144 THE STONES OF VENICE

century, the good Doge Pietro Orseolo II. left in his will the third of his entire fortune “per la festa delle Marie;” and, in the fourteenth century, so many people came from the rest of Italy to see it, that special police regulations were made for it, and the Council of Ten were twice summoned before it took place.* The expense lavished upon it seems to have increased till the year 1379, when all the resources of the republic were required for the terrible war of Chiozza, and all festivity was for that time put an end to. The issue of the war left the Venetians with neither the power nor the disposition to restore the festival on its ancient scale, and they seem to have been ashamed to exhibit it in reduced splendour. It was entirely abolished.

§ 14. As if to do away even with its memory, every feature of the surrounding scene which was associated with that festival has been in succeeding ages destroyed. With one solitary exception,† there is not a house left in the whole Piazza of Santa Maria Formosa from whose windows the festa of the Maries has ever been seen: of the church in which they worshipped, not a stone is left, even the form of the ground and direction of the neighbouring canals are changed: and there is now but one landmark to guide the steps of the traveller to the place where the white cloud rested, and the shrine was built to St. Mary the Beautiful. Yet the spot is still worth his pilgrimage, for he may receive a lesson upon it, though a painful one. Let him first fill his mind with the fair images of the ancient festival,¹ and then seek that landmark, the tower of the modern church, built upon the place where the daughters of Venice knelt yearly with her noblest

* “XV. diebus et octo diebus ante festum Mariarum omni anno.”-Galliciolli. The same precautions were taken before the Feast of the Ascension.

† Casa Vittura.

¹ [In his copy for revision, Ruskin has here again referred to Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets, as giving the spirit of such scenes: see part iii. 26.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]