journey was real, though some have wondered.

Behind high walls of red brick lay the place where Venice built its ships. The Venetians called it the Arsenale, and in English we call it the Arsenal. The word probably comes from an Arabic word meaning a basin of water.

An old tradition says that Doge Ordelafo Falier gathered the city's small, scattered boatyards into one great yard, and the Arsenal is traditionally said to date from eleven-oh-four. In the early thirteen-hundreds it was greatly enlarged, and it went on growing for centuries. In the end it covered some forty-five hectares, a whole district of the city, closed in by battlemented walls about three kilometres long. A writer of nineteen-oh-three described the twelve watch-towers that once guarded them, and the sentinels who paced the walls night and day.

Inside lay basins of still water, long sheds and busy workshops. Thousands of workers, some say as many as sixteen thousand, laboured here. They were called the arsenalotti, the men of the Arsenal. The ships were put together from parts made ready in advance, and at times up to a hundred galleys might be in hand at once. Hemp for the ropes came from far away, from the mouth of the river Don, and the ropes were spun in a long, narrow building called the Tana. The Republic spent nearly a tenth of all its income on its ships and naval works.

In the early fourteenth century, the poet Dante wrote his great poem, the Divine Comedy. In one part of it, in Hell, he looks down into a dark ditch where thick pitch is boiling, and it reminds him of the Arsenal of Venice in winter. In Longfellow's old translation, the lines begin: "As in the Arsenal of the Venetians boils in the winter the tenacious pitch to smear their unsound vessels o'er again."

Dante goes on to picture the busy yard. One man builds a new ship, and another fills the gaps in the ribs of an old one that has made many voyages. One hammers at the prow, and one at the stern. One makes oars, one twists rope, and another mends the sails.

Imagine the yard on a winter morning, the air cold and sharp. It is full of the smell of hot pitch and the ringing of hammers, and smoke drifts low over the still water.

The men of the Arsenal held an honoured place in the city. It was they who rowed the doge's golden barge on Ascension Day.

In the summer of fifteen seventy-four, a young king came to Venice. He was Henry the Third of France, twenty-three years old. He arrived in July, and was lodged in the palace of Ca Foscari. The Venetians showed him all their wonders, and the Arsenal was one of them. It was said that a whole galley was put together and launched while the king feasted.

The land gate of the Arsenal was built around fourteen sixty, in the shape of a Roman triumphal arch. It is counted the first building of the Renaissance in Venice, and a statue of Saint Justina stands upon it. Beside the gate sit marble lions, brought from Greece in sixteen eighty-seven by the Venetian commander Francesco Morosini, one of them from the harbour of Athens.

The tallest lion is about nine feet high, and it was carved in the fourth century before Christ. On its shoulders, lines of carving wind in the shape of a serpent. They are runes, probably cut in the eleventh century by a Scandinavian soldier.

In later times, a museum in the Arsenal kept models of Venetian ships and galleys of every kind. They are small and still now. But they bring back the days when the great basins rang with the sound of work.

In the early centuries, the doge was chosen, at least in name, by the whole people of Venice. But after a failed expedition in eleven seventy-one, things changed. A Great Council was created, traditionally in eleven seventy-two. Each of the six sestieri chose two men, and each of these named forty citizens, so that the council had four hundred and eighty members, serving for one year.

From now on, the council chose the doge. When a new doge was chosen, he was shown to the people with a short, polite formula: "This is your doge, if it please you."

The doge also swore an oath, the promissione, which set out what he might do and what he might not, and it was changed a little at each new election. One historian wrote that the doge had great pomp, but little power. He could not leave the city, or open letters from foreign rulers on his own.

In twelve sixty-eight, as rivalry among the great families grew, a new way of choosing the doge was introduced. On the day of the election, the youngest councillor went into Saint Mark's and prayed. Then he went out into the Piazza, and took the first boy he met. The boy was called the ballottino, the ballot-boy, and it was his task to draw the ballots from the urn.

Then the slow work began. Thirty councillors were chosen by lot, and the thirty were reduced by lot to nine. The nine chose forty, and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve. And so it went on, back and forth, until there were forty-one electors. Their choice would be the last of ten rounds of lots and votes. Each of them wrote a name, and the names were put in an urn. One was drawn, and the man named left the room, while the others spoke of his merits and his faults, and then he was called back to answer.

If he won twenty-five votes or more, he was doge. He was shown to the people from the porphyry pulpit in Saint Mark's, and carried around the Piazza, scattering coins to the crowd. At the top of the palace stairs, the oldest councillor set on his head the corno, the doge's cap. The first doge chosen this way was Lorenzo Tiepolo. A chronicler of the time tells how the bells rang out, and even the little children ran to Saint Mark's, calling his name.

In twelve ninety-seven, under Doge Pietro Gradenigo, came the change the Venetians called the Serrata, the closing. Everyone who had sat in the council in the past four years was voted on, one by one, and those with twelve votes or more became members. Soon, in practice, only men whose fathers' families had sat in the council could hope to enter. The council grew quickly, and by thirteen eleven it had more than a thousand members. Their names were written in a book later called the Golden Book.

On a stormy June morning in thirteen ten, a group of nobles tried to seize the Piazza, but the plot had been betrayed, and rain and wind and the doge's men scattered them. An old story says that a woman dropped a stone mortar from her window, and the rebels' banner fell.

A few weeks later, a small council was set up to watch over the safety of the state. It was meant to last only a short while, but it soon became permanent. This was the Council of Ten. Its members served for one year, without pay. Three of them served as heads, each for a month, and during that month they had to keep away from shops and public places. With the doge and his six councillors they sat seventeen in all, the councillors in crimson, the heads of the Ten in violet, and the others in black.

