EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WATER TRAVEL
scribes the journey to Venice in detail: "Taking the Florentine Procaccio's boat to Venice, we passed through nine sostegni or locks to Mal Albergo, where we shifted our boat, going from a higher to a lower channel, which brought us to Ferrara, forty-five miles distant from Bologna. From Ferrara we were tow'd by a horse through an artificial channel as far as Ponte, where ent'ring the river Po, we chang'd our boat again and were row'd down the stream twenty-seven miles to Corbola, where ent'ring the Venetian territories we were obliged once more to change in order to take a Venetian boat."[1]
James Edward Smith, who traveled in the same region more than a century later, found the accommodations on this route still sufficiently primitive: "This evening (May 8), about ten o'clock, we went on board the boat of the courier for Venice, paying thirty pauls each, not quite fifteen shillings, to be landed there free of all other expense, and fed by the way. … After a confused kind of supper which our good captain endeavoured to make as comfortable as possible, an arrangement of mattresses took place … and the company were laid, or rather piled upon them, over chests, bales, and everything that could be thought of."[2]
Mariana Starke at the end of the eighteenth century went from Ferrara to Mestre by carriage and by gondola to Venice. But she recommends invalids "to embark at Francolino, which is five miles from Ferrara, and go all the way to Venice by water, a voyage of eighty miles up the Po, the Adige, the Brenta, and the Lagoons, which is usually performed in about twenty hours. Carriages, however, must at all events go over land; but, as the road is extremely bad, they go best empty."[3]
One water journey was celebrated, and that was the passage of the Brenta in going from Padua to Venice, a distance of about twenty-five miles. On both sides of the stream rose the palaces of the Venetian nobility, "built with so great a variety of architecture that there is not one of them like another."[4] Of the richness and beauty of these
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