fictional cities :: venice 2

Non-Fiction Books to love Films Comics

John Berendt
City of Falling Angels
When this was published in 2005 reviewers tended to dismiss it as muck-racking and gossipy froth. The book mostly concerns itself with the devastating fire at the Fenice opera house, and the subsequent investigation and typical Italian flurries of accusation and innuendo. The other major strand concerns Jane Turner Rylands, who Bernedt accuses of being a scheming necrophile in general, and an embezzler of Olga Rudge in particular. The controversy over Rylands attempting to get the Ezra Pound letters and papers out of Rudge, Pound's mistress, for a song is explored in much detail. Rylands (the wife of the director of the Guggenheim) subsequently exacted some small revenge when she published her second book of Venice-set short stories, called Across the Bridge of Sighs. One of the stories features an unscrupulous American journalist called Cad Peacock who gets his eye spat in, and the stories evidently contain more thinly-veiled unfavourable portraits of people who condemned her over the Pound business. Aside from these two attention grabbers there are portraits of people - important and eccentric - who live, move, and shake in Venice today and, I think, it provides a useful update to all the books about Venice as it was. When I read about and admire, say, Palazzo Barbaro I sometimes wonder how it's surviving into our Century, and this book tells you. You'll also learn about pigeons, rats, Woody Allen and the wear and tear caused by film crews in fragile palazzos. I'll admit, though, that when I got to the bit about the restoration of the Miracoli church and the bickerings within Save Venice I started to more fully appreciate the criticisms that, in the face of the beauty of Venice, to concentrate on the festerings underneath is a perverse choice. I skipped much of this section as it was contributing very little to both my understanding of Venice and my will to live. A mostly very readable book about Venice for our times, then, with all the benefits and disappointments that that implies.

Bidisha
Venetian Masters Under the skin of the City of Love
OK, the problems first. Firstly, what's with her not having a surname? She's not Kylie, or Prince. Secondly, why is the cover so crap? A drawing of generic, but unauthentic, Venetian-type domes. Getting beyond these minor trials one is immersed in the life of a young woman who decides to go live in Venice for a few months in 2004. She has a rich friend, who has very rich parents who live in a Grand Canal-side palazzo. She meets people, makes friends, eats meals and ice cream, and learns about the locals. She writes well and sharply about the people, and makes a very good go at the city itself and its buildings. (I'd never thought that the Frari church looked like Bourbon biscuits myself, but I'll have a compare next time I'm there.) There's very little actual art appreciation as such, which makes the title a bit confusing. (She also makes the daft mistake of mixing up the (small) Bellini altarpiece in the Frari with the (huge) Titian one.) Maybe it's to do with getting a symbolic masters degree in being Venetian. Reading this book will undoubtedly get you booking flights and hotels, as it conjures the place strongly and evocatively. The fact of our observer being more at home in bars and social gatherings, rather than art galleries and churches, is sometimes over-apparent - this is a book more full of evenings than daytimes. And the unrestrained pointedness of her evaluations of a lot of the people she meets makes you wonder at their reactions, and the warmth of her welcome back. She is also refreshingly unflinching in her portrayal of the misogyny and prejudice she encounters. This all gets more than a little out of hand, though, in the final section - a later visit for the Biennale - where her feminist rhetoric, hyper-sensitivity to perceived slights and bitchiness towards her friend's mother begins to leave a bad taste in the mouth. She has a rant about the only famous Venetian women being 'colourful poetry-spouting hookers' and the like, and how women artists were 'locked out'. She thereby fails to give any credit to Marietta Tintoretto and Rosalba Carriera, two admittedly rare exceptions, but no less worthy of mention and praise for that. If you can get beyond the bile, the book can be a perceptive and flavoursome Venice fix from a different perspective than usual. Or it might just make you flinch too much for real enjoyment.

Giacomo Casanova
History of my life
translated by Willard R. Trask
Johns Hopkins 1966-71
He's Venice's most famous son, and one of those rare people whose name has entered the language - everyone knows what he liked doing - and anyone with a light-hearted attitude to love is likely to get called a Casanova. This is not entirely unfair, but it's also not the whole story. He saw himself as a man who loved well and often, rather than one who trifled with women, and it's a view you can have some sympathy with. He writes so well, feelingly, and perceptively about society in 18^th Century Europe that you can't help admiring him. His story starts in Venice and he returns at intervals from his travels around Italy and Europe. His adventures are sufficiently varied and gripping to hold your attention like a good novel of the period would. This translation, published in paperback in six handsome double volumes, was the first untamed edition.

