| Title | : | Venice |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0571168973 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780571168972 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1960 |
| Awards | : | Κρατικό Βραβείο Λογοτεχνικής Μετάφρασης Μετάφραση Έργου Ξένης Λογοτεχνίας στην Ελληνική Γλώσσα (2011) |
'Entertaining, ironical, witty, high spirited and appreciative . . . Both melancholy and gay and worldly, I think of it now as among the best books on Venice; indeed as the best modern book about a city that I have ever read.' Geoffrey Grigson
'One of the most diverse and diverting books ever written about Venice . . . A taut and personal report, wholly absorbing, quickened by vivid prose and astringent humour.' Sunday Times
'For those of whom Venice is a memory, a treat in store, or even a dream, the broad canvas of this book covering a thousand years in the life of one of the most complex, original, and active communities the world has ever seen, is a work of lasting interest.' Guardian
Venice Reviews
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What a tangled web they weave, as they practice to deceive. Venice is and was a snare for fools, a smiling whore clad all in jewels. Gilded masks and tourist traps, palaces in slow collapse. Pretty lies told in bloom of youth; old age has turned those lies to truth. We all transform - there is no norm! Morris writes as Morris does, with mournful heart and mind abuzz. Nonfiction rarely rocks my boat, but on a boat my eye took note: This author is this city - loving secrets, lacking pity. Her crowded days hold no surprise, but dusk descends and dreams then rise. This paean is to long-lost past; the power gone, the torch was passed. The city ebbs and flows as with the tide, and so this was a perfect guide.
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It may be strange for me to categorise this book as a biography, but Jan Morris treats the city here as a character in a melancholic story of her history, her streets, her canals and her people. It is a fantastic read and should be in your luggage should you ever visit this one of the world's most incredible magical cities (hint: read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino too!)
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Audiobook, read by Sebastian Comberti.
Is Jan Morris's book responsible for perpetuating a certain idea of Venice through the later 20th century? Venice as elegant, decaying, exotic, a mélange and meeting-point of East and West... Perhaps in Britain at least. In this book, I felt like I'd found a key to where it comes from. When I was younger, I managed to do an entire course on the city without being aware of these ideas: this legend is something that lives in the realms of literature and pop high-culture, not academic texts. In arts it seems overwhelming once you've noticed it, almost the only way Venice is talked about, a given in general-audience writing and TV documentaries.
The book, first published in 1960, was originally titled 'The World of Venice', and the richness of its description makes Venice feel like an enclosed world, intoxicating, enthralling and claustrophobic and crowded: ("the little subsidiary passages that creep padded and muffled among the houses, like the runs of city weasels.") This Venice as a place different and apart from the rest of the world, even from its own hinterland, the idea of it as a place of intrigue and carnival, which is a holiday from normal life more so than most cultural city destinations. (Although the recent level of prominence of the carnival and its masks for tourism are apparently a fairly recent innovation).
It is typical of mid-century upper-middle class British travel writing, with its refined little snobberies, romanticised stereotypes, asides addressed to a readership assumed to be familiar with London and Oxbridge, and breezy recommendations of expensive endeavours, such as motorboats being best way to see Venice. A few days ago I found
a BBC Radio 4 retrospective on the programme 'Bookclub' from 2008, which spent half an hour on Venice and compared it with Brideshead Revisited - at the time of writing, Morris had returned to Venice after first seeing it in late 1945 at the end of active duty in the Second World War - and Brideshead is an excellent signpost for the atmosphere of this book. (In there Morris also mentions that the recommendation to see the city by motorboat no longer stands. The presenter's joke against a Scotsman - with an accent reminiscent of Fraser from Dad's Army - for raising the expense of motorboats made even the radio show seem like an artefact from former times.) The reader's liking for Morris's Venice may be heavily dependent on whether they tend to find such patrician tones escapist or grating. Similar attitudes underlie a lot of British children's literature of the same age, which mean it conjures a nostalgic, cosy atmosphere for some of us who grew up on books like and became wired to imagine ourselves in the place of the characters and narrators. But for others who were always conscious of the narrowness of that world, or who did not become accustomed to it early, the faults in this book may be more obvious.