Here and there in the city, there were stone lions' mouths where written accusations could be posted. One, on the Zattere, was for breaches of the health rules. Another, near the Arsenal, was for brawlers in church.

Beside the basilica, looking out over the water, stands the palace of the doges. The first palace here was probably a small, strong castle. In the eleven-seventies Doge Sebastiano Ziani restored and enlarged it. But the palace we see today began to grow after the closing of the Great Council. The council had become larger, and it needed a bigger hall.

A new hall was begun in thirteen-oh-one, and from around thirteen forty the great wing on the lagoon was built. Around thirteen sixty-five, a painter from Padua, Guariento, covered a wall of the new hall with a great fresco of Paradise, and around fourteen hundred the ceiling was painted with stars. Early in the fifteenth century the Great Council took its seats in the new hall. Then, from fourteen twenty-four, under Doge Francesco Foscari, the wing along the Piazzetta was built to match the front on the water.

The outside is like no other building. Along the bottom run two storeys of open arches, with seventeen great arches below on the side of the lagoon, and eighteen on the Piazzetta. Above them rises a great wall, pierced by only a few large windows. It is covered in a diamond pattern of creamy white Istrian stone and red marble from Verona, which gives it, as an old encyclopedia says, "a delicate rosy-orange hue". At the corners, carved groups show the Drunkenness of Noah, Adam and Eve, and the Judgment of Solomon. High above them stand the archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel.

Beside the basilica is the ceremonial gate, the Porta della Carta, the work of Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon, from around fourteen forty. Inside the courtyard rises the Giants' Staircase, and at its top, since the mid-sixteenth century, stand Sansovino's great statues of Mars and Neptune, for the power of Venice on land and on the sea.

There was a fire in fifteen seventy-four, and a far greater one in December fifteen seventy-seven, which swept through the hall of the Great Council. It destroyed paintings by Carpaccio, by the Bellini, by Titian and many others. The architect Palladio wished to pull the burned palace down and build a new one. But others argued for keeping the old walls, and by about fifteen eighty the palace was repaired.

The hall of the Great Council is fifty-three metres long and twenty-five metres wide. On Sundays, when the bells of Saint Mark's rang, between twelve hundred and two thousand noblemen came to sit here, the doge on a raised platform, and the councillors on long double rows of benches. Below the ceiling runs a line of portraits of the early doges, and one doge, who plotted against the Republic, is shown only by a painted black cloth. Behind the throne hangs Tintoretto's Paradise, painted with his workshop between fifteen eighty-eight and fifteen ninety-two, one of the largest paintings on canvas ever made. In nineteen-oh-three, scorched traces of Guariento's old Paradise were found beneath it.

The palace held prisons, too. There were the Pozzi, the wells, on the ground floor, and the Piombi, the Leads, up under the lead roof. One famous prisoner escaped from the cells under the roof, as we will hear. In time, new prisons were built across the narrow canal behind the palace, with lighter and airier cells, and around sixteen hundred a bridge was built to join them. It is closed and covered, with two corridors side by side, and its little windows look out towards the lagoon and San Giorgio. Its famous name, the Bridge of Sighs, came later, in the age of the Romantic poets.

On the Piazzetta, near the water, stand two tall columns. On one is the winged lion of Saint Mark, and on the other Saint Theodore, standing on a crocodile. They were brought from the East as trophies and, by tradition, raised in the twelfth century, and the bronze lion is far older than Venice itself. It is said that an engineer, Nicolo Barattieri, raised them with wet ropes that tightened as they dried, and that a third column fell into the water and was never found.

The name Rialto comes from Rivoaltus, the high bank, an old name for the banks of the channel that became the Grand Canal. In ten ninety-seven the city's market moved here, and for centuries this was the busy heart of Venetian trade. There were shops and warehouses, and offices for insurance and for taxes, and bankers kept their tables in the little square of the Rialto. An English traveller of sixteen-oh-eight noted that the merchants met there twice a day, between eleven and twelve in the morning, and between five and six in the afternoon.

At first there was no bridge here at all. Then, in the late twelfth century, came first a bridge of boats. Later there were bridges of wood, and the middle part of the wooden bridge could be lifted, to let the tall masts of ships pass through, as an old painting by Carpaccio shows. In the troubles of thirteen ten, the wooden bridge was partly burned. In the first half of the fifteenth century, two rows of shops were built along its sides. It fell in fourteen forty-four, under a crowd gathered to watch the wedding procession of the Marquis of Ferrara, and it fell again in fifteen twenty-four.

A bridge of stone was proposed in fifteen-oh-three, and in fifteen fifty-one designs were invited. Great architects, Sansovino and Palladio and Vignola among them, offered plans, but their bridges needed several arches, and they were turned down. At last, between fifteen eighty-eight and fifteen ninety-one, Antonio da Ponte built a single arch of stone, about thirty-two metres across. Another architect, Scamozzi, said that so bold an arch would surely fall. It has stood ever since.

The same English traveller, Thomas Coryat, found it newly built of squared white stone, with two rows of little shops for craftsmen. He called it "the fairest bridge by many degrees for one arch that ever I saw, read, or heard of." In seventeen eighty-six, the German poet Goethe looked down from the arch at the canal, full of ships unloading goods from the mainland, with a swarm of gondolas between them. It was still the only bridge across the Grand Canal.

In fifteen fourteen, a great fire destroyed most of the buildings of the Rialto. Only the little church of San Giacomo di Rialto survived, and the market was built again around it.

The market sold fish and meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables, and goods from the East, spices, gold and silk. If you walk there early in the morning, you will still find the herb market, the Erberia, with radicchio from Treviso, and artichokes and asparagus from the garden islands of Sant'Erasmo and Le Vignole. In the fish market there are soles and sardines, squid and cuttlefish, crabs and eels. The fish-market hall was rebuilt in nineteen-oh-seven, in the old Gothic style, and its stone capitals are carved with fish, scallops, crabs, lobsters and seahorses.

