Non-Fiction    Books to love    Films   Comics




 

Peter Ackroyd Venice: Pure City Coming as is does with an attached TV series, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Peter Ackroyd is here merely 'doing a Da Mosto' and starting to read the book does little to stifle these cynical suspicions. Ackroyd's similar, though much larger, book about London is a well-reputed recent attempt at summing up a whole city, its history, people and character, using a chronology-mangling and artfully random chapter structure. It worked for London (although not for me) but here it results in more of the same for readers of many books about Venice. After a brief intro dealing with the foundation the chapters do the usual stuff with topics like stone, art, water, trade, myth-making, sex, hubris and decay. It's all done very readably, much more readably than usual in Ackroyd's non-fiction in fact, which often tends towards somewhat self-conscious flights of style. And if you've never read a history of Venice, or any of the variously formatted meditations on its unique features (of which a fair few are reviewed on this page) you might learn much here.  A chapter on nature in Venice, its lack and its incursions, makes fresh reading, but then when talking of the smuggling in of nature in the grain and fossils within its stones and pillars Ackroyd fails to mention San Giacomo dell’Orio - a rather glaring oversight, this church being fossil-flecked-column central. Maybe his research assistants, credited prominently in the acknowledgements along with only his editors, didn't venture that far out. He quotes from two sources new to me, aside from the usuals like Sanudo and Coryat. One of these is one James Howell, who has the same surname as my Mum, so maybe I'd better get family-tree checking. The book's central thesis is that Venice is a prison and that Venetians have ever been docile and more inclined to be part of a larger whole than individuals. This allows him then to posit the convents and the Ghetto as Venices in miniature. I'm not entirely convinced myself. A readable 400 pages, I suppose, but disappointingly unspecial. Louis Begley & Anka Muhlstein Venice for Lovers A bit of a librarianly quandary with this one. It is made up of three parts - one short story, one piece of travel writing and one piece of lit-crit. So, should it go with the fiction or here? Well I've gone with the librarians who catalogued the copy I've just read. Mr Begley wrote Mistler's exit  - a novel I didn't like, and here he turns in a short story equally full of self-love and the admiration of rich people. But these themes take a back seat here to some pretty overt wish-fulfilment erotica. The primary early lust-object is again a college-days sweetheart, who spurns our hero, despite the influence of Venice, and later becomes more than a bit of tart. Lovely. The second part, by Begley's wife, is about the restaurants that the couple have become recognised regulars at. It's more about people than food, and is the best part of this book. In the third piece Begley looks at how great authors have used Venice, with lots of big quotes and plot spoilers. His examples are Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and himself. My case rests.

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. Number one: 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? Dunno. 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 bit of 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 with his childhood in Venice and he returns at intervals from his travels around Italy and Europe. His adventures are sufficiently varied and spicy 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 - reviewed below)  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.

Giorgio & Maurizio Crovato The Abandoned Islands of the Venetian Lagoon (Le isole abbandonate della laguna veneziana) This book was originally published in 1978 by two journalist brothers who were shocked and ashamed at the way the history and treasures of the Venetian lagoon islands had been ignored and plundered for so long. The original book, which followed an exhibition, documents their sad decline and dilapidated state. This updated edition provides some cause for optimism that the situation has changed much in the intervening years. The brothers undoubtedly did good, though, raising awareness and also reawakening interest in the use of traditional rowing skills, which had been long in decline and are now again flourishing, what with all the anti-motorboat feeling and the increasing knowledge of the damage they do. The new edition of the book (which has Italian-English dual text) has an updating introduction by the brothers and then a chapter each on thirteen of the islands, consisting of historical texts describing the island in its glory days, then some lovely old prints made back in them days (there's one below) and photos of their sad 70s state (that's one on the right). These black and white photographs (which are also the work of the brothers) are a major part of the pleasure of this book, at least for this fan of romantic ruin and crumble. The future is looking less bleak for some of the islands as they are being preserved and converted to uses ranging from luxury hotels to a museum of lagoon history and facilities for various educational institutions. All these efforts deserve our support and 10% of sales of this book in the UK will go to Venice in Peril, and 10% of US proceeds will go to Save Venice. So the least that you can do is buy and enjoy this book. You can get it from the publishers sanmarcopress.com, some shops in London, most of the bookshops in Venice and many online sources.

