Her ancient liberty gives her a joyous spirit. She prefaces her solemn days of sacrifice with days of carnevale, for masques and dream and glittering splendor, a furious few days, a luscious farewell to pleasures, and that only for a season. She is Venezia, la Repubblica Serenissima, and her pleasures like her lovers, will surely come again.

At this wildest time of year, at the carnevale, they all wear masks. They trade them about with no regard to class. They are all princes, all thieves, all harlequins, all pulcinellas behind the masks, since Venezia knows this truth about her citizens, that one man, a cobbler, is very like the clerk, and either one might be mistaken for their lord. A courtesan can become a lady for a night, and a virgin again by daybreak. If a citizen wearies of one mask, why, change the mask again. Carnevaleencourages it. God has blessed it. Has He not been patient with carnevaleforever?

And does not Venezia endure?

Beyond her slender link to the dry land, out in the higher, rolling hills, people put their faith in lords again, strong warlords, wielders of dependable power—lords, so they hope, that may make them safe. But they pay a price for this. One might say that in Venezia people only wear their masks for the season. But in the cities to the west, people wear them forever, the dukes, the laborers, the artisans all doomed to their roles for life.

They lack humor and romance, those outsiders, Venetians say; but Venezia possesses both. Even if the powers of the world come in with heavy boots and rules as tyrants for a season—why, as philosophically and easily as they observe their annual interval of sacrifice, Venetians accept that things might be grim for the while, but Venetians always have their will, and their ways, interlopers and sojourners be damned, Venezia is confident she will choose her doge again. She will hold her masques again and build back her realm of glittering glass, her power like the glassworkers' art, like a bubble of air, of glowing heat. Sometimes it fails, but most times it hardens and shines like the sun.

Venezia is mercantile, more than regal, more glass than gems. Her days rest, like her foundations, on quaking ground, her eternal ideals of equality, and freedom. Everything is for sale in her markets. And nothing she sells is irreplaceable. When outsiders come to rule her, Venezia changes them, or, if they refuse, allows them a space to parade and make a show. When the show ceases to amuse—then Venezia can change her masks, oh, so quickly, and the interloper finds nothing quite as it had seemed.

Venezia is no friendlier to immigrants than to conquerors, alas: she is so tiny a city compared to, say, Milano, or ancient Ravenna, or Verona, She exists on a set of isles. She can scarcely expand her boundaries, or build up, or outward. She is what she is and has been and will be. Those families who live here have lived here forever. Those who come here come on family connections, or on the charity of residents, or find no place to lodge. There is simply no room. Yet over millennia, family bloodlines run thin, and a few great houses stand vacant—a few, at least, as the age advances, as the floods grow more frequent.

In that particular circumstance, a very few newcomers find a foothold. Giovanna Sforza is one of these—la duchesa, she calls herself, this bitter old woman, la duchesa di Milano. Whether she is, in fact truly titled in Milan, no one can ascertain, or greatly cares. The necessary matter is that she came with sufficient money, and the Venetian Montefiori, who might know the truth of her claim, has rented her an elegant house in a cluster of buildings overarching the Calle Corrente. Four canals border this clump of buildings, and bridges bring foot traffic along the Priuli margin, and back along the calles. It is, in short, a place where shops spread their wares, where tabernas set out tables, on the rare walkway beside a lesser canal, It is thus not a grand palazzo, this little house with its water-stairs on the Racheta waterway. It has been run down and let go, its last owner having died in penury and the current one, who inherited it, himself reputed as mad. But the little house possesses one glory one amazing glory that would have made many wealthy families envy it, before it fell to ruin—and this was a garden, run entirely to weeds. Land was so precious in Venezia, that not to build on it and install a dozen persons on it was a token of wealth, of truly great wealth and standing. But this garden was simply neglected by the mad Montefiori, who took to religious orders, and lived in the upstairs.

Some said later that the duchesa was a distant Montefiori herself. Some said her fortunes had fallen so low that she had no income, but to serve as nurse and caretaker to this mad old man. Whatever the truth of it, la duchesa came by boat, bringing no furniture at all, so far as anyone remembered. She came with a young granddaughter and three servants, the servants with six valises which they hired ported through the calles, and which they zealously followed afoot, as if they feared the porters were thieves. The duchesa and the young girl went by gondola to the water-stairs of the little house—such were the details afterward gossiped at the edge of the lagoon, where the gondoliers gathered, and on the Serpentine, by the offended porters. La duchesa's arrival was a moment's buzz in the city: the fact that she had leased from the odd Montefiori—that was itself a delicious oddity. But the gossip among the gondoliers and the porters was thin, beyond the fact that la duchesa had arrived with one very heavy valise among the others. Gold was the common and natural guess, and in three days thieves made two attempts on the little house, in vain; the servants were quick, and efficient. The merchants of the city knew nothing, except that la duchesa, through her servants, purchased new furnishings, a dining table and two stout chairs of classical taste, three carpets of good quality, and excellent dinnerware, with, of course, blown glass. She also, through her servants, bought extravagant fabrics, and engaged seamstresses, who reported that the young girl, Giacinta, about twelve, was a lovely if solemn child, and that la duchesa was elegant and clearly of exquisite taste.

There was early speculation as to when la duchesa might invade society, and society underwent a slight stir of preparation and a shudder of fortification. Venezia did not readily admit foreigners—anyone not born in Venezia was, by definition, foreign—least of all welcomed foreign aristocrats, who might expect to be bowed to and deferred to by the merchant princes of the Adriatic. And no one wanted to admit that an acquaintance with the mad Montefiori constituted native standing. Venezia drew a deep breath and closed ranks behind its doge and its council, its mercantile elite, and its own sense of proprieties. It waited for the assault. In vain. La duchesa did not enter society, and the mad Montefioro languished and died, taken in the black funerary barge to the sea, without relatives to lament him, only that la duchesa provided him a decent funerary procession, and watched from the windows as he was taken away, with what emotion no one could tell. She stayed quiet in her rented house afterward, engaged a gardener, and gossip about the gowns and the furnishings faded in favor of a grudging acceptance, since she never came out. The gossip that surrounded the house grew uninteresting, providing no amusement and no scandal.

So they caused no difficulties. They became a known quantity, and in their self-imposed isolation, respectable, even considered in invitations—but never quite invited, for fear of everyone else's opinion. The Montefiori house became an address, a location, an odd tidbit of knowledge. Fashionable people never saw the duchesa, except that gondoliers noted the beautiful child that looked out from the waterside windows, and from time to time merchants received requests to bring goods for inspection and purchase. The merchants thus favored reported the house as exquisite inside, and the gardener, who ate his lunch at a certain café on the Priuli, said the duchesa and her daughter spent hour upon hour in their little garden, that they had rooted out the weeds with their own hands, and discovered greenery and flowers under the neglect. Three years passed, in which more important matters than la duchesa di Milano pressed on Venezia. In the first of those three years, a far more extravagant visitor arrived, noisily, with abundant baggage and a train of servants. His name was Cesare di Verona, exiled and out from his own city in a recent coup, but, it seemed, far from penniless. In fact, he had long supported Venetian mercantile interests, through intermediaries—not quite idle enough a nobleman to rule Verona, perhaps, but an easier fit within Venetian society than the duchesa from farther west, since he spread gold about, liberally. More, Cesare di Verona owned ships. Society therefore understood how he derived his money. I was apt to increase. It employed and it built, it traded and therefore I could be traced, by those who knew such things, by those whose business it was to know.