From the Rialto, the shopping street called the Merceria winds towards Saint Mark's. An English diarist of sixteen forty-five found it hung with cloth of gold, damask and silk. It was full of perfumes, and of cages of nightingales singing from shop to shop.

Beside the bridge stood the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the house of the German merchants. It was first built in twelve twenty-eight, as a hostel, a warehouse and a market for traders from German lands. When they arrived, they handed in their weapons, and Venice took a small share of every bargain made there. It burned in fifteen-oh-five and was rebuilt by fifteen-oh-eight, four storeys around a courtyard. Its outer walls were painted by Giorgione and the young Titian, and a few faded fragments survive, in the Ca d'Oro and in the Accademia.

Around fifteen ninety-six, in England, Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice. In it, Shylock speaks of Antonio's ships, one bound for Tripolis, another for the Indies. And more than once in the play, someone asks: "What news on the Rialto?"

The word gondola is recorded from the late eleventh or twelfth century. In old paintings of around fifteen hundred, gondolas have open canopies of rich, coloured cloth, held up on light arched frames. Then, by a law of the sixteenth century, usually dated fifteen sixty-two, they became black. The laws against luxury said the cabins must be draped in plain black wool, with no silk, no fringes, no carving and no gilding. Only foreign ambassadors were free of these rules.

There were once perhaps ten thousand gondolas in Venice. When the German poet Goethe arrived in seventeen eighty-six, he knew them at once. His father had brought home a beautiful model of a gondola, and as a child Goethe had been allowed to play with it. Now the black boats greeted him like old friends.

A gondola is about eleven metres long, and less than a metre and a half wide. It is made of some two hundred and eighty pieces, cut from eight kinds of wood, lime and oak, mahogany and walnut, cherry, fir, larch and elm, and building one takes about two months. It is not quite even. One side is a little fuller than the other, so that a single oarsman, standing at the stern, can row it straight. The modern shape was perfected in the late nineteenth century in the Tramontin boatyard.

At the prow stands the ferro, a piece of bright steel shaped like the head of an axe, with six teeth below it, and one more tooth pointing back. Venetians like to say that the six teeth stand for the six sestieri, and the backward tooth for the Giudecca. At the stern, the oar rests in the forcola, a carved oarlock of walnut. It is shaped so that the oar can sit in several places, for rowing forward, for turning, for slowing, for stopping, and for going backwards. It is thought the most precious piece of all.

For passengers there was the felze, the little cabin. It had a wooden frame, covered with black woollen cloth and tufts of silk, with a door, two windows, and a little brass shrine for the picture of a saint. Inside, the walnut was carved, often with scenes from the poet Tasso. Brass sea-horses and dolphins shone on either side.

Gondolas were built in boatyards called squeri, open yards beside small canals, with wooden sheds and a long slope, plastered with mud, running down to the water. Imagine the scene. A pot of pitch bubbles in one corner, and fires of straw blaze up beneath the hulls to dry them. The men move about, blackened with pitch, a little saint or a charm hanging at their throats. The squero of San Trovaso has worked since at least the seventeenth century, and its wooden buildings look like the mountain houses of the Cadore, where the first carpenters and the timber came from.

A gondolier loved his boat. He spent hours each day sponging and drying it, and in wet weather he oiled and polished the steel twice a day. Across the Grand Canal, from the thirteenth century, there were gondola ferries called traghetti, and the boatmen formed their own guilds very early.

On a moonlit evening in October, seventeen eighty-six, Goethe asked to hear the famous song of the boatmen. By then it was half forgotten, and had to be ordered. He sat in a gondola with one singer in front of him and one behind, and they sang verses of the poets Tasso and Ariosto, taking turns. Then they landed on the Giudecca and stood far apart, and Goethe walked slowly between them. "As a voice from the distance it sounds in the highest degree strange," he wrote, "as a lament without sadness." His old boatman told him that the women of Malamocco and Pellestrina sang the same verses on the beach in the evening, until their husbands, out fishing on the sea, answered them from far away.

A short way north of Venice, about one and a half kilometres across the water, lies the island of Murano. Like Venice itself, it is a cluster of small islands joined by bridges, with its own Grand Canal. Looking at it from the quays of Venice, Goethe thought of it as a little Venice. Murano kept its own councils, under a governor sent from the city, called the podesta, and it even had the right to coin money. Its arms showed a cock with a snake in its beak.

Glassmaking in the lagoon is recorded as early as the eleventh century. In twelve seventy-five the government took the craft under its protection, with a special code of laws. The raw materials of glass could not be sent abroad, and two fairs were held each year. Then, towards the end of the thirteenth century, and tradition gives twelve ninety-one, the furnaces were moved out of Venice to Murano, for fear of fire in a city built largely of wood.

The glassmakers had special privileges. Their daughters could marry into the richest noble families, and the men, it was said, could carry swords. Strict laws tried to keep the glassmakers, and their secrets, at home, though many left all the same. In the fourteenth century there were at least twelve glassworks on the island, making everyday things, such as long-necked bottles with round bodies, like onions.

An English diarist of sixteen forty-five crossed over to "Murano, famous for the best glasses in the world." He watched the furnaces, and learned how white flints from Pavia were pounded and sifted very fine, and mixed with white sand and the ashes of a seaweed brought from Syria. He sent a collection of glasses home to England by sea, and he tried the little Murano oysters.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, a glassmaker called Angelo Barovier made cristallo, a glass as clear as rock crystal, new in its time. Painted with enamel and gold, it was ordered by great families, by doges and by popes. The famous blue Barovier Cup, made around fourteen seventy, is still kept on the island.

