A Woman's Walks E-Book

Various Authors

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 106

Beschreibung

"To anyone of my sex who feels inclined to follow my example and visit Billingsgate Market when it is in full blast, I would recommend the use of Louis XV. heels - the higher the better - in fact, a pair of stilts would not be inappropriate"From young men seeking outdoor adventure to intrepid ladies of a certain age discovering other cultures, Victorian explorers were starting to develop a more personal kind of travelogue. In A Woman's Walks, Lady Colin Campbell takes us on a voyage of exploration through her inner landscape - as well as through Italy, France, Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, London, and the English countryside. A Woman's Walks is part of 'Found on the Shelves', published with The London Library. The books in this series have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over 17 miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.

Leseprobe

A WOMAN’S WALKS

Studies in Colour Abroad and at Home

Contents

Title PageA Woman’s Walks About this Book About the Publisher Copyright

A WOMAN’S WALKS

BY LADY COLIN CAMPBELL

LADY COLIN CAMPBELL (née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood), born in 1857, was best known for the divorce scandal which shocked Victorian society. After four years of marriage, she sued for divorce on grounds of her husband’s infidelity and cruelty. Lord Colin alleged that his wife had committed adultery with at least four men. No divorce was obtained, and she became a successful writer, editor and journalist, a member of The London Library, and died in 1911.

Lady Colin Campbell

A Venetian Market

It is not only in the gondola that the charm of Venice is to be felt: the popular notion that there is no walking to be done in the City of the Sea is as fallacious as most popular notions usually are. I know Venice too well to give in to this idea, and so one morning I start off in the clear golden sunlight up the Riva degli Schiavoni, where the first morning vaporetti are starting for the Lido and for Chioggia, and the gondoliers are lounging about lazily, knowing that it is yet too early for the forestieri, as a rule, to be afoot and afloat. I reach the Piazzetta, and see a friend coming across from the Zecca opposite, but we are both too consistent Venetians to court malanni by meeting on the ill-omened space between the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore, where the executions were ordered by the Council of Ten to take place, so as to put a stop to the gambling-tables which stood there; so instead we meet and exchange greetings under the loggia, where formerly the Austrian cannon stood ready pointed into the heart of the fair Queen of the Adriatic. My friend is going for a morning constitutional along the Riva to the Giardini Pubblici; I am bound for the market beyond the Rialto; so we part, and I continue my way across the Piazzetta, not forgetting to glance upward at the little shrine of the Madonna, where every evening two tiny lamps are lighted in perpetual memory of the Fornaretto, the young baker who was falsely accused and unjustly executed for a murder he had never committed.

Those birds of prey, the guides, are hardly yet astir, so one escapes their offers of personal guidance, reiterated in that extraordinary mayonnaise of languages which is the peculiar lingua franca of the tribe in every country; the glorious façade of the most beautiful church in Christendom (at last free from scaffoldings) is bathed in the morning sunshine, which lights up the golden burnish on the great bronze horses, as they stand pawing the air above the doorway. Out here in the sunshine everything is golden, and quiet, and motionless; but as I turn down the Merceria, and penetrate still farther into the heart of the labyrinth, going from one narrow calle to the other, crossing a bridge here, passing under a sotto-portico there, one seems to get into another world. A world of luminous greys and transparent browns, splashed here and there by wandering rays of sunlight that have lost their way and cannot get back again to the blue sky, of which one has an occasional glimpse overhead; a world no longer silent, majestic, and peaceful, as out there in the silvery Piazza by the sapphire sea, but full of the life and bustle of a Southern crowd intent on its little every-day affairs. The fish ordinaries, as I suppose they would be called in London, are doing a roaring trade; each one crowded with people breakfasting off the innumerable varieties of cooked fish, which lie in large open dishes round the shop, and are ranged in the windows behind wire gratings to attract the passers-by.

I am in no hurry, now that I have got beyond the ordinary tourist haunts, so I wind in and out from one calle to another, each one narrower than the last, until I finally come out on the Riva del Carbon by the Grand Canal, and, after stopping to admire the skill and good temper of every one concerned in the disentangling of a huge barge, which has got into a side canal a great deal too small for its bulky proportions, and threatens ruin and destruction to half a dozen gondolas and sandolos, I pass along, and, turning to the left, ascend the steps of the great stone bridge, the Rialto, which was erected by the Doge Pasquale Cicogna in 1588, who therefore adorned it with his crest, a stork or cicogna, in allusion to his family name.

Verily it is a motley crowd that is passing up and down between the lines of small shops that divide the width of the great bridge into three thoroughfares. The women clatter along in their fascinating wooden zoccoli, which are so becoming to the feet when the wearer is young and carries herself erect; when the wearer is old and bent, and the heels protude at the back beyond the wooden sole, then the effect is perhaps not so happy. Their heads and figures are draped in the long pointed shawls of every imaginable colour, for here we are among the popolo, and the smart black mantillas of the bourgeoisie are unknown except, perhaps, on festa days. Here and there I see a woman from the mainland of Lombardy, her head flashing with a nimbus of large silver pins thrust in a semicircle into the plaits at the back of her head. The little children toddle along, clattering also in their sciabatte, holding on to a corner of the mother’s shawl, or else the little one is nestling on its mother’s arm, and the one shawl covers the two dark heads and the wondering brown eyes, and every woman and child is thus transformed into a Madonna and Bambino. One wonders no more that the painters of old never wearied of painting such a subject, when it was daily suggested to them by such models.

