Should you find yourself in Venice this year, you have a particular treat in store—one above and beyond the enormous pleasure of simply being in La Serenissima. It seems that Venice, with the collaboration of the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and the Italian Cultural Institute of Shanghai, has mounted an exhibition to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of its most famous citizen, who died there on January 8, 1324.
We don’t know the day of Marco Polo’s birth, although the year seems to have been 1254, and there’s even some uncertainty over the place of his birth, with Venice andthe Croatian island of Korčula both claiming him as a native son. However, since Korčula was a Venetian possession at the time of Marco’s birth, the question isn’t a particularly pressing one.
In any case, more than 300 artifacts relating to the explorer are on display in the Doge’s Palace, many of them loaned by the countries through which Marco is thought to have traveled. You can even see the explorer’s handwritten will. The Worlds of Marco Polo: The Journey of a 13th-Century Venetian Merchant runs through September 29, so you have plenty of time to make your plans.
I wrote about Marco in my 2002 book When the Going Was Good, and below is what I had to say.
□□□
The Description of the World (Divisament dou monde), 1299
For most of us, Marco Polo is the quintessential traveler, yet we know little about him. He was born into a noted Venetian mercantile family, two of whose members—Marco’s father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo—had already made the long journey east. When they set out on a second expedition to China in 1271, they took Niccolo’s son with them. The three returned in 1295 after an absence of twenty-four years.
Marco might never have recorded his impressions of Asia had he not been captured in a naval battle between Venice and Genoa and imprisoned in the latter city. It was here that he met one Rustichello de Pisa, an experienced writer who took down his account. The resulting book—originally entitled Divisament dou monde—appeared in 1299, the year Marco was freed, but is commonly known to us today as The Travels of Marco Polo.
Marco’s actual journey through western and Central Asia to the Mongol capital of Shangtu (northwest of today’s Beijing) takes up only the first chapters of his book. Most of the remainder are devoted to celebrations of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (into whose service Marco had entered) and to descriptions of the kingdoms and cities that the Mongols had so recently conquered. A list of modern countries that the explorer passed through would include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Turkey.
Marco’s seemingly endless lists, the fruit of his merchant’s eye, can be dry and uninvolving, and his virtual absence from his own book is frustrating to modern readers. Yet he introduced a world of wonders to his fellow Westerners, reportedly asserting on his deathbed that he had not revealed half of what he had actually seen. (If true, the assertion might account for the fact that he failed to mention the Great Wall of China, which would have been virtually impossible to overlook.) Marco’s message, albeit challenged from time to time, is that of every traveler before and since: I was there!
Due to the early period in which the Description was produced, a number of versions of it exist. Among English translations, those prepared by Sir Henry Yule contain extensive notes and numerous illustrations. The last of these (published in 1902 as The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East) was completed by Henri Cordier, who went on to publish yet another volume of notes in 1920. A three-volume reprint published by Dover in 1993 includes Yule’s complete 1902 text as well as Cordier’s 1920 supplement. The translation prepared by Manuel Komroff (numerous editions) corrects William Marsden’s 1818 translation against Yule’s, regularizes the numbering of its chapters to match Yule’s, and includes an introduction for the general reader. The Penguin edition (1958) is translated with an introduction by Ronald Latham.
And for a highly imaginative take on the explorer, I recommend the 1972 novel Le città invisibili by Italo Calvino, translated into English as Invisible Cities. It’s made up of descriptions of 55 cities as described by Marco to Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, cities that are not only imaginary but fantastic. In turn, the novel inspired a 2013 opera by Christopher Cerrone that was staged in Union Station in Los Angeles while the station was in operation. The work was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for music.
If you’d like to subscribe to World Enough, enter your email address below:
November 5 is the anniversary of the establishment of the United States of the Ionian Islands.
Despite what their name might lead you to think, these United States were actually a British protectorate, and operated for most of their existence—from 1815 to 1864—under the terms of a British-approved Constitution.