Andrea di Robilant
A Venetian affair
In the attic of the family's palazzo in Venice the author's father finds a box of letters made into damp wads by time and humidity. These turn out to be further evidence of the torrid relationship between Andrea Memmo, an ancestor, and a half-English woman called Giustiniana Wynne. Using these and other letters Andrea di Robilant pieces together a story of brazen love and romance thwarted in 18th Century Venice. The story of the affair is interesting enough, but the book also evokes well this era, of Venice's fading as a real power and evolving into a magnet for visitors. Hitherto Venice would be known more for its visitors than its natives (see John Julius Norwich's Paradise of Cities - review coming soon) and so it's appropriate that Consul Smith and Casanova play their parts here, as an early influential foreigner and the last famous native respectively. The love story evolves at a stately pace but has just enough events and details, sometimes lovely sordid ones, to keep you reading. Just as mobile phones are essential to the development of any affair nowadays, so masks where a big help back then. As Giustiniana is banished back to England, via Paris, so the tale takes on a sadder note as the making of choices and the wasting of lives becomes the theme, and our heroine evolves into a far stronger and more ambiguous character. The emotions are well observed and identified by the author, who fills in gaps in a convincing way, and so you end up with a strong feeling of real lives.

Predrag Matvejević
The Other Venice
This is the sort of book that has a blurb saying that it promises to 'utterly reconfigure the Venetian cityscape'. But don't let that put you off. What it is is collection of short chapters each dealing with an odd aspect of Venice's rich and hidden tapestry. There's a piece about the weeds that grow out of the cracks in church walls and another about an eccentric old Venetian who stands in the same sotoportego every day and spouts fragrant 'facts'. Other topics include Venetian bread, fragments of pottery emerging from the slime of ages, barbers, paving stones... An intriguing and entertaining read but rather lacking in real substance , I thought. A cake of a book, rather than a full meal.

Judith Martin
No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
A book about what it is to be a Venice-lover, written by a Venice-lover, for other Venice-lovers. What's not to love? Well, a tendency to tweeness, the coverage of some familiar ground, and a certain lack of depth. But set against this we have some spot-on analysis of what makes we Venetophiles tick and some undeniably witty writing. She covers topics like the famous visitors and the hated Napoleon, but also the pitfalls of the property market and the books and films that we obsessives pore over. Her precise analysis of the impossible route of Audrey Hepburn's canal-jumping vaporetto in Summer Madness will strike a chord in most of us, I imagine. You'll find yourself grinning often with self-recognition, and the realisation that you're not the only Venice obsessive to do the sometimes sad things she describes. She pretty much nails the joy of posing regally on balconies overlooking the Grand Canal, for example - a pleasure that pretty much beats sex, I think. It's a cosy read rather than a challenging one, but a pretty much essential one for all of us members of its intended readership, no matter what stage of the ongoing relationship we're at.

Jan Morris
A Venetian Bestiary
A slim volume dealing with the creatures associated with Venice and to be found in it's history and art and on its streets. Birds, sea creatures, cats, dogs and some more mythical beasts are all to be found in here. There's the winged lion, the portentous birds, the horses that were once ridden and the bronze horses that were stolen by and from Venice. There's a chapter on the cats, of course, with a few famous moggies, including Nini the Frari cat and the unfortunate sole victim of the San Marco campanile collapse. This chapter also points out how Venetian artists have all failed satisfactorily to portray a convincing cat, despite the fair number of memorable dogs they managed. A small book, then, but one full of tasty nuggets. (I speak of gold, not of chicken.)

John Julius Norwich
Paradise of Cities
Venice and its nineteenth-century visitors
This book looks at Venice from the fall of the Republic in 1797 through the nineteenth century - the period during which the city had to begin to come to terms with its new role as a city defined by its visitors. It's appropriate, therefore, that it does so through the lives of famous visitors and foreign lovers. After a chapter each devoted to the fall and Napoleon, we get straight down to a quartet of Englishmen, none of whom were exactly paragons of Victorian wedded stability. Chapters for Byron and Ruskin are followed by a chapter devoted to two chaps named Brown who kept their dalliances with handsome gondoliers very secret, for many years, unlike Baron Corvo whose later indulgence in the same predilection a little more openly scandalised the British ex-pat community. John Julius deals well with these, more private, aspects of lives whilst also keeping and broadening our interest with the less racy details and observations. Later chapters deal with the Siege, Sargent, Whistler, Wagner, Henry James and Corvo. (Very few plain and domestically blissful home lives there.) This period chimes nicely with our melancholy and faded-glory view of Venice and so this is unlikely to be the last book to deal with this century, but it's the one to beat for the present.

