The festivals which were peculiar to Venice were important. The procession of the Doge to the smallest and perhaps the oldest church in Venice, San Vio, founded in 917, celebrated the deliverance of the city from the {73} conspiracy of Tiepolo in 1310; and as it occurred on the 15th of June, that lovely season in Venice, we can but regret its discontinuance. But the deliverance from the plague in 1576 and in 1631 is still celebrated each year. The ravages of the plague in Venice at various times were almost beyond belief. That of 1171 is curiously associated with the Giustiniani. A hundred or more members of this most noble house were cut off by this scourge, and its very name was in danger of extinction, since the young Niccolo, who now represented the family, was a novice in the convent of San Niccolo, on the Lido. The Doge Michieli, under these circumstances, thought it not wrong to send at once to the Pope, asking that Niccolo Giustiniani might be released from his vows, and married to Anna Michieli, the daughter of the Doge. Mrs. Oliphant pictures the interval between the departure of the messenger and his return:-- "The old Giustiniani fathers, in the noble houses which were not as yet the palaces we know, must have waited among their weeping women for the decision from Rome. And it is wonderful that no dramatist or modern Italian romancer should have thought of taking for his hero this young monk upon the silent shores of the Lido, amid all the wonderful dramas of light and shade that go on upon the low horizon sweeping round on every side, a true globe of level, long reflections, of breadth and space and solitude, so apt for thought. "Had he known, perhaps, before he thought of dedication to the church, young Anna Michieli, between whose eyes and his, from her windows in the Doge's palace to the green line of the Lido, there was nothing but the dazzle of the sunshine and the ripple of the sea? Was there a simple romance of this natural kind, waiting to be turned into joyful fulfilment by the Pope's favorable answer? Or had the novice to give up his dreams of holy seclusion, or those highest, all-engrossing visions of ambition, which were to no man more open than to a bold and able priest?" {74} The Pope could but consent under such circumstances, and the marriage was celebrated immediately. Nine sons and three daughters were born of this union; and many men of illustrious character and some great orators afterward proceeded from the Casa Giustiniani. But his life in the world, with all its good fortune, did not make Niccolo forgetful of his early vows nor of the peace of his convent; and when his duty to the State was done, he there re-dedicated himself to God's service, and his wife Anna entered her chosen nunnery, where the holiness of her life caused her to be made a _Beata_ after her death.