The Venetian houses resembled those of the Romans in many respects. A covered portico, surrounding a closed court, gave access to the ‘hall of the fireplace,’ as the principal place of gathering for the family was named, and to the kitchens and offices. The upper story consisted entirely of bedrooms, and had a wide balcony called the ‘liago’--a word corrupted from the Greek _heliacon_, ‘a place of sunshine.’ Here in warm weather the family spent the evening. Higher still, a rustic wooden platform was built over a part of the gabled and thatched roof, and was called the ‘altana.’ It was here that the linen was dried after washing, and later, in Titian’s day, it was here that the Venetian ladies exposed their hair to the sun after moistening it with the fashionable dye.
The ‘hall of the fireplace’ was more than any other part of the house a special feature of Venetian dwellings, and was as necessary to them as the balcony that ran round the inner court. To this day the Venetians boast that their ancestors invented the modern chimney flue, and that while King Egbert still warmed himself like a savage before a fire of which the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, the poorest Venetian fisherman had a civilised fireplace before which he could warm his toes as comfortably, and with as little annoyance from smoke, as any fine lady of the twentieth century.
Another peculiarity of the early Venetian house which has come down to our day was that it almost always had two entrances, the one opening upon the
[Illustration: A WATER DOOR NEAR ST. BENEDETTO]
water, and the other, at the back, upon land. In those days this back door almost always gave access to a bit of garden, in which flowers and a few kitchen vegetables were carefully cultivated, but these gardens were soon crowded out of existence by the necessity for larger and more numerous houses.
The palace of the Doge differed from other Venetian dwellings chiefly by its size and its battlemented walls, and was very far from resembling what we see to-day in its place. It was destroyed by fire again and again, and only here and there some fragment of the original walls was incorporated in the new buildings which the doges were so often obliged to construct for themselves. A high battlemented wall joined the island of Olivolo with Rialto and enclosed the ducal palace.