A Side Canal 241 The Gondoliers’ Shrine 247 Entrance of the Grand Canal 257 View on the Grand Canal 269 Palazzo Rezzonico 281 Towards the Rialto San Angelo 291 Bronze Well-Head by Alberghetti--The Courtyard of Palazzo Ducale 305 Evening in the Piazzetta 313 A Palace Door 323 Zattere 331 VENICE Chapter One INTRODUCTORY “Venice herself is poetry, and creates a poet out of the dullest clay.” It was a poet who spoke, and his clay was instinct with the breath of genius. But it is true that Venice lends wings to duller clay; it has been her fate to make poets of many who were not so before--a responsibility that entails loss on her as well as gain. She has lived--she has loved and suffered and created; and the echoes of her creation are with us still; the pulse of the life which once she knew continues to throb behind the loud and insistent present. The story of Venice has been often written; the Bride of the Adriatic, in her decay as in her youthful and her mature beauty, has been the beloved of many men. “Wo betide the wretch,” cries Landor through the mouth of Machiavelli, “who desecrates and humiliates her; she may fall, but she shall rise again.” Venice even then had passed her zenith; the path she had entered, though blazing with a glory which had not attended on her dawn of life, was yet a path of decline, the resplendent, dazzling path of the setting sun. And now a second Attilla, as Napoleon vaunted himself, has descended upon her. She has been desecrated, but she has never been dethroned. She could not, if she would, take the ring off her finger. No hand of man, however potent, can destroy that once consummated union, however the stranger and her traitor sons may abase her from within.