After the doges were let go in 1797 by the new management team of Napoleon and Satan, there was a very unhappy lull in Venetian history. It was an unhappy lull even while it was happening, before it became history.
And it wasn’t what I’d really call a lull, either, unless you call being put to bed with dengue fever a lull.
This interval of tyranny and anguish was abruptly cut short on March 22, 1848, when the Venetians revolted against Austria, which had acquired Venice from France in a diplomatic trade-off immortalized in the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 18, 1797). Cleverly, Napoleon effected this trade only after he had disemboweled the former Queen of the Seas, carrying off wagonloads of treasure and razing palaces, churches, convents and scuole (thereby making more treasure available for his waiting wagons).
The man who led the uprising and the brief establishment of the Republic of San Marco was a Venetian lawyer named Daniele Manin. I’ve outlined the story in another post, so I won’t go over it again. I would just appreciate your pausing for a moment to consider the magnificence of this doomed attempt and the people who put everything into it.
And just think: Only twelve years later, the Austrians were gone. I’m not capable of determining to what extent 1848 led to 1861, but I still want to give my own puny recognition of a huge event which everyone by now just takes for granted, I guess.
5 Comments
Resisteremo all’ultima polenta!!!!
I just began reading a book last night, “The City of Fallen Angels” by John Berendt, which has Venice as its locale, and I thought then about writing in today so you, Erla, and your readers, with your love of the city, might know about it. The book opens with two characters walking across a bridge to Campo Manin, and then I see this post! If I had been born on March 22nd (or yesterday, which some would suggest is true ;-), instead of today’s date, March 23rd, all of this would have been truly cosmic for me. But close, anyway.
I know Venice pretty well, having spent approximately a month there in several visits, and I think the book’s good, both as literature and (so far) as a representation of the city. It’s a novel centered around the historical actuality of Teatro La Fenice burning in 1996. But I wonder if any of you, especially Erla, who know Venice much better than I, have read the book and what your opinion of it might be.
I remember when the book came out — of course, I remember the event itself, too. I haven’t read it, so have no opinion.
What a melancholy story. I’ve read John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice and how he describes the pride that Venetians had in their Republic and the Stato da Mar. This leads me to my question: How many of today’s Venetians remember the fact that their citiy was one of the most powerful city-states of all time? I understand that they live in the city and see visual reminders of empire all the time. I don’t mean to come off as rude or anything.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Every Venetian remembers what their city used to be — not personally, obviously. The children, probably not as much because history is taught differently now than it was when Lino was a boy. In any case, you can’t generalize about “Venetians” — each individual remembers according to lots of factors, just as each individual in every country relates in his or her own way to their nation’s distant past. Two hundred years have gone by since the Republic fell, after all.