Venice

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The end of the Most Serene Republic of Venice happens when it cedes to Austria. We have Napoleon, Austria, and Italy, all foreign powers—and certainly Venice sees Italy as every bit as much a foreign power as Austria, possibly even more. It’s a bit of history that’s probably less well handled in most guidebooks because it’s quite complicated, but it has quite an effect on what the city looks like. There’s the filling in of some canals, the straightening of some roads, the building of some fairly gloomy social housing. There’s a Teutonic effort to rationalize the city, though if ever there was an absolutely futile project it would be trying to make sense out of Venice. 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. Absolutely. It’s dark and numinous and glittering and oriental. Even Ruskin, who loved it more than his mother, hates the cresting that goes around it. He’s full of frightful fury about various people’s work to it. But it’s right up there with Hagia Sophia as one of the great Byzantine, early Christian buildings. But he was a marvelous painter and an amazing thinker. His ideas were behind the Natural History Museum in Oxford being built, and the O’Shea brothers carving those extraordinary capitals. Someone would bring a plant from the botanical gardens in the morning, and these Irish masons would carve that plant into the building. A lot of those ideas about the Gothic, Ruskin cuts in Venice. He spends a lot of time drawing and measuring. He’s very careful, trying to tabulate the world. He has a lot of ideas about when arches became Byzantine, and when they became Romanesque. He is quite often quite wrong. But the idea is a powerful one, that Venice, as a Gothic city, is an act for good.

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Themis-Athena wrote: "Good grief. There are still PLENTY of books on this list that don't seem to have anything to do with Venice whatsoever! 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) Reading the whole of The Stones of Venice is unbelievably stiff and solid, but this edition is one of two or three very good, filleted versions of it with commentaries. It’s got such a bearing not just on how you read Venice, but on how you read our own built environment. There’s the Gothic Revival, which turns into the Arts and Crafts movement. It’s at the root of a lot of socialist ideas. William Morris is writing News from Nowhere at the same time as he is trying to help campaign for Venice to be looked after properly. It’s a powerful document. It’s a book that says Venice is not just a beautiful playbox, it’s also a crucible of ideas that have had a massive effect on Northern European culture and social life. It is also very good on the still current quite big issue, which is migration out of the city. The whole world is full of people moving into cities, but when you get highly developed as Venice did you move out. That probably starts in earnest after the Second World War, but it had happened before. There was the building of Mestre, and then of Marghera, the chemical port.The modern Venetian ... examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider." (The City: 17) It’s the idea of the Venetian Republic as a complicated world. We don’t get it now because we’ve had universal suffrage for so long, but people longed to be an elector. In Venice, if you weren’t on that list, you didn’t have a vote as to who would be Doge and, as such, preferment was unlikely to come your way.

Best Books About Venice (24 books) - Goodreads

Let’s turn to the history book you’ve chosen. This is Italian Venice: A History by Richard Bosworth, who is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. This is about modern Venice, I believe, after the fall of the Republic in 1797.

Venice fly-drive

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) Abelard's Love - I associate Abelard and Heloise with medieval France. Did he spend time in Venice? Does this book?