The Books … of Venice! Gondola Days!

Our book today is that incredibly durable classic of Venice books, Gondola Days by the redoubtable artist, novelist, and all-around overachiever F. Hopkinson Smith, who wrote it, illustrated it, and basked in its success in 1897. He’d written quite a few books prior to this one, and he’d go one to write quite a few more. But Gondola Days struck gold with the burgeoning tourist industry and sold like iced toffee.

Smith sticks to guidelines for writing this kind of book, guidelines we’ve seen quite a few times in examining the books … of Venice here at Stevereads. He opens his account by bringing his readers straight into Venice (“Now the smells greet you – damp, cool, low-tide smells … the palaces and warehouses shut out the sky …”), and then in a series of chapters, he wanders the cafes, markets, gardens, churches, and canals of the city. Throughout, he strikes the stereotypical tone of high romance, but he adds in some sharp image-making that’s always appealed to me (I may very well be the only remaining reader who actually knows and likes his novels):

This quality of the picturesque saturates Venice. You find it in her stately structures; in her spacious Piazza, with its noble Campanile, clock tower, and facade of San Marco; in her tapering towers, deep-wrought bronze, and creamy marble; in her cluster of butterfly sails on far-off, wide horizons; in her opalescent dawns, flaming sunsets, and star-lit summer nights. You find it in the gatherings about her countless bridges spanning dark waterways; in the ever-changing color of crowded markets; in lazy gardens lolling over broken walls; in twisted canals, quaint doorways, and soggy, ooze-covered landing-steps. You find it, too, in many a dingy palace – many a lop-sided old palace, with door jambs and windows askew, with lintels craning their heads over the edge, ready to plunge headlong into the canal below.

He’s very good at including a variety of the city’s moods as well. Most tourists never see any of those moods – they trundle off their cruise ship, walk around complaining and taking pictures, the trundle back onto their cruise ship, all in high summer. But for anybody who’s actually lived there instead of only visiting, the memories are quite different, and Smith catches some of them quite well, as in his very skillful chapter “On Rainy Days”:

All the light, all the color, all the rest and charm and loveliness of Venice are dead. All the tea-rose, sun-warmed marble, all the soft purples of shifting shadows, all the pearly light of summer cloud and the silver shimmer of the ever-changing, million-tinted sea are gone. Only cold, gray stone and dull, yellow water, reflecting leaden skies, and black-stained columns, wet, colorless gondolas, and disheartened, baffled pigeons! To-day the wind blows east!

Many, many, many other travelogues of Venice have come and gone since Gondola Days first flew off the “Newest Items” tables of Tremont Street bookshops, but this book always pulls me back for re-reading, whereas so many of the others were bought, read, and then discarded without a second thought. Except for a few accidentally-included details here and there, most of the Venice in Smith’s account never really existed outside of fantasy – but maybe that’s the point.