There are seven major Ionian Islands scattered down the western coast of Greece, from Corfu (or Kerkyra) in the north, opposite the Greek border with Albania, to Kythira, off the southern tip of mainland Greece. There are also a number of islets, including Antikythira, which lies about 24 miles southeast of Kythira itself.
The Ionian Islands are generally referred to as a group, but given their geography and particularly the great distance between Kythira and the other islands, I think it’s more accurate to think of them as a string. Some sources, including the Ionian Environment Foundation, refer to the six northernmost islands—Corfu, Paxos, Lefkada, Ithaca, Kefalonia, and Zakynthos—as an archipelago. It’s a classification that makes sense, as they lie more or less closely to each other.
The islands were controlled by the Republic of Venice from 1363 to 1797, by France for a few subsequent years, by a Russo-Turkish alliance (during which the islands were known as the Septinsular Republic) for a few more years, and by France again for a few more years still. During the early nineteenth century, the British navy defeated the French navy in a number of battles and went on to seize several of the islands, eventually capturing Corfu itself in 1814.
Finally, on November 5, 1815, according to the terms of the Treaty between Great Britain and Russia, Respecting the Ionian Islands, a British protectorate—the United States of the Ionian Islands—was established. (If you’re paying attention to the broader picture, the treaty was one of several signed during the 1815 Peace of Paris.) A constitution providing for a locally elected Parliament that would advise a British Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands went into effect a little less than two years later.
Britain instituted a number of welcome reforms, including freedom of the press and the use of modern Greek in all public and legal proceedings. An Ionian University was established, along with Greece’s first botanical garden. The British also introduced cricket, tsitsibira (lemon-flavored ginger beer), and postage stamps. Once mainland Greece established its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, however, sentiment for union with Greece naturally grew. After considering the situation for three decades, during which time it resorted to imprisoning and exiling a number of dissidents, Britain gave up its protectorate and ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece on May 21, 1864.
Britain’s decision was largely a strategic one. While it valued Corfu’s wide harbor, that of the island of Malta, which was some two and a half miles long and had been the base of the British Mediterranean fleet since 1827, was even better. In addition, Greece’s newly enthroned king, Danish-born George I, was viewed as sympathetic to British interests.
The image at the top of today’s post is a photograph of the harbor of Corfu, said to have been taken in 1860. The first map shows a section of the Ottoman Empire as it existed in 1801, with the Septinsular Republic in orange, while the second—a German map published by Georg Joachim Goschen in Leipzig in 1830—shows what had become the United States of the Ionian Islands. The stamp is one of three issued by Britain in 1859. Rather than carrying face values, they were distinguished by color; this one was for 2 pence.
□□□
If you’d like to subscribe to World Enough, enter your email address below:
A couple of weeks ago I described three fictional works set in Venice, one apiece from Thomas Mann, Frederick Rolfe, and L.P. Hartley. Today I’m taking up three later works—a long story, a novel, and a shorter novel, each of them written from a different point of view. Every writer, it seems, and perhaps every visitor, discovers a different Venice.
Daphne du Maurier: “Don’t Look Now,” in Not after Midnight and Other Stories, 1971
Grieving the recent death of their daughter, John and Laura are vacationing in Venice when they encounter two aging sisters, one of whom is blind. Laura is assured by the blind sister, who is also (or pretends to be) psychic, that their daughter is actually sitting beside them and is happy. Laura takes the statement to heart, but John refuses to believe the woman, and grows doubly frustrated when the psychic passes on a message from the daughter that the couple are in danger if they remain in the city.
Like most of the other stories by du Maurier that I’ve read, “Don’t Look Now” suffers from overplotting, but the masterful 1973 film adaptation directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie prunes away the inessentials.
