The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

This is San Marco as it was. Eight centuries had harmed it little; they had but touched the building with a gentle hand and had mellowed its tints into tender harmony; now its new masters, cruel in their kindness, have restored the mosaics and scraped the marbles; now raw blotches and patches of crude color glare out in violent contrast with those parts which, owing to the intricacy of the carved work, or some other reason, it has been found impossible to touch. To look at St. Mark’s now is like listening to some symphony by a master of harmony which is played on instruments all out of tune.

Photographs, pictures, illustrations of all kinds, have made St. Mark’s so familiar to all the world that it is needless to attempt to give any description of its details.

It may suffice to say that the cathedral stands on the site of a smaller and older building, in which the relics of St. Mark, the tutelary saint of Venice, had been already enshrined. The present structure was begun about the year 976, and occupied very nearly a century in building. But it is adorned with the spoils of many a classic structure: with columns and slabs of marble and of porphyry and of serpentine, which were hewn from quarries in Greece and Syria, in Egypt and Libya, by the hands of Roman slaves, and decked the palaces and the baths, the temples and the theaters of Roman cities.

The inside of St. Mark’s is not less strange and impressive, but hardly so attractive as the exterior. It is plain in outline and almost heavy in design, a Greek cross in plan, with a vaulted dome above the center and each arm. Much as the exterior of St. Mark’s owes to marble, porphyry, and mosaic, it would be beautiful if constructed only of grey limestone. This could hardly be said of the interior: take away the choice stones from columns and dado and pavement, strip away the crust of mosaic, those richly robed figures on ground of gold, from wall and from vault (for the whole interior is veneered with marbles or mosaics), and only a rather dark, massive building would remain, which would seem rather lower and rather smaller than one had been led to expect.

The other view in Venice which seems to combine best its peculiar character with its picturesque beauty may be obtained at a very short distance from St. Mark’s. Leave the façade of which we have just spoken, the three great masts, with their richly ornamented sockets of bronze, from which, in the proud days of Venice, floated the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the Morea; turn from the Piazza into the Piazzetta; leave on the one hand the huge Campanile, more huge than beautiful (if one may venture to whisper a criticism), on the other the sumptuous portico of the Ducal Palace; pass on beneath the imposing façade of the palace itself, with its grand colonnade; on between the famous columns, brought more than seven centuries since from some Syrian ruins, which bear the lion of St. Mark and the statue of St. Theodore, the other patron of the Republic; and then, standing on the Molo at the head of the Riva degli Schiavoni, look around; or better still, step down into one of the gondolas which are in waiting at the steps, and push off a few dozen yards from the land: then look back on the façade of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, along the busy quays of the Riva, towards the green trees of the Giardini Publici, look up the Piazzetta, between the twin columns, to the glimpses of St. Mark’s and the towering height of the Campanile, along the façade of the Royal Palace, with the fringe of shrubbery below contrasting pleasantly with all these masses of masonry, up the broad entrance to the Grand Canal, between its rows of palaces, across it to the great dome of Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana della Mare, with its statue of Fortune (appropriate to the past rather than to the present) gazing out from its seaward angle. Beyond this, yet farther away, lies the Isola San Giorgio, a group of plain buildings only, a church, with a dome simple in outline and a brick campanile almost without adornment, yet the one thing in Venice, after the great group of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its triumphs in presses itself on the mind. From this point of view Venice rises before our eyes in its grandeur and in its simplicity, in its patrician and its plebeian aspects, as “a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, throned on her hundred isles … a ruler of the waters and their powers.”

