

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
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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.
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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 18th 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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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