at midday, emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto,
that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations
of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the
presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico,
t who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters,
makes the priest who completes the act of consecration cry to heaven,
'When we hereafter attempt great things, S grant us prosperity! Now we
kneel before a poor altar; but if [ our vows are not made in vain, a
hundred temples, O God, of 6 gold a nd marble shall arise to Thee.' The
island city at the end [' of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
of the world. It ; is so described by the same Sabellico, with its
ancient cupolas, [ its leaning towers, its inlaid marble facades, its
compressed k splendor, where the richest decoration did not hinder the
y practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the
crowded Piazza before San Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business
of the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with
the subdued bum of many voices; where in the porticoes round the square
and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money changers
and goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their
heads. He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge,
where their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships
are drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet
laden with wine and oil, and parallel with i t, on the shore swarming
with porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to
the square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers' cabinets. So he
conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he
comes at last to the two hospitals, which were among those institutions
of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the
people, in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this
government, and its attention to the wounded, even to those of the