Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE PIAZZA AND THE CAMPANILE Tbe heart of VeniceOld-fashioned musicTeutonic invadersThe honeymoonersTrue republicanismA city of the poorThe black shawlsA brief triumphRed hairA band-night incidentThe pigeons of the PiazzaThe two ProcuratieA royal palaceThe shopkeepersFlorian'sGreat namesVenetian restaurantsLittle fish The old campanileA noble resolveThe new campanileThe angel vaneThe rival campaniliThe welcome liftThe bellsVenice from the Campanile. S MARK'S Square, or the Piazza, is more than the centre of Venice: to a large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore among its arcades. No other city has so representative a heart. On the four musical nights hereafternoons in the winterthe Piazza draws like a magnet. That every stranger is here, you may be sure, and most Venetian men. Some sit outside Florian's and the other cafes; others walk round and round the bandstand; others pause fascinated beside the musicians. And so it has been for centuries, and will be. New ideas and fashions come slowly into this city, where one does quite naturally what one's father and grandfather did; and a good instance of such contented conservatism is to be found in the music offered to these contented crowds, for they are still true to Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini, and with reluctance are experiments made among the newer men. In the daytime the population of the Piazza is more foreign than Venetian. In fact the only Venetians to be seen are waiters, photographers, and guides, the knots of errand boys watching the artists, and, I might add, the pigeons. But at night Venice claims it, although the foreigner is there too. It is amusing to sit at a table on the outside edge of Florian's great quadrangle of chairs and watch the ...