But to leave Venice without a visit to the Grand Canal would be to leave the city with half the tale untold. Its great historic memories are gathered around the Piazza of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its triumphs in peace and in war, to the deeds noble and brave, of its rulers. But the Grand Canal is the center of its life, commercial and domestic; it leads from its quays to its Exchange, from the Riva degli Schiavoni and the Dogana della Mare to the Rialto. It is bordered by the palaces of the great historic families who were the rulers and princes of Venice, who made the State by their bravery and prudence, who destroyed it by their jealousies and self-seeking. The Grand Canal is a genealogy of Venice, illustrated and engraved on stone. As one glides along in a gondola, century after century in the history of domestic architecture, from the twelfth to the eighteenth, slowly unrolls itself before us. There are palaces which still remain much as they were of old, but here and there some modern structure, tasteless and ugly, has elbowed for itself a place among them; not a few, also, have been converted into places of business, and are emblazoned with prominent placards proclaiming the trade of their new masters, worthy representatives of an age that is not ashamed to daub the cliffs of the St. Gothard with the advertisements of hotels and to paint its boulders for the benefit of vendors of chocolate!

But in the present era one must be thankful for anything that is spared by the greed of wealth and the vulgarity of a “democracy.” Much of old Venice still remains, though little steamers splutter up and down the Grand Canal, and ugly iron bridges span its waters, both, it must be admitted, convenient, though hideous; still the gondolas survive; still one hears at every corner the boatman’s strange cry of warning, sometimes the only sound except the knock of the oar that breaks the silence of the liquid street. Every turn reveals something quaint and old-world. Now it is a market-boat, with its wicker panniers hanging outside, loaded with fish or piled with vegetables from one of the more distant islets; now some little bridge, now some choice architectural fragment, a doorway, a turret, an oriel, or a row of richly ornate windows, now a tiny piazzetta leading up to the façade and campanile of a more than half-hidden church; now the marble enclosure of a well. Still the water-carriers go about with buckets of hammered copper hung at each end of a curved pole; still, though more rarely, some quaint costume may be seen in the calle; still the dark shops in the narrow passages are full of goods strange to the eye, and bright in their season with the flowers and fruits of an Italian summer; still the purple pigeons gather in scores at the wonted hour to be fed on the Piazza of St. Mark, and, fearless of danger, convert the distributor of a pennyworth of maize into a walking dovecot.

Still Venice is delightful to the eyes (unhappily not always so to the nose in many a nook and corner) notwithstanding the pressure of poverty and the wantonness of restorers. Perchance it may revive and yet see better days (its commerce is said to have increased since 1866); but if so, unless a change comes over the spirit of the age, the result will be the more complete destruction of all that made its charm and its wonder; so this chapter may appropriately be closed by a brief sketch of one scene which seems in harmony with the memories of its departed greatness, a Venetian funeral. The dead no longer rest among the living beneath the pavement of the churches: the gondola takes the Venetian “about the streets” to the daily business of life; it bears him away from his home to the island cemetery. From some narrow alley, muffled by the enclosing masonry, comes the sound of a funeral march; a procession emerges on to the piazzetta by the water-side; the coffin is carried by long-veiled acolytes and mourners with lighted torches, accompanied by a brass band with clanging cymbals. A large gondola, ornamented with black and silver, is in waiting at the nearest landing place; the band and most of the attendants halt by the water-side; the coffin is placed in the boat, the torches are extinguished; a wilder wail of melancholy music, a more resonant clang of the cymbals, sounds the last farewell to home and its pleasures and its work; the oars are dipped in the water, and another child of Venice is taken from the city of the living to the city of the dead.

A long line of islands completely shelters Venice from the sea, so that the waters around its walls are very seldom ruffled into waves. The tide also rises and falls but little, not more than two or three feet, if so much. Thus no banks of pestiferous mud are laid bare at low water by the ebb and flow, and yet some slight circulation is maintained in the canals, which, were it not for this, would be as intolerable as cesspools. Small boats can find their way over most parts of the lagoon, where in many places a safe route has to be marked out with stakes, but for large vessels the channels are few. A long island, Malamocco by name, intervenes between Venice and the Adriatic, on each side of which are the chief if not the only entrances for large ships. At its northern end is the sandy beach of the Lido, a great resort of the Venetians, for there is good sea-bathing. But except this, Malamocco has little to offer; there is more interest in other parts of the lagoon. At the southern end, some fifteen miles away, the old town of Chioggia is a favorite excursion. On the sea side the long fringe of narrow islands, of which Malamocco is one, protected by massive walls, forms a barrier against the waves of the Adriatic. On the land side is the dreary fever-haunted region of the Laguna Morta, like a vast fen, beyond which rise the serrate peaks of the Alps and the broken summits of the Euganean Hills. The town itself, the Roman Fossa Claudia, is a smaller edition of Venice, joined like it to the mainland by a bridge. If it has fewer relics of architectural value it has suffered less from modern changes, and has retained much more of its old-world character.

