VENICE IN THE DETAILS: THE MARFORIO DRAGON

As I touched on in my blog post "On the Walls," Venice is something of a never-ending cache of historical and romantic wealth. At any one point in the city, you can spot detail upon beautiful detail that helps to tell the spiderweb story of Venice and probably the story of places millions of miles away at the same time, and these left-behinds of prevalent history are so numerous in Venice that they are almost hidden in their own crowd, nearly forgotten regardless of their significance due to such abundance. In an attempt to address this situation, the "Venice in the Details" project asked me to choose anything in Venice, preferably an obscure, or unknown object, to analyze, gathering an understanding of Venice's richness as well as a better knowledge of Venice and the world through thought and research. I eagerly took this opportunity to learn about something that has always caught my attention, even during my first couple days in Venice. In Campo San Salvidor, on the corner of Via Due Aprile and Larga Mazzini Merceria, a black, iron dragon clinching a bouquet of three umbrellas in its mouth protrudes over the street, clinging to its spot on the corner while watching over its portion of Venice like a fierce and mysterious angel. I had always had particular interest in the dragon because of its grand appearance and prominence on the campo. As you can see in the photographs I took of it, the dragon has a long neck covered in feather-like scales, two elegant and detailed wings, and strong talons on which it seems to gracefully balance. Animals with twisting, meandering, yet strangely agile necks, arms, legs, tails, or bodies in general tend to unnerve me slightly, and in my fascination with my own fears, I always stared at this dragon on my walks to and from the Rialto Bridge, which is just about two Venetian blocks away from this corner. A certain friendliness about the dragon makes it less unnerving to me than it could be, though; the umbrellas it is holding are colorful, as are the decorative circles in the strip of pattern below it, and its extension down towards the people in the campo seems inviting rather than threatening. Unfortunately, its appearance is almost the only direct history I could find about it. The dragon was designed only about a century ago as a signpost for a leather goods store called Marforio, which was the largest and oldest leather goods store in Italy, run by the same family through five generations since 1875, until it closed about 10 years ago. I could not find any information directly connecting the dragon to Marforio, but the fact that Marforio was in the building on which the dragon still stands and that it initially opened as an umbrella store sort of makes that connection for me; the leather suitcases, handbags, wallets, belts, and other travelers' merchandise became more central probably after the store's success as an umbrella boutique and possibly after the creation of the dragon, but I have no evidence on which to base that theory. No matter my lack of knowledge about the Marforio dragon itself, though, this detail can say more to us than we might expect.

To begin with, the form and origin of the dragon reflects upon Venice's long history with commercialism and more recently with heavy tourism. In 1611, Thomas Coryat, an English traveler, wrote in his travelogue Coryat's Crudities,

"And many of them do carry other fine things of far greater price, that will cost at least ducket, which they commonly call in Italian tongue "umbrellas," that is, things which minister shadow veto them for shelter against the scorching heate of the sunne. These are made of leather, something answerable to to the forme of a little cannopy, and hooped in the inside with divers little wooden hoopes that extend the umbrella in a pretty large cornpasse. They are especially used by horsemen, who carry them in their hands when they ride."

The umbrellas hanging from the dragon's mouth, and the fact the Marforio sold umbrellas in the mid-1800's, shows an association of umbrellas to travel and luxury even much later than Coryat's time. Before umbrellas had made their way to England, surprisingly through Captain Cook rather than from Italy, umbrellas seemed exotic to English travelers, and it follows that umbrellas would also become a traveler's tool and sign of the upper class because knowledge of the exotic meant both money and education. Furthermore, umbrellas were a perfect piece of equipment for traveling in general, they could keep off the sun during a ride or a stroll, could keep off the rain if traveling happened to occur on a damp day, and they could simply display a traveler's position as someone able to afford this object of "great price," as Coryat describes them. Looking closely at my "detail," the dragon, you may even notice that the umbrellas are being held under a crown, which signifies the luxurious aura of the umbrella. During my presentation, Professor Emily Allen commented that the quote I read from Coryat's travelogue gives us insight into the word "umbrella" itself, because the word "ombra" in Italian means "shadow" in English. This directly ties the umbrella, as well as its classy persona, to Italy, possibly giving Italy an added boost of "classy" in the opinions of English and other western European travelers. As a french traveler remarked as early as 1680, the shops between the Rialto and Piazza San Marco give a "grand impression of Venice" to any traveler stopping through. Clearly, Marforio's location and its expensive merchandise placed Marforio in this collection of shops that made Venice luxurious to tourists even today. To be correct, Marforio probably chose its location because of the longstanding prestige of that shopping area in Venice, and now, even in the store's absence, it has left its mark with the dragon that somehow still speaks to Venice's touristic side. The effeminate yet powerful and historically fierce Venice seems to extend its neck to greet its visitors, making Venice a gracious host for its tourists, literally offering them comforts and luxury for their stay and the rest of their travels. Furthermore, the dragon is particularly fitting as a touristic marker because it is the remains of a story and history, leaving another slightly mysterious detail for which Venice is so well renowned. Tourists certainly see a romantic significance in the Marforio dragon today due to its age, its obvious use of Gothic aesthetics, and mostly its addition to the Venetian collection of random "details" that makes Venice so interesting.

