the puzzling question, but observe instead that we are passing
the mouth of the populous Canareggio, next widest of the
waterways, where the race of Shylock abides, and at the corner of
which the big colourless church of San Geremia stands gracefully
enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its wide lateral footways
and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. John an
admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the
most infantile of the Venetian processions.

The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of
interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the
Cornaro, of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which
cluster about the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence
of the Comte de Chambord and still that of his half-brother, in
spite too of the big Papadopoli gardens, opposite the station,
the largest private grounds in Venice, but of which Venice in
general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form of
irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water.
The rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and
malachite, all a cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness,
and here too, opposite, on the top of its high steps, is San
Simeone Profeta, I won't say immortalised, but unblushingly
misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to
unravel the mystery of this prosaic painter's malpractices; he
falsified without fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will
the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the particular
view that may have constituted his subject. It would look exactly
like such and such a place if almost everything were not
different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the
wall; but it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other