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Unsung hero of the revolution. In 1848, after decades of foreign occupation, Venice rose up against its oppressors. The revolt was led not by a dashing general or aristocratic poet, but by a spectacle-wearing middle-class lawyer. By Jan Morris
Published 22 August 2005
The Siege of Venice
Jonathan Keates Chatto & Windus, 495pp, £20
ISBN 0701166371
In a niche in the north portico of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, beside the two little marble lions in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, there is a 19th-century sarcophagus. Few tourists notice it, few guidebooks mention it, but it contains the remains of a noble Venetian hero: not a swaggering admiral, not a patrician doge, nor a patriarch, a condottiere, a composer or a mighty painter, but a small middle-class lawyer with spectacles, looking rather like Franz Schubert, whose remains were denied a place inside the basilica proper because he had been disrespectful to the papacy and was half Jewish.
He is the central figure of this majestic book - which, like a focusing gunsight, narrows its vision from the panoramic to the particular, until its cross-wires land upon Daniele Manin, born in 1804 in a house in a cul-de-sac near Campo San Polo. The panoramic view embraces the whole epic story of the Italian liberation movement which, between 1820 and 1870, gradually freed the Italian peninsula from the domination of the Habsburgs; the particular concerns Manin's role in the Venetian revolution, a largely forgotten but seminal contribution to the Risorgimento.
Jonathan Keates is the perfect chronicler of this bitter-sweet tale. Not only is he immensely learned on all matters Italian (who else could tell us in a footnote that Custoza is the only Italian place name without a duplicated z?), but his sensibility is such that repeatedly in and between the lines of his long book one senses the very presence of Venice in the saddest period of her history. The Venetian Republic had lost its independence to Napoleon half a century earlier, and after being contemptuously tossed to the Austrians by its conqueror, was still enduring the humiliation of foreign occupation when, in 1848, that year of revolution, its citizenry rebelled against their oppressors and proclaimed the restoration of the Republic.
It was truly a municipal gesture, drawing upon the ancient traditions of the city state, patricians left over from the Seren-issima allied with the stalwart and immensely patriotic proletariat. There were inevitably dissensions, failures of leadership and command, class jealousies and ideological differences, but on the whole it was a glorious performance, some might even say Venice's finest hour, and its improbable Churchill was Manin. When the various Italian risings of the time were put down one by one, Venice was the very last to give in.
Yet Manin's name, like his revolution, is almost forgotten in the rest of Italy. This is partly, I suppose, because the Siege of Venice did not end in victory, and because the independent unity of Italy was eventually achieved elsewhere, but partly because he was insufficiently Byronic. He was outcoloured by Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini. Verdi did not write an opera about him. He was not made for equestrian statuary, and the only figure of him even in Venice shows him to be decidedly less than epical. His principal political colleague, Niccolo Tommaseo, was a moody poet, a novelist and translator of the Gospels; his best general, Guglielmo Pepe, was a gigantically charismatic Calabrian nobleman; his ultimate opponent was the almost fictional Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky of the Radetzky March. But Manin himself, the revolutionary president of the most glamorous city in Europe, was more like a diligent and legalistic provincial mayor.
Nevertheless, through 500 days of isolation and siege which degenerated into fearful bombardment, squalor, near-starvation, disease and ultimate defeat, somehow or other Manin retained the loyalty and the confidence of Venetians. They trusted him. Amidst all the swashbuckling soldiers and the magnificoes, all the jealousies and recriminations, he stood out as a man of plain integrity. His revolution failed, and he died in exile in Paris in 1857, having made a living in his final years as a teacher of Italian. But in 1868, when all was over, his remains were brought back to Venice, and thousands of Venetians lined the Grand Canal to salute his memory as the funeral gondola passed by.
Manin's life, death and personality are the essence of Keates's tremendous book, set against the sad romance of Venice in its last spasm of glory. It would make little sense, however, without the wide background of the Risorgimento as a whole. G M Trevelyan, when he tackled the same theme in the 1900s, made two books of it - one about Manin and the Venetian revolution, the other about Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour and all that. I think Keates's approach the more satisfying, because as it goes along it interweaves the intensely vivid saga of Venice with the tumbled struggles of the liberation movement at large, from Sicily to Piedmont.
Manin's Venice fell in August 1849, and Radetzky himself attended a celebratory Te Deum at the basilica. The Austrians remained in the city for two more decades, bitterly resented by the indigenes, until in 1866 Venice became part of a united Italian kingdom: a second-best solution, no doubt, to an older generation of Venetian patriots, and probably to the republican Manin himself, but all that the times would allow. (And more, in fact, than the late Queen Victoria would have approved of - "What shall we say," she once demanded, at the height of the Risorgimento's assaults upon the Habsburg empire, "if Canada, Malta, etc begin to trouble us? It hurts me terribly.")
So a grand, sad story finds its worthy chronicler. Jonathan Keates is no populariser, and his book is sometimes properly demanding: but then the Risorgimento was not a classical sort of progress, and Daniele Manin not one of your Homeric champions. He was a part-Jewish provincial lawyer with short sight, lying today unnoticed in his portico, while the noise and colour and magnificence of his city swirl eternally by, and children scamper with balloons around those two small lions in the sunshine.
Jan Morris's most recent book, A Writer's World: travels 1950-2000, is published by Faber & Faber
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