There is a calle and a traghetto next the museum, and then a disreputable but picturesque brown house with a fondamenta, and then the home of the Teodoro Correr who formed the nucleus of the museum which we have just seen and left it to Venice. His house is now deserted and miserable. A police station comes next; then a decayed house; and then the Palazzo Giovanelli, boarded up and forlorn, but not the one which contains the famous Giorgione. And here, at the nice garden on the other side of the Rio S. Giovanni Decollato, I think, we may cease to identify the buildings, for nothing else is important.
Beyond S. Simeone, however, at the corner of the Rio della Croce, is a large and shady garden belonging to the Papadopoli family which may be visited on application. It is a very pleasant place.
THE GRAND CANAL. IV: FROM THE STATION TO THE MOCENIGO PALACE, LOOKING TO THE LEFT
The Scalzi--The Labia Palace--The missing cicerone--Tiepolo and Cleopatra--S. Marcuola and Titian--A maker of oars--The death of Wagner--Frescoes on palaces--The Ca' d'Oro--Baron Franchetti--S. Sebastian--The Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne--A merry tapestry--A cardinal's nursery--The Palazzo Lion--The Fondaco dei Tedeschi--Canova, Titian, and Byron.
Beginning at the Railway Station and going towards the Ducal Palace, the first building is the church of the Scalzi, by the iron bridge. The church is a very ornate structure famous for its marbles and reliefs, which counterfeit drapery and take the place of altar pictures; but these are an acquired taste. On the ceiling the brave Tiepolo has sprawled a vigorous illustration of the spiriting away of the house of the Virgin to Loreto, near Ancona.
Next come a row of shops, and, at the corner, the Lido hotels' motor-launch office, and then several negligible decayed palaces. The first of any importance is the tall seventeenth-century incomplete Flangini with Michael Angelesque figures over the door. Then the Scuola dei Morti with its _memento mori_ on the wall, and then S. Geremia: outside, a fine mass of yellow brick with a commanding campanile; inside, all Palladian coolness. Against the church a little house has been built, and at the corner of the Grand Canal and the Cannaregio is the figure of the Virgin. The great palace a little way down the canal which branches off here--the Cannaregio--is the Labia, interesting chiefly as containing the masterpiece of Tiepolo, unless one agrees with Symonds that his picture of S. Agnes in SS. Apostoli is his greatest effort. So far as I am concerned, Tiepolo painted largely in vain. I can admire the firm decision of his drawing and his skill in composition, but I can never lose the feeling that his right place is the wall of a restaurant or a theater curtain. Still, since at the Palazzo Labia we find him decorating a banqueting hall with a secular subject, all is well.