Murano, an island or group of islands, is a tiny edition of Venice, and a much shorter excursion, for it lies only about a mile and a half away to the north of the city. Here is the principal seat of the workers in glass; here are made those exquisite reproductions of old Venetian glass and of ancient mosaic which have made the name of Salviati noted in all parts of Europe. Here, too, is a cathedral which, though it has suffered from time, neglect and restoration, is still a grand relic. At the eastern end there is a beautiful apse enriched by an arcade and decorated with inlaid marbles, but the rest of the exterior is plain. As usual in this part of Italy (for the external splendor of St. Mark’s is exceptional) all richness of decoration is reserved for the interior. Here columns of choice stones support the arches; there is a fine mosaic in the eastern apse, but the glory of Murano is its floor, a superb piece of opus Alexandrinum, inlaid work of marbles and porphyries, bearing date early in the eleventh century, and richer in design than even that at St. Mark’s, for peacocks and other birds, with tracery of strange design, are introduced into its patterns.

But there is another island beyond Murano, some half-dozen miles away from Venice, which must not be left unvisited. It is reached by a delightful excursion over the lagoon, among lonely islands thinly inhabited, the garden grounds of Venice, where they are not left to run wild with rank herbage or are covered by trees. This is Torcello, the ancient Altinum. Here was once a town of note, the center of the district when Venice was struggling into existence. Its houses now are few and ruinous; the ground is half overgrown with populars and acacias and pomegranates, red in summer-time with scarlet flowers. But it possesses two churches which, though small in size are almost unique in their interest, the duomo, dedicated to St. Mary, and the church of Sta. Fosca. They stand side by side, and are linked together by a small cloister. The former is a plain basilica which retains its ancient plan and arrangement almost intact. At one end is an octagonal baptistry, which, instead of being separated from the cathedral by an atrium or court, is only divided from it by a passage. The exterior of the cathedral is plain; the interior is not much more ornate. Ancient columns, with quaintly carved capitals supporting stilted semicircular arches, divide the aisles from the nave. Each of these has an apsidal termination. The high altar stands in the center of the middle one, and behind it, against the wall, the marble throne of the bishop is set up on high, and is approached by a long flight of marble steps. On each side, filling up the remainder of the curve, six rows of steps rise up like the seats of an amphitheater, the places of the attendant priests. The chancel, true to its name, is formed by enclosing a part of the nave with a low stone wall and railing. Opinions differ as to the date of this cathedral. According to Fergusson it was erected early in the eleventh century, but it stands on the site of one quite four centuries older, and reproduces the arrangement of its predecessor if it does not actually incorporate portions of it. Certainly the columns and capitals in the nave belong, as a rule, to an earlier building. Indeed, they have probably done duty more than once, and at least some of them were sculptured before the name of Attila had been heard of in the delta of the North Italian rivers.

The adjoining church of Sta. Fosca is hardly less interesting. An octagonal case, with apses at the eastern end, supports a circular drum, which is covered by a low conical roof, and a cloister or corridor surrounds the greater part of the church. This adds much to the beauty of the design, the idea, as Fergusson remarks, being evidently borrowed from the circular colonnades of the Roman temples. He also justly praises the beauty of the interior. In this church also, which in its present condition is not so old as the cathedral, the materials of a much older building or buildings have been employed. But over these details or the mosaics in the cathedral we must not linger, and must only pause to mention the curious stone chair in the adjacent court which bears the name of the throne of Attila; perhaps, like the chair of the Dukes of Corinthia, it was the ancient seat of the chief magistrate of the island.

