Carlo Gozzi (1720—1806)
After the first outburst of the Renaissance, Italy entered upon a period of intellectual and artistic decline extending into the Nineteenth Century; the Eighteenth, a fertile period in other countries, contains but one notable Italian figure, Count Carlo Gozzi. He is generally remembered for his plays but his fairy tales are quite as charming. His work exerted considerable influence over the German Romanticists, especially Schiller and E. T. A. Hoffmann.
The present version is translated by Thomas Roscoe, and reprinted from his Italian Novelists, London, no date. The story has no title in the original.
The Venetian Silk-Mercer
Happening to recollect an amusing incident that occurred in my own times at the Church of Santi Ermacora and Fortunato (which the Venetians, making two saints into one, call the Church of Santo Marcuola), I will repeat it to you as follows. Messer Gherardo Hcnvenga was a Venetian silk-mercer, a very pleasant and good kind of man, and as creditable as you would wish to find any tradesman.
Rising early, as usual, one Sunday morning, being the day he had fixed upon, to save time, for the payment of the half year`s rent of his shop, he was no sooner washed and dressed than he counted out the money. “First of all,” he says, “I will go to mass, after putting these ten sequins in my purse, and when I have heard mass, I will just step and despatch I his other little affair.” He had no sooner said it than he snatched up his mantle, crossed himself devoutly, and sallied forth.
Passing along near the said church, he heard, by the tinkling of a little bell, that the mass was going out. “Oh,” he cried, “it is going, full of unction.” So he hastens into the church, touches the holy water, and approaches the altar where the priest pronounces the introido. He knelt upon a form, where there was no other person except a very pleasing and good- natured looking lady, adorned in the Venetian fashion, with a Florentine petticoat and a black silk vest, apparently just from the mercer`s, trimmed with sleeves of the finest lace, along with gold rings, bracelets of the richest chain gold, and a necklace set with beautiful diamonds, while, full of devotion and modesty, she held a very prettily bound book in her hands, from which she was singing hymns like an angel.
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