Muriel Spark: Territorial Rights, 1979
Scottish novelist Spark spins a frantic black comedy from the interactions of a group of louche characters whose lives intersect in Venice, from expatriate murderers to connivers, adulterers, and private detectives. The book reaches back to the intrigues of World War II to what is, in the 1970s, the present day. Much of the action is set in the Hotel Byron, a reference to the famous poet who visited the city in the early nineteenth century. There are questions not only about motive and opportunity but also about the ownership of the truth and the past, with seemingly everything up for grabs.
As a contemporary once said of Byron, he was “bad, mad and dangerous to know,” and that estimation sums up the atmosphere of Territorial Rights. I had the opportunity to review it in Library Journal before its publication, and wrote that at its conclusion, “Spark grasps the rope out of which she has tied her cunning knot, snaps the ends, and lo! the knot vanishes.”
Susan Hill: The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story, 2007
The author of the popular Woman in Black (1983) constructs this old-fashioned but frightening short novel around a “dark and unattractive” eighteenth-century painting of a Venetian carnival scene. Cambridge don Theo Parmitter buys the painting at auction, but despite having bid on impulse, he refuses to sell it in turn to the aging Lady Hawdon, who’s desperately anxious to have it for herself. The story behind that desperation makes up the principal thread of this dark work, but the painting’s malignity eventually spreads like acid to touch all of its characters.
The painting you see at the top of today’s post is The Molo: Looking West (1730), by Canaletto, while the one at the bottom is Venice at Night (1874) by John Joseph Enneking.
Venice has been the setting of numerous literary works over the years, and their variety is suggestive of the city’s elusive character, compounded as it is of air and land and water. Today I’m writing about three of the earliest of these works, and in a few weeks I’ll finish up with a selection of more recent ones.
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), 1912
Death in Venice recounts the final days of German writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who has created an esteemed body of work through a lifetime of stringent discipline. Yet he senses that something is amiss. Prey to a vague longing and realizing that he’s in need of a vacation, von Aschenbach travels first to an island in the northern Adriatic Sea (as Mann himself did, in the company of his wife, in 1911). But finding the weather poor and his fellow travelers boring, he decamps to Venice (as Mann and his wife themselves did), where he spies a beautiful young boy on vacation with his family. As his unspoken infatuation with the boy grows, von Aschenbach learns that a plague is spreading through the city, but finds himself paralyzed with longing and indecision.
Italian film director Luchino Visconti turned von Aschenbach into a composer much like Gustav Mahler in his 1971 adaptation of Mann’s short novel, with Dirk Bogarde taking the lead role and Mahler’s music providing a haunting backdrop. Having watched and enjoyed the movie several times, I’m surprised that it got only tepid reviews.
Frederick Rolfe: The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, 1934, 1993
A would-be Roman Catholic priest, Rolfe was a notoriously treacherous individual who seems to have lived a life of largely unfulfilled ambitions. He tended to abbreviate his name Fr. Rolfe, which suggested, incorrectly, that he had achieved the priesthood, and claimed to have been given the title Baron Corvo (“Crow” or “Raven” in Italian) by an Anglo-Italian duchess. Maybe, maybe not. Whatever his shortcomings, however, Rolfe was a talented writer, and his life was a fascinating one.
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole opens with a description of the terrible 1905 earthquake in the southern Italian region of Calabria, a disaster from which Rolfe’s protagonist, Nicholas Crabbe, rescues the androgynous Ermenegilda. Crabbe returns to Venice with the waif, who has been raised as “Zildo,” a boy, but who is, more accurately, “Zilda,” a girl. This sleight of hand with names and sexual identities allows Rolfe to treat his book as a veiled erotic fantasy while more or less preserving the proprieties. At the same time, the novel is a lively, fictionalized account of Rolfe’s own up-and-down life in Venice over the years 1908-1910, and he takes the opportunity to bite every hand that had fed him there.
Rolfe completed The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole in 1910. However, its libelous treatment of many of the city’s prominent residents and visitors (easily recognizable behind fictitious names) and its ambiguous sexual agenda meant that it was not published until 1934, twenty-one years after its author’s death, in a bowdlerized edition. Only in 1993 was the novel printed in its entirety.
