you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though
the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was a
very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the
little island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a
bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, which was very
bad, but where in the warm evenings your dinner didn't much
matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that
stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united
Italy and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. A
little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom and a
third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic.
There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and
a teatro diurno. The bathing-establishment is bigger than
before, and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation
perhaps that the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however,
you won't scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy
platform under which bathers dart and splash, and which looks
out to where the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and crimson,
wander along the darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is
still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the
cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is classical
and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have
floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not
easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger
excursions--you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and
Chioggia. Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply
interesting little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood
there on the edge of the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its
grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones
of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now been