Venice: Pure City

The shade of the prison house may also induce secrecy. If privacy is a luxury, then the keeping of secrets may become ever more urgent or obsessive. The city of masks must, in any case, also be the city of secrets. The Venetians, despite their apparent sociability, are notoriously reticent. They do not invite casual visitors into their homes. In the portraits of Venetians there is a general air of inscrutability; they are painted for their office rather than for their person, and their actual temperament or personality is not to be divulged. They are impenetrable. It was said of one doge that “one never knows whether he loves or hates anything.” One public lecturer, from another part of Italy, found it impossible to engage his audience of young Venetian nobles in any form of political discussion. “When I ask them,” he wrote, “what people think, say, and expect about this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they know nothing about the matter.” Was this silence the result of fear or of distrust? In a city where you could be banished on the evidence of suspicion alone, who would willingly open their mouths? After Napoleon had conquered Venice in 1797 he instigated a survey of the newly captured people. He asked, in particular, what were Venetian prejudices and opinions. The native writers of the survey could not enlighten him since, they said, such questions admitted no answer. No other city had so effectively silenced its inhabitants. There were times, in fact, when indiscretion exacted a high price. When two glass-blowers escaped to foreign capitals with the secrets of their trade, in 1745, the senate decreed that they should be assassinated by means of poison.

It was observed that, on the Rialto, the bankers and merchants customarily spoke in hushed voices. The government of the city was conducted in secrecy. We might almost describe it as an Oriental secrecy, with secret meetings, secret payments, secret audiences, secret decisions and secret deaths. When new nobles were introduced to the business of government their oath of allegiance included the promise of “faith and silence.” It is highly characteristic of Venice. One of the allegorical paintings in the doge’s palace is that of taciturnity. There is a strange figure of stone on the edifice of Saint Mark’s; it is of an old man, leaning on crutches, who has a finger to his lips. It was said that Venice was a secret oligarchy; it not only kept its secrets, but the nature of its own identity was also a secret.

The oath for the council of ten was “jura, perjura, secretum prodere noli

”—swear, foreswear and reveal not the secret. There are pages in the annals of government where the words “non scribatur

,” let it not be written, are to be found. Other chronicles of Venice were burned. The archives of the government were secret; the doge himself could not consult them, unless he were accompanied by an official. The keeper of the archives was a man who could neither read nor write. In an eighteenth-century text, The Chinese Spy, it is stated that “silence is the emblem of this government; everything is secret and cloaked in mystery. Political doings are covered by a thick veil of darkness. In Venice those who talk are buried alive in a tomb covered with lead.”

Thus it was said by a seventeenth-century historian that “the Venetians are apt to be jealous of all ambassadors, and to interpret all their Actions as Mysteries tending to Conspiracy.” They discussed every word and action “from whence they make great conjectures and draw mighty consequences of State.” No Venetian official could speak to a foreign diplomat, on pain of death or life imprisonment. The boxes at the opera had little “withdrawing rooms”; diplomats felt obliged to visit one of the several opera houses, if only to discover secrets which would otherwise be hidden from them. Paradoxically the mute stealth of these proceedings encouraged suspicion and conspiracy. Venice was known as the city of conspiracies.