L.P. Hartley: “Podolo,” in The Travelling Grave and Other Stories, 1948
Hartley visited Venice for the first time in 1922 and subsequently set several of his works in the city, including “Podolo.” I encountered the story for the first time in the Avon paperback anthology Fright, and since then I’ve gone back to it again and again. Each time I’ve been impressed by how adroitly and economically Hartley manages the story’s elements: a rocky, ostensibly uninhabited islet in the Venetian lagoon far off the familiar tourist track; a woman whose reckless sympathy for an abandoned cat takes a cruel turn; and … something dimly seen in the darkness that doesn’t “walk like a man.” A small masterpiece.
□□□
The images in today’s post are, top to bottom, View of Venice by Fritz Thaulow; the 1994 Norton Critical ed. of Death in Venice; the 1934 Cassell ed. of The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole; and the Frank Utpatel cover of the 1948 Arkham House ed. of The Travelling Grave and Other Stories.
Signor Campari’s name gives away the subject of today’s post, for Campari is undoubtedly the world’s most famous apéritif.
Campari (1828-1882) worked as a maitre licoriste, or master bartender, at the Bass Bar in Turin, Italy, and it’s there that he introduced a new liqueur in 1860. He had put together a secret mixture of (according to the Campari company) “bitter herbs, aromatic plants and fruit.” The maître named his concoction Bitter all’uso d’Hollanda, after a drink he had tasted in the Netherlands, but enthusiastic patrons took to calling it Bitter del Signor Campari.
While the complex recipe remains a secret to this day, experts guess that it includes gentian, ginseng, orange, and rhubarb, along with a host of (to me) more exotic ingredients. One is cascarilla, which is derived from the bark of the Caribbean plant Croton eluteria and which accounts for much of the aperitif’s bitterness. And another bitter ingredient is chinotto, the fruit of the myrtle-leaved orange tree, or Citrus myrtifolia—one of the seemingly endless varieties of citrus that the world is blessed with. Depending on where you live, the liqueur’s alcohol content ranges from 20.5 percent to 28.5 percent ABV.
Yet another of Campari’s ingredients, and one we’re sure of, was carmine dye derived from dried and crushed cochineal insects (Dactylopius coccus), which are native to the tropical and subtropical New World and which live on prickly pear cactus (Opuntia sp.). I don’t know where Campari obtained his dye, but the closest source in his day may have been in the Canary Islands, where prickly pears have long been naturalized. Sadly enough, the Campari company replaced this perfectly safe dye with a synthetic substitute in 2006.
In any case, Signor Campari moved on to Milan in 1862 and opened a café near the city’s famous cathedral. When his building was scheduled for demolition a few years later, he moved his Caffè Campari into the spacious Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade, where it became a meeting place for composers and musicians. Campari’s son, Davide, continued his father’s enterprise, building a factory in Milan and introducing a mix of the liqueur and soda water—Camparisoda—in a conical bottle designed by Futurist artist Fortunato Depero. And somewhere along the line, the company erected an eye-catching sign (which you see in our photograph) atop the Riviera Hotel on Venice’s Lido, although I understand that it’s now been taken down.
Over the years, the company has also commissioned prominent artists to produce posters. One is the elegant design by Adolf Hohenstein that you see below, but the most famous (reproduced at the top of today’s post) may be the whimsical design by Leonetto Cappiello, which dates from 1921. We used to admire a reproduction of this work in Rico’s Ristorante in Ketchum, Idaho. Unfortunately, Rico closed his restaurant a few years ago, but I suspect he’s kept the poster.
Today’s post is a revised version of an article I wrote for the August 17-23, 2000 issue of Boise Weekly.
□□□
Visitors to Venice in the late 1960s frequently reported seeing a ghostly figure striding through the city’s narrow streets and crowded squares.