		Sarah Quill Ruskin's Venice The Stones Revisited Ruskin's place as the foremost foreign fighter for Venice of relatively recent times is assured, and The Stones of Venice is the proof that remains. In its full length it remains pretty daunting for the average reader. His concentration on surface detail and his prejudiced abhorrence of the classical can be wearing too. There have been many attempts to abridge - a few years ago Jan Morris made a pretty good job of it - and there have even been editions published in the form of guide books. In this, the most recent abridgement, Sarah Quill presents mouth-watering snippets of Ruskin's prose arranged in guide-book format by building and all made more gorgeous by lots of his drawings and her photos. A less glossy portable abridgment is available as a Penguin edited by J.G.Links
Tiziano Scarpa Venice is a fish A cultural guide An attention-grabbing title, you have to admit. But this book is not about Venice from a surrealist perspective - it's another of those collections of rambling and entertaining (usually) digressions on what makes Venice Venice, with the promise of secrets revealed and essences distilled. After the explanation of the fish theory there are small chapters called things like feet, legs, heart and face, dealing with the joys of wandering and getting lost, the gondolier's stance, Venice as a city for lovers, masks and the need for them in such a small city, and so on. All very entertaining and even occasionally educational, but then my cool appreciation got very much heated up by the smell and sight chapters. The first is full of fragrant poo and pee lore, including an explanation of the Venetian proverb In the Summer even turds float, and the latter has cat stories and reveals the secrets of the differences between, and conventions in naming, calli, salizada, rami, rii and the rest. It also posits the theory that Venice is such an eye-bashing feast that it needs view-blocking scaffolding and eyesores like the bank in Campo Manin just to give our eyes a rest. Great stuff!

Nicholas Woodsworth
The Liquid Continent Volume 2: Venice
The blurb and the publicity for this book lead you to expect a book that's all about 'Venice's love-affair with the sea'. But this is more than a little cheeky as the 279-page book doesn't reach Venice until page 107 and doesn't start discussing matters nautical until page 177. This dishonesty aside it is a fine read if you like travel books. The opening chapters (or the pre-amble as it's known to Venice fans) progress along the Eastern Mediterranean coast and around cities and ruins, offering insights and observations of Mediterranean life and the range of characteristic Mediterranean personalities. The Turkey bit I liked a lot. Reaching Venice he first keeps to the area around his apartment in Eastern Cannaregio, and finally ventures into the wider and crowdeder bits. Venice the tourist nightmare stars in this section, with the usual queues and crowds and Murano glass ornaments like 'glazed vomit'. So far so not unpredictable, if well and sharply described. The discussion of Venice's maritime history and relationship with the sea, past and present, contains few surprises for the well-read Venetophile either, but again the author marshals and presents very effectively.

Like no other city Venice encourages the creation of big and gorgeous books.
There's the glitz of the Palazzi, the grandeur of the Grand Canal, and the glowing colours of Venetian painting.
Heavily illustrated and well produced books on these topics can't help but be objects of bibliographical desire.
Track down any of the following and you too will be smitten.

These two are as expensive as you'd think

These three aren't

Umberto Franzoi & Mark Smith The Grand Canal
Arsenale Editrice 1993
This large black-covered slip-cased volume takes the form of a photographic panorama recording the Grand Canal - both banks, the whole length. The photographs were specially taken for the book (except the Ca' d'Oro pic which has been pasted in, presumably because it was scaffolded over when Mark Smith was doing his photographic thing) and are gloriously bright and sharp. At regular intervals it ventures into a full photographic portrait of a particular palazzo, giving us glimpses of the grandeur behind the facades. The text is informative, if a little lacking in sparkle, and can get a little tedious and repetitive if you try to read it through cover-to-cover, but who would do such a silly anal thing? Well, me actually. Recently republished in a disappointingly smaller format, but with a proper photo of the Ca' d'Oro.

Alvise Zorzi & Paolo Marton Venetian Palaces
Rizzoli 1990
In this one the major palazzi, on and off the Grand Canal, and including the Doge's gaff, get photographed inside and out, art and details, with some text giving their history, and the coats of arms of the families who owned them. But it's the photographs that'll have you drooling.

Giandomenico Romanelli, ed.
Venice: Art & Architecture Konemann 1997
Two truly huge volumes, in a slip case, trace the history of art and architecture in Venice from the city's foundation to the 20th Century. It does this with a series of heavily illustrated essays on the various periods by various contributors, and even covers the art of the book and weaving and glass. Production values are high, as is the desirability quotient. And the essays are even worth reading, if your arms can take it. Recently republished condensed into one inexpensive volume to make it oh so easy to buy the book twice by mistake.