Murano made beads, too, the tiny one-coloured conteria, and the layered rosetta beads, said to have been invented by Marietta Barovier, Angelo's daughter. For centuries, women called the impiraresse sat out in the little streets, with a box of tiny beads on their knees, threading them one by one. Later came mirrors, famous all through the eighteenth century, and great chandeliers hung with flowers and garlands of glass.

When Henry the Third of France came to Venice, in fifteen seventy-four, the glassmakers' boat in the procession carried a sea-monster with a furnace inside it. As flames came from the monster's mouth, craftsmen inside made beautiful crystal vases. There were stories, too, of goblets so fine that they would break if poison were poured into them, though one American visitor thought that charming notion must be a fable.

After the end of the Republic came hard times. In the eighteen-sixties the famous mirrors were no longer made, though beads were still sent out to every corner of the world. Yet from around eighteen fifty, makers such as Antonio Salviati, and firms such as the Fratelli Toso, began to bring the old skills back, and took Murano glass to the great exhibitions. In eighteen sixty-one, the mayor, Antonio Colleoni, and the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti founded a glass museum, and the next year a school was added where glassworkers learned to draw.

On the island stands the church of Santi Maria e Donato, one of the oldest in the lagoon, rebuilt in the twelfth century. Its floor of marble mosaic, laid in the twelfth century, covers more than five hundred square metres of porphyry and coloured stone, with peacocks, an eagle and griffins, and two roosters carrying a fox. And behind the altar hang four great bones, each more than a metre long. According to an old legend, they belonged to a dragon slain by Saint Donatus himself.

Further out across the lagoon, about seven kilometres north-east of Venice, lies the fishing island of Burano, close to quiet Torcello. It grew from five small islands. One canal was filled in to make its main street and square, named after the composer Baldassare Galuppi, who was born on Burano in seventeen-oh-six. In nineteen-oh-one, about eight thousand people lived here, in houses crowded close together.

The houses of Burano are painted in strong, bright colours. Tradition says the fishermen painted them so that they could pick out their own homes from the water, even in the winter fog. Above the roofs rises the bell tower of San Martino, built in the eighteenth century. It is about fifty-three metres high, and it leans noticeably to one side.

No one knows quite how the lace of Burano began. Some say it grew from the making and mending of fishing nets, but that is a legend. We do know that needle lace flourished in Venice. As early as fourteen seventy-six, the Senate forbade punto in aria on curtains and bed linen. In the sixteenth century, hundreds of books of lace patterns were printed, many of them in Venice, for noblewomen who worked at home.

Punto in aria means a stitch in the air. The design was drawn on a pattern and held on a little wooden cylinder, the murello, resting on a round cushion. Stitch by stitch, the lacemaker built up the flowers, and then the ground between them, little bars in Venetian point, or a fine net in Burano point. The threads were of fine linen, and sometimes of silk, gold and silver. The seventeenth century was the century of lace, and Venetian lace was so costly that France set up workshops of its own, with lacemakers from Venice.

Burano point had a square mesh of uneven thread, which gave it a soft and cloudy look. In the eighteenth century, many girls on the island and in its convents made it. Around eighteen forty-five, an old nun of ninety told a visitor how, in her youth, she and her companions had made it, ordered long in advance for great weddings. But by eighteen sixty-six the craft had died away, and the islanders no longer knew why one street was called the Contrada del Pizzo, once the street of the lacemakers.

Then came the winter of eighteen seventy-two. The lagoon froze, and the fishermen could not go out. Money was raised all over Italy, from the Pope and from the King, to help them. A first plan, to employ people making fishing nets, came to nothing. And so, in eighteen seventy-two, a lace school was founded by Countess Andriana Marcello, encouraged by the politician Paolo Fambri and under Queen Margherita's patronage.

They found an elderly Burano lacemaker who still remembered the old stitches. A schoolmistress learned from her, and began to teach eight pupils, who were paid a little to come. By eighteen seventy-five there were more than a hundred. By eighteen ninety-seven there were four hundred workers, and in the early twentieth century, some five hundred girls. They began at twelve years old, and worked six hours a day in winter, and seven in summer.

Imagine them at work, bent over their round cushions, their needles catching the light from the canal. Some saved their earnings to buy a little house, to bring as a dowry when they married. A book on lace of nineteen-oh-two says simply: "Nearly all the young men of Burano seek their wives from among the lace-women."

The school learned to copy every kind of old lace. The Queen allowed it to copy two great laces from the churches, and it made the wedding veil of Queen Elena. Meanwhile, at Pellestrina, a small fishing town on the long sandbank south of the Lido, Michelangelo Jesurum was bringing back the making of lace on bobbins. And on Burano, the old school building is now a museum of lace, where lacemakers can still be watched at work, stitch by patient stitch.

Venice was a city of festivals and light. But it also knew hard seasons, when sickness came to the islands. In thirteen forty-eight, the great sickness that people called the Black Death reached the lagoon. And over the centuries that followed, the plague came back again and again.

On a small island of the lagoon, Augustinian hermits had once built a church called Santa Maria di Nazareth, with a hostel for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land. In fourteen twenty-three, in a time of plague, the Senate made the island into a hospital, where the sick could be cared for apart from the city. Such places came to be called lazzaretti, and the name, it is said, grew from Nazareth.

In fourteen sixty-eight, the Republic chose a second island, once a walled vineyard ringed by little salt pans. This was the Lazzaretto Nuovo, the new lazaretto. It was not meant for the sick, but for those who might have met the sickness on their way: travellers, the crews of ships, and the goods they carried. In a great warehouse there, about a hundred metres long, porters called bastazi aired and cleaned the cargoes. They washed them in cold, hot and salt water, smoked them, and soaked them in vinegar. And on the warehouse walls, they left their writing and their drawings.