Whilst the book's tone feels very much like a product of sixty years ago, not all the information is (Morris revised the book in the 1990s) and, as my friend Patrick pointed out in
his review, there are moments when it is unclear whether the Venice of the early 1960s or of the 90s is being described, as it is all thrown in together. There are times when this does not matter, as the writing is an evocation of a mythic atmosphere - and obviously if one wanted up-to-date travel info, or academic history or geography, one would look at other books - but there are others when it is outright frustrating because it makes it difficult to picture a scene. At times, I wished the revision had been in the form of an extra separate chapter or two, to make it clear how Venice was at which times, and what changed. (There is, incidentally, nothing at all in this book about Morris' transition, or if or how Venice seemed different experienced as a man or a woman. In 'Bookclub', Morris said she visits the city annually - so if that is a long-running custom, differences in what is observed about the place over time and experienced oneself will necessarily be blurred, and not discrete in the manner of visits many years apart.)
When I started listening to audiobooks last summer, I hoped to use them rather like extended radio programmes, and have mostly chosen books on non-fiction subjects with which I already have some degree of familiarity - or where there is another reason not to take notes or worry about remembering as much detail as possible (e.g. a history book already well known as having inaccuracies). But Jan Morris' Venice is the one where I've managed this most effectively, and for which I took fewest notes. A lot of the material I'd already read, albeit it felt distant, and I would have been unable to recount it myself without looking it up; this led to more relaxed listening, the felt, and experienced, sense that the facts are out there in many other sources. This is not a new work that debunks, the sort of thing whose arguments *should* be outlined in a half-decent review: it is the kind of work that gets debunked, but which isn't even positioned as modern or academic information. The point of the book seems to be mood and atmosphere and, as such, whether a given point is legend, or historical truth, or something which has been corrected by recent scholarship, felt fairly irrelevant. It's not a book readers are likely to take as accurate, as might be the concern with a recent popular history that contains errors; people who pick up this book know it's old, and the style is a constant reminder because it feels old, and many of them will read it for that literary style, not as a guidebook. (Though I'd love to know if tour guides in Venice are sick of correcting certain points from it, and if so what those are.)
Even whilst knowing the material is a clichéd selection, I enjoyed hearing about it in this beguiling way: the settlement's emergence from the marshes, a "city of water-peasants" and the safety of the lagoon, acting like a really long-lasting Wonder in a game of Civilization; Doges and the stability and class structure of the Republic and its eventual tragic fall to Napoleon; those intrigues and dungeons on which Pratchett based Vetinari's court, not to mention the officialisation of pickpockets and the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Thieves; there's Ruskin and Byron and 'Baron Corvo'; Dalmatians being pirates not dogs; nuns being courtesans and other such decadence behind the city's "lasting reputation for lascivious charm"; the cats (what is it with Mediterranean cities and cats?); the bazaar-city and caravanserais and bridges reminiscent of willow-pattern; a city of hotels even in the 14th century; the contradictions of race - "in Venice, as a sixteenth-century Englishman observed, it signified nothing ‘if a man be a Turk, a Jew, a Gospeller, a Papist or a believer in the Devil; nor does anyone challenge you, whether you are married or not, and whether you eat flesh and fish in your own home’", but in other instances there is no shortage of racial discrimination; the spooky small islands with exhumation of burials and remains of hospitals; lots of gondolas, more than I ever thought I'd hear about gondolas. Morris loves the word froward: I went from 'how lovely, it's too long since I've heard that' to becoming sick of its overuse in the second half. There is surprisingly little about music - it's implicitly explained why on 'Bookclub': Morris said that she cannot stand Monteverdi.
