Confusing the names of Goro and Moro, and fancying that the ancient
figure of a warrior standing on the corner of the Campo del Carmine
house, now blackened by time, although not so black as he is painted,
represents a Moor, the guides and the gondoliers, and even the
antiquaries, of Venice have given to “Othello’s House,” according to
Signor Tassini, a local reputation and a name which it does not merit.
The beautiful little Gothic Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, built in the
Fourteenth Century and done over at the end of the Nineteenth, on the
right bank of the Grand Canal, going towards the Rialto, and near the
Grand Hotel, seems to have no excuse, either from tradition or from any
confusion of names, for calling itself “the House of Desdemona” at all.
Its only dramatic interest to-day consists in the fact that it has been
the home of Signora Eleonora Duse, the leading actress of Italy, who is
called by her admirers the Italian Sara Bernhardt, although she has
genius enough of her own to warrant her being compared with no one but
herself.
And thus perish, at the hands of a transatlantic, present-day iconoclast
and grubber after the truth, two of the most cherished of the Landmarks
of Venice.
Mr. Hare is of the opinion that the Doge Christoforo Moro, buried in the
Church of S. Giobbe in the Canareggio District, is the Moro of the
Othello legend, although he died in 1470, almost half a century before
Signor Tassini married him to Desdemona; and his tomb, in the chancel
of the church, as Mr. Hare points out, “is ornamented with the moro or
mulberry, which was his family device.” It will be remembered that
Othello inherited from his mamma a handkerchief spotted with
strawberries (mulberries?) which played an important part in the great
tragedy of his life.
Christoforo Moro lies under a large flat stone in front of the altar of
the church. The slab has been greatly defaced by the tread of
generations of priests and of acolytes, but its carvings still bear
distinct traces of fruits which to-day look as much like strawberries as
mulberries, while certain of their leaves are decidedly of the
strawberry form. A portrait of Doge Moro hangs in the sacristy of S.
Giobbe. It exhibits a face in which there are no signs of the duskiness
which dramatic tradition has given to Othello during all these years,
but which is hard enough to have silenced the most dreadful belle who
ever frighted the isle from its propriety.
Mr. Hare also explains that a story very like to that of Shakspere’s
_Othello_ was told
[Illustration: THE OTHELLO HOUSE]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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