They described the figure as white-haired and white-bearded, dressed in the elegant Edwardian style of the early 1900s and carrying a Malacca cane. He appeared preoccupied and he seldom spoke, but when he did—and he occasionally submitted to interviews—he might say such things as, “the error is all in the not done.”
The figure was Idaho-born poet Ezra Pound, and a visitor who followed him on a walk one day realized that the poet, mentally situated in an older era, “was taking me on a tour of his Venice [in] 1908.”
“Under the Crocodile”
The launch that carried Maggie and me in late June from the Italian mainland via the islands of Murano and Lido revealed an increasingly busy and vibrant scene. At first a mere smudge on the horizon, Venice proper disappeared from time to time, only to reappear nearer and brighter. The city’s ornate, orientalized façades suggested one story—the familiar one of countless brochures—while shadowy side canals and half-glimpsed roof gardens suggested another.
We disembarked at the foot of the Piazetta, the open area that adjoins the Piazza San Marco and near which, our plans suggested, our hotel should lie. Two great columns stood at the foot of the Piazatta, one sporting the winged lion of St. Mark and the other St. Theodore—subduing a crocodile. It was the latter column, I realized, that Pound was referring to when he dramatized his own search for lodging: “And / I came here in my young youth / and lay there under the crocodile / By the column, looking East on the Friday, / And I said: Tomorrow I will lie on the South side / And the day after, south west.”
We had a plan—to see something of Pound’s Venice ourselves by hunting down the houses that he had occupied in 1908 and to visit his grave. Although the plan was sketchy, it was of course left-brained, as all plans are. But Venice, we were to discover, is right-brained, a magical city open all night to poets but closed to planners.
“With tapers quenched”
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, and although his family left the territory for the East when Pound was 18 months old, the man routinely adopted the mask of the cracker-barrel philosopher—a role familiar, if no longer endearing, to the rest of us Westerners.
Pound visited Venice as early as 1898, and was so drawn to its Renaissance spectacle that he was to return repeatedly. He made an extended stay in 1908, putting up at two different locations. The first was above a bakery at 861 Ponte San Vio, near the Grand Canal yet beyond the crush and glitter of San Marco—or, as Pound himself put it in his enormous work, The Cantos, “by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande.” We made this site, in the Dorsoduro district, our first goal.
The Dorsoduro was deceptively easy to reach, and there was indeed a ponte—a bridge—over the Vio not far from the Grand Canal, yet the narrow street running alongside the canal was posted as Piscina del Forner. The numbers reached 863 on one side and 862 on the other, but where 861 by all rights ought to have been, there was nothing. I approached a clerk in a tiny gallery with my photocopied pages from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Pound, A Serious Character, pointing at the address. As luck had it, the charming young woman spoke English but admitted that she was not from Venice herself and was unfamiliar with the district or with Pound. “Now this poet, he is 14th century, no?”
At that moment an aged man emerged from across the street, locking his door with a great care. Approaching him with my broadest American smile, I asked whether he spoke English. He shook his head slowly and sadly. Holding my copies up to him, I pointed at the address and raised my eyebrows. He shook his head slowly and sadly again. But believing that he would recognize the famous name, I explained that I was tracking Ezra Pound, the poet Ezra Pound. The old man shook his head more slowly and even more sadly. Hell, by then I was feeling a little down myself.
It took two more visits to various points in the Dorsoduro to realize that its street numbers—perhaps all of Venice’s—don’t seem to run in sequential order. We had probably passed 861 a dozen times, but hadn’t noticed the faded number painted above the nondescript door.
It must have been here, then, that Pound assembled the poems that would appear in his first book, A Lume Spento, printed at his own expense. The title is taken from Dante’s Purgatory, the second volume of his Divine Comedy, and means, as Pound translated it, “with tapers quenched.” Despite the title, which suggests a drearily twilit fin de siècle mood, many of the poems show great character. “Bah! I have sung women in three cities,” begins one vigorous example, “But it is all the same, / And I will sing of the sun.”