Many characterisations and generalisations are the of-their-time sort; there are commonplace references to housemaids and housekeepers that sound, in this voice, like a hangover from pre-war Britain; there's apparent romanticisation of Italian corruption as quaint; locals described "like figures from a Goldoni comedy". Indeed the Venetians in the book seem a little too much like a scene which Morris describes being filmed for TV:
The exposure was estimated; the producer approved the arrangements; the script-writer had a look through the viewfinder; the sun shifted satisfactorily; the steamer in the background was nicely framed through the washing; and suddenly the cameraman, pressing his key, bawled ‘Via!’ In an instant that tenement was plunged in frantic activity, the housewives scrubbing furiously, the gossips jabbering, the passers-by vigorously passing, the old ladies leaning energetically from their windows, and a multitude of unsuspected extras, never seen before, precipitately emerging from back-doors and alleyways – an old man in a black hat, sudden coveys of youths, and a clown of a boy who, abruptly appearing out of a passage, shambled across our field of vision like a camel, till the tears ran down the script-writer’s face…
"Sudden coveys of youths" is rather marvellous phrasing. But much later, Chapter 21 hits a stride of particularly striking, almost too-rich descriptions:
"the remains of some Byzantine frescoes that are said to be the oldest works of art in Venice, and which, though not in themselves very beautiful, have a certain hypnotic allure to them, like the goggle-eyes that peer at you out of the middle of cuckoo-spit…
the Renaissance church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, hidden away behind the Rialto like a precious stone in ruffled satin…
at night, if you take your boat out there through the lamplight, it is as still and dark and luscious as a great lake of plum-juice, through which your bows seep thickly, and into whose sickly viscous liquid the dim shape of the Doge’s Palace seems to be slowly sinking, like a pastry pavilion."
For all the loveliness of this, I only enjoyed hearing about it to an extent. It's like gâteau for every meal. In the later chapters, the brief mentions of the mainland towns in the hinterland, of bridges and industry and Mestre, made me crave to hear about the other Venice, a site of everyday life. (And from a writer who is, perhaps, less rude about Chioggia and Burano.) If the book had been half about the humdrum - about people working in tourist attractions and in jobs which had nothing to do with sightseeing, inside Venice and further away, a little on the hard graft of maintaining the buildings, in the words of those doing the labour, about how local people live around the tourists, about what it feels like to live near Venice but not in it - that could have made a 5-star book, but that would have been a different book. I needed to hear a hint of this stuff to realise there's too little about it here.
With British cities that are tourist attractions, it's easy to find fictional and factual writing that deals with the grimy underbelly or the quotidian grind. But as was mentioned on 'Bookclub', so much of what has been written about Venice (or as they didn't specify, so much of what is available in English about Venice) has been written by visitors, not by people who were born and grew up in the area, that it gives a different (and probably distorted) picture of the place. I listened to
another radio programme - a series of excerpts from
The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles- but even then, among the material on Moldovan immigrant workers there was the usual modern-rarefied-Venice stuff about Contessas in decaying palazzos. (The phenomenon of Moldovans going to Italy is covered from the other end in Vladimir Lorchenkov's novella
The Good Life Elsewhere.)
Comberti's audio reading was entirely in tune with the material: an RP-accented, slightly camp yet serious voice - with perfect pronunciation of Italian - which would have worked perfectly as that of a character in a film about upper-middle class midcentury bohemians. The sense of stepping elegantly back in time was as complete as it could be within the very contemporary format of the digital audiobook. (And unlike a couple of other audiobooks I've listened to recently, the narration was not too fast.)
