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The Third Tower
Journeys in Italy
By Antal Szerb, Len Rix Steerforth Press
Copyright © 1936 Estate of Antal Szerb
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78227-053-9
CHAPTER 1
I initially wanted to go to Spain, but Spain, in this most horrific summer in all its history, did not seem a very welcoming place, with its opposing radio stations taking turns to howl in triumph over the destruction of everything in the world for which one would want to visit that country. Perhaps I shall never get there now; and if I did, I would no longer find what I went to see. From time to time history seems to forget a particular city or citadel — a Nuremberg, an Oxford, a Toledo — tucked away behind its back. But this is mere absentmindedness: a signal arrives, and amid wars, revolutions, catastrophic upheaval and the hammer blows of "progress", its impermanence is laid bare.
Then it occurred to me that I simply must go to Italy — while Italy remains where it is, and while going there is still possible. Who knows for how much longer that will be; indeed, for how much longer I, or any of us, will be able to go anywhere? The way events are moving, no one will be allowed to set foot outside his own country The Germans have long found it almost impossible to venture abroad, with a fine of a thousand marks for attempting to visit Austria. The Russians too have been denied this right for a great many years. Foreign travel is not one of life's basic needs. No doubt the totalitarian state will sooner or later decree that the true patriot is the one who stays at home.
And this is why, whenever I travel to Italy, I go there as if for the very last time, and why, when I first set eyes on any of its towns, it is as if I am not just returning, but bidding it farewell. Dostoevsky writes that we should live as if our every minute were the last moments of a man condemned to death: that way, we would grasp the ineffable richness of life. My impressions of Italy always feel like the last visions of a dying man.
TO BE IN VENICE
I travelled to Italy in a headlong rush, a blind panic, only half packed, without attending upon the deities of the National Bank's foreign exchange department, barely pausing for breath, straight to Venice. The heat was sweltering, the city bursting at the seams, and I was moved on, with varying degrees of brusqueness, from hotel to hotel. They say the city had never known such a season. The Spanish resorts were being bombed, and in the French ones the waiters were going on strike at every second mealtime. In the early morning, when the late-to-bed had finally retired and before the early risers were up, there was not a single lodging, of any description, to be had in the city — if we ignore the odd German dozing until dawn on the coffee-house terraces to save the expense of a hotel. It was certainly not pleasant to arrive in the heat, in this pampered city, crammed as it was with the world's fashionable riffraff, and be forced to wander for hours looking for somewhere to lay my head. But I drew enormous comfort from the simple fact that I was there. Whether things were going well or badly, whether I was miserable or happy, meant nothing beside the fact that it was there, in Venice, that I was happy or unhappy, that things were going well or badly. Life is not always and everywhere uniformly "real". How wise were the great scholastics who distinguished between degrees of being, rising by regular gradations of reality towards perfection.
No, I didn't "enjoy myself" or "feel at home" in Venice, in the commonly accepted, physical-emotional sense of these terms. But, for the entire length of my stay, I was filled with elation by the mere fact that I was there, and that, by sharing in the life of that exalted sphere, I was more completely myself.
IN PRAISE OF VENICE
Venice is the centre of the world. Or rather, one of its centres, for the world has several. It tilts on various axes, its prevailing truths are legion; the "one thing needful" takes many different forms. In St Mark's Square you really have a sense of being at the centre of the world — -just as you do in several places in Rome, or at the Place de l'Opéra in Paris. London has none of these sites. London may be the greatest city on Earth, and the most populous, but it remains somewhere out on the periphery, not at the centre. It has no St Mark's Square. Following Valery Larbaud's principle, one might describe it as village-like in its isolation. A man strolling around St Mark's Square knows that by doing so he is performing a kind of function, just being there, at the centre of the world, letting the world revolve around him.
Venice is the city of intimate closeness. The most human-scale of all cities. Here Western culture's Faustian rush to infinite expansion comes to a halt. Venice cannot "develop". It cannot become any larger than it already is, because every square inch of available dry land has long been crammed full. Nor is there very much of it. Wherever you set out from, the city can be traversed from one end to the other in half an hour, almost all of it on foot. Everything is to hand, and distant objects are brought close enough to touch. Great seafaring ships make their way between the rows of houses, for here the wide ocean comes home. That is perhaps why Venice is more of a city than any other. It holds more. It is more of a home.
