John Evelyn came to Venice in the month of May, 1645, and, as he put it, as soon as he got ashore his portmanteaus were examined at the Dogana, and then he went to his lodging, which was at honest Signor Rhodomante’s, at the Black Eagle, near the Rialto, one of the best quarters of the town. The journey from Rome to Venice, he stated, cost him seven pistoles and thirteen julios. “Two days after, taking a gondola, which is their water-coach,” he said, “we rode up and down their canals, which answer to our streets. These vessels are built very long and narrow, having necks and tails of steel, somewhat spreading at the beak, like a fish’s tail, and kept so exceedingly polished as to give a great lustre.” His first visit was to the Rialto. “It was evening, and the canal where the Noblesse go to take the air, as in our Hyde Park, was full of ladies and gentlemen.... Next day I went to the Exchange, a place like ours, frequented by merchants, but nothing so magnificent.... Hence I passed through the Merceria, one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness of it [!]; and is all the way, on both sides, tapestried, as it were, with cloth of gold, rich damasks and other silks, which the shops expose and hang before their houses from the first floor; ... to this add the perfumes, apothecaries’ shops, and the innumerable cages of nightingales, which they keep, that entertain you with their melody from shop to shop, so that shutting your eyes you could imagine yourself in the country, when, indeed, you are in the middle of the sea.” Evelyn left Venice at the end of March, 1646. Ruskin, in _The Stones of Venice_, speaks of “the hostelry of the Black Eagle, with its square door of marble deeply moulded in the outer wall, where we see the shadows of its [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE MERCERIA] pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side.” This must not be confounded with Signor Rhodomante’s establishment, where Evelyn was entertained two centuries earlier. Evelyn’s Black Eagle, after many inquiries among the oldest residents of its neighborhood, and after much interesting and fluent interchange of bad Italian and worse English, was discovered to be the ancient house near the Rialto Bridge, now numbered 5238 Calle dei Stagneri, on the Ponte della Fava, and close to the Campo S. Bartolommeo, where stands the Goldoni statue. The house has retired to private life, and is, at present, the home of a practising lawyer in good standing. Ruskin’s Black Eagle died an unnatural death in 1880, when a certain unusually narrow street was wiped out of existence, under the direction of a chief magistrate (whose name was Dante di Siego Alighieri), to make way for the broad avenue now known as the Street of the 22d of March. The inn was in a retired corner, but on the line of travel between the larger hotels and the Square of S. Moisè. Not a stone of it seems to be left in Venice now.