In Britain at least, Morris's account may be the first or only book a lot of people read about Venice. I can understand why it is loved the way it is, for its atmosphere and style, but as I read it after similar books (
Joseph Brodsky and Peter Ackroyd a few years ago), and after academic study of the place (longer ago), it didn't cast quite the same spell. If I'd read Morris before Ackroyd's
Venice: Pure City, Ackroyd might have got 4 stars rather than 5. As well as info repeated in both books, there is a similarity in the atmosphere the two authors conjure; I am inclined to prefer Ackroyd's chronological approach because it feels more organised whilst still retaining the literary-narrative spell Morris also weaves. (Ackroyd also isn't a proponent of the absurd theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, as Morris sadly appears to be here.) Morris' book feels more like seeing a place as a tourist; as with any visit to a place on which you haven't done a lot of background reading, linear historical time ends up subsumed into the itinerary of places you look at in whatever order you happen to visit them. I think Morris' Venice is a little overrated in literary circles - but that is hardly unique - these are circles in which people often seem to give too much weight to creative non-fiction and to authors respected in the press, instead of to the most accurate, which may require more research to pinpoint. And to some general readers who stumble on the book in libraries, this book may seem old-fashioned and a little pretentious. Within these caveats, I enjoyed it; listening whilst drowsy, it made it feel like it might still be 1983 on an analogue radio, not 2019 on a cheap Android tablet.
(Listened Nov 2018-Jan 2019; reviewed Feb 2019.) -
The husband and I visited both Trieste and Venice earlier this year (before then setting off for two weeks of fine walking in Slovenia). I read J. Morris'
Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere while in Trieste and lapped up its languid, rich portrayal of that faded Habsburg port. We then fell in love with La Serenissima and I determined to read Morris's classic treatment of Venice upon our return. I was expecting a work of a similar quality and style, but it just can't compare.
It's so....listy. Lists of boats, lists of lions, lists of towers, lists of burial places. The lists go on and on. The description is so exhaustive as to be exhausting. In a word: tedious.
There is, I think, an easy explanation for the vast difference in quality and style between the two books.
Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere was written in 2002, one of her later works. The World of Venice, on the other hand, was written in 1960. I don't think she'd yet found her unique and lovely way of bringing together the eloquent travel essay, the quirks of history, and the expert tour guide into one unified whole.
I think she admits this herself in her forward to the 1974 edition, when she notes that - upon revisiting the book to update and revise it - she'd discovered that she'd fallen out of love with Venice, that the "sad magic" was gone for her. My guess, however, is that she did still love Venice (how can you not?). She just no longer cared for the way her pen had treated it as a younger, less mature writer. Just my guess. -
A quirky but richly detailed portrait of Venice in all its history and visual splendour by an English woman who has lived there. I can't say I agreed with all her opinions - that all the palaces on the Grand Canal are ugly for example, a rather preposterous bit of snobbery - but I did admire her determination - often conducted in her boat - to ferret out points of interest from almost every corner of the city and its lagoon.
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In many ways this book is like the city itself. It has to be five stars, but with some caveats.
First the good news. Jan Morris has written a magnificent depiction of a fabulous city. She clearly knows the city extremely well and loves it like a mother loves a child. This oozes from every page. It is almost as if she is showing us a photograph of her dearly beloved first-born. This is his first bicycle. Here he is at his fifth birthday party. This is his pet lion.
And that makes for an incredibly dense and rich book. The depth of her knowledge is astounding. You turn the page and find a juicy bit of scandal, an amusing life story, a fascinating custom. It's a bit like wandering the streets. At every turn you find new sights to delight you. A crooked bridge over a minor canal. A pair of porters singing as they deliver flour to local pizza restaurants. A couple snogging in public - he enthusiastically, she trying to paw him away. A stone lion rampant. A faded palace slowly sinking into the grand canal. A pickpocket nipping at your trousers.
But there's a problem. The book, like the city, is frozen in time. Jan Morris's Venice is very much of the 1950s. First published in 1960, which at the time of writing makes it more than 64 years old. And while much of Venice hasn't changed in that time, there is a sense that we are reading two histories - Jan's history of Venice plus her own history.
