Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 November 1879 — Morning in Venice. [ARTICLE]

Morning in Venice.

Little little business began to take possession of the streets. Bakers’ shops and butchers’ shops and fish stalls were opened; the din of countless blacksmiths and coppersmiths filled the air at every turn, as though the making of locks and kettles and chimney pots were the usurping industry of the world; loud-voiced women called all the people to come and partake of baked pumpkin, fresh and hot; and the melody of mingled street cries grew to a chorus of supplication. Lately risen maidens lowered baskets from their balconies and fished up catmeat, or bread, or onions, or other household supplies, lowered the coppers for payment, gathered their scanty raiment about them and withdrew. The vender—we knew at the opera—pocketed his money, tossed his load to his head and yelled his noisy way down the alley. In the Piazza beyond the Rialto, where the early activity most centers, I took up a commanding position at an outrof-door table, aud ordered my “white coffee” and bread and butter. What a wonderful place it was for breakfasting—just for once! What pretty but carelessly clad women in black lace head-dresses came from each street and went toward the church; what a clatter the wooden pattens made and what a gabble the newsboys; what loads of fresh fruit and vegetables the women carried past; ho,w the urchins gambled for soldi; how unlike everything was to what we see at home; and how unreal one grows to feel himself in watching it all! The cheap dealers of the Rialto were taking down their shutters and'displaying their low-priced wares. Boys were sitting om the broad steps munening bread and revelling in the yellow luxury of bread wedges of hot and savory pumpkin. The purveyors of the adjacent quarters were climbing the steps with whole head-loads of grapes, or fish, or vegetables. Over the hand-rail, filling the whole width of the Grand Canal, la\ a fleet of barges unloading, with produce from beyond the lagoons, or stowing awa\ assorted cargoes of white and purple grapes, peaches, figs, lettuce, chiccory, rad-, ishes, shining white onions, carrots, beets, potatoes—the whole fresh-col-ored assortment of green-grocery. On shore the market people filled the streets and arcades with fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit, and flowers, and the whole air with a tumult of noisy traffic. I descended among the throng, where customers were importuned on every hand, and where sharp bargains were driving m sprats and snails and in fractions of the smallest fowls. Entering a little square shut in by

high houses, and, like most Venetian squares, dominated by the unfinished facade of a time-stained church, I noticed a singular activity among the people. They were scurrying in from every alley, and hastening from every house door, with odd-shaped copper buckets on hook-ended wooden bows, and with little coils of rope. Old men and women, oovs and gins, all gathered closely about a covered well curb in the middle of the square; and still they hurried on, until they stood a dozen deep around it. ' Presently the church tower slowly sturck eight, and a little old man forced his way through the crowd, passed his ponderous iron key through the lid, and unlocked the well. The kettles went jangling into it, and came slopping out again at an amazing rate, and the people trudged off home, each with a pair of them swung from the aheulder. The wells are deep cisterns, which are filled during the night, and it is out of amiable consideration for those who love their morning nap that they are given as good a chance as their neighbors of getting an unsoiled supply. It to the first instance that has come to my notice of a commendable municipal restrain upon the reprehensible practice of early rising. Few, very few, of those who came for water had had time for their toilets. Their day evidently begins with this excursion to the public reservoir. Later in my walk I saw a cistern being replenished. A barge fillel with fresh water lay in a canal near by, and a steampump forced the supply through a hose to the square, where a gutter carried it to the well. The water to of excellent quality. It to brought through conduits from Euganean Hills, near Padua, but Its distribution through the city is carried on in the original manner indicated. For a city where the salt sea to the scavenger, where ablutions are not de rigueur, and where water to not a beverage, the costfof laying distributing mains has wisely been spared.