The Palazzo Narni and the Ponte del Paradiso made, a few years ago, together one of the most beautiful corners in the world; go look at that spot now; it is enough to make the grey-beard of Cadore rise from his grave. There still remains on high, between the two houses, the admirable cuspide of the Trecento, on which there is sculptured the Madonna, who opens wide her mantle and her cloak to receive the kneeling people; but the beautiful bridge has been destroyed, and in its place has been built a frightful structure, with asphalte roadway and painted metal parapet. In similar manner the elegant, yet bold, arches of the three bridges at S. Nicolo di Tolentino exist nowhere, now, except upon the canvases of painters, and the three banks, near the Campo di Marte, which those graceful arches united, are now basely conjoined by three erections of stucco and cast-iron. 'In the _Arzere_ of Santa Marta,' Molmenti writes in his latest work, 'once so green and gay and sunlit, a poor quarter no doubt, but one intensely interesting by customs and traditions, there blocks the way now, in all its stolid vulgarity, a cotton factory. Between the public gardens and the Lido, instead of the lovely verdure of the island of Sant' Elena, in its grace and its green twilight of drooped boughs, is a shapeless expanse of mud and cinders, which spreads farther every season, and threatens to invade the water-space which separates it from the gardens and S. Pietro di Castello. On this desert of coke and dirt there have been lately erected offices, sheds, warehouses, chimneys, engines, in the midst of which there still stands, hiding as though ashamed, the beautiful church of the Quattro Cento. But the invasion has been useless; the speculations have failed; and art and history mourn unavailingly the senseless and profitless destruction of this fairest gem of the lagoons: _insularum ocellus_. The ruin of Sant' Elena, of the view of San Giorgio, of the bridge of San Lio, the hideous new wing added to the noble brown marbles of the Pal Tiepolo, the hideous iron warehouse fronting and affronting the Ca d'Oro, the whitewash daubed on the Pal Sagredo, the indecent alterations and additions to that jewel of Pietro Lombardo the Pal Corner-Spinelli, the new red (like ruddle or red ochre) with which the Pal Foscari has been insulted, these are all offences which every traveller of taste, every artist of culture, can see, and number, and denounce. But countless, and unknown to the world in general, and undreamed of by those who knew not Venice fifteen years ago, is the enormous loss to the city by the destruction at the hands of the Muncipal Councillors of the _Calli_, of the _Arzere_, of the mediæval bridges, as of those of which I have spoken above, of innumerable nooks and corners, historical and