, being an intimate friend, and
Pordenone painted its walls.

Another calle and traghetto and we come to a very commonplace house, and
then, after a cinematograph office and another calle, to the Palazzo
Benzon, famous a hundred years ago for its literary and artistic
receptions, and now spruce and modern with more of the striking blue
posts, the most vivid on the canal. In this house Byron has often been;
hither he brought Moore. It is spacious but tawdry, and its plate-glass
gives one a shock. Then the Rio Michiel and then the Tornielli, very
dull, the Curti, decayed, and the Rio dell'Albero. After the rio, the
fine blackened Corner Spinelli with porphyry insets. At the steamboat
station of S. Angelo are new buildings--one a very pretty red brick and
stone, one with a loggia--standing on the site of the Teatro S. Angelo.
After the Rio S. Angelo we come to a palace which I always admire: red
brick and massive, with good Gothic windows and a bold relief of cupids
at the top. It is the Garzoni Palace and now an antiquity dealer's.

A calle and traghetto next, a shed with a shrine on its wall, a little
neat modern house and the Palazzo Corner with its common new glass, and
we are abreast the first of the three Mocenigo palaces, with the blue
and white striped posts and gold tops, in the middle one of which Byron
settled in 1818 and wrote _Beppo_ and began _Don Juan_ and did not a
little mischief.

CHAPTER XII

THE GRAND CANAL. V: BYRON IN VENICE

The beautiful Marianna--Rum-punch--The Palazzo Albrizzi--A play
at the Fenice--The sick _Ballerina_--The gondola--Praise of
Italy--_Beppo_--_Childe Harold_--Riding on the Lido--The inquisitive
English--Shelley in Venice--_Julian and Maddalo_--The view from the
Lido--The madhouse--The Ducal prisons.

The name of Byron is so intimately associated with Venice that I think a
brief account of his life there (so far as it can be told) might be
found interesting.

It was suggested by Madame de Flanhault that Byron was drawn to Venice
not only by its romantic character, but because, since he could go
everywhere by water, his lameness would attract less attention than
elsewhere. Be that as it may, he arrived in Venice late in 1816, being
then twenty-eight. He lodged first in the Frezzeria, and at once set to
work upon employments so dissimilar as acquiring a knowledge of the
Armenian language in the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro and
making love to the wife of his