Venice
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0571168973
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Often hailed as one of the best travel books ever written, Venice is neither a guide nor a history book, but a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life and character, set against the background of the city's past. Analysing the particular temperament of Venetians, as well as its waterways, its architecture, its bridges, its tourists, its curiosities, its smells, sounds, lights and colours, there is scarcely a corner of Venice that Jan Morris has not investigated and brought vividly to life. Jan Morris first visited the city of Venice as young James Morris, during World War II. As she writes in the introduction, 'it is Venice seen through a particular pair of eyes at a particular moment - young eyes at that, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth.' Venice is an impassioned work on this magnificent but often maddening city. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Sydney, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain and Manhattan '45. Since its first publication, Venice has appeared in many editions, won the W.H. Heinemann award and become an international bestseller. "The best book about Venice ever written." (Sunday Times). "No sensible visitor should visit the place without it...Venice stands alone as the essential introduction, and as a work of literature in its own right." (Observer).
its homely shops, its banks, its taverns, its private tourist attractions. The very centre of Venice is said to be the pedestal in the middle of Campo San Luca, but the completeness of these various antique settlements means that the city is rich in depth: it has few barren quarters or sterile suburbs. No part of the city, wherever you look, lacks its great monuments or its pungency of character. To the east are the ramparts of the Arsenal, with its frowning tower-gates; to the north-west you may
Campanile to be seen raising his golden forefinger (for he stands in an exhortatory, almost an ecological pose) above the mud-banks. 16 The Bestiary Somebody once won a handsome prize from the Republic for suggesting in a laborious sonnet that Venice was divinely founded. I am myself often reminded in this city (though nobody is going to reward me for it) of the old tag about those whom the gods destroy. Venice went half-mad in the decades before her fall, reeling through her
and then graced with a popular classic, but at the Quadri you sometimes hear the drummer indulging in something precariously approaching jazz). The flags of Italy and Venice fly from the three bronze flagstaffs before the Basilica – symbolic of lost Venetian dominions, Crete, Cyprus and the Morea. Down the Piazzetta there is a glimpse of sparkling water, a flicker of gondoliers’ straw hats, a shifting web of moored boats: and the shadowy Merceria, with its glittering shops, falls away out of the
‘No other power on earth can aid us as you can; therefore they implore you, in God’s name, to have compassion on the Holy Land, and to join them in avenging the contempt of Jesus Christ by furnishing them with the ships and other necessaries, so that they may pass the seas.’ The Doge returned a classic Venetian reply. ‘On what terms?’ he asked. Nor did he allow any soft Christian scruples to affect the conduct of the campaign. The agreed fee for the job was 85,000 silver marks, payable in four
playwright, which stands in the Campo San Bartolomeo, gently and quizzically smiling, and seems to me as happy a memorial as any man could ask for. Consider next the southern ward of Dorsoduro, the ‘Hard Back’, with its attendant island of Giudecca. It extends from the Dogana at one end, with the bronze figure of Fortune holding his sail of chance, almost to the car park at the other. The Salute is its most ponderous monument: in this vast church, besides its Titians and its Tintorettos and the