From the prayer-book of the Magnificent Signora Caterina Venier of Venice, a Book of Hours in the Venetian use, parchment, with marginal devotional notes in her own hand. The book passed to her younger daughter Bianca at Caterina's death in 1497 and to the Convent of S. Maria della Salute upon Bianca's profession; preserved in the convent's library through 1810, and then in the Marciana. The relevant marginal note is on folio 47v, alongside the prayer for Compline.
[On folio 47v, beneath the antiphon Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes, the Signora's hand, in a brown ink darker than the printed text:]
The xixth of March, 1485. A year and a month since the dissolution. I have not given it back. I will not, I think, give it back. The girl wrote me a letter in October which I have not answered; she did not ask for it; she said only that she remembered the dinner and the chain catching at her embroidery, and that she was whole and twenty and the spring was coming. She is twenty-one now. She will be married by Christmas to someone else, I am told.
I do not pray well at Compline this year. I keep at the salva nos vigilantes a moment longer than I used to, and at the requiescamus in pace I think of the Greek words on the back of the colombina. Christe eleison. The girl wore it without knowing what it said. Her great-grandmother knew. So do I.
My own grandfather brought it back from the third of the Crusades — not a Crusade he was meant to be on, the dating being long; but he was in those waters with a Venetian galley in the year of grace 1204 (which Venetians shall remember as Venetians shall remember) and he had it of a woman whose husband had it of his father who had it of the Patriarch's sacristan whose name the sacristan would not say. The colombina is older than this house by four hundred years and the niello-work is of a hand not living in any city of Italy. I know what I am keeping. I knew when I set it upon the table beside my plate at the dinner and did not return it to her hand when the dinner was over.
Domine, miserere mei. The girl wrote that the Venetians, for all their faults, are nearer the sea. So we are. We are also nearer the things we took from it.
The colombina is in the small painted box behind the rosaries in the wall-cabinet of the oratorio at the back of the piano nobile. I will tell Pietro before I die. I will tell no one else. If Pietro has the sense his father had, he will keep it where it is, and his son in his turn will not learn what its inscription says, and there will be a generation of this house that holds the colombina without knowing it is the colombina, which is, I think, the best that any of us can hope for in such matters.
— C.V.
[Below the marginal, in a different hand, smaller and later, undated, in a brown ink that has faded to grey:]
Letto dalla figlia, Bianca, suora di Santa Maria della Salute, l'xj agosto 1497, tre giorni dopo la morte della madre.
Trovato nello scrigno. Lasciato dove era.
[Read by the daughter, Bianca, nun of Santa Maria della Salute, the xith of August 1497, three days after her mother's death. Found in the cabinet. Left where it was.]