I too have seen the beginning of many quarrels, chiefly on the water.  But I have seen only two Venetians use their fists—­and they were infants in arms.  For the rest, except at traghetti and at the corners of canals, the Venetians are good-humoured and blessed with an easy smiling tolerance.  Venice is the best place in the world, and they are in Venice, and there you are!  Why lose one’s temper?

Next the Casa Falier is a calle, and then the great Giustinian Lolin Palace with brown and yellow posts.  Taglioni lived here for a while too.  Another calle, the Giustinian, a dull house with a garden and red and white striped posts, and we are at the Iron Bridge and the Campo S. Vitale, a small poor-people’s church, with a Venetian-red house against it, and inside, but difficult to see, yet worth seeing, a fine picture by Carpaccio of a saint on horseback.

The magnificent palace in good repair that comes next is the Cavalli, with a row of bronze dragons on the facade.  This is the home of the Franchetti family, who have done so much for modern Venice, conspicuously, as we have seen, at the Ca d’Oro.  Then the Rio dell’Orso o Cavana, and the Palazzo Barbaro with its orange and red striped posts, a beautiful room in which will be familiar to all visitors to the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, for it is the subject of one of Mr. Sargent’s most astounding feats of dexterity.  It is now the Venetian home of an American; and once no less a personage than Isabella d’Este lived in it very shortly after America was discovered.  The older of the two Barbaro palaces is fourteenth century, the other, sixteenth.  They will have peculiar interest to anyone who has read La Vie d’un Patricien de Venise au XVI Siecle, by Yriarte, for that fascinating work deals with Marcantonio Barbaro, who married one of the Giustiniani and lived here.

Nothing of importance—­a palace with red and gold posts and an antiquity store—­before the next rio, the beautiful Rio del Santissimo o di Stefano; nor after this, until the calle and traghetto:  merely two neglected houses, one with a fondamenta.  And then a pension arises, next to which is one of the most coveted abodes in the whole canal—­the little alluring house and garden that belong to Prince Hohenlohe.  The majestic palace now before us is one of Sansovino’s buildings, the Palazzo Corner della Ca Grande, now the prefecture of Venice.  Opposite it is the beautiful Dario palace and the Venier garden.  Next is the Rio S. Maurizio and then two dingy Barbarigo palaces, with shabby brown posts, once the home of a family very famous in Venetian annals.  Marco Barbarigo was the first Doge to be crowned at the head of the Giants’ Stairs; it was while his brother Agostino was Doge (1486-1501) that Venice acquired Cyprus, and its queen, Caterina Corner, visited this city to abdicate her throne.  Cardinal Barbarigo, famous not only for his piety but for refusing to become Pope, was born in this house.