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Italian Hours by Henry James

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This etext was prepared by Richard Farris (rf7211@hotmail.com), and
proofread by the online team at Distributed Proofreaders.



ITALIAN HOURS

BY

HENRY JAMES


PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1909





PREFACE

The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few
exceptions already been collected, and were then associated
with others commemorative of other impressions of (no very
extensive) excursions and wanderings. The notes on various
visits to Italy are here for the first time exclusively placed
together, and as they largely refer to quite other days than
these--the date affixed to each paper sufficiently indicating
this--I have introduced a few passages that speak for a later
and in some cases a frequently repeated vision of the places and
scenes in question. I have not hesitated to amend my text,
expressively, wherever it seemed urgently to ask for this,
though I have not pretended to add the element of information or
the weight of curious and critical insistence to a brief record
of light inquiries and conclusions. The fond appeal of the
observer concerned is all to aspects and appearances--above all
to the interesting face of things as it mainly used to
be.

H. J.





CONTENTS

VENICE
THE GRAND CANAL
VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION
TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN
CASA AL VISI
FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN
THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD
ITALY REVISITED
A ROMAN HOLIDAY
ROMAN RIDES
ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS
THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME
FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK
A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS
A CHAIN OF CITIES
SIENA EARLY AND LATE
THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE
FLORENTINE NOTES
TUSCAN CITIES
OTHER TUSCAN CITIES
RAVENNA
THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS





ILLUSTRATIONS

THE HARBOUR, GENOA (Frontispiece)
FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S, VENICE
A NARROW CANAL, VENICE
PALAZZO MOCENIGO, VENICE
THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA
CASA ALVISI, VENICE
THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN
THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE
UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN
ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI
SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE
THE FACADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME
THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER'S, ROME
CASTEL GANDOLFO
ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME
VILLA D' ESTE, TIVOLI
SUBIACO
ASSISI
PERUGIA
ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA
A STREET, CORTONA
THE RED PALACE, SIENA
SAN DOMENICO, SIENA
ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE
THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE
BOBOLI GARDENS, FLORENCE
THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA
THE LOGGIA, LUCCA
TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO
SAN APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA
RAVENNA PINETA
TERRACINA





VENICE


It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure
there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything
to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of
times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to
visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find
a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and
you will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it. There
is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one
has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of
photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as
about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as
familiar as the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to
speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-
lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said
about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It
would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to
say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having
no information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten
the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I
hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love
with his theme.


I

Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after
extracting half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable
quantity of fame from it. We all may do the same, after it has
served our turn, which it probably will not cease to do for many
a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin who beyond anyone helps
us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several aids to
depression in the shape of certain little humorous--ill-humorous--
pamphlets (the series of St. Mark's Rest) which embody
his latest reflections on the subject of our city and describe
the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are
numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have
spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled--an
admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty.
Fortunately one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one
hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose.
This queer late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised
and condensed issue of the Stones of Venice, only one
little volume of which has been published, or perhaps ever will
be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to
children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and
might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is,
however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just.
There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author
has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and
scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and
flashes with the love of his subject--a love disconcerted and
abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration.
Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has
had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man
of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has
made her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice
therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can
separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit,
the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and
pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may
doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all--without
criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is
a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous
thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as
much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for
all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle--a
thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it
is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call
their own--little more than the bare privilege of leading their
lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are
decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their
opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life
presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in
this meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better
terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain.
They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear
bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist
at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy to say that
one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would
make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number
of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is
painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not
equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom
upon a dog's allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine
and leisure and conversation and beautiful views form the greater
part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a
successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a
handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the
good and the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that
if the civilisation of a society is measured by the number of its
needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be
feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor
figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery,
doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases
the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a
beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way
to enjoy Venice is to follow the example of these people and make
the most of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the
place are simple; this may be maintained even under the
imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure
than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine
Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark's,--abominable the way one
falls into the habit,--and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon
the windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than
hanging over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's.
It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is
composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to
which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest--
otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is
good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best
thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for
Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you
often--to linger and remain and return.