The waiting lasted about forty days. In the Venetian tongue, a time of forty days was a quarantina, and that is where our word quarantine comes from.

In fifteen seventy-six, when the sickness came again, the Senate made a solemn vow, to build a church to Christ the Redeemer. In May fifteen seventy-seven, the first stone was laid on the island of the Giudecca, for a church designed by Andrea Palladio. It is called the Redentore, the church of the Redeemer, and on its dome stands a statue of the Redeemer himself. That July, a bridge of boats was laid across the water, and the first procession crossed over to give thanks.

A bridge has been laid every year since. On the third Sunday in July, Venice still keeps the feast of the Redentore. On the Saturday evening, boats hung with flowers, green branches and lanterns gather on the Giudecca Canal. Families eat their supper on board, or at long tables along the quays, and fireworks light up the water. An American who lived in Venice in the eighteen-sixties wrote of older days, when Venetians feasted all night, and "at dawn went in their fleets of many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy light, to behold the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea."

In sixteen thirty, the plague returned once more, and that autumn the Senate vowed a great church to the Virgin Mary. Out of eleven designs, it chose that of a young Venetian architect, Baldassare Longhena. When the sickness ended at last, in November sixteen thirty-one, the city could not wait for stone. A church of wood was raised at once. And on a cloudless day, the doge, the Senate and the people walked in procession from Saint Mark's, and crossed the Grand Canal to it on a bridge of boats.

The church of stone was consecrated half a century later, in the sixteen-eighties. It is Santa Maria della Salute, Saint Mary of Health. It stands facing Palladio's San Giorgio across the water, eight-sided beneath a great dome, on a forest of wooden piles, with broad steps rising out of the water. On its high altar, a marble Madonna drives away the figure of the Plague.

Every year, on the twenty-first of November, a bridge of boats is laid across the Grand Canal, and all day long people walk over it, carrying candles. Inside, the candles are passed forward to the altar, one after another, until, as an old book about the lagoon puts it, "the whole space by the altar seems like one solid wall of embossed gold as the flames waver and flicker in the draught." Outside, there are stalls of sweets and sugared almonds. And in many homes, a dish of salted, smoked mutton, called castradina, is cooked for the day.

All this time, Venice was filling its churches, its palaces and its halls with paintings. And in the fifteenth century, one family of painters stood above the rest, the Bellini.

There were two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. Gentile, the elder, was sent by the doge to Constantinople, and there he painted a portrait of the Sultan. Back in Venice, for one of the city's brotherhoods, the scuole, he painted the miracles of the Holy Cross. Giovanni, the younger, painted quieter pictures, Madonnas and saints full of tenderness. When the painter Albrecht Durer came to Venice, he wrote that Giovanni Bellini, though very old, was still the best in his art.

Vittore Carpaccio grew up under the influence of the Bellini, and he loved to tell a story. For the brotherhood of Saint Ursula, he painted a whole series of pictures of her story, full of the clothes and the buildings of his own day. Standing before one of them, the writer Henry James saw "Saint Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel visits her at dawn."

Then came Giorgione, from the town of Castelfranco, called Zorzi in the Venetian way. He was remembered as a great lover of music and song, and he died young, in fifteen ten. Very few paintings are surely his. One is an altarpiece in Castelfranco. Another is the picture called the Tempest, which an old guide praised for its poetic grace and romantic beauty. With Giorgione, it was said, a new and romantic kind of painting was born, made not only for the church, but for poetry.

Titian was born among the mountains of Cadore, and he is said to have learned his craft in the workshop of Gentile Bellini. In fifteen eighteen, his great Assumption of the Virgin was unveiled above the high altar of the church of the Frari. It is nearly seven metres tall. Below stand the apostles. Above them, the Virgin, robed in crimson, rises in a golden light against a blue sky. Titian went on painting for more than half a century after that. When the writer Vasari called on him in his old age, he found him still with a brush in his hand. He died in fifteen seventy-six, a very old man, and was buried in the Frari, near one of his own paintings.

Tintoretto was quick and bold. In fifteen sixty-four, the brotherhood of San Rocco, named for Saint Roch, the saint of the plague, held a competition for a painting on the ceiling of one of its rooms. The other painters prepared drawings. Tintoretto quietly painted the whole canvas and fixed it in its place, and when the masters protested, he offered it to them as a gift. And for more than twenty years he went on painting for them, some sixty great canvases.

Paolo Veronese was born in Verona around fifteen twenty-eight, and he loved splendour and feasting. For the friars of Santi Giovanni e Paolo he painted a vast banquet as a Last Supper, crowded with guests and servants, a dog, and a jester with a parrot on his wrist. One summer day in fifteen seventy-three, he was called before the Inquisition to explain them. Asked what his profession was, he answered simply that he invented and drew figures. He was told to correct the picture within three months. Instead, he gave it a new name, the Feast in the House of Levi, and changed very little else.

Why were their colours so bright? Goethe, floating across the lagoon in full sunshine in seventeen eighty-six, thought he knew. Growing up among such light and water, he wrote, "the Venetian artist must see all things in a clearer and brighter light than other men."

And in the eighteenth century, Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, and Francesco Guardi painted the views of the city, and faithfully kept for us the Venice of their day. In Guardi's pictures, the gondolas already look just like the gondolas of later times.

In eighteenth-century Venice, some visitors thought the finest music in the city came not from the opera houses, but from four great charitable houses, the ospedali: the Pieta, the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Ospedaletto. In them, girls who were orphaned, or whose parents could not raise them, were brought up at the expense of the state, and trained above all in music.

