It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences
of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day
roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their
first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of
the season's clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in
mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense
that it is summer only a little out of humor.

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a
degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally
with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold,
objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort
to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a
pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among
people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no
means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed
that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are
the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the
harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different)
of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the
warmth which health demands.

The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer,
and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty,
and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments--the
smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the