XI

ALEXANDRIA

The bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta – Peculiar shape of the city – Strange and varied picture of Alexandrian street life – The Place Mehemet Ali – Glorious panorama from the Cairo citadel – Pompey’s Pillar – The Battle of the Nile – Discovery of the famous inscribed stone at Rosetta – Port Said and the Suez Canal.

It is with a keen sense of disappointment that the traveller first sights the monotonous and dreary-looking Egyptian sea-board. The low ridges of desolate sandhills, occasionally broken by equally unattractive lagunes, form a melancholy contrast to the beautiful scenery of the North African littoral farther west, which delighted his eyes a short time before, while skirting the Algerian coast. What a change from the thickly-wooded hills gently sloping upwards from the water’s edge to the lower ridges of the Atlas range, whose snow-clad peaks stand out clear in the brilliant atmosphere, the landscape diversified with cornfields and olive groves, and thickly studded with white farmhouses, looking in the distance but white specks, and glittering like diamonds under the glowing rays of the sun. Now, instead of all this warmth of color and variety of outline, one is confronted by the bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta.

If the expectant traveller is so disenchanted with his first view of Egypt from the sea, still greater is his disappointment as the ship approaches the harbor. This bustling and painfully modern-looking town – the city of the great Alexander, and the gate of that land of oriental romance and fascinating association – might, but for an occasional palm-tree or minaret standing out among the mass of European buildings, be mistaken for some flourishing European port, say a Marseilles or Havre plumped down on the Egyptian plain.

But though we must not look for picturesque scenery and romantic surroundings in this thriving port, there is yet much to interest the antiquarian and the “intelligent tourist” in this classic district. The Delta sea-board was for centuries the battle-ground of the Greek and Roman Empires, and the country between Alexandria and Port Said is strewed with historic sites.

Alexandria itself, though a much Europeanized and a hybrid sort of city, is not without interest. It has been rather neglected by Egyptian travel writers, and consequently by the tourist, who rarely strikes out a line for himself. It is looked upon too much as the port of Cairo, just as Leghorn is of Pisa and Florence, and visitors usually content themselves with devoting to it but one day, and then rushing off by train to Cairo.

It would be absurd, of course, to compare Alexandria, in point of artistic, antiquarian, and historical interest, to this latter city; though, as a matter of fact, Cairo is a modern city compared to the Alexandria of Alexander; just as Alexandria is but of mushroom growth contrasted with Heliopolis, Thebes, Memphis, or the other dead cities of the Nile Valley of which traces still remain. It has often been remarked that the ancient city has bequeathed nothing but its ruins and its name to Alexandria of to-day. Even these ruins are deplorably scanty, and most of the sites are mainly conjectural. Few vestiges remain of the architectural splendor of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Where are now the 4,000 palaces, the 4,000 baths, and the 400 theaters, about which the conquering general Amru boasted to his master, the Caliph Omar? What now remains of the magnificent temple of Serapis, towering over the city on its platform of one hundred steps? Though there are scarcely any traces of the glories of ancient Alexandria, once the second city of the Empire, yet the recollection of its splendors has not died out, and to the thoughtful traveller this city of memories has its attractions. Here St. Mark preached the Gospel and suffered martyrdom, and here Athanasius opposed in warlike controversy the Arian heresies. Here for many centuries were collected in this center of Greek learning and culture the greatest intellects of the civilized world. Here Cleopatra, “vainqueur des vainqueurs du monde,” held Antony willing captive, while Octavius was preparing his legions to crush him. Here Amru conquered, and here Abercrombie fell. Even those whose tastes do not incline them to historical or theological researches are familiar, thanks to Kingsley’s immortal romance, with the story of the noble-minded Hypatia and the crafty and ambitious Cyril, and can give rein to their imagination by verifying the sites of the museum where she lectured, and the Cæsarum where she fell a victim to the atrocious zeal of Peter the Reader and his rabble of fanatical monks.