The book is also densely packed - again just like the city. With no spare land to build on, Venice necessarily has become more compact and dense over the centuries. And now it cheerfully accepts several cruise ships a day in high season. This makes for a closely-packed and at times claustrophobic place. Her text mirrors this, with thousands of stories and characters crammed somewhat haphazardly between the covers. She will start to tell you about the lions in the city ... and then list dozens of different types of lions.
The book like the city is also labyrinthine. There is a kind of logic to how it is arranged, but it's very hard to follow. You will be reading about animals one minute and then torture and murder the next - all linked with a general title of "bestiary". Each page hops from ancient history to architecture to food to the 1950s and then repeat.
In a sense, that doesn't matter. Jan Morris is such an engaging companion that you don't mind getting lost with her. It has been said that the best way to appreciate Venice is to get lost there. Just wander the back streets and let the city unfold in front of you. This marvellous unique crazy city.
Will you like this book? Probably. Some people love it to bits - a book to wallow in. But there's a warning. This book is a fantastic scholarly achievement. It's writing of the highest order from someone who really knows their subject. It is bewitching, unique.
It is also dense, illogical, meandering and highly personal. If you are going to Venice you simply have to read it. You probably have to read it anyway as one of the best examples of a travel book ever written.
But just don't expect to finish it. You may well do. Or you may find, like I did, that your interest wanes after a while.
It has to be five stars. A book this well written could not be anything less. But there's just that little caveat that this book, like the city, has it's own unique way of doing things. Dense, labyrinthine, human, crazy, intense. -
This is a rich combination of erudition and the personal, told in sparkling prose. It's almost too much, but that's my problem. The main problems with the book are two revisions that marry poorly with the original text; I'd have preferred leaving it as a snapshot of Venice ca. 1960 - which is all that would excuse some unfortunate racial references that are unacceptable at the date of later revisions. I also question ending the book with a prolonged disquisition on the islands of the lagoon; I get it as a stylistic choice, but for the reader, it's going out with a whimper, not a bang.
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What a disappointment - felt a bit guilty clicking on the 'Yes, I've finished' when I very obviously hadn't, but couldn't read any more. The history bits were interesting, but the current stuff was dated and patronising (still want to go to Venice sometime though, and the book group discussion was a lot more interesting than the book itself)
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A slightly strange experience. I'm not sure that the book necessarily benefits from the two updates that Morris has written since the first edition came out in 1960. Perhaps if I were a tourist looking for a literary version of a guidebook, and, more to the point, if I were travelling to Venice in 1993, this would be a positive. But as it is, there's something slightly unsettling about reading Morris' detailed accounts of her visits to Venice at the tail-end of the 1950s, when it appeared that the place was rather more of a backwater than it is now, only to find random references to what has been happening in the city in the early 90s making their way into the text. In the second and third parts of the book, especially, it did sometimes leave me rather confused as to exactly what time period the events she's describing are actually happening in. Which arguably doesn't matter, except it leaves me wondering whether the initial impression I had got of the Venice of 1959 as a romantic, but slightly down-at-heel place was misplaced, and it was, actually, even then, rather more of a tourist trap than the initial chapters suggest, or whether instead, it is simply that her accounts of, for example, the problems associated with managing the sheer volume of visitors the city gets were actually written into the book much later.
As it is, it is good in parts. The first part is the best, and the bit that is most consciously written as a 'visitor's guide', singling out the best sites to visit was the weakest part of the book for me (though perhaps if I was planning to visit, I'd have a different perspective on this). It left me thinking that perhaps what I should really have read was a straight history of Venice, rather than this slightly peculiar mix of travelogue, visitor's guide, memoir and potted history. -
My review may be a little unfair, but reflects a level of disappointment with this book. I saw a TV programme on an Morris which I found fascinating. What a fabulous person, what an interesting life story and how many fantastic journeys she had made. I suppose a combination of being impressed by her talking about her life, and the reputation of this book, made me expect far better.
