EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 78, 1 March 1938, Page 2

EUROPE TO-DAY

VOYAGING BETWEEN WALLS. Stop into the gondola again and voyage between walls of ancient stone or brick, all sunlit. We sail down a street of palaces. The old Zecca is on our right—the building where money used to be minted. There is the Grand Hotel with the Ridotto, once the Monte Carlo of the South. Still farther are 200 palaces in two miles, unrivalled splendour. There is the ostentatious Palazzo Rezzonico where Robert Browning lived under Italian skies, and died at the last, bravely and gallantly. The Foscari palace is possibly the most famous of ail, and near by the grandstand for the regatta has been moored for no one knows how long. Henry the Third of France was entertained in this sumptuous palace in the 16th century, and near it is the palace in which Wagner wrote Tristan and Isolde. Across the canal—just round the bend —you might look up at the Mocenigo palace where Byron lived scandalously. If we go farther still we come to the 16th century Rialto Bridge, and when our gondola has slipped beyond a few more palaces we come to the imposing Palazzo Vendramin where the great Richard Wagner breathed his last. These are only a few of the sights of this one Venetian waterway. Without seeing it, who can picture half the glory of the Grand Canal with its towers and buildings, its Riva del Vino quay, and its green and purple water for ever spangled with reflections? Wo pass the dome and campanile of San Geremia built about 1763, and every now and then we pass the ends of lesser canals, and come upon mighty piles of masonry built upon unnmbered thousands of piles. —(G.)