The peculiar shape of the city, built partly on the Pharos Island and peninsula, and partly on the mainland, is due, according to the chroniclers, to a patriotic whim of the founder, who planned the city in the form of a chlamys, the short cloak or tunic worn by the Macedonian soldiers. The modern city, though it has pushed its boundaries a good way to the east and west, still preserves this curious outline, though to a non-classical mind it rather suggests a star-fish. Various legends are extant to account for the choice of this particular spot for a Mediterranean port. According to the popular version, a venerable seer appeared to the Great Conqueror in a dream, and quoted those lines of the Odyssey which describe the one sheltered harbor on the northern coast of Egypt: – “a certain island called Pharos, that with the high-waved sea is washed, just against Egypt.” Acting on this supernatural hint, Alexander decided to build his city on that part of the coast to which the Pharos isle acted as a natural breakwater, and where a small Greek fishing settlement was already established, called Rhacotis. The legend is interesting, but it seems scarcely necessary to fall back on a mythical story to account for the selection of this site. The two great aims of Alexander were the foundation of a center for trade, and the extension of commerce, and also the fusion of the Greek and Roman nations. For the carrying out of these objects, the establishment of a convenient sea-port with a commanding position at the mouth of the Nile was required. The choice of a site a little west of the Nile mouths was, no doubt, due to his knowledge of the fact that the sea current sets eastward, and that the alluvial soil brought down by the Nile would soon choke a harbor excavated east of the river, as had already happened at Pelusium. It is this alluvial wash which has rendered the harbors of Rosetta and Damietta almost useless for vessels of any draught, and at Port Said the accumulation of sand necessitates continuous dredging in order to keep clear the entrance of the Suez Canal.

A well-known writer on Egypt has truly observed that there are three Egypts to interest the traveller. The Egypt of the Pharoahs and the Bible, the Egypt of the Caliphates and the “Arabian Nights,” and the Egypt of European commerce and enterprise. It is to this third stage of civilization that the fine harbor of Alexandria bears witness. Not only is it of interest to the engineer and the man of science, but it is also of great historic importance. It serves as a link between ancient and modern civilization. The port is Alexander the Great’s best monument – “si quæris monumentum respice.” But for this, Alexandria might now be a little fishing port of no more importance than the little Greek fishing village, Rhacotis, whose ruins lie buried beneath its spacious quays. It is not inaccurate to say that the existing harbor is the joint work of Alexander and English engineers of the present century. It was originally formed by the construction of a vast mole (Heptastadion) joining the island of Pharos to the mainland; and this stupendous feat of engineering, planned and carried out by Alexander, has been supplemented by the magnificent breakwater constructed by England in 1872, at a cost of over two and a half millions sterling. After Marseilles, Malta, and Spezzia, it is perhaps the finest port in the Mediterranean, both on account of its natural advantages as a haven, and by reason of the vast engineering works mentioned above. The western harbor (formerly called Eunostos or “good home sailing”) of which we are speaking – for the eastern, or so-called new harbor, is choked with sand and given up to native craft – has only one drawback in the dangerous reef at its entrance, and which should have been blasted before the breakwater and the other engineering works were undertaken. The passage through the bar is very intricate and difficult, and is rarely attempted in very rough weather. The eastern harbor will be of more interest to the artist, crowded as it is with the picturesque native craft and dahabyehs with their immense lateen sails. The traveller, so disgusted with the modern aspect of the city from the western harbor, finds some consolation here, and begins to feel that he is really in the East. Formerly this harbor was alone available for foreign ships, the bigoted Moslems objecting to the “Frankish dogs” occupying their best haven. This restriction has, since the time of Mehemet Ali, been removed, greatly to the advantage of Alexandrian trade.

During the period of Turkish misrule – when Egypt under the Mamelukes, though nominally a vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, was practically under the dominion of the Beys – the trade of Alexandria had declined considerably, and Rosetta had taken away most of its commerce. When Mehemet Ali, the founder of the present dynasty, rose to power, his clear intellect at once comprehended the importance of this ancient emporium, and the wisdom of Alexander’s choice of a site for the port which was destined to become the commercial center of three continents.