Lady Colin Campbell - A Womans Walks

Studies in Colour Abroad and at Home

1. Title Page
2. A Womans Walks
3. About this Book
4. About the Publisher
5. Copyright

BY LADY COLIN CAMPBELL

LADY COLIN CAMPBELL (ne Gertrude Elizabeth Blood), born in 1857, was best known for the divorce scandal which shocked Victorian society. After four years of marriage, she sued for divorce on grounds of her husbands infidelity and cruelty. Lord Colin alleged that his wife had committed adultery with at least four men. No divorce was obtained, and she became a successful writer, editor and journalist, a member of The London Library, and died in 1911.

Lady Colin Campbell

It is not only in the gondola that the charm of Venice is to be felt: the popular notion that there is no walking to be done in the City of the Sea is as fallacious as most popular notions usually are. I know Venice too well to give in to this idea, and so one morning I start off in the clear golden sunlight up the Riva degli Schiavoni, where the first morning vaporetti are starting for the Lido and for Chioggia, and the gondoliers are lounging about lazily, knowing that it is yet too early for the forestieri, as a rule, to be afoot and afloat. I reach the Piazzetta, and see a friend coming across from the Zecca opposite, but we are both too consistent Venetians to court malanni by meeting on the ill-omened space between the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore, where the executions were ordered by the Council of Ten to take place, so as to put a stop to the gambling-tables which stood there; so instead we meet and exchange greetings under the loggia, where formerly the Austrian cannon stood ready pointed into the heart of the fair Queen of the Adriatic. My friend is going for a morning constitutional along the Riva to the Giardini Pubblici; I am bound for the market beyond the Rialto; so we part, and I continue my way across the Piazzetta, not forgetting to glance upward at the little shrine of the Madonna, where every evening two tiny lamps are lighted in perpetual memory of the Fornaretto, the young baker who was falsely accused and unjustly executed for a murder he had never committed.

Those birds of prey, the guides, are hardly yet astir, so one escapes their offers of personal guidance, reiterated in that extraordinary mayonnaise of languages which is the peculiar lingua franca of the tribe in every country; the glorious faade of the most beautiful church in Christendom (at last free from scaffoldings) is bathed in the morning sunshine, which lights up the golden burnish on the great bronze horses, as they stand pawing the air above the doorway. Out here in the sunshine everything is golden, and quiet, and motionless; but as I turn down the Merceria, and penetrate still farther into the heart of the labyrinth, going from one narrow calle to the other, crossing a bridge here, passing under a sotto-portico there, one seems to get into another world. A world of luminous greys and transparent browns, splashed here and there by wandering rays of sunlight that have lost their way and cannot get back again to the blue sky, of which one has an occasional glimpse overhead; a world no longer silent, majestic, and peaceful, as out there in the silvery Piazza by the sapphire sea, but full of the life and bustle of a Southern crowd intent on its little every-day affairs. The fish ordinaries, as I suppose they would be called in London, are doing a roaring trade; each one crowded with people breakfasting off the innumerable varieties of cooked fish, which lie in large open dishes round the shop, and are ranged in the windows behind wire gratings to attract the passers-by.

I am in no hurry, now that I have got beyond the ordinary tourist haunts, so I wind in and out from one calle to another, each one narrower than the last, until I finally come out on the Riva del Carbon by the Grand Canal, and, after stopping to admire the skill and good temper of every one concerned in the disentangling of a huge barge, which has got into a side canal a great deal too small for its bulky proportions, and threatens ruin and destruction to half a dozen gondolas and sandolos, I pass along, and, turning to the left, ascend the steps of the great stone bridge, the Rialto, which was erected by the Doge Pasquale Cicogna in 1588, who therefore adorned it with his crest, a stork or cicogna, in allusion to his family name.

Verily it is a motley crowd that is passing up and down between the lines of small shops that divide the width of the great bridge into three thoroughfares. The women clatter along in their fascinating wooden zoccoli, which are so becoming to the feet when the wearer is young and carries herself erect; when the wearer is old and bent, and the heels protude at the back beyond the wooden sole, then the effect is perhaps not so happy. Their heads and figures are draped in the long pointed shawls of every imaginable colour, for here we are among the popolo, and the smart black mantillas of the bourgeoisie are unknown except, perhaps, on festa days. Here and there I see a woman from the mainland of Lombardy, her head flashing with a nimbus of large silver pins thrust in a semicircle into the plaits at the back of her head. The little children toddle along, clattering also in their sciabatte, holding on to a corner of the mothers shawl, or else the little one is nestling on its mothers arm, and the one shawl covers the two dark heads and the wondering brown eyes, and every woman and child is thus transformed into a Madonna and Bambino. One wonders no more that the painters of old never wearied of painting such a subject, when it was daily suggested to them by such models.

Wandering merchants are many on the great bridge, and I have my choice of breaking my fast on small cuttlefishcrimson and knotty abominations, which the vendor lifts on a stick for my benefit out of a beautiful old copper basinroasted pumpkins in glorious slices of orange and green, or pan-forte di Siena, a compound of burnt almonds and hazelnuts, toothsome but unwholesome. Being fortunately possessed of the digestion of an ostrich, and having fond memories of the esteem with which I regarded pan-forte when a child, I decide in favour of the latter, and descend into the market, munching serenely.

The market is aglow with life and colour. I stop at a poultry-stall, where the chickens are trussed in a comical way, with their heads looking out from under the pinion of one wing: it is not chickens I sigh over, however, but the bunches of little birds of all sortsblack-caps, chaffinches, thrushes, and, alas! redbreasts too, that are hung up for sale. Underneath are the trays of beccafichi, their little bare red bodies looking, at a distance, like red sea-anemones. They are not half the size of the little green figs they are said to live upon, which are to be found at the next stall, where a riot of grapes, black and golden, is being poured out from the baskets which have just arrived. The bloom is still on them like hoar-frost, so I plunge in behind the stall among the baskets, and am lost to sight for many minutes, after which I emerge rather sugary about the finger-tips, having sampled all the grapesthe curiously-flavoured black