Darkness is gathering over the lagoon where it touches St Mark's Square, bringing the silhouette of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Giudecca Island and Santa Maria della Salute into sharp relief, and making them more than ever the standard schoolroom example — a paradigm of inflection, like amo-amas-amat — of the beauty of landscape and the works of man. And the soft radiance of its brick-pink serenity spills out over the city — this city that exists in the spontaneous sense of nostalgia experienced by everyone who feels, on arrival, that he must have been here before, though he has never previously set eyes on it.
THE BACK ALLEYS
And once again, with the same expectation and excitement, I wander through the back alleys of Venice. These streets are wonderfully narrow. There are some so narrow that two overweight men cannot pass through them walking side by side. Even the broader ones are only wide enough for the traffic of a bygone age. One Easter Sunday I saw for myself how one of these passageways can become so crowded that the flow comes to a complete stop, unable to move forward or go back. Only very slowly, step by step, after a good half-hour's wriggling and squeezing, could you fight your way free from a street just one hundred metres long.
If I were compelled to speak with total candour, I would say that it is for these back alleys that I love Italy. For me, they represent what gardens were to the age of Goethe, and what "Nature" was to the Romantics. No snow-covered peak, no glacier, mountain lake or stream, no sea or parkland could ever move me like the back alleys of an old Italian city. My dreams, my moods of nostalgia, lead me thither. The first time I set eyes on an Italian hilltop town with these same tiny streets I felt the deepest ecstasy I had ever known.
What this is in me I do not know. Under the influence of these little passageways I experience an altered state so deep I simply cannot regard it as the sort of emotion you would expect from a historically minded person; it is so much more intense and instinctive. I am aware of the usual Freudian explanation, and it bores me. It is so plausible I no longer believe it.
PENSIONE
In the first hotel that promised an available room, the waiter spoke French. I panicked. Instinct told me, as the event confirmed, that the French language would not come cheap there. Where they address you in German, it is because they know you have no money; where the language is French, they take you for a member of the aristocracy. I did not linger in that particular establishment. Eventually I came to anchor in a little pensione that nestled, in the most historical way imaginable (embedded, as it were, in world history), in a building right beside the Clock Tower, the Torre dell'Orologio, in St Mark's Square, by the entrance to the Merceria. From my window I can study some of the more intimate details of the Basilica. Directly above my head the two bronze men bong out the hours. I feel as a mouse would in a slipper of the great Doge Morosini.
The food here is tolerable. The tiny window of the dining room opens onto St Mark's Square. The guests speak various dialects of French and German. A French family: two mothers (or, rather, one of them must be a mother, though I can't work out which) and two daughters. You would think that gaucherie was the preserve of the Northern races, but from my observation of these two French ladies and other French guests they offer strong competition to the Germans. It's just that theirs is a different sort of gaucherie: more gracious. Or is this just my prejudice?
UNGHERIA
The Italians adore Hungary. Every day you read in the papers: "Family house on Lake Balaton", or "Nostalgie di Halászbástya". (For them, as I see it, "nostalgia" signifies "ambience" or "atmosphere" — what a wise language!) And people respond most warmly when they hear the word "Ungheria". I get the impression that the name implies almost as much for Italians as "Italy" does for us — a friendly, romantic and fundamentally different country. What attracts us to them is that everything there is so old, and what attracts them to us is that everything we have is so new — a closely related thing. I once watched a group of Italian tourists gazing in reverence at the Pasaréti Church: they had never before seen such a new one.
I was once asked in England how I could possibly have left my own highly romantic country for such a grey, petty-bourgeois place. Naturally my questioners were Italian.
THE SECRET OF ST MARK'S
The vast, classical Square and the Byzantine Basilica of St Mark form an organic whole, but logically speaking they are mutually contradictory. The Procuratorial buildings and the Piazza represent the culmination of European culture: the Basilica is primordial, barbarically gilded, primitive, pre-European, older than anything European. When it was built, Europe had not yet fully decided to become what it now is. It might have been another Byzantium.
Over its portal one sees an iron grill of which any village blacksmith today would be ashamed. What a rudimentary lion stands atop St Mark's column on the quay ... and the Don Quixote on the column opposite! The two porphyry lions behind the Basilica are so childishly clumsy you feel compelled to stroke their manes. I see these same red lions again and again in Northern Europe, crouching tamely in front of churches, as if begging for alms.
But what does mere technique matter? Here, the spirit is everything. St Mark's Square is no larger than Szeged's Dóm Tér, but what miraculous grandezza, in its immediate setting and the wider Venetian context! Its very grandeur stems from this contradiction: that, small as the place was, they never stinted on the offerings they made to their own greatness. And the secret of the Basilica is that when Venice was still no more than a clearing in the jungle, in the European middle ages, they could sacrifice so much gold, and physical labour, and beauty, to their God and patron saint. If St Mark's were built today, would it genuinely please as much, for example, as the Duomo in Florence? I doubt it. The Campanile is a modern construction, and one senses a certain sacrilege about it. The Basilica of St Mark is modern in no sense at all.
