The Signorino and Antonio, though want of wind obliged them to row the whole way from Venice, had reached Chioggia an hour before, and stood waiting to receive us on the quay.  It is a quaint town this Chioggia, which has always lived a separate life from that of Venice.  Language and race and customs have held the two populations apart from those distant years when Genoa and the Republic of S. Mark fought their duel to the death out in the Chioggian harbours, down to these days, when your Venetian gondolier will tell you that the Chioggoto loves his pipe more than his donna or his wife.  The main canal is lined with substantial palaces, attesting to old wealth and comfort.  But from Chioggia, even more than from Venice, the tide of modern luxury and traffic has retreated.  The place is left to fishing folk and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest quarter.  Wandering about its wide deserted courts and calli, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility.  Passages from Goldoni’s and Casanova’s Memoirs occur to our memory.  It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani.  Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga.  Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark’s decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani in the fourteenth century.  From his prison in blockaded Venice the great admiral was sent forth on a forlorn hope, and blocked victorious Doria here with boats on which the nobles of the Golden Book had spent their fortunes.  Pietro Doria boasted that with his own hands he would bridle the bronze horses of S. Mark.  But now he found himself between the navy of Carlo Zeno in the Adriatic and the flotilla led by Vittore Pisani across the lagoon.  It was in vain that the Republic of S. George strained every nerve to send him succour from the Ligurian sea; in vain that the lords of Padua kept opening communications with him from the mainland.  From the 1st of January 1380 till the 21st of June the Venetians pressed the blockade ever closer, grappling their foemen in a grip that if relaxed one moment would have hurled him at their throats.  The long and breathless struggle ended in the capitulation at Chioggia of what remained of Doria’s forty-eight galleys and fourteen thousand men.

These great deeds are far away and hazy.  The brief sentences of mediaeval annalists bring them less near to us than the chroniques scandaleuses of good-for-nothing scoundrels, whose vulgar adventures might be revived at the present hour with scarce a change of setting.  Such is the force of intimite in literature.  And yet Baffo and Casanova are as much of the past as Doria and Pisani.  It is only perhaps that the survival of decadence in all we see around us, forms a fitting framework for our recollections of their vividly described corruption.