It is a hard book to categorise. It is not a history of Venice, though it does trace out much of its history. It is not a guide book, at least not in a practical sense as you could not use it to guide yourself around Venice. It might be more thought about as a reflection on Venice, or perhaps if you have never been, a preparation for it. It is organised into a whole host of themes, which I suppose make some sort of sense.
It is a pleasant enough read, but its main fault for me is that Morris wants to seem to tell you everything about every aspect of Venice. So for instance, in the section on the secondary forgotten attractions of Venice, rather than describe one or two examples she lists lots and lots of them, and you get lost under the sheer quantity of facts and information. I felt less facts, and more about the mood, might have been better. At times I wanted to skim over the parts when she lists lots of examples.
It is also a bit of a historical guide as it was originally written 60 or more years ago. Morris updated it a few times, but the last of those was almost 30 years ago, and even in as apparently timeless cities as Venice, things change, so again little use as a practical tool.
Many other people rate this book far higher than I do, but to me it is caught between being not enough of a meditation on the feel of the city and not quite practical as a guidebook. I will thought try other books by Morris, as I still have hope of finding a gem! -
Quin espectacle de llibre. És meravellós💔
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Usually I reserve 5 stars for a life-changing book - but this deserves it for being so well written. Read it before you go to get a feel for the city, read it afterwards to savor what you and Morris have seen and to mark places you'll need to see next time. I can't resist one quote that exemplifies her sharp eye and love of language (I recommend reading it aloud for the full effect):
And around the corner, beside the Grand Canal, there lies the incomparable fish market of Venice, a glorious, wet, colourful, high-smelling concourse of the sea, to which in the dawn hours fleets of barges bring the day's supply of sea-foods. Its stalls are lined deliciously with green fronds, damp and cool: and upon them are laid, in a delicately-tinted, slobbering, writhing, glistening mass, the sea-creatures of the lagoon. There are sleek wriggling eels, green or spotted, still pugnaciously alive; beautiful little red fish packed in boxes like shampoos, heads upwards; strange tube-like mollluscs, oozing at the orifice; fine red mullet, cruel pseudo-sharks, undefeated crabs and mounds of gem-like shell-fish; skates, and shoals of small flat-fish, and things like water-tarantula, and pools of soft bulbous octopus, furiously ejecting ink; huge slabs of tunny, fish-rumps and fish-steaks, joints of fish, fish kidneys, innards and guts and roes of fish: a multitude of sea-matter, pink, white, red, green, multi-limbed, beady-eyed, sliding, sensuous, shimmering, flabby, spongy, crisp--all lying aghast upon their fresh green biers, dead, doomed or panting, like a grove of brilliant foliage among the tundra of Venetian stone.
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It's a travel book, isn't it? Well, yes and no. It's a document about Venice, then and now. From a writer she's a thrill already. Jan Morris is a woman which in past was a man. That's not news, she's not the first or the last. But her view in details, in hidden places and things is precious. A calm voice, just like a gondola slipping gently in the venetian lagoon. It's not the type "go there, see this, do that", but in fact it's like the memoirs of a city as a person. You learn a lot and you enjoy venetians' uniqueness. Venice, which is one of my favorite cities, is like that old precious vases or houses that have been broken, shattered or else but still have this magical beauty that makes any plan for restoration to be very, very careful for not loose its fragile "verdigris". I wish this writer would have write novels about Venice, too, it could be a paradise.
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Jan Morris writes beautiful prose. This hymn to Venice, from someone who has lived there, is, as you would expect, a lyrical and haunting evocation of the beauty of one of the world's most visited tourist destinations, and a fascinating history of a city state that was a republic and maritime empire throughout the middle ages, but it is also shrewd and practical and funny.
This isn't a tourist guide. I have been to Venice as a tourist and I would not have packed this book. This is a piece of the best sort of travel writing, the sort where the traveller becomes part of an alien landscape and has deep interactions with the inhabitants and begins to struggle to an understanding of what it must be like to live in such a place. This is that perfect sort of travel book ... except that it focuses on a single place and it is all the better for that.
