Three Islands of Venice

Three Islands of Venice

I don’t often spend much time reading the puffery articles in the Easyjet inflight magazine (apologies to one loyal reader). But one piece did catch my eye as I flew into Venice recently. It was about the islands in the Venice Lagoon.

Although there was a lot of stuff about start-up vineyards and boutique hotels, at least the author did highlight the charms of the islands – even the ones that are most visited (being on the Vaparetto routes) Murano (the glassware place), Burano and Torcello; and the ones that are  component islands of Venice itself, such as San Giorgio.

The trip to Venice included some tussles with the selfie-jams around St Mark’s Square and the nearby bridges to the west. But like a lucky debauchee, Venice’s clogged arteries are not fatal to the experience of the city. Step away from the various ant trails, and one is quickly in easily walked streets and alleys. (I mean that there is space to proceed. I don’t mean that you won’t get completely lost, even with a decent map. Venice is guaranteed to reduce most map reading skills to guesswork.)

The island of San Giorgio, although only a couple of minutes’ boat ride away from the slowly surging crowds round S Marco, exemplifies that truth. One arrives at a tranquil place, endowed with a huge Palladian church

and a huge former monastery, with strikingly handsome courtyards.

This building is now the home of the Cini Foundation, a privately endowed cultural institution that promotes arts (it was providing space for a London dance company and an exhibition of Viennese glassware during my visit), current affairs symposia (Russia a recent topic), and has occasionally hosted big-ticket political events (a couple of G7 summits).

But the overwhelming impression given by the monastery is one of faded, silent beauty.

The rest of the island is quiet and green, dotted with empty military buildings. The one exception is the lively small, but elegant, C19 stone marina.

A visit to two of the further-away islands, Burano and Torcello provides further contrasts. Burano, famed for lace, has two or three main thoroughfares that are pretty crowded.

Away from these, there is not so much a patchwork of streets as a series of jumbled, mostly empty, courtyards, one giving on to the next in a haphazard fashion that inflicts micro-confusion on the visitor. (One is never more than a few metres from a main route or the edge of the island.)

Burano is mainly built up. Torcello is almost wholly green and open land, with one solitary access canal. To be sure, there are tour groups, but they tend to come in spasms and not in a continuous flow. They fill out a couple of restaurants, helpfully leaving the handful of others half empty. (One such is set in a huge garden and serves excellent food.)

The architectural jewel of Torcello is its “cathedral”. It is about the size of medium level English parish church (but with a very tall bell tower) and traces its origins back to C7. The church seen today was mainly built between C10 and C11.

Each end of the building is dominated by huge Byzantine-style mosaic frescoes. One, of Mary, looms majestically over the main altar, another over a side chapel, religious confidence in all their colours, gold predominating.

The third fills the rear wall and depicts, with no less confidence, the Day of Judgment.

Unlike the sinuous writhings of later great painters, the mosaicists’ art is simple, stylised – and very, very effective. Demons poke the damned beneath the fires of Hell, those fires seemingly originating, towards the top of the Mosaic, from the Blood of Christ.

One wonders what the early medieval churchgoer felt when contemplating these images. Was he or she suitably cowed into virtue by fear of Hell? Perhaps, sometimes, the converse held: the pious rejoiced at the fate of the damned.

It seems to have been a tenet of the early Church (and presumably of later versions) that those who are saved have full knowledge of the torments of the lost. Here was a conundrum – if the feelings that that knowledge called forth were ones of horror or pity, then God’s perfect goodness and perfect justice would be impugned. Therefore theologians concluded that those in heaven must rejoice at the everlasting punishment of the damned, even if the sufferers included their own kindred. Eminent Church Fathers wrote accordingly:

Tertullian: “How I laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils…”

Aquinas: “In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned…”

To (most) modern minds such views are the ultimate reductio ad absurdum. If this kind of joy is the conclusion, then the premise of hellfire must be wrong. However, proponents of the murderous versions of Islamism would doubtless recognise and approve of these sentiments and, indeed, the logic behind them, even if they would select different candidates for damnation.

July 2016