Venice, Venice: where the sublime becomes the commonplace, and the majestic the ordinary. All the words in English that denote beauty come to a complete halt when they behold Venice, their hands to their mouths, speechless at their own utter inadequacy. Venice is the proof of the greatness of man, writes Kevin Myers
Venice is less a city than a civilisation. How much of its heart is attached to the country it belongs to now, I cannot say. Certainly, its caravelles and its argosies traded with the known world many centuries before that curious creation of 19th-century romantic nationalism, Italy, had been even dreamt of. Its empire was far greater than anything achieved by modern Italy; the great ports of Split and Dubrovnik are merely memories in stone of the city-state. In themselves they are fabulously beautiful, but nonetheless, they are mere pale shadows of the original, as all memories of the Venice inevitably are.
The islands in the armpit of the Adriatic created the civilisation, and the civilisation created the islands. That archipelago in the vast salt-water lagoon was an intemperate place to live, savagely hot in summer and vilely cold in winter. Only the hardiest, those who were prepared to master the tides, to stem the waters and steal land from the sea, could survive here. They were, they are, the Dutch of the greater Mediterranean.
Venice is retained only by constant effort: its shores are defended by millions of pine trees, pile-driven into the sea-bed, and mesh-bound together in the brotherhood of the desperate. For war is the national condition of those who must endlessly fight the besieging sea. Such daily domestic ardour gives men the edge, whets their appetites for more, causes them at their rest to look for opportunities elsewhere.
The Dutch reached out to the West and East Indies; the Venetians to the riches of the greater Mediterranean, to repeated and pitiless war with the Genoese and, most cruelly of all, with Byzantium. The four famous gilded bronze horses of St Mark's were looted from Constantinople by Doge Enrico Dandolo in 1204, in the course of one of the most savage and deliberate acts of pillaging in European history. Constantinople never recovered from it, which is one reason why today it is known as Istanbul.
The vitality of Venice, like that of the Netherlands, in part derived from its instincts towards democracy. The doge - merely the dialectal corruption of the Latin dux - leader - was essentially an elective office; and even though it could be corrupted and at times even inherited, the dynamic involved enabled Venice to adapt endlessly to circumstances. Moreover, the lapping tides of brine at the wooden walls taught the Venetians vigilance, while behind their island ramparts they became obsessed with the magic of beauty.
This is why beauty assails you in Venice, at every astonishing turn. St Mark's Square is one of the great cinematic clichés of the world; but film cannot hope to capture the majesty, the grandeur, the vision of those who over centuries assembled it. And even in its modest quarters, Venice is quite magnificent, its back streets of canals along endless facades of elegant stucco.
The sea and its subsidiary waters still seem to command the culture of Venetian man. Gondoliers row for a living, and charge handsomely for it too, but when work ends and pleasure calls, the gondoliers revel in the same contests of manhood by which they make a living. Last weekend, some of these were informal, casual impromptu races between laughing friends; and one was highly serious - solemn, sturdy young men in their striped jerseys waiting in their boats while liveried trumpeters sounded a florid fanfare before a priest blessed them.
Then off up the Grand Canal, carving a way through the teeming river boats, cruisers and vaporettos, so named from the little steam engines which once powered them, and under the stupendous bridge of Rialto, whose name in turn comes from the modest title "riva alto", high banks.
Last weekend the film stars began to gather and become inconspicuous for the city's Film Festival, for no-one can compete with Venice. Harry's Bar was full of some of the lesser species of starlet, and the spangled human satellites which circulate in the strange solar system of cinema celebrity.
Tans are still in fashion in such circles: deep browns that seem to have been tattooed into the skin, with prawn lip-gloss and purple lip-liner engraved with steel-tipped pens.
And breasts: Lord above, a voluptuous menagerie of breasts, cleavages, embonpoints and bosoms. The clear winner was a lady who had apparently had a skin-graft from a nut-brown terrapin. Her neckline met her umbilicus, and on either side rested a huge brown water-melon striving to break free of the imprisoning gauze.
Not a person in the restaurant didn't regularly check if the fight had been successful, while her companion, a man with three large dyed moustaches -one beneath his nose, and one over each eye - glared ferociously around him,like a pirate trapped on a spar of the mainmast with a dagger between his teeth. Alas, the struggle naught availeth, certainly while I was there. I stole a glance as I left: Captain Morgan glowered back, while beside him two hippo cubs swung in their hammocks.
A boat back to our island, Torcello, where the first Venetians settled early in the first millennium AD, to the very house where Napoleon once stayed.
His vanities came and conquered and then departed. The beauty of Venice outlasted him, and will outlast us all. It is mankind's greatest achievement.