There are some fascinating bits about the Venetian language. The word 'Arsenal' which was the name for the Venetian shipyard which used assembly-line techniques (celebrated by Dante in the Inferno) to produce, at peak, a fighting galley every day, comes from the arabic 'dar es sinaa' which means 'house of art'. The Arabic word 'sikka' (a die) became 'zecca' (a mint) and thence 'zecchino' (a coin) which is the origin of the Venetian unot of currency, the sequin. (The City: 17)
It is enlivened with historical anecdotes:
"One bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch." (The People: 9)
"The Grand Canal ... follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto - the origin of the Rialto." (The City: 11)
"The earliest of all state banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century." (The City: 19)
"The fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby." (The Lagoon: 26)
"St Nicholas of Myra ... was particularly revered by the Venetians, if only because at the Council of Nicaea he had soundly boxed the ears of the theologian Arius, from whose very heresy, adopted by the Lombards, some of the earliest Venetians had fled into the lagoon." (The Lagoon: 30)
"The silver reliquary of St Nicholas [in Bari] ...has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the purest spring water." (The Lagoon: 30)
But the most remarkable thing about this book is the writing. The prose is like wonder washing over one:
There are stupendous descriptions:
"A mesh of nets patterns the walls of a fisherman's islet, and a restless covey of boats nuzzles its water-gate." (Landfall)
There are utterly original metaphors:
"An air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes." (The People: 2)
"The gondolier ... utters a series of warning cried when he makes a manoeuvre of this sort, throaty and distraught, like the call of an elderly and world-weary sea-bird." (The City: 12)
"Other Venetian waterways ... have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub." (The City: 12)
"The modern Venetian ... examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider." (The City: 17)
"Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles." (The City: 18)
And there are profundities:
"It is a difficult world, is it not, and heavy with disillusionment?" (The City: 18)
"Do we not know them well, whenever we live, the aesthetic conservers on the one hand, the men of change on the other? Which of these two philosophies is the more romantic, I have never been able to decide." (The City: 22)
This is a book of magic with enchantment on every page. -
I read this as I am visiting Venice for the first time next month. Some atmospheric passages and fascinating nuggets of information, but far too much detail and too many lists. I skipped through the last third of the book as I was on information overload by then and desperate to finish it so I could read something less dry! Still very excited about my first trip to Venice though ...
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From the reviews here, many people rave about this book and others thought it was terrible for various reasons and couldn't finish it. I am squarely on the fence! Generally I don't like stories with excessive descriptive paragraphs or that run on about how lovely the garden is..... I just want a good tale.
Jan certainly is good with words. I had to keep the dictionary handy. She does have a beautiful style of writing but I often started drifting and could only get through this book by skimming over many parts. That said, I learned a lot about Venice history - the kind of stuff you definitely don't get from a history book. I made many bookmarks about the quirks and landmarks, and some history anecdotes, that I will definitely go back and review before my upcoming trip.
I am glad I read it but if you just want an overview before a 3-day visit, this book is not for you. If you already know you love Venice or are truly interested in its social history, then... Go for it! Happy browsing. -
"(...) if you shut your eyes very hard, and forget the price of coffee, you may see a vision of another Venice. She became great as a market city, poised between East and West, between Crusader and Saracen, between white and brown: and if you try very hard, allowing a glimmer of gold from the Basilica to seep beneath your eyelids, and a fragrance of cream to enter your nostrils, and the distant melody of a cafe pianist to orchestrate your thoughts if you really try, you can imagine her a noble market-place again. In these incomparable palaces, East and West might meet once more, to fuse their philosophies at last, and settle their squalid bickerings. In these mighty halls the senate of the world might deliberate, and in the cavernous recesses of the Basilica, glimmering and aromatic, all the divinities might sit in reconciliation. Venice is made for greatness, a God-built city, and her obvious destiny is mediation. She only awaits a summons."
