end of the Rialto campo, opposite the church, is the famous
hunchback, the Gobbo of the Rialto, who supports a rostrum from which
the laws of the Republic were read to the people, after they had been
read, for a wider audience, from the porphyry block at the corner of S.
Mark's.

Leaving the Gobbo on our left and passing from the campo at the
right-hand corner, we come to the great arcaded markets for fruit and
vegetables, and further to the wholesale and retail fish markets, all of
which are amusing to loiter in, particularly in the early hours of the
morning. To the Erberia are all the fruit-laden barges bound, chiefly
from Malamocco, the short cut from the lagoon being through the Rio del
Palazzo beneath the Bridge of Sighs and into the Grand Canal, just
opposite us, by the Post Office. The fruit market is busy twice a day,
in the early morning and in the late afternoon; the fish market in the
morning only.

[Illustration: S. MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI]

The vegetables and fruit differ according to the seasons; the fish are
always the same. In the autumn, when the quay is piled high with golden
melons and flaming tomatoes, the sight is perhaps the most splendid.
The strangest of the fish to English eyes are the great cuttle-fish,
which are sold in long slices. It strikes one as a refinement of
symmetrical irony that the ink which exudes from these fish and stains
everything around should be used for indicating what their price is.

Here also are great joints of tunny, huge red scarpenna, sturgeon,
mullet, live whole eels (to prove to me how living they were, a
fishmonger one morning allowed one to bite him) and eels in writhing
sections, aragosta, or langouste, and all the little Adriatic and lagoon
fish--the scampi and shrimps and calimari--spread out in little wet
heaps on the leaves of the plane-tree. One sees them here lying dead;
one can see them also, alive and swimming about, in the aquarium on the
Lido, where the prettiest creatures are the little cavalli marini, or
sea horses, roosting in the tiny submarine branches.

From all the restlessness and turmoil of these markets there is escape
in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario, a few yards along the Ruga
Vecchia di San Giovanni on the left. Here one may sit and rest and
collect one's thoughts and then look at a fine rich altar-piece by
Pordenone--S. Sebastian, S. Rocco, and S. Catherine. The lion of the
church is a Titian, but it is not really visi