Wandering merchants are many on the great bridge, and I have my choice of breaking my fast on small cuttlefish—crimson and knotty abominations, which the vendor lifts on a stick for my benefit out of a beautiful old copper basin—roasted pumpkins in glorious slices of orange and green, or pan-forte di Siena, a compound of burnt almonds and hazelnuts, toothsome but unwholesome. Being fortunately possessed of the digestion of an ostrich, and having fond memories of the esteem with which I regarded pan-forte when a child, I decide in favour of the latter, and descend into the market, munching serenely.

The market is aglow with life and colour. I stop at a poultry-stall, where the chickens are trussed in a comical way, with their heads looking out from under the pinion of one wing: it is not chickens I sigh over, however, but the bunches of little birds of all sorts—black-caps, chaffinches, thrushes, and, alas! redbreasts too, that are hung up for sale. Underneath are the trays of beccafichi, their little bare red bodies looking, at a distance, like red sea-anemones. They are not half the size of the little green figs they are said to live upon, which are to be found at the next stall, where a riot of grapes, black and golden, is being poured out from the baskets which have just arrived. The bloom is still on them like hoar-frost, so I plunge in behind the stall among the baskets, and am lost to sight for many minutes, after which I emerge rather sugary about the finger-tips, having sampled all the grapes—the curiously-flavoured black fragole as well as the greenish moscata, and the sweet, juicy vineyard grapes that taste of the sun; and bearing a bulgy paper parcel, that threatens to “come undone,” as the children say, in a most distressing manner at every step. However, this is but the first of many parcels, for who that is fructivorous could refrain from buying in the midst of such profusion? Figs, tender, green, and luscious, each bearing testimony to its internal excellence by the little drop of gum which adorns one end, follow next, and then pears of all sizes and colours, from the big Jerseys to the tiny red “Canadas,” until we finally can carry no more, and on counting up, find we have expended the enormous sum of a franc and a half!

A Fruit-Stall

Laden like the spies from Canaan, and like them laden with fruit, we leave the market-place and, picking our steps amongst heaps of huge pumpkins, grey-green, olive, red, and orange in colour, that might serve, any one of them, for the chariot of Cinderella, we make our way to the Pesceria, or fish-market. We pass a woman sitting, like the figure of Titian’s mother in the picture of the “Presentation of the Virgin,” between a basket of eggs and another of live doves, whose pure white plumage would seem to mark them out for sacrifice. The cast-iron roofing to the fish-market is a new institution, far from ornamental to the Grand Canal, but no doubt useful to the vendors who have their stalls beneath. Never have I seen such a wonderful variety of sea-beasts disposed for sale. Fish of all shapes and sizes, to which I do not even attempt to give names: some striped like tigers, others spotted like the pard; red fish, white fish, green fish, blue fish, fish that are all body and no head, fish that are all head and no body. In size there is the same variety: at one end of the scale is whitebait, at the other a gigantic tunny which is being cut into slices that look just like steaks of horseflesh, while in between are small sharks, evil-looking beasts even in death. “Eels a many” are wallowing in buckets and tubs, sticky, slimy masses of dark olive-green, flanked by crawling heaps of tiny, gruesome-looking crabs and jumping masses of large greyish-brown gamberi or shrimps, awaiting the cauldron which is to improve their complexions and turn them a rosy red. In and about all these frutta di mare are strange-looking piles, some snow-white, others steel-grey, others again white and grey, and all garnished with dreadful eyes that follow one with a glassy stare. With a shudder I discover that they are various kinds of sepias and octopods, which the omniverous Venetians look upon as toothsome and delicious morsels. One merchant presses upon me a dish of these revolting creatures ready prepared for cooking, cut into long strips that suggest macaroni; and as I look at them askance, I secretly wonder how near death by starvation would have to come before I would consent to make such a gastronomic experiment.

The mere thought of eating one of those dreadful things with their glassy eyes makes one feel cold all over; so we flee back to the Rialto, where we only pause to purchase a poor little live bird that some children of Belial (is it necessary to particularise that they were small boys?) have captured and are worrying after the manner of their kind; and then we plunge once more into the twilight of the calle, where the red and green peppers, and the piles of fruit and vegetables at the stalls, make blots of colour in dark places, and so return to the Piazza. Here we let go our captive bird; but it is too tired and bewildered to fly more than a few yards, when, with a cry of glee, it is captured by a facchino, who proceeds to carry it off in triumph. But it is not for that I released the prisoner from the boys, so I start off in pursuit, and, in vigorous Venetian, denounce the pirate and reclaim my property. There is some danger to the victim of the dispute, as the pirate is loth and indignant; but I am not to be daunted, and having made good my claim, I carry off the frightened birdling to the steps of the Luna, and bribe a gondolier to take it across to the Royal Gardens, where it finally regains its liberty among the trees and flowers. And thus feeling that my morning walk has at least benefited one living thing besides myself, I return happy and hungry to my temporary home.

Marooned at Milan

For the collecting of varied experience there is nothing like being a good-natured idiot. A reluctance to say “No” to unreasonable requests, especially from helpless brother or sister idiots, is apt to introduce all sorts of variations into the quietest and best-ordered existence. This is no doubt the reward; for who would sooner “rest unburnished” rather than “shine in us”? When,