But, Venice has not always had such a luxurious and romantic identity for travelers, and I think the very fact that tourists do not normally realize this or know a lot about Venice's history other than what writers and travelers have fantasized adds to the myth around Venice that the Marforio dragon taps into in order to bring money to Venice's tourist economy. Buzard writes in The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture” that "anti-tourists seeking distinctively enriched experiences relied mainly upon the mediating texts of European Romanticism to tell them what distinctively enriched experiences should fell like;" Venetian tourists come to Venice, assume that Venice has only existed as writers have utilized it, and never seem interested in learning about Venice's true past (or present, I might add). As I read in Venice the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City by Robert Davis and Garry Marvin, Venice's original tourists were medieval pilgrims who traveled from all over Europe to the Levant, through Italy to visit relics, and then on to the Holy Land. As pilgrims traveled through Venice, as they made their way East, they would rest for weeks on the peaceful islands, sightseeing, in a way, before they moved on. At that time, Venice was a growing and powerful city of trade. In Venice's high period, the city was respected as a grand, rising power, comparable to and even feared by powerful cities like Paris and London. The tourism we know today, associated with a romantic Venice, did not really start until the late 17 century and did not fall into full swing until the 19 century. Decline, beautiful, weak decay, and the feminine characteristics of Venice that began to fill the novels and poetry of visitors during these periods is what really fueled the up rise of tourism, but while Venice was an empire, that is during its reign of trade between the East and the West, it was hardly considered a romantic city. People traveled to Venice to do business, and although they also enjoyed Venice as a town of certain splendors and freedom, they came for purposes other than entertainment. Venice was a wealthy city, though, which attracted wealthy people, and, therefore, attracted luxury, such as the tourist-attracting luxury written of between the Rialto and Piazza San Marco. At one point, before Venice's decline, gold was so plentiful due to trade with Africa that Venetians began to value and trade with silver before gold, and, in the early 1600's even as Venice did begin its decline, the income per capita in Venice was 37 ducats on the islands to 10 ducats on the mainland. Tourism could not move in until Venice declined, which, again, happened slightly differently than tourists assume. After the direction of trade changed from East to West after the discovery of routes through the Americas, Venice's economy also changed. Although trade did not falter in Venice, prices did, and it soon became cheaper and more pleasurable for the most wealthy families in Venice to own their own farms and second homes on the mainland, which they also enjoyed as a social asset; Venice's wealthiest families pulled out of trade all together and began a more local lifestyle with both a main Venetian home and a pleasure farm in the country. As the most wealthy Venetians stopped trading, competition opened up for middle-class merchants. Unfortunately, the extraction of the wealth of the upper classes from the Venetian trading business was a strong enough development to send Venice into full economic decline. Middle-class merchants were too careful with their money, not willing to risk it on trade gambles. Andrea Tron, an aristocratic Venetian traveler who had often been to England and Holland, wrote to a friend in 1743:

"There is no commrse useful to the State in any country where the richest men do not engage in trade. In Venice we must persuade the nobility to put their money into trade... something of which it is impossible to persuade them at the present. The Dutch are all merchants and that is the cheif reason why their trade flourishes. If only this spirit could be introduced into our country (notice how Tron refers to Venice as a country) then one would soon see a great trade revival here."

But that never happened. Venetian upper classes were too content producing fish, fruits, potatoes, wine, and silks while enjoying a more diverse lifestyle, and Venice truly declined, becoming a place for romantic tourists from the countries that once revered Venice for its worldly power. Yet, as the economy in Venice changed from trade to tourism, Venetians were very aware of their prospects as a tourist city. Shops such as Marforio were opened, gondole became attractions, and Venice skillfully catered to its new buyers. The Marforio dragon catered as well, acting as a "sign," as John Urry puts it in Consuming Places: "the gaze is constructed through signs and tourism is involved in the collection of such signs." Tourists come, without knowing Venice for what is was or even what it is, and they indulge in the gaze, seeing Marforio's dragon and thinking not of Venice but of an image of Venice created by romantics. The dragon tells us about the truth, the truth of the non-truth. The Marforio dragon reminds us of the past, even though most of us do not know what past that is. And the dragon still invites in the tourists, both because it plays into their visions of Venice as Gothic, not its reality, and because it still offers them the shade and promise of comfort and classiness during their stay in Venice. This is the Marforio dragon, and it says a lot, even though it has nothing to say at all; we just have to notice it and remember it before it is lost forever in Venice's sea of details.