Background Image: Henry de Vere, eighteenth Earl of Oxford; and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton – the “Two Henries” circa 1619
“In Belmont is a lady richly left; and she is fair, and, fairer than that word, of wondrous virtues: sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages: her name is Portia” – Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice
“BELMONT… the estate of Portia … apparently located on the mainland near Venice … a fictitious place” – Charles Boyce, Shakespeare A to Z, 1990
“Belmont is a real place, though called differently in Italian: its identification has been made possible by the precise geographical information and a specific historical reference given in the play.” – Dr. Noemi Magri, De Vere Society Newsletter, 2003; reprinted in Great Oxford, 2004
Villa Foscari on the River Brenta, built by 1560, is Portia’s estate of Belmont
Portia’s home in The Merchant of Venice is a grand palace where trumpets sound as each new member of the nobility is received in its richly decorated Great Hall, where musicians serenade and aristocrats dance and players perform. Shakespeare took the name “Belmont” from his main Italian source, Il Pecorone, a novella composed around 1380 and printed in Italian in 1558, wherein the character Gianetto travels a long distance from Venice to see the Lady of Belmont.
The original Belmont in the story was a port on the Adriatic coast. To simplify things for his play, Shakespeare indicates that Belmont is much closer to Venice; but no real place by that name actually existed or exists at the location he gives — or at any location anywhere near it. Given that William Shakspere of Stratford never left England, much less spent time in Italy, it follows that he had no real grand estate in mind to begin with; and so, as Boyce indicates above, scholars have universally viewed Shakespeare’s Belmont as a wondrous “fictitious place” he created as a vivid contrast to the crass commercial world of Venice.
The trouble, however, is that the author takes great pains to precisely locate and identify Portia’s estate of Belmont. He indicates, for example, that the mansion is on a riverbank — in the scene with Lorenzo and Jessica outside the great house in the evening, gazing at the water, when Lorenzo exclaims: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!”
So Portia’s great house is on a river. And in the third act she plans to go to Venice with Nerissa, both disguised as men (to be at Antonio’s trial, where Portia will appear as a lawyer), and then to return straightaway to Belmont. She tells Nerissa to “haste away, for we must measure twenty miles today.” So the roundtrip is twenty miles, or ten miles to Venice and ten miles back to Belmont.
Now the author inserts another clue. To conceal her true plan, Portia tells Lorenzo and Jessica a fake story about where they’re going: “There is a monastery two miles off,” she says, and “there we will abide” until the trial in Venice is concluded.
So now we know Belmont is (1) on the bank of a river, (2) ten miles from Venice and (3) two miles from a monastery. And it so happens that there was, and still is, a famous grand mansion on the bank of the River Brenta – the Villa Foscari-Malcontenta, the country residence of the illustrious Foscari family in Venice, exactly ten miles from Venice and precisely two miles from the monastery Ca’ delle Monache, the Nun’s House.
These clues from “Shakespeare” serve to identify Belmont as the architectural masterpiece Villa Foscari , designed by Andrea Palladio and constructed by 1560, when Elizabeth I of England was at the outset of her reign. This grand villa on the River Brenta, with its richly decorated interior rooms and Great Hall, was known for receiving members of the nobility (and royalty, such as Henry III of France, in 1574) with trumpets sounding, and for entertaining the guests with music and dance and plays – an unforgettable place that the author saw firsthand, later changing its name to Belmont.
“Though now the central seat of the University of Venice, the Villa-Foscari-Malcontenta can be visited today,” writes Richard Paul Roe, author of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2011), who independently came to the same conclusion as Dr. Noemi Magri. “It was an easy reach to Venice and a fitting ‘Belmont’ for an heiress, such as Portia, whose hand was sought by princes far and wide” – just as princes came from far and wide for the hand of Queen Elizabeth.
But the man who wrote The Merchant of Venice supplied even more specifics — such as when Portia sends her servant Balthasar to Padua for “notes and garments” that she needs, telling him to then continue in haste “unto the Tranect, to the common ferry which trades to Venice,” where she will be waiting with Nerissa in her coach. The two women will go from the Tranect by ferry to Venice.
According to Roe, scholars have been wide of the mark trying to identify the Tranect, unaware that it was a narrow strip of land where travelers could transfer from their coach to a ferry, which was pulled across the dry land by machinery to the water and the final lap to Venice. Their rendezvous at the Tranect “would have to have been in Fusina,” Roe concluded, because it’s five miles alongside the river from Belmont to Fusina, and from there across the water it’s “exactly five miles to the landing place called ‘il Molo,’ which sits in front of the Ducal Palace and Courts of Justice,” where Antonio’s trial was being held.
The ten-mile journey was in two parts of five miles each. Portia and Nerissa would return from Venice by ferrying the five miles across the water to the Tranect at Fusina, then travel by coach beside the River Brenta for five miles back to the Villa Foscari — or, as it’s called in the play, Belmont. In total the roundtrip had four legs of five miles apiece, adding up to the “twenty miles” that Portia states so emphatically. In other words, the great dramatist of The Merchant described not only the various lengths of the journey, but, also, the practical means by which the two women went to the trial in Venice and back.
Now for that “specific historical reference” mentioned by Dr. Magri – an event that is mentioned in The Merchant as having occurred at Belmont and that actually did happen at Villa Foscari. The reference is made by Nerissa, who asks Portia if she remembers Bassanio’s visit to Belmont: “Do you not remember, lady, in your father’s time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier that came hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat?”
“Yes, yes, it was Bassanio, as I think, so he was called,” Portia says, but totally ignoring Nerissa’s recollection of the Marguis of Montferrat, who is neither one of Portia’s suitors nor one of the play’s characters; in fact, this is the only time he’s mentioned. Traditional scholars have never found any good reason for the playwright to make such an allusion, but Dr. Magri, viewing The Merchant as written by Edward de Vere, found the reason — in the historical record of the visit to Venice in July 1574 by Henry III of France, who traveled with his party up the River Brenta and stopped at Villa Foscari, where he had been invited for dinner.
It turns out that with the French king on that visit was Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Marquis of Montferrat!
“il Molo,” Portia’s landing place in front of the Ducal Palace and Courts of Justice
Just eight months later in March 1575, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Oxford arrived at the royal court in Paris and met King Henry III, who was fond of expressing his admiration for Villa Foscari and its charming location. Oxford continued his journey to Italy and stopped in Mantua — where, Mark Anderson writes in Shakespeare by Another Name, the earl’s “probable host” was Guglielmo Gonzaga, Marquis of Monteferrat, who surely would have told Oxford about his experiences during that historic visit of the French king.
Oxford’s trip from Padua to Venice by traghetto (horse-drawn ferry) along the River Brenta lasted seven hours. His ferry ride passed “the classically inspired Villa Foscari,” Anderson writes, “as the traghetto slowed down to round a wide curve on the riverbank.”
Noemi Magri concluded that Oxford “intended to describe Villa Foscari and had in mind the Brenta with its villas” and that he “wished to remember the Marquis of Montferrat, Guglielmo Gonzaga Duke of Mantua, the ruler of one of the greatest centers of learning in Renaissance times.”
What does it matter who wrote the Shakespeare plays? I’d say that Belmont = Villa Foscari is one good reason all by itself.
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