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No other book could be filled with as many details about Venice and its environs as this one. Certainly, it made me wish that I could go back to Venice to see all the campos, small churches and artwork that I missed on my previous visits.
It is important to remember that this book was published first in 1960. Even though the Forward indicates that the book has been updated, it still has the the "feel" of something written in the 1960's. This a paragraph about "housewives" picking up their children from school. I don't think a writer completing this in 2017 would use the same terms.
There is so much detail here that it would be difficult to use the book as a modern guidebook as the material is not organzied the way that modern guide books do. -
The book is generally regarded as one of the greatest travel books, but then, it shouldn't be treated as a travel book say it's (many) fans. Nor should it be thought of a history book. And so on. I guess that's my trouble with it, that it seems to wander all over the place. In Venice itself, that is just the thing to do, but here I found it frustrating. A straight forward history book would of probably been more my cup of cappuccino. I thought about giving it two stars but settled for three stars because some of the writing is rather good, but even here I hit an issue - I really don't like generalisations of people; of the Venetian women are so so - variety. But the sun is out, and I'm actually in Venice right now, so three stars it is.
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My dream trip. My traveling days are done, but if I had just one more trip in me, it would be to Venice. My first glimpse of the city was through an old movie called Dangerous Beauty about the famous literary courtesan Veronica Franco. The story was interesting, but even more were the sights of the city.
I fell in love with La Serenissima and have read everything I could get my hands on, fiction and non-fiction. This is one of the best non-fiction titles I have read. From the history to the story of uninhabited islets, the book covers every aspect of this great city. Reading this book gives an idea of what it means to live in Venice.
Sigh.
My blog: The Interstitial Reader
https://theinterstitialreader.wordpre... -
Jan Morris writes beautifully about a beautiful city. Not your typical travel guide but more like meandering through Venice with a good and interesting friend. I've only been to Venice once. Something very sad happened to me there - my brother told me he was dying. I thought I would never want to go back there but this book makes me want to go back and see all that I missed.
My only criticism of the book is that Ms. Morris is coy about her personal life there; makes allusions to things left unexplained and it got a bit exasperating. -
The original version was published in 1960, and the writing seems of a different time. It is lyrical with some unexpected humor. The chapter setup doesn't necessarily flow, and it took me a good half of the book to get into the writing style--or maybe the second half of the book, and especially the last few chapters, was just more interesting. Regardless, if you have any interest in Venice, this is a pretty fascinating read. It covers history, style, art, architecture, customs, people, religion, etc.
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First book I ever read on Venice. Made me totally fall in love with the place and I hadn't even visited it then. Since then I have visited and it only confirmed the wonderful writing of Morris. Hope to visit again soon but the Morris book was one which inspired me and since then I have voraciouly consumed any book I can find on La Serenissima and its fabulous history and ...hopefully...its future. So, an enormous thank you to Jan Morris.
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I was rather disappointed considering all the positive reviews. I haven't been to Venice and now have no wish to. I thought the writers style very pretentious and boring - especially the endless lists!!!
Maybe if you know Venice you understand what he/she is writing about. I thought it was a travel book but no the author detests those and classes this as ' travel literature'. I recommended this to my book club and now wish I hadn't. -
I am interested in reading this book because it is about Venice, which is a city that fascinates me. I also became interested in Venice after reading The Merchant of Venice in my Shakespeare seminar and reading City of Fallen Angels by John Berendt earlier this year. It seems like a magical city and I am interested in learning more about its history. I found this book on my goodreads feed.
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In my usual fashion, when we decided to take a cruise beginning in Venice to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, I consumed everything I could about Venice. Eventually I came across this little gem. Jan Morris' writing is excellent - I absolutely absorbed this fantastic 'travelogue'.