The Pieta had been founded in the fourteenth century, to care for orphaned and abandoned girls. In its wall there was a small opening called the scaffetta, just large enough for a baby. A mother who could not keep her child might leave it there, to be taken in and cared for.

The most gifted girls joined the choir and the orchestra. They were called the figlie di coro, the daughters of the choir, and at the Pieta there could be as many as sixty of them. They sang and played in the galleries of the church, behind grilles of iron, so that they could be heard, but not seen. Most of them stayed for life. Those who left were given a small portion by the Republic, so that they could marry, or enter a convent.

In the spring of seventeen-oh-three, a young Venetian called Antonio Vivaldi, born in sixteen seventy-eight, was ordained a priest. His father was a barber, and also a fine violinist in the orchestra of Saint Mark's, nicknamed Rossi, for his red hair. Antonio had the same red hair, and so people called him il prete rosso, the red priest. In September of that same year, the Pieta took him on as its master of the violin.

He stayed there, on and off, for more than thirty years, first teaching the violin, and later as master of the concerts. He wrote more than seven hundred and seventy works. In seventeen twenty-five, a book of his concertos was printed in Amsterdam, and at the very beginning of it were the Four Seasons.

In seventeen thirty-nine, a French traveller, Charles de Brosses, wrote to his friends about the music of these houses. He went most often to the Pieta, which he thought the finest of all. The girls, he said, played the violin and the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello and the bassoon. And he added, in words that translate roughly as, "there is no instrument so large that it could frighten them." He watched a young girl in a white habit, with a sprig of pomegranate flowers over her ear, lead the orchestra and beat time with all the grace one could imagine. He praised a violinist of the Pieta called Chiaretta, and a celebrated violinist called Anna Maria, who played even better.

He met Vivaldi too. The old composer, de Brosses wrote, made friends with him in order to sell him some concertos at a very high price. He composed with a kind of fury, and claimed he could write a concerto faster than a copyist could copy it out. And yet, in a city where everything went by fashion, the Frenchman was surprised to find that Vivaldi was not as much admired as he deserved.

A few years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau came to Venice, working for the French ambassador. Every Sunday at vespers, he wrote, the girls sang in the galleries, not one of them more than twenty years old, and even the singers of the opera came to learn from them. He loved it all, but one thing troubled him. "What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy."

Vivaldi died far from home, in Vienna, in the summer of seventeen forty-one. But the music of the galleries went on. In seventeen eighty-six, Goethe found his way through the maze of little streets to the church of the Mendicanti, and heard the girls sing an oratorio behind the grating, with an alto singing the part of King Saul, in a voice such as he had never imagined.

For centuries, Venice was famous for its Carnival. A document of ten ninety-four is often cited as its first mention, and by twelve ninety-six the last day before Lent was a public holiday. In the early days, it is said, young men threw eggshells filled with rose-water at the young women they were courting.

When John Evelyn came at Shrovetide, in sixteen forty-six, it seemed to him that all the world had come to Venice for the Carnival. He saw "persons of all conditions disguising themselves in antique dresses, with extravagant music and a thousand gambols," going from house to house, with every door open. There were card tables and operas, comedians, and the little stages of mountebanks at every corner. People threw eggs filled with sweet water, though sometimes, he noted, the water was not so sweet.

By the eighteenth century, the season could stretch from early autumn all the way to Lent. A French visitor wrote that for months on end, everyone went about masked, priests and all, even the Pope's own envoy.

The most famous mask was the bauta, made of cloth and painted plaster, and worn with a black cape, the tabarro, and a three-cornered hat. It was worn by Venetians of many ranks. Women might wear the moretta instead, a small oval of black velvet, held in place by a button gripped between the teeth, so that the wearer could not say a word. Behind a mask, a woman could go out alone, and a nobleman and a shopkeeper looked much the same, though servants, it seems, could still recognise their masters.

In sixteen thirty-eight, a wing of a palace near the church of San Moise was opened as the Ridotto, a house for gambling, licensed by the state for the time of Carnival. Players had to wear a mask and a three-cornered hat. Francesco Guardi and Pietro Longhi both painted it. In seventeen seventy-four, the Great Council voted to close it.

Carnival was also the season of the theatres. Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice in seventeen-oh-seven, in a house near the church of San Toma, and as a small boy he made puppets dance. He grew up to write comedies of real, everyday life. Once he promised to write sixteen comedies in a single year, and he kept his word. In seventeen sixty-one he was called to Paris, and before he left, he gave the city a farewell play, One of the Last Nights of Carnival. When it ended, the theatre rang with applause and good wishes, and Goldoni wept like a child.

One Venetian of those years, Giacomo Casanova, later told the story of his own escape. In the summer of seventeen fifty-five, he had been arrested and shut up in the Leads, the cells beneath the lead roof of the Doge's Palace. More than a year later, on the night of the last day of October, seventeen fifty-six, he and a monk named Balbi climbed out through an opening onto the roof. The moon had set. As they sat astride the top of the roof, with the domes of Saint Mark's in front of them, the clock struck midnight, and Casanova remembered that All Saints' Day had begun.

The two of them found a way down through the palace, and walked out by the Giants' Stair, quickly, but trying not to look like fugitives. At the water's edge, Casanova stepped into the first gondola he saw, and called for Fusina. By the first light of All Saints' Day, they were gone, out across the lagoon. Years later he wrote: "It was a glorious morning, the air was clear and glowing with the first rays of the sun, and my two young watermen rowed easily and well." And thinking of the night behind him, he burst into tears.

After the Republic fell, the new rulers restricted masks and gatherings, and the old Carnival slowly faded away. Long afterwards, in nineteen seventy-nine, it was revived, and the masks returned.

