as brightly burnished as the new mosaic invention. After a hasty dinner we rushed to the mighty Place of St Mark. It was crowded. Two Greek and one Turkish ship of war were from accidental circumstances in port and their crews mingled with the other spectators…Tired with travelling we left the gay scene but the moon was so bright that a juggler was conjuring in a circle under our window, and an itinerant Italian opera performing by our bridge. Serenades were constant during the whole night; indeed music is never silent in Venice. I wish I could give you an idea of the moonlight there, but that is impossible. Venice by moonlight is an enchanted city; the floods of silver light upon the moresco architecture, the perfect absence of all harsh sounds of carts and carriages, the never-ceasing music on the waters produced an effect on the mind which cannot be experienced, I am sure, in any other city in the world.10
The next five days were spent in sightseeing and, in a later letter to his father, Disraeli described his impressions of the Doges’ Palace – in which ‘in every room you are reminded of the glory and the triumphs of the republic’ – and of St Mark’s, that ‘Christian mosque’, ‘a pile of precious stones’, outside which the four ‘brazen horses’ – not long since returned from Paris, having been looted on Napoleon’s orders – ‘amble, not prance as some have described them’.
Napoleon had also given orders for the gates of the Ghetto to be pulled down and for the Jews to live where they liked. Many Jews had chosen to remain, however, and Disraeli’s great-aunt was still living there. If he knew of her presence, he made no effort to seek her out; nor did he try to see his Basevi cousins in Verona; nor yet did he go to Cento where his grandfather had been born.
‘According to common opinion,’ however, Disraeli ‘saw all that ought to be seen but never felt less inclined to quit a place’ than he felt on leaving Venice for Bologna. On his way there he made an excursion to the tomb of Petrarch at Arqua and from Ferrara he went to Tasso’s cell. ‘The door posts of this gloomy dungeon are covered with the names of its visitors,’ he wrote. ‘Here scratched with a great nail on the brick wall I saw scrawled “Byron” and immediately beneath it, in a neat banker’s hand was written “Sam Rogers”’.*11
Reluctant as he had been to leave Bologna also, Disraeli found Florence ‘a most delightful city’ and astonishingly cheap; ‘an English family of the highest respectability may live in Florence with every convenience and keep a handsome carriage, horses, liveries etc. for five hundred a year’, that was to say in present-day terms about £17,000 a year.
‘You may live in a palace built by Michael Angelo,’ he continued, ‘keep a villa two miles from the city in a most beautiful situation, with vineyards, fruit and pleasure gardens, keep two carriages, have your opera box, and live in every way as the first Florentine nobility, go to Court, have your own night for receiving company on less than a thousand a year.’12
‘There are some clever artists and sculptors in Florence,’ Disraeli told his father:
Among the latter since the death of Canova, Bertolini [Bartolini] is reckoned the most eminent in Italy.† He is a man of genius. I had the honour of a long conversation with him…He is a friend of Chantrey but the god of his idolatry, and indeed of all Italians, is Flaxman.
In one of my speculations I have been disappointed. In the Pitti Palace there is the most beautiful portrait of Charles I by Vandyke, the most pleasing and noble likeness that I have seen. It is a picture highly esteemed. I engaged a miniature painter here to make me an exquisite copy of this picture with which I intended to surprise you. After a week’s work he has brought it today, but has missed the likeness! And yet he was the Court painter, Signor Carloni. I have refused to take the work and am embroiled in a row but in this country firmness is alone necessary and the Italians let you do what you like, so I’ve no fear as to the result. My mortification and disappointment, however, are extreme.13
This letter was written on 29 September 1826. The next was written in Turin on 10 October and in it, having given his impressions of Pisa – ‘where the Cathedral and its more wonderful Baptistry, the leaning tower and the Campo Santo rivetted [his] attention’ – he said that he expected to be at Dover on the 24th, having, according to Austen’s calculations, travelled over two thousand miles, and his share of the expenses, including £20 for prints and other purchases, being no more than £150.14 On 15 October he wrote to his sister from Lyons:
Nothing can have been more prosperous than our whole journey. Not a single contretemps and my compagnons de voyage uniformly agreeable. Everything that I wished has been realized. I have got all the kind of knowledge that I desired…I had a great row about the portrait of Charles 1st, but was quite successful. The consequence is that I have got a new miniature in which the likeness is exactly hit and at a cheaper rate…I am glad that I at last get some account of my mother – my best love to her; we must meet soon. My father says that he has been very idle and I fear from his tone that I am to believe him. I have been just the reverse, but I would throw all my papers into the Channel only to hear that he had written fifty pages.15
Mrs Austen, in a letter to Sarah D’Israeli, confirmed that the journey had passed without the least disagreement. ‘Your brother is so easily pleased, so accommodating, so amusing, and so actively kind, that I shall always reflect upon the domestic part of our journey with the greatest pleasure.’ Indeed, Benjamin, so Sara Austen said, had behaved ‘excellently, except when there is a button, or rather buttons, to be put on his shirt; then he is violently bad, and this happens almost daily. I said once “They cannot have been good at first”; and now he always threatens to “tell my Mother you have abused my linen”.’16
Travelling homewards through France, Disraeli and his friends left the main road to go to see the Layard family. Austen Henry Layard, the future excavator of Nineveh, was then nine years old. In later life he retained ‘a vivid recollection’ of Disraeli’s appearance, ‘his black curly hair, his affected manner and his somewhat fantastic dress’.17
His holiday was almost over now; and, as he approached the Channel, Disraeli congratulated himself upon having seen five capitals and twelve great cities, and, although he might well see more cities, he could not hope to see more ‘varieties of European nature’. ‘I feel now,’ he added, ‘that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together, and I hope it is not misanthropy when I feel that I love lakes and mountains better than courts and cities, and trees better than men.’18
‘I was bled, blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’
AFTER HIS RETURN TO LONDON, Disraeli continued to see much of Sara Austen, with whom he went for walks in Bloomsbury and by whom he was frequently invited to dinner at the Austens’ house in Guildford Street. He was working hard on the second part of Vivian Grey, which, as with the first part, Mrs Austen copied out for him from the hastily