Buoyed by our success, we proceeded to site number two with fewer false steps. Here, in a working-class neighborhood at 942 Calle dei Frati, his window overlooking the old gondola repair yard known as Squero di San Trovaso, Pound lived from June to August 1908. It was during this period that A Lume Spento finally appeared. The enterprising poet sent out a number of review copies, eventually garnering two tepid reviews. A third review, however, spoke of “wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative, passionate, and spiritual.” Several of these adjectives are on target, perhaps because the review was written by Pound himself!
“Eye-deep in hell”
For many readers, Pound’s most important achievement came in 1920, long after he had left Italy for the literary lights of London but shortly before he would return. The occasion was the publication of the sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, among other things a lament for the casualties of World War I and an excoriation of the forces that (said Pound) had brought about the debacle. One section speaks of those who “walked eye-deep in hell / believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving.” The next poem concludes with the famous lines, “There died a myriad, / and of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.”
When I think of Pound, it’s those searing lines that I hear, that I heard growing up in Idaho in the 1960s, mourning another generation dying for that same botched civilization.
And yet Pound’s subsequent life presents a series of paradoxes that can be explained but not explained away. Praised by his fellow poets as having one of the finest ears in the history of English literature, he fulminated—endlessly but none too coherently—against the evils of the economic status quo; usury became a particularly tedious bugaboo. The man who worked tirelessly on his friends’ behalf, routinely neglecting his own work, grew increasingly impatient, often with those same friends. The anger that had lain beneath the surface of his work came to the fore. The antisemitism that he would later excuse as a “stupid, suburban prejudice” grew vile. His old friend Ernest Hemingway—another lover of Venice who would, oddly enough, end his life within miles of Pound’s birthplace—declared, “He is obviously crazy.”
Beginning in 1941, Pound broadcast regularly on Italian radio to an American and British audience, acts that eventually led to his trial for treason in the United States and this incarceration in an insane asylum for twelve years. Freed in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where he greeted waiting journalists with the Fascist salute.
No wonder the Venetians might not want to recognize Pound’s name. No wonder they hadn’t affixed plaques to the houses he had occupied.
“What I have made”
Ezra Pound’s grave lies in the unkempt Protestant section of Venice’s cemetery isle, San Michele. The spot is marked with a simple stone slab. Beside him lies his mistress, concert violist Olga Rudge. The afternoon that Maggie and I visited San Michele, the cemetery was silent except for the manic rasping of a single cicada. There was no wind. Lizards sunned themselves on the tombs and brick walls. Red chrysanthemums and an incongruously blue plastic rose lay at Pound’s grave. A laurel bush grew between the markers, but then laurels were a common sight among the cypresses and dusty palms.
Toward the end of his life, Pound spent part of every year in Venice in Rudge’s house. By now, he had sunk into the nearly unbroken silence that marked his final years. In one of his last cantos, he wrote, “Let the Gods forgive what I have made / Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.” The Cantos as a whole, the immense and confoundingly difficult series on which he had worked since 1915, he judged a “botch.” There were reports that he wanted to revisit his birthplace, but the issue became moot November 1, 1972.
On the long, long vaporetto trip back from the cimitero, we took on a crushing load of eager young travelers carrying backpacks and sleeping rolls. They surely had never heard of Pound, and probably never would.
That day the canal was busy with motor boats and gondolas and the waves danced in the sun as they slapped against the vaporetto. The Venice of so many dire stories—sinking, stinking, its canals afloat with dead rats—was nowhere to be seen. The city was emphatically alive.
“What thou lovest well remains,” the man had written in one of the later cantos, snatching a bright coin from the dross.
What thou lovest well remains. Could be.
□□□
Maggie’s color photographs show (top) me on one of my first, fruitless searches; a typical canal-side scene in Venice proper; a view of the Squero di San Trovaso; and Pound’s grave. The first black-and-white image shows the aging poet in front of the Squero, while the second is his passport photograph from 1919; both are reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia.
World Enough 