The most insistent and pesky shopkeepers of all are those who hive in the ground floors of the professedly converted palaces that face on three sides of the Square of Saint Mark’s.  You dare not hesitate for the smallest fractional part of a second in front of a shop here.  Lurking inside the open door is a husky puller-in; and he dashes out and grabs hold of you and will not let go, begging you in spaghettified English to come in and examine his unapproachable assortment of bargains.  You are not compelled to buy, he tells you; he only wants you to gaze on his beautiful things.  Believe him not!  Venture inside and decline to purchase and he will think up new and subtle Italian forms of insult and insolence to visit on you.  They will have brass bands out for you if you invest and brass knuckles if you do not.

There is but one way to escape from their everlasting persecutions, and that is to flee to the center of the square and enjoy the company of the pigeons and the photographers.  They—­the pigeons, I mean—­belong to the oldest family in Venice; their lineage is of the purest and most undefiled.  For upward of seven hundred years the authorities of the city have been feeding and protecting the pigeons, of which these countless blue-and-bronze flocks are the direct descendants.  They are true aristocrats; and, like true aristocrats, they are content to live on the public funds and grow fat and sassy thereon, paying nothing in return.

No; I take that part back—­they do pay something in return; a full measure.  They pay by the beauty of their presence, and they are surely very beautiful, with their dainty mincing pink feet and the sheen on the proudly arched breast coverts of the cock birds; and they pay by giving you their trust and their friendship.  To gobble the gifts of dried peas, which you buy in little cornucopias from convenient venders for distribution among them, they come wheeling in winged battalions, creaking and cooing, and alight on your head and shoulders in that perfect confidence which so delights humans when wild or half-wild creatures bestow it on us, though, at every opportunity, we do our level best to destroy it by hunting and harrying them to death.

At night, when the moon is up, is the time to visit this spot.  Standing here, with the looming pile of the Doge’s Palace bulked behind you, and the gorgeous but somewhat garish decorations of the great cathedral softened and soothed into perfection of outline and coloring by the half light, you can for the moment forget the fallen state of Venice, and your imagination peoples the splendid plaza for you with the ghosts of its dead and vanished greatnesses.  You conceive of the place as it must have looked in those old, brave, wicked days, filled all with knights, with red-robed cardinals and clanking men at arms, with fair ladies and grave senators, slinking bravos and hired assassins—­and all so gay with silk and satin and glittering steel and spangling gems.