In its last century, the old Republic no longer played a great part in the affairs of the world, and life in Venice was easy and pleasant. Nobles in periwigs and crimson cloaks strolled on the Liston, at the foot of the bell tower in the great square. There were cafes and casinos, first nights at the theatre, and cantatas sung by the girls of the ospedali. And late at night, or rather in the early morning, Venetians would cross the lagoon to the Lido, to take a supper at dawn and greet the rising sun.

In seventeen eighty-six, Goethe watched the old doge of those days step ashore for a feast-day mass. He wore a golden cap, a long golden robe and a cloak of ermine, and he looked, Goethe thought, like the grandfather of the whole people, kind and friendly. That same autumn, galleys lay in the lagoon, waiting for a good wind, to join the fleet of Angelo Emo, who was making war on the Algerian pirates. An old writer called him the last of the great Venetians.

But beyond the Alps, great changes were stirring. In seventeen ninety-six, Napoleon Bonaparte came down into Italy with a French army, and the Austrian armies stood before him. The Venetian lands on the mainland had few defences, and they became a field where both armies came and went. In the spring of seventeen ninety-seven, in secret, Bonaparte agreed to give the Venetian mainland to Austria. And he made it plain that the old government of Venice must come to an end.

The doge in those days was Lodovico Manin, the hundred and twentieth doge of Venice. On the twelfth of May, seventeen ninety-seven, the Great Council gathered in its hall. While one of the councillors was speaking, the sound of guns was heard, and the members, fearing that the French were already at hand, called for the vote. The Great Council voted, by a large majority of those present, to end the Republic. When the doge laid aside the ducal cap, he is said to have told his servant, "Take it away, we shall not want it again." A historian later counted that it was eleven hundred years since the Venetians had chosen their first doge.

A few days later, French soldiers entered the city, and a new, provisional government was set up. Through the summer, paintings, statues and old manuscripts were taken and shipped away to Paris. In October, by the Treaty of Campo Formio, Bonaparte handed Venice over to Austria. And in January seventeen ninety-eight, the first Austrian soldiers took possession of the city.

Even the four bronze horses of Saint Mark's were taken down from the front of the basilica, in December seventeen ninety-seven, and carried off to Paris, where they were set up first at the Tuileries and then on a triumphal arch. They were home again in eighteen fifteen, after Napoleon's fall, and were lifted back into their place with great ceremony.

The Bucintoro, the golden barge of the doges, had a sadder end. The last of them had been built in the Arsenal in the seventeen-twenties, carved all over by the sculptor Antonio Corradini, and gilded. Every year, on Ascension Day, it had carried the doge out over the water for the marriage of the sea, rowed by some forty great oars, with four men to each. In seventeen ninety-eight, French soldiers broke away its carvings, carried them to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and burned them, to recover the gold. The bare hull lingered on for some years, as a gun barge and then a prison ship. A few carved pieces survive, in the Museo Correr. As one historian of Venice wrote, quite simply, "the golden Bucentaur is dust."

So, quietly, after more than a thousand years, the Republic of Saint Mark came to an end.

In the years that followed, Venice passed from Austria to France, and then back to Austria again. From eighteen fourteen it stayed Austrian, for half a century. Slowly, the old port began to stir. The entrance to the lagoon at Malamocco was deepened and kept open for larger ships, and a new dock was built at the far end of the Giudecca Canal.

Then the railway came. The Emperor Ferdinand the First wanted a line to join Venice to Milan, and in eighteen forty-one, work began on a bridge across the lagoon. It opened in January eighteen forty-six. It ran for some three and a half kilometres over the shallow water, on more than two hundred arches, and for the first time, trains could come all the way into Venice. A road bridge beside it came only much later, in nineteen thirty-three.

Now travellers could arrive by train. In eighteen sixty-one, William Dean Howells came this way, at night, after a long, cold journey from Vienna. He stepped from the blaze and bustle of the station into a gondola, and slipped away down the dark, quiet canal. "I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars." Then, on either side, grey palaces rose from the dark water, with here and there a lamp that threw long streams of crimson across the canal.

But the Venetians had not forgotten their Republic. Early in eighteen forty-eight, a lawyer named Daniele Manin, born in Venice in eighteen-oh-four, was arrested. In March, the people set him free. And on the twenty-second of March, his followers marched out from the Arsenal, and a new Republic of San Marco was proclaimed, with the old cry, Viva San Marco, long live Saint Mark. That summer, the Venetians voted to join the Kingdom of Sardinia, but the union lasted only about a month.

The new Republic did not last long either. In the spring and summer of eighteen forty-nine, the Austrians laid siege to the city. Food grew scarce, and in August, sickness spread through the streets. In late August eighteen forty-nine, the siege came to an end, and Venice gave itself up. Manin sailed away into exile, and lived quietly in Paris, teaching Italian. He never saw Venice again. But many years later, in eighteen sixty-eight, his remains were brought home, and they rest beside Saint Mark's. And when the sickness of that summer had passed, the city gave a great silver lamp to the church of the Salute, in thanks.

Under Austrian rule once more, the Venetians kept their hopes alive in small, quiet ways. Howells, who lived in the city in the early eighteen-sixties, wrote that on the anniversary of the Republic of eighteen forty-eight, red, white and green lights would be shown. And three times a week, when the Austrian military band played its beautiful music in the Piazza, many Venetians would walk away to the long quay beside the water, or listen only from under the arcades. Even the old festivals felt quieter. The bridges of boats were still laid to the Redentore and the Salute, Howells wrote, but the crowds were thin.

At last, in eighteen sixty-six, after Austria was defeated in a war with Prussia, Venice was given up. On the night of the eighteenth of October, the Austrian soldiers began to leave, and the next morning the city was handed over. A few days later, the people voted, almost unanimously, to join the Kingdom of Italy. And on the seventh of November, eighteen sixty-six, King Victor Emmanuel the Second came to Venice.

