Among other popular festivals of the Venetians, the free fair held at the Ascension was of great importance. Until 1357 this lasted eight days, but, after that, it was prolonged during a fortnight. It was at this time, as I have said elsewhere, that the famous function of the ‘Espousal of the Sea’ was held. During the fair, every kind of merchandise was allowed free entrance to the port and was sold in the Square of Saint Mark’s, in booths and on improvised counters, which gave that enormous space the air of a market. About the beginning of the fourteenth century it began to be the custom to wear masks during this period of mingled business and amusement. It is needless to say that the fair became a source of large wealth to the treasury, and an opportunity for making money for many, since at that time an immense number of foreigners came to Venice from all parts of the world. It has been estimated that at times as many as two hundred thousand strangers were present in the city for this occasion, which I shall hereafter take an opportunity of describing with more detail in the form it had acquired in a later age.
Strangers who visit Venice often wonder idly whether there is any meaning in the half-cabalistic signs coarsely painted on the dyed sails of the fishing-boats that glide in towards evening, one after the other, and take their places for the night, like weary live things coming home to sleep. There shines the roughly-drawn presentment of a cock, apparently in an attitude of ecstasy before a rising sun that bears a strong resemblance to an omelet; and there a mystic beast that may be meant for a donkey, unless it stands for a grasshopper. You may wonder which, unless you ask of some superannuated old fisherman loitering on the quay at sunset with his pipe for company. But he will tell you that the cock and the rising sun are the hereditary emblems of all the descendants
of ancient Josaphat, a fisherman of Padua who adopted them long ago; and that the monster grasshopper-donkey is really a horse, and belongs to another family of fishers, the Cavallarin; and so on, through as many as you can point out. It is the heraldry of the fisher people, begun long ago by the Niccolotti and preserved religiously by their descendants to this present time; and though heraldry is ancient in Venice, there may be stone coats of arms on walls of time-worn palaces that look down upon the Grand Canal, less old than some of these rude ancestral bearings of the sea, that have been handed down from generation to generation through uncounted centuries.