II

The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which
the author of these lines had known something. It is possible to
dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible
and intelligent manner. There are travellers who think the place
odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find
themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous. The
sentimental tourist's sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has
too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original;
to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. The
Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that
admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march
through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is
nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude
is completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can
only turn your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his
want of delicacy. But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the
fault of the rest of the world. The fault of Venice is that,
though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy to live with as
you count living in other places. After you have stayed a week
and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can
accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits
become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new
ones of an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired
of your gondola (or you think you are) and you have seen all the
principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a
dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as
impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into
a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the
Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have
visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible sign-boards
dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you
have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at
the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a
shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon
and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are
obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you
miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail,
and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a
sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked
to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the
irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by
the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out
toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The
canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where
you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window
and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell
bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their
wares at you, where the same tightly-buttoned officers are for
ever sucking the same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in
front of the same cafes--the Piazza, as I say, has resolved
itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state of mind
of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a
week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you
act with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is
not--with all deference to your personal attractions--that of
your companions who remain behind; for though there are some
disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as
the visitors. The conditions are peculiar, but your intolerance
of them evaporates before it has had time to become a prejudice.
When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and
you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to
Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the
fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to
sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman,
whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty.
She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink,
cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour.
She is always interesting and almost always sad; but she has a
thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy
accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you
count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you
become; there is something indefinable in those depths of
personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The
place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and
conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress
it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows
up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is very
true that if you go, as the author of these lines on a certain
occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of
disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several
years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had
suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full
possession and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded
from the moment of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any
more as a city at all; that she exists only as a battered peep-
show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in
the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy with
their uproar. The English and Americans came a little later. They
came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet
enough to make very long repasts at the Caffe Quadri, during
which they were out of the way. The months of April and May of
the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season
for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de-
place had marked them for his own and held triumphant
possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible
brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has,
whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom.
During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the
great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through
churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They infest
the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about the
bridges and the doors of the cafes. In saying just now that I was
disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that
assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The
condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal.
The pedlars and commissioners ply their trade--often a very
unclean one--at the very door of the temple; they follow you
across the threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve,
and hiss into your ear, scuffling with each other for customers.
There is a great deal of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether,
and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this
exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.


III

It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a
great spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have
little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The
restoration of the outer walls, which has lately been so much
attacked and defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the
necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in a position
to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it is
one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing
necessity have people of taste lately had to resign themselves.
Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all semblance of
beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that the
external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less
impressive only than that of the still comparatively uninjured
interior. I know not what is the measure of necessity in such a
case, and it appears indeed to be a very delicate question. To-
day, at any rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and
marble which, to the eye of the traveller emerging from the
narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the further
end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence--to-day this
lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed
well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--
the work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt
sea--is giving way to large crude patches of new material which
have the effect of a monstrous malady rather than of a
restoration to health. They look like blotches of red and white
paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of a noble
matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest-
looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or as
the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a
scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our
complaint is a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in
united Italy must doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must
endeavour to believe that it is through innumerable lapses of
taste that this deeply interesting country is groping her way to
her place among the nations. For the present, it is not to be
denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than
the result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she
was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-
day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless too soon
to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to
forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside as well
there has been a considerable attempt to make the place more
tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered.
What I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark and
rugged old pavement--those deep undulations of primitive mosaic
in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended
resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not
the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house of images;
but from a considerable portion of the church it has now
disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement
remains as recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked,
uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite,
polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers; but in other
large stretches the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the
ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have taken the floor of
a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian
and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and
when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the
Times about the whole business and holding meetings to
protest against it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as
they heard or heeded the rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies
and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they took
a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the
Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking;
the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of
existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people
have to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I
must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension
of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one.
The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the
best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of
Venice, open Theophile Gautier's ltalia, and you will
see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because
there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it;
the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple
of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass
in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and
friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark. There are
moments, after all, when the church is comparatively quiet and
empty, and when you may sit there with an easy consciousness of
its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into any
Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at
the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I
just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-
show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the
worst, an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the molten colour
that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its
richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded and yet all so
brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures,
bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through the
glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them
catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes
nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or
perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching;
there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The
church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of
surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and
kneel upon and lean against--it is from this the effect proceeds.
In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may
go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook.
It is a treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are
usually three or four of the fraternity with their easels set up
in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy
to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable
attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid.
But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the
great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the
lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the
tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image
spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot paint these things
you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old
benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many
generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of
which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness,
with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with
honourable age.

[Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S VENICE]


IV

Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges
reduced to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its
keenness, there was a great deal of entertainment to be got from
lodging on Riva Schiavoni and looking out at the far-shimmering
lagoon. There was entertainment indeed in simply getting into the
place and observing the queer incidents of a Venetian
installation. A great many persons contribute indirectly to this
undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring out at you
during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up in
some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little
establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to
trace the subtle connection existing between the niece of the
landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it
was none too visible, as the young lady in question was a dancer
at the Fenice theatre--or when that was closed at the Rossini--
and might have been supposed absorbed by her professional duties.
It proved necessary, however, that she should hover about the
premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid gloves with
one little white button; as also, that she should apply a thick
coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a
sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens,
who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-
lady's niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You
soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon
you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of
everything Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the
great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly
Palladian church a success beyond all reason. It is a success of
position, of colour, of the immense detached Campanile, tipped
with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because San
Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn,
faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has
a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading
colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink,
and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue
occurs very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink;
the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale
whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is
indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never
fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always
exquisitely mild.

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