Gianluigi Trivellato, et al Venetian Palazzi
Evergreen 1998
Does a similar job to the Zorzi volume above, but stays indoors, covers fewer palazzi, and has less-good, more flatly-lit, but still rather fine, photographs. The exteriors are taken care of with some nice old prints - that's one of them below lefy - and with some contrastily printed photographs strangely standing in for palazzi where prints where presumably unavailable. But it's reasonably priced and very worth owning if you're a palazzophile.

Andrea Fasolo & Mark E. Smith
Palaces of Venice Arsenale Editrice 2003
An alphabetical survey of the grander palazzi, and not just those on the Grand Canal. The photos are by the same photographer as the lovely Grand Canal book mentioned above and are a big draw. Unfortunately they have to be the main draw as the text is so badly translated from the Italian as to be all but unreadable, unless you want some cheap laughs. So here goes: A recent and radical intervention of restoration has enabled to recover the original readability of the Gothic building. And from the introduction: Therefore it is not difficult to think that Venice's characteristic had held a fundamental role in the exceptional mark that have always distinguished this city from the others. So that's pretty clear then.

Comic-book artists like Venice too, for a variety of reasons. Foremost amongst these is probably the fact that it's a city easily recognisable by most people, even in the most slap-dash and inauthentic rendering.
	Milo Manara is Italian, which may explain why Venice crops up more than once in his oeuvre. His work is pretty pornographic, on the whole, but his ability to conjure up a certain sort of pseudo-Helmut Newton female allure with a pen is not to be dismissed easily. The colour panel is from a graphic novel called Hidden Camera, the black and white ones are from Perchance to dream.

Venetian-born Hugo Pratt's grandmother took him on trips into the Venice Ghetto, and from these visits he retained a fascination with Jewish symbols, and the whole Eastern influx/trading hub thing, which all play a part in Fable of Venice featuring his hero Corto Maltese. This is much more the classic adventure - with far more Venice and far less pubes - than the Manara tales above. Pratt died in 1995.

	In the 90s there were lots of those shiny post-X-Men team-ups with their impossibly long legs and big chests. Some of the largest chests belonged to Scott Lobdell's Wildcats, or Wildc.a.t.s as they were also known. In 1999 they took their covert ops mayhem to Venice, arriving by scuba naturally. Later the baddies roll out a tank, and how did they get that into Venice?

The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) are a post-Buffy team - created by Mike Mignola, the man responsible for Hellboy - out to combat supernatural naughtiness wherever it surfaces. So when Venice's canals start getting foul and stinky they're called in. From a graphic novel called The Soul of Venice and other stories.

More recent is a comic called Seaguy, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Cameron Stewart and published in 2004. In issue #1 our hero and his pal Chubby, a free-floating cigar-chewing tuna, get into a spat with Death, dressed as a gondolier, over a game of chess.

Well, this was more than a bit disappointing. Having seen some scans of Les Voyages d'Anna by Emmanuel Lepage on another website I decided to give it a go despite it being in French, so appealing were the drawings. My disappointment was caused by the above fine site's scans turning out to have been nearly all of the finished Venetian content. The story's voyage taking our heroine away from and back to Venice there's a lot of less interesting stuff in the middle. And the artist chooses to provide us with pages of sketches for the finished art, which is either an aesthetically interesting choice or a case of getting the most pages out of the least work, according to your point of view.

New lion on the block in late 2007 is Capitan Venezia.
He seems to only speak Italian as yet, in print and on the
Venezia Comix website, but Venezia ha un nuovo supereroe indeed.

