PIAZETTA, VENICE. Drawn by S. Prout. "Venice, lost and won, Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, Sinks, like a sea-weed, into whence it rose ! Better be whelm'd beneath the waves, and shun, Even in destruction's depth, her foreign foes, From whom submission wrings an infamous repose. "In youth she was all glory,-a new Tyre,- "Statues of glass -- all shiver'd-the long file Of her dead Doges are declined to dust; But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous pile Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust; C C Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust, Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice's lovely walls." "Venice pleases me as much as I expected, and I expected much. It is one of those places which I know before I see them, and has haunted me most, after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety of their gondolas, and the silence of their canals. I do not even dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the singularity of its vanished costume however, there is much left still; the Carnival, too, is coming." Letter to Mr. Murray," Life of Lord Byron." The Piazetta is the state entrance to Venice from the sea, and extends to the church and the eastern end of the Place of St. Mark. In the view here given, the Ducal Palace, in all the grandeur of its massiveness, and all the topsy-turvy of its architectural character,— a vast incumbent structure upon an apparently very inadequate support,-appears on the left hand; and on the right, the Mint and the Library of St. Mark; beneath which are a range of shops under a colonnade, extending into and around the Place of St. Mark. In the foreground are the square marble pillars which Simond mentions as being covered with Syriac characters, upon PIAZETTA. which the gates of the city of Acre were once suspended. In the distance terminating the Piazetta, and parallel with the sea façade of the palace, are the two granite columns (thirty feet by eight, each in a single piece) which were brought to Venice in the early part of the twelfth century by the victorious doge, Dominico Micheli, on his return from Palestine. They were among the trophies which he took from some island in the Archipelago, where he had compelled the emperor of the East to respect the Venetian flag. In 1329, the Venetians placed upon one of these columns a statue of St. Theodore, anciently the patron saint of Venice, who afterwards lost his election, in opposition to St. Mark; when the senate, tired of their old protector, sought a new one. Upon the other was the bronze winged-lion-the companion of St. Mark, and the emblem of the new patron saint; a strange figure, which has been oddly compared by Simond to “ colossal chimney-sweeper crawling out of a chimneytop." This lion was removed by the French in the year 1797, and placed in the square of the Invalids; whence, after the events of 1815, it returned to its old station, overlooking the Adriatic. The object in the extreme distance of this view is the Porto Franco. a There is scarcely a spot in Venice which more powerfully recalls the eventful history of the republic than this: here is the seat of ducal power, whence issued the mandates of a senate which so greatly influenced the destinies of Europe in the middle ages; here are at once the trophies of this sea queen, and the evidence of her subjugation. The history of Venice is one of the most interesting, except that of our own country, to which the political inquirer can turn his attention, and of which the "Sketches of Venetian History," recently published by Mr. Murray, is an admirable epitome. In it the origin and progress of its political existence are traced, and the immense resources of wealth and power derived from commerce by a people placed upon a spot so limited by Nature that she defied art greatly to extend it. The mud and sand-banks in the Lagunes, formed by the deposition of silt within the Lido, the natural breakwater of Venice, appear to have been inhabited by a few fishermen at a very early period, but they were unnoticed by the Romans, from their utter insignificance. In the fifth century, when the Huns under Attila overran the territory of ancient Venetia, many of the inhabitants took refuge on the flat islands along the coast, particularly within the Lagunes, and on that of Ripa-Alta, where the Rialto, the first foundation of Venice, was laid. From this place the inhabitants sent the salt of their islands, and fish from their seas, to the neighbouring continent; afterwards they became transporters of wine and oil from Istria to Ravenna; and finally, the carriers of the Adriatic. Their commerce produced wealth, their wealth importance. At this time they considered their |