 

Iain Fenlon Piazza San Marco If, like me, you look upon the Piazza San Marco as a crowd-infested nuisance to be passed through as quickly as possible then you, like me, may be in need of something to reawaken your fascination for what is arguably Venice's most important space. This book could be that something. The writing is much more elegant than we have any right to expect, the stories are well told, and the scepticism at the more far-fetched of these tales is refreshing. After a very interest-stirring introduction the chapters begin with the myths and early history of the Piazza and Venice. The fascinating conjecture here for me was how, having been founded well after the Roman Empire, Venice lacked the status that such ancient history conferred, and so the mythologically loaded story of St Mark and his vision, and his remains being brought to Venice, conferred some much needed theological clout and state-cred. We're then taken through the history of the piazza up until the present (tourist-infested) day. The chapters are themed with, for example, a chapter on the processions and rituals (including fascinating details of the doges' funerals) which is followed by one devoted to the traders, performers and scammers who have always been a fixture. Everything from the most important political events to ritual pig disembowelments and a Pink Floyd concert have happened here, with the performance of  rituals and music and problems with traders and visitors being pretty much constant themes down the centuries. The last chapter ends with the observation that the problems facing Venice today are to be seen concentrated into the Piazza, with its shuffling hoards just happy to be there, to say they've been to Venice, and with little experienced beyond the café bands, the buzz and the pigeons. Which neatly loops us back to the start of this review. The photo below (from the book above) shows the Doge's Palace in 1915, with brick supports under the arches and protective scaffolding around the sculpture of Adam & Eve on the corner in case of bombing.

