Venetian Life, Past and Present (Noon Today)

"Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice," writes William Deans Howells in Chapter VII of his great non-fiction book Venetian Life (originally published in 1866), "are those ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of the country’s clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great cream-colored cows.

Fishermen, also, come down the little calli—with shallow baskets of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own price. “Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they hawk their fish.

Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders—who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman."

It was the last of these types of "provisioners" once common in the calli and campi of Venice that I thought I caught sight of today around noon in Cannaregio, hurrying along Fondamenta dei Mori with two wooden chairs stacked seat to seat in his hands, then dashing over a bridge as we puttered beneath it in our little boat and out of sight. Thinking of the Howells passage above, I was almost ready to take him for a ghost. But he's more likely to have been heading to Sunday lunch with a pair of extra seats for some other guests--in one of the few areas of the city still animated by Venetian life.