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544 David Laven

(1786-1872) , who soon became Byron’s riding companion, wrote a
2
long letter to Richard William Hamilton (1777-1859), Permanent Un-
der Secretary at the Foreign Office. Hoppner’s letter, full of hypochon-
driac grumbling, described the condition in which he found Venice.
Hoppner never stopped complaining about his posting to Venice. But
his representation of the state of the impoverished city is interesting:

This unfortunate country is in a truly deplorable state. The people are re-
duced to the greatest distress; the country is infested with robbers, and no
one measure has been taken by the government to alleviate the general suf-
fering. The people are no longer permitted to complain, nor to draw compari-
son between their present situation and that in which they were while under
the French government, and that the Austrians themselves seem to feel the
justice of their general detestation in which they are held so strongly as no
longer to express any surprise at it. The little trade which was still carried on
here last year is now almost entirely at a stop [...]. Venice indeed appears to
be at her last gasps, and if something is not done to relieve and support her,
must be soon buried again in the marshes from whence she originally sprang.
Every trace of her former magnificence which still exists serves only to illus-
trate her present decay 3 .

Hoppner’s image of Venice’s slipping back into the marshes
matches common tropes in British accounts of the city after 1797.
Byron predicted in his Ode to Venice (1818) that the former Dom-
inante’s marble walls would end «level with the waters» ; Samuel Rog-
4
ers in the second edition of his Italy, a Poem (1830) similarly prophe-
sied that there would be a time when «the wave rolls o’er Venice» .
5
William Wordsworth’s On the extinction of the Venetian Republic (com-
posed at some point between 1799 and 1802) spoke of grief at the
Serenissima’s lost grandeur . If Percy Bysshe Shelley’s characterisa-
6

anglophone myths of Venice, «MDCCC ’Ottocento», n° 1 (2012), pp. 5-32. For more tra-
ditional and hagiographic accounts of Byron in Venice, see P. Quennell, Byron in Italy,
Collins, London, 1941; P. Cochran, Byron and Italy, Cambridge Scholar Press, Newcas-
tle upon Tyne, 2012; F. MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, Faber and Faber, London,
2002, pp. 316-73.
2 On Hoppner’s career, see C.S.B. Buckland, Richard Belgrave Hoppner, «The English
Historical Review», vol. 39, issue155 (1924), pp. 373-85.
3 Hoppner to Hamilton, Venice, 15 November 1816, National Archive, FO7.130.
4 G. Byron, Beppo: Mazeppa: Ode to Venice: a Fragment; a Spanish Romance: and
Sonnet, translated from Vittorelli, John Murray, London, 1820, p. 115.
5 S. Rogers, Italy, a Poem, Cadewell, London (1830), p. 59. Note that in the first
edition of the poem, this line was not included, although the notion of a doomed Venice
was still strong. S. Rogers, Italy, a Poem, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Lon-
don, 1822.
6 A.J. George (ed.), The complete poetical works of William Wordsworth in ten volumes,
vol. IV (1801-1805), Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1904, p. 95. On the debated

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)