On this his first visit to Venice, Byron was a private individual. He was sociable in a quiet way, attending one or two salons, but he was not splendid. And he seems really to have thrown himself with his customary vigour into his Armenian studies; but of those I speak elsewhere. They were for the day: in the evening, he tells Moore, "I do one of many nothings--either at the theatres, or some of the conversaziones, which are like our routs, or rather worse, for the women sit in a semi-circle by the lady of the mansion, and the men stand about the room. To be sure, there is one improvement upon ours--instead of lemonade with their ices, they hand about stiff _rum-punch_--_punch_, by my palate; and this they think _English_. I would not disabuse them of so agreeable an error,--'no, not for "Venice"'."
The chief houses to which he went were the Palazzo Benzon and the Palazzo Albrizzi. Moore when in Venice a little later also paid his respects to the Countess Albrizzi. "These assemblies," he wrote home, "which, at a distance, sounded so full of splendour and gallantry to me, turned into something much worse than one of Lydia White's conversaziones."
Here is one of Byron's rattling descriptions of a Venetian night. The date is December 27, 1816, and it is written to his publisher, Murray: "As the news of Venice must be very interesting to you, I will regale you with it. Yesterday being the feast of St. Stephen, every mouth was put in motion. There was nothing but fiddling and playing on the virginals, and all kinds of conceits and divertisements, on every canal of this aquatic city.
"I dined with the Countess Albrizzi and a Paduan and Venetian party, and afterwards went to the opera, at the Fenice theatre (which opens for the Carnival on that day)--the finest, by the way, I have ever seen; it beats our theatres hollow in beauty and scenery, and those of Milan and Brescia bow before it. The opera and its Syrens were much like all other operas and women, but the subject of the said opera was something edifying; it turned--the plot and conduct thereof--upon a fact narrated by Livy of a hundred and fifty married ladies having _poisoned_ a hundred and fifty husbands in the good old times. The bachelors of Rome believed this extraordinary mortality to be merely the common effect of matrimony or a pestilence; but the surviving Benedicts, being all seized with the cholic, examined into the matter, and found that their possets had been drugged; the consequence of which was much scandal and several suits at law.