The First Armenian I Met With
Here Was Sitting On A Stone Bench On The Piazza Di San Marco, And This
Brought Forcibly To My Recollection The Armenian In Schiller's
Ghost-Seer.
These Cafes and Casinos on the Piazza are open day and night.
Ices
and coffee superiorly made and other refreshments of all kinds at very low
prices are to be had. Some of these casinos are devoted to gaming. The
first families in Venice repair to the Piazza in the evening after the
Opera, female as well as male. They promenade up and down the Piazza or
sit down and converse in the Cafes and Casinos till a late hour. Few go
to bed in Venice in the summer time before six In the morning, so that
sleep seems for ever banished from the Piazza. Music and singing goes
forward in these casinos, and the ear is often charmed with the sound of
those delightful Venetian airs, whose simple melody ravishes the soul. The
Venetian dialect is very pleasing, and scarcely yields in harmony to the
Tuscan. It contains a great many Sclavonic words. It is the only dialect of
Italy that is at all pleasing to my ear, for I do not at all relish the
nasal twang and truncated terminations of the Piedmontese and Lombard
dialects, nor the semi-barbarous jargon of the Genoese and the Neapolitan
and, least of all, the execrable cacophony of the Bolognese.
I visited of course the Arsenal and the Doge's Palace.
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