Venice // Florence //London

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John Berendt City of Falling Angels When this was published in 2005 reviewers tended to dismiss it as muck-racking and gossipy froth. The book mostly concerns itself with the devastating fire at the Fenice opera house, and the subsequent investigation and typical Italian flurries of accusation and innuendo. The other major strand concerns Jane Turner Rylands, who Bernedt accuses of being a scheming necrophile in general, and an embezzler of Olga Rudge in particular. The controversy over Rylands attempting to get the Ezra Pound letters and papers out of Rudge, Pound's mistress, for a song is explored in much detail. Rylands (the wife of the director of the Guggenheim) subsequently exacted some small revenge when she published her second book of Venice-set short stories, called Across the Bridge of Sighs. One of the stories features an unscrupulous American journalist called Cad Peacock who gets his eye spat in, and the stories evidently contain more thinly-veiled unfavourable portraits of people who condemned her over the Pound business. Aside from these two attention grabbers there are portraits of people - important and eccentric - who live, move, and shake in Venice today and, I think, it provides a useful update to all the books about Venice as it was. When I read about and admire, say, Palazzo Barbaro I sometimes wonder how it's surviving into our Century, and this book tells you. You'll also learn about pigeons, rats, Woody Allen and the wear and tear caused by film crews in fragile palazzos. I'll admit, though, that when I got to the bit about the restoration of the Miracoli church and the bickerings within Save Venice I started to more fully appreciate the criticisms that, in the face of the beauty of Venice, to concentrate on the festerings underneath is a perverse choice. I skipped much of this section as it was contributing very little to both my understanding of Venice and my will to live. A mostly very readable book about Venice for our times, then, with all the benefits and disappointments that that implies.
	Bidisha Venetian Masters Under the skin of the City of Love OK, the problems first. Firstly, what's with her not having a surname? She's not Kylie, or Prince. Secondly, why is the cover so crap? A drawing of generic, but unauthentic, Venetian-type domes. Getting beyond these minor trials one is immersed in the life of a young woman who decides to go live in Venice for a few months in 2004. She has a rich friend, who has very rich parents who live in a Grand Canal-side palazzo. She meets people, makes friends, eats meals and ice cream, and learns about the locals. She writes well and sharply about the people, and makes a very good go at the city itself and its buildings. (I'd never thought that the Frari church looked like Bourbon biscuits myself, but I'll have a compare next time I'm there.) There's very little actual art appreciation as such, which makes the title a bit confusing. (She also makes the daft mistake of mixing up the (small) Bellini altarpiece in the Frari with the (huge) Titian one.) Maybe it's to do with getting a symbolic masters degree in being Venetian. Reading this book will undoubtedly get you booking flights and hotels, as it conjures the place strongly and evocatively. The fact of our observer being more at home in bars and social gatherings, rather than art galleries and churches, is sometimes over-apparent - this is a book more full of evenings than daytimes. And the unrestrained pointedness of her evaluations of a lot of the people she meets makes you wonder at their reactions, and the warmth of her welcome back. She is also refreshingly unflinching in her portrayal of the misogyny and prejudice she encounters. This all gets more than a little out of hand, though, in the final section - a later visit for the Biennale - where her feminist rhetoric, hyper-sensitivity to perceived slights and bitchiness towards her friend's mother begins to leave a bad taste in the mouth. She has a rant about the only famous Venetian women being 'colourful poetry-spouting hookers' and the like, and how women artists were 'locked out'. She thereby fails to give any credit to Marietta Tintoretto and Rosalba Carriera, two admittedly rare exceptions, but no less worthy of mention and praise for that. If you can get beyond the bile, the book can be a perceptive and flavoursome Venice fix from a different perspective than usual. Or it might just make you flinch too much for real enjoyment.
Giacomo Casanova History of my life translated by Willard R. Trask Johns Hopkins 1966-71 He's Venice's most famous son, and one of those rare people whose name has entered the language - everyone knows what he liked doing - and anyone with a light-hearted attitude to love is likely to get called a Casanova. This is not entirely unfair, but it's also not the whole story. He saw himself as a man who loved well and often, rather than one who trifled with women, and it's a view you can have some sympathy with. He writes so well, feelingly, and perceptively about society in 18^th Century Europe that you can't help admiring him. His story starts in Venice and he returns at intervals from his travels around Italy and Europe. His adventures are sufficiently varied and gripping to hold your attention like a good novel of the period would. This translation, published in paperback in six handsome double volumes, was the first untamed edition.
	Andrea di Robilant A Venetian affair In the attic of the family's palazzo in Venice the author's father finds a box of letters made into damp wads by time and humidity. These turn out to be further evidence of the torrid relationship between Andrea Memmo, an ancestor, and a half-English woman called Giustiniana Wynne. Using these and other letters Andrea di Robilant pieces together a story of brazen love and romance thwarted in 18th Century Venice. The story of the affair is interesting enough, but the book also evokes well this era, of Venice's fading as a real power and evolving into a magnet for visitors. Hitherto Venice would be known more for its visitors than its natives (see John Julius Norwich's Paradise of Cities - review coming soon) and so it's appropriate that Consul Smith and Casanova play their parts here, as an early influential foreigner and the last famous native respectively. The love story evolves at a stately pace but has just enough events and details, sometimes lovely sordid ones, to keep you reading. Just as mobile phones are essential to the development of any affair nowadays, so masks where a big help back then. As Giustiniana is banished back to England, via Paris, so the tale takes on a sadder note as the making of choices and the wasting of lives becomes the theme, and our heroine evolves into a far stronger and more ambiguous character. The emotions are well observed and identified by the author, who fills in gaps in a convincing way, and so you end up with a strong feeling of real lives.