large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore
among its arcades.

No other city has so representative a heart. On the four musical nights
here--afternoons in the winter--the Piazza draws like a magnet. That
every stranger is here, you may be sure, and most Venetian men. Some sit
outside Florian's and the other cafés; others walk round and round the
bandstand; others pause fascinated beside the musicians. And so it has
been for centuries, and will be. New ideas and fashions come slowly into
this city, where one does quite naturally what one's father and
grandfather did; and a good instance of such contented conservatism is
to be found in the music offered to these contented crowds, for they are
still true to Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini, and with reluctance are
experiments made among the newer men.

In the daytime the population of the Piazza is more foreign than
Venetian. In fact the only Venetians to be seen are waiters,
photographers, and guides, the knots of errand boys watching the
artists, and, I might add, the pigeons. But at night Venice claims it,
although the foreigner is there too. It is amusing to sit at a table on
the outside edge of Florian's great quadrangle of chairs and watch the
nationalities, the Venetians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the
Anglo-Saxons, as they move steadily round and round. Venice is, of
course, the paradise both of Germans and Austrians. Every day in the
spring and summer one or two steamers arrive from Trieste packed with
Austrian tourists awfully arrayed. Some hundreds have to return to
Trieste at 2 o'clock; other hundreds remain till night. The beautiful
word Venezia, which we cheapen but not too cruelly to Venice and the
French soften to Venise, is alas! to Teutonic tongues Venedig.