To the Top of a Tower on Horseback

On the 16th of May, 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte rode to the top of the Campanile, or bell tower, of St. Mark's, Venice, that he might himself signal to his fleet the surrender of the city. This Campanile, like all others in Italy, is detached from the Cathedral to which it belongs; it is 332 feet in height and 42 feet square at the base. The ascent, by a winding inclined plane, is easy and well lighted. The city of Venice owes its origin to a panic produced by the invasion of Italy in 421 A. D. by Attila the Hun, or, "The sword of Mars." Many inhabitants of cities bordering on the Adriatic fled before the barbarians to the islands in the Lagoon, a shallow bay twenty-five miles long and nine miles wide. To speak of Venice as "rising from the bosom of the ocean," is a poetical exaggeration. The Lagoon, which surrounds the city, is not a lake, but a low-level shore, an immense delta more or less inundated by the river waters which descend from the glaciers of the distant Alps, and especially by the influx of the Adriatic. The islands are evidently nothing but the accumulations of mud and sand brought together by the joint action of the sea and the rivers. There are three large and one hundred and fourteen small islands, formed by one hundred and forty-seven canals, connected by three hundred and seventy-eight bridges (most of them stone), and altogether about seven miles in circumference. As the water rises and falls four times daily, the Lagoon changes, having alternately the appearance of a vast tract of mud and of a solid sheet of water. The canals are happily called "the vital organs of Venice;" that they are so regarded is proved by the care and skill with which the Venetians have at all times maintained these artificial water passages, as well as those formed by nature. They have used every scientific device to keep up a perfect circulation of the waters in the Lagoon. But for the indefatigable labor of generation after generation, Venice must long since have ceased to be the "Island City," and the proud "Queen of the Adriatic" would have lost her title by losing her insular position. The independence of Venice lasted thirteen hundred and seventy-six years (421-1797 A. D.), from the foundation of a government on the island Rialto (High Bank) to the declaration of Napoleon Bonaparte that the Venetian Republic had ceased to exist.

No other state--not even Rome--has rivaled this longevity. After changing rulers many times, Venice was finally annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, in 1866.

The following mediaeval epigram on Venice, founded on the seas and established on the floods, pleased the Senate so well that they presented its author with a purse of gold:--