But ... why do they always play the Blue Danube and Die Fledermaus?
SAN ZANIPOLO
This is where the doges rest, after their labours ruling the city. In front of it, the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni — the quintessential equestrian statue and reference point for every subsequent such tribute to kings and generals. None of them surpasses the grim, manly features of the condottiere, or the perfect unity of horse and rider so justly admired by art historians. But inside the Basilica I saw a tomb on which the dead man was no less inseparable from his coffin than the condottiere from his horse. I found that much more affecting. Not everyone comes into the world associated with a horse. But with a coffin ...
The impermanence of things. Venice found itself on the road to annihilation once before, at the start of the nineteenth century, an appalling decline that was eventually arrested. But for how much longer? Here in the Zanipolo, standing above the tombs of the doges, I am filled once again by that overpowering vision that haunts all of us who concern ourselves with the inner workings of history and Schiller's "prophecy of hindsight". The time will come when the human race, horribly reduced in numbers, will scrabble for a living in the mansions of the world's great cities like troglodytes in caves. We can see this process already beginning in some of the oldest metropolitan centres: at the Place des Vosges in Paris, in the Orsini Palace in Rome, and here in Venice in the more outlying palazzi along the Grand Canal. First will come a time when the Ducal Palace is divided into tiny bedroom-and-kitchen flats; then a time when even they are no longer needed. This is how antiquity itself passed away: there were centuries during which Rome had no more inhabitants than a village. The Eskimo scene in Madach's The Tragedy of Man is set in the world of the natural sciences. If Madach were writing today he would surely have placed this episode not in the polar regions but in St Mark's Square, or the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, and Eve would emerge not from an igloo, but from the ruins of a stairway leading down to the Métro.
A THOUGHT
I cannot decide which was here first, the water or the houses. I think it must have been the water; but how is it that the water should begin so precisely where the houses end? One has the impression that they must have built the streets first and then put the water in position.
EVENING IN THEPIAZZA
After dinner I sit on the terrace of a coffee house. The square is no larger than a middle-class dining room, and yet five busy streets pour into it. It is pure theatre, Italy as represented in the opera. And the population comes and goes, rushing about in a vast crowd. It is hard to believe that there could be so many Italians — especially towards evening. All coming and going. But where to? And always along the same streets, until they are two-thirds empty.
On the coffee-house radio the Italian commentator Pluhar is reporting on some Olympic contest. His delivery is calm and expressionless; it carries no trace of his usual infectious excitement. You would have thought that the Italians ...
The streets are filled with large numbers of elderly men in sailor's tops and trousers; they are indeed sailors. Among the general throng one sees the occasional figure clad in white drill and pith helmet. These are police. They stroll about in their white uniforms like Englishmen among the natives.
SIGNORAS AND SIGNORINAS
And so many women! Venetian women go about bareheaded, and they are all decidedly plain. Compared to them the women of Paris are genuinely beautiful. There are plenty of blondes to be seen: partly because the Venetian type, as we know from our Burckhardt, tended to blondeness even in the Renaissance, and partly because they follow the currently fashionable Anglo-Saxon ideal of beauty and bleach their hair. The paradox of their faces lies in the fair Teutonic hair and the fine-chiselled Latin features. The two somehow do not sit well together. The faces of the men have their own paradox: along with their prominent Romano-Jewish noses and beautiful Southern eyes they have ears that stick out, like the Germans. You do see younger men who are exceedingly handsome, but the women are not in the least attractive. But no doubt very respectable. In Venice I saw only one street girl, and even she was walking arm in arm with her mother. Yet I was solicited by another, who cannot have been twelve.
There is no shortage of them. But in Italy even I am respectable. In Paris and London my amorous fantasies burned with a persistent and restless flame. I imagined that within the unfamiliar houses (and the unfamiliar women, of a different racial type) lurked a whole new world of feelings and pleasures. In Italy I don't feel even the usual low level of sexual restlessness that inevitably characterizes my bachelor existence. Women simply don't interest me. In Venice I have no need of them. The reason: Venice is herself a woman, mysterious and alluring, in her brick-pink serenity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Third Tower by Antal Szerb, Len Rix. Copyright © 1936 Estate of Antal Szerb. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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