Birgit Haustedt Rilke's Venice I freely admit to coming to this book with my mind a clean slate, as it were, with regard to Rilke. But as I start reading I learn that he loved Venice and wrote many poems about the place. The book consists of eleven walks through parts of Venice that Rilke knew, loved, wrote about and stayed in. The book's copious quoting from his writings nicely evokes Venice in the early part of the 20th Century, a period in the city's history not much written about. It's not greatly different from the present day, but there are occasional surprises, like Rilke's complaint about the eternally noisy children in Campo San Vio - a place for peaceful contemplation and the consumption of tasty pizza slices on most of my recent visits. This is not a book for one-sitting cover-to-cover reading but I'm slowly working through it for regular Venice fixes, which is a role it suits. Taking it and using it as a guidebook is, I would suggest, for real Rilke fans, but reading this could well make you one. The translation (from the German) is elegant and reads so well you wouldn't know. Add to this the handsome red cloth cover, with well-chosen photograph, and you have a tasteful treat for Venice buffs. Thomas Jonglez and Paola Zoffoli Secret Venice I don't tend to do guidebooks on these pages, but this one is different. It actually lives up to the title, even for one such as I who smugly thinks he's surprise proof, what with making this site and almost a dozen visits. Some of the secret places and a few weird facts were already known to me, but I admit that lots weren't. The matching London volume I was less enlightened by, showing that only by living in a city can one truly know it. These guides push this point too, by featuring the by-line Local guides by local people. The presentation and page layouts are modern, with 'box outs' and digression sections, but stylish and easy to read - not always the case when designers try to be different. There are plaques and carvings here I'd never noticed and buildings and gardens that can be visited if you know who to ask (and the authors tell you). Medical oddities, unknown libraries, eccentrics and artists all feature. And who knew that Venice had to bowling greens? You'd have to be a Venice resident of some age to not get something from this book, I think, and I'm getting a lot. Ian Kelly Casanova With 2005's film and TV series, and not a few novels published in recent years, you could hardly describe Casanova as a forgotten figure. This is, however, the first big biography for a while, and a more modern evaluation of the man is therefore not a little overdue. Mr Kelly is no fusty academic, though, and so this is likely to be seen as an entertainment rather than a contribution to the scholarship, not that he doesn't do a pretty thorough job. His main source is Casanova's own History of my life (reviewed above) but he is at pains to sort the truth from the myth-making by comparing the memoirs with known dates and other written sources - he seems to have put in some time in the Frari state archives. The stress in on Casanova as a performer wherever he went - his theatrical childhood is seen here as the major influence on his personality. Kelly being an actor himself (and by some accounts a bit of a performer offstage too) makes this stress understandable and not unconvincing. He gets a bit carried away with his use of language sometimes, but when he settles down this is a very readable romp. Kelly is also not unsympathetic to Casanova's convincing contention that he was a lover rather than a user of women. The lover-numbers comparison is made with the likes of Byron, and even Boswell, and Casanova is found to not be the sex-machine that he's often painted. Mary Laven Virgins of Venice This book was published in 2002, and one suspects that the subsequent fashion for novels that revolve around Venetian convent life has been not-a-little inspired by its revelations. It's unflinching in its detailing of transgressions and punishments and of the power of economic and political considerations to ruin women's lives. There's a good deal of friendship and support in evidence, but the overriding impression is of women locked away - regardless of their vocation, or lack of it - so as not to be a drain on their family's financial resources. The convents also reflected the stratification of the society outside their walls, with cliques of idle women from the ruling families lording it over the poor nuns forced into the convents by poverty, and forced to work. There is a subtext that the convent life may have given some women more chances to explore their abilities and sexuality than they would have had as wives or spinsters outside, but incarceration is incarceration. This book sure adds texture and detail to one's understanding of life behind the walls, and the shifting nature of secular and religious attitudes. It's a non-dry must-read for anyone interested in the convents and the lot of women in Renaissance Venice. Mary Lutyens (editor) Effie in Venice Mrs John Ruskin's letters home, 1849-52 The book opens with an indulgent but evocative, and short, account of the editor's times in Venice, firstly in 1924 and then after the war in 1946 with her husband Joe Links, and their later trips. She then gives us the background and details the development of the relationship between John Ruskin and Euphemia Gray. This period takes in the continued non-consummation of their marriage, a situation which was continue in Venice. If you know anything about the couple its that their marriage failed due to this non-consummation, and that an annulment was granted at which point she was still a virgin. There's been much salacious conjecture as to the reasons for this. Ruskin himself writes, in a statement later, that there were 'certain circumstances in her person which completely checked' his passion. This has been interpreted as meaning many things, from a repugnance at her pubic hair, which he wasn't expecting having only ever seen female nude statues and drawings, to a squeamishness at her menstruating. Far more likely, given his observable and continued preference for idealised young girls, he just couldn't take all the real-life smells and textures of a real woman, and all the hygienic sacrifices that a physical relationship entails. The letters are from Venice during the two trips, also taking in the preparations and journeys. They're concerned mainly with Effie's social whirl - the parties she goes to, the Austrian soldiers she meets and the frocks she wears and admires. Equally there's much about the Ruskin in-laws and their attitude towards her, which is rarely what one would could supportive. So there's a lot of reading between the lines to be done regarding the couple's separate lives in Venice and how much the parents (Effie's also) contributed to the divisive emotional stew. Without this back-story the letters make somewhat tedious reading, and even with it I found myself skipping whole chunks regarding the  mixings and cupboard-skeletons of European royalty, and who's saying what about whom. Some juicy Venetian details, to be sure, but not enough to make this more than a cautious recommendation for the general reader. Towards the end there's the excitement of a robbery and Ruskin challenged to a duel. The book ends with Effie writing to her mother about a sitting for Millais, the man who was to finally remove her L-plates. 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 a 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, and 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 Katherine Hepburn's canal-jumping vaporetto in Summertime 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 that they managed. A small book, then,  but one full of tasty nuggets. (I speak of gold, not of chickens.)

 

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.