The long line of arches across the lagoon now led, not to an empire, but to Italy.

Venice had always drawn travellers. Thomas Coryat had admired its great stone bridge in the early sixteen-hundreds, John Evelyn had watched its Carnival, and Goethe had listened to its gondoliers singing by moonlight. And in the nineteenth century, the travellers kept coming, to write, to paint, and simply to look.

The poet Lord Byron came in eighteen sixteen, and spent the winter in Venice. On the island of San Lazzaro, at the Armenian monastery, he studied the Armenian language with Father Pascal Aucher. And he liked to gallop on horseback along the lonely shore of the Lido. In eighteen eighteen he published the fourth part of his long poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which begins with these lines: "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand." After Byron, as Howells later noticed, the whole sentimental world looked upon that little covered bridge with feeling. Byron left Venice for Ravenna in eighteen nineteen.

In the early eighteen-fifties, John Ruskin published The Stones of Venice, in three volumes. He followed the building of the Doge's Palace through the centuries, stage by stage, and taught his readers to love the paintings of Carpaccio and Tintoretto. Henry James later wrote that Ruskin had held up a generous lamp to Carpaccio's fame.

The painter Turner came to Venice between eighteen nineteen and eighteen forty. In his oils and watercolours, and in his studies by moonlight, the city seems to melt into light, colour and reflections on the water. And in eighteen fifty-seven, Carlo Naya, born near Vercelli, opened a photographer's studio in Venice, which went on working long after him.

William Dean Howells was the American consul in Venice in the early eighteen-sixties, and in eighteen sixty-six he published a book called Venetian Life. He learned to row in the gondolier fashion, and went all over the lagoon in his own boat. In his day, the Lido was still a long, narrow island between the lagoon and the sea, with a village at either end, a few bath-houses, forts, and some poor little trees. The Adriatic, he wrote, was the bluest water he had ever seen, dotted with fishing sails of purple and yellow.

Henry James first saw the Lido in eighteen sixty-nine. Then there was only a rough lane across the island to the beach, and a wooden terrace stretching out into the sea. By the early eighteen-eighties, there were gas lamps, lodging-houses and a larger bathing establishment. Yet the beach, he wrote, was still lonely and beautiful. And "the return to Venice in the sunset is classical and indispensable."

In the early eighteen-eighties, too, the first little steamboats, the vaporetti, began to carry passengers along the Grand Canal. The very first of them had sailed all the way from France, around the coasts of Italy. James grumbled about their churning, and the way they always seemed to be kicking up the water, but he admitted that they had put rapid travel within everybody's reach.

In eighteen ninety-five, to celebrate the silver wedding of King Umberto and Queen Margherita, the city opened an international exhibition of art in its Public Gardens. Many thousands came to see it. It was held again every two years, and so it became the Biennale. In nineteen-oh-seven, Belgium built the first of the national pavilions in the gardens.

The Lido changed too. In the summer of nineteen hundred, the Grand Hotel des Bains opened on its seafront, with electricity, telephones, lifts and private bathrooms. In nineteen-oh-eight came the Hotel Excelsior, built in a fanciful style, part Moorish, part Venetian and Byzantine. And by nineteen eleven, the lonely shore where Byron had galloped was fast becoming a fashionable place for sea bathing.

For many centuries, the great brick bell tower of Saint Mark's had stood in the square, nearly a hundred metres high. Inside, instead of stairs, a sloping ramp wound up toward the bells, so broad that John Evelyn thought one could ride up it.

In July nineteen-oh-two, a long crack opened in its wall. On the morning of the fourteenth of July, a little before ten o'clock, stones began to fall inside it, and the people in the square, warned by the sound, hurried away. Then the old tower sank down, almost where it stood, into a great heap of brick, and a cloud of red dust hung over the city. The basilica and the Doge's Palace were spared. The golden angel from the very top was found lying at the great door of Saint Mark's. The only casualty, so the story goes, was the caretaker's cat.

Of the five bells, only the largest, the Marangona, survived. The city resolved at once to rebuild the tower where it was, and as it was. And slowly, on wider foundations, it rose again.

On Saint Mark's Day, the twenty-fifth of April, nineteen twelve, the new bell tower was inaugurated. Its bells rang out over the square, and more than two thousand Venetian children were each given a little bag, with a beaker of Murano glass, two rolls, a sweet and an orange. In Rome, the Pope, who had once been Patriarch of Venice, listened to the bells by telephone. And it was reported that he cried out, "I can hear the Marangona. I can tell it among all the rest."

In nineteen eighty-seven, Venice and its lagoon were named together a World Heritage Site, a unique work of art built upon the water.

And now, evening comes down over the lagoon. Long ago, the Marangona rang at sunset, to close the working day. Imagine it ringing now, slow and deep, across the roofs and the water. The light on the lagoon changes from one colour to the next, like the hues of an opal. Far out, the sails of the fishing boats, orange and crimson, wander along the darkening edge of the sea.

The lamps are lit along the quays, and their light falls on the water in long, trembling streams. In the quiet canals, the gondolas rest at their moorings, and the old wells sleep in the empty squares. Out in the lagoon, the tide comes softly in over the mud and the salt marsh, as it has done twice a day since long before there was a city here. Murano, Burano and Torcello are only a few small lights now, far away across the dark water.

High above the square, the golden angel on the bell tower catches the very last of the light. And then it, too, is gone.

Thank you for spending this long evening with me, among the islands and the canals of Venice. There is nothing more to remember now, and nothing more to do. Let the story drift away behind you, like the soft wake of a gondola on the water. Sleep well. And goodnight.