One of the prettiest sights that I remember in Venice was, one Sunday morning, a gondolier in his shirt sleeves, carefully dressed in his best, with a very long cigar and a very black moustache and a flashing gold ring, lolling back in his own gondola while his small son, aged about nine, was rowing him up the Grand Canal. Occasionally a word of praise or caution was uttered, but for the most part they went along silently, the father receiving more warmth from the consciousness of successful paternity than we from the sun itself. Gondoliers can have pride: but there is no pride about a rampino, the old scaramouch who hooks the gondola at the steps. Since he too was once a gondolier this is odd. But pride and he are strangers now. His hat is ever in his hand for a copper, and the transference of your still burning cigar-end to his lips is one of the most natural actions in the world. CHAPTER VIII THE GRAND CANAL. I: FROM THE DOGANA TO THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, LOOKING TO THE LEFT The river of Venice--Canal steamers--Motor boats--Venetian nobility to-day--The great architects--A desirable enactment--The custom house vane--The Seminario and Giorgione--S. Maria della Salute--Tintoretto's "Marriage in Cana"--The lost blue curtain--San Gregorio--The Palazzo Dario--Porphyry--The story of S. Vio--Delectable homes--Browning in Venice--S. Maria della Carita. To me the Grand Canal is the river of Venice--its Thames, its Seine, its Arno. I think of it as "the river." The rest are canals. And yet as a matter of fact to the Venetians the rest are rivers--Rio this and Rio that--and this the canal. During a stay in Venice of however short a time one is so often on the Grand Canal that a knowledge of its palaces should come early. For fifteen centimes one may travel its whole length in a steamboat, and back again for another fifteen, and there is no more interesting half-hour's voyage in the world. The guide books, as a rule, describe both banks from the same starting-point, which is usually the Molo. This seems to me to be a mistake, for two reasons. One is that even in a leisurely gondola "all'ora" one cannot keep pace with literature bearing on both sides at once, and the other is that since one enters Venice at the railway station it is interesting to begin forthwith to learn something of the city from that point and one ought not to be asked to read backwards to do this. In this book therefore the left bank, from the custom house to the railway station, is described first, and then the other side returning from the station to the Molo.