On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the corner
and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,--this time to go into the house of
Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay. The
house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it is
large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a now
illegible tablet describing it as the painter's dwelling, and a medallion
portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had contented myself
with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long narrow passage and
complicated stairway, to the interior of the house, I found that it had
nothing to offer me but the usual number of commonplace rooms in the usual
blighting state of restoration. I must say that the people of the house,
considering they had nothing in the world to show me, were kind and
patient under the intrusion, and answered with very polite affirmation my
discouraged inquiry if this were really Tintoretto's house.

Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian's
house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of the
church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an intolerable
bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in upon their
privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and assure the
strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as they behold it
without (and it _is_ extremely restored), that it merely occupies the
site of the painter's dwelling, and that there is nothing whatever to see
in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance after these
protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom I had the
honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a story of
rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in the new
one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found that so
far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates had been