Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mony intoned, “We wed thee, O sea, in token of true and everlasting dominion.” [78] This
ceremony (on the Sunday after Ascension) still continues, but on a far less lavish scale, and
with dreams of tourist wealth now substituted for the wealth of trade.
As for everlasting dominion, in human affairs, everlasting is mostly never lasting. As
the wealth of the Indies and the Americas flowed to Europe in Iberian ships, Venice began
its slow political decline. It kept on with its trade and expanded its banking enterprises, but
…Venice declined in power and virility, her power whittled away in constantly defens-
ive wars against the Turks and by the rise of new commercial rivals in the west. By
the 18 th Century, her empire was almost gone, and she subsided in carnival and garish
excess toward her end as a state. [79]
William Wordsworth summarized Venice's sad decline in his sonnet on the extinction
of the Venetian Republic this way: “Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee, / And was
the safeguard of the West.” [80]
CARNEVALE IN VENICE
Carnival, as most everyone knows, is the merrymaking in Roman Catholic countries that
precedes the austerity of the forty days of Lent. The word's derivation may be from the Lat-
in carne , meat, and vale, farewell. The Carnival of Venice was thought to have been started
to commemorate a military victory in 1162. San Marco Square became the meeting place
for dance and merriment. The Carnival soon came to mean letting-go, freedom, festive be-
havior, and even good-willed madness By the late 1600s, Carnival in Venice had become
secularized; for the upper and middle classes it was a year-round series of masquerades.
Visitors to Venice noted that women and men wore mysterious and flirtatious disguise even
in daylight and that the domino (a hooded cape) was common dress.
Why the secular Carnival in Venice? One answer is that Venetians lived under the
watchful eyes of secret police and the Inquisition. Disguise was a way of evading those
eyes. Sociologists who pay attention to people at play, for example, suggest that Carnival
in today's Brazil offers an opportunity to transform desperate lives into fantasies; more im-
portant, it is an outlet for social and political unrest.
The archetype of the Venetian libertine is Giovanni Casanova, born in Venice in 1725.
His autobiography, no doubt filled with boastful exaggeration, traces the arc of his life. Ex-
pelled from seminary because of scandalous conduct, he was a violinist in Venice and an
accomplished seducer of women. He was denounced as a magician and sentenced to prison
under the roofs of the doge's Palace, but he escaped by scrambling “over the leads” and
performed diplomatic service for rulers in Prussia, Russia, and Poland. When finally per-
 
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