Venice

A Literary Guide for Travellers

Marie-José Gransard

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857729149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, ' Marco Polo said. 'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.' Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Venice, La Serenissima, is one of the most breathtaking cities in the world. A floating labyrinth; the world's greatest museum, frozen in time; a cultural jewel, slowly sinking into the lagoon from which it rose; tourist-trap, irresistible muse. From its earliest beginnings in the 7th century, Venice has been a magnetic centre of trade and culture, wealth and power and has acted as a crossroads for an array of religious pilgrims and refugees, diplomats, crusading armies and merchants. Later, its fabled beauty and reputation as a haven for freedom of expression seduced some of the most celebrated figures in history: artists such as Durer, Bellini and Turner; writers Dickens, Byron, Kafka, Poe, Rousseau, Thomas Mann, Ruskin and Ezra Pound and composers Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Stravinsky. In this captivating guide to literary Venice, the author uncovers the city's myriad secrets, revealing how every floating palace, gilded church and bustling square is imbued with the lives and creations of those who were inspired by the city, which still echoes with their voices.

1

Introduction

There is nothing new to be said about her.

(Henry James, Italian Hours)

From the very beginning Venice has been a magnet, a crossroads for all kinds of travellers, owing to its geographical situation, its wealth and power, its aesthetic appeal and its magical scenery. Travellers and visitors became increasingly drawn by its tragic decline in the nineteenth century.

It was often the first stop in a long journey south through Italy. Travellers would also plan to include Padua, Vicenza, Florence, Rome and Naples, and continue to Sicily. Throughout the centuries a constant stream of people has moved through or stayed in Venice. Before the twentieth century, visitors did not come to shop, feed pigeons and stare at the Basilica or climb the Campanile. They came in much smaller numbers, and for many reasons. Trade brought Turks, Germans, Slavs and Greeks. Venice was the most popular and best organised point of departure for the long and hazardous journey by sea for Crusaders to Jerusalem, and it was a refuge for those whose religion was threatened: Knights Templar, Knights of Malta, Armenian Mechitarists, Franciscans, Benedictines, Jesuits, Jews and Gesuati. For centuries the Venetian Republic was seen as a haven for them, a place to settle in peace, away from persecution.

The Republic of Venice was known as La Serenissima – ‘the Most Serene’ – and foreigners had always been impressed by its reputation for tolerance, hospitality and generosity. According to one sixteenth-century writer, Francesco Sansovino, the city’s name came from the Latin veni etiam, ‘come back again’ or ‘return to this beautiful place’.

The city certainly knew then and knows now how to entertain. Religious festivities for Ascension Day (Festa della Sensa), for example, were always followed by an impressive meal given also to pilgrims, and intended to enhance the city’s reputation. On these occasions the head of the Republic, the doge, offered trays of sweetmeats as well as wines in great quantities. Venetian regattas, pageantry, processions, bull runs, musical and theatrical entertainments became famous worldwide. The wealth displayed profoundly impressed Henri III of France, whose table napkin at the Doge’s banquet was made of sugar. A fourteenth-century visitor recorded seeing toys made of gold and people eating with a strange implement called a forchetta (fork).

The Serenissima was widely considered, rightly or wrongly, to be a model of democracy: ‘Many historians agree that it generally provided better government than elsewhere,’ wrote Elizabeth Horodowich in her 2009 Brief History of Venice.

Venice provided a haven for those deprived of free expression in the rest of Europe. The first publishing houses were founded in Venice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, providing an outlet for a remarkable range of classical works and drawing contemporary writers to the city to be published. The concept of Venice as a sanctuary allowing personal freedom persisted to the twentieth century. Many Russians fleeing censorship, the threat of imprisonment, execution or the gulag after the 1917 revolution gathered in the city, particularly favouring the island of the Lido. The poet Alexander Pushkin dreamed in the nineteenth century of this escape, but he was never to fulfil it because for political reasons he was never allowed to leave tsarist Russia.

Venice prided itself on being in the vanguard in many areas, not all of them benign: its dress code (envied for its elegance, opulence and innovation everywhere in Europe), the first ghetto, the first quarantine hospitals, the first hospital for tuberculosis sufferers, the first biological warfare protection, the first bank, lottery, newspaper, travel guidebook (by Francesco Sansovino), the first industrial revolution, first opera house open to the paying public, the first European theatre, the first coffee house, and, as we have seen, the first table fork. Venetians claim even to have invented playing cards. This extraordinarily innovative city attracted a stream of writers and artists, including Albrecht Dürer, Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Jacopo Sansovino, Palladio and Canova. Some visitors remained in the city for long periods as ambassadors – Dante, Petrarch, Sir Henry Wotton, the Duke of Montealegre and Quevedo – or as consuls (Joseph Smith) or as mere embassy secretaries (Rousseau, Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye). Although as foreigners they were confined to some areas of the city and were not allowed to deal directly with Venetian patricians, they reported in their writings the generally pleasant Venetian way of life.

In the nineteenth century, many young men, particularly from England and Germany, were sent by their wealthy and powerful families on a Grand Tour to complete their cultural education, or on shopping missions (Walpole, Goethe, Ruskin). Others came for love, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, George Sand and Alfred de Musset. Thomas Coryat and Charles de Brosses were attracted by Venice’s famous courtesans. Visitors to Venice naturally took in museums, churches and palaces, a trip up the Brenta River, a stop at Padua, Vicenza or Treviso, Baedeker later clutched dutifully in hand, and Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Some like Byron and Shelley ventured further and went to Este, others as far as Trieste on the Adriatic, like the German poet Rilke.

Venice represented the ultimate city for those who sought its past fame, beauty, power and wealth nostalgically. Mark Twain called it the ‘Venice of poetry and romance’. For a long time it was, with Paris and London, one of the largest and most powerful cities in Europe, a major centre for music and entertainment. It offered variety and excitement, coloured by the less salubrious reputation it had enjoyed since the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century those who came looking for liberty found also libertinage, as it had become a city of earthly pleasures, with gambling, alluring amorous adventures, endless festivities and carnivals. This was another concept of paradise altogether, a centro dei piaseri (centre of pleasure) according to Giorgio Baffo, a eighteenth-century licentious Venetian poet. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described it more candidly as ‘a sink of vice’. It was arguably Europe’s most popular playground for the privileged and adventurous.

This changed abruptly in 1797 when, after the French Revolu­tion, the French army led by Bonaparte took the city and the last doge was deposed. The French were succeeded by an Austrian occupation, which was to last until 1866. The fallen city then gained popularity for different reasons, inspiring a deluge of writing, in praise of or bewailing its faded beauty and tragic fate. Romantic poets and writers saw the fall of the Venetian Republic as a catastrophic event, putting an end to the city’s glorious past. It had become a melancholic yet fascinating fallen giant, continuing to inspire Romantic poets, scholars, historians, painters and artists. On his deathbed, the 25-year-old Keats, who had not managed to go further than Rome, was reported to have exclaimed: ‘To Venice!’ Proust and Goethe knew all about it before setting foot in the city, and Edgar Allan Poe set his short story ‘The Appointment’ in a fantasy Venice which he knew mainly through Byron’s writings.

The ‘myth’ did not work its magic on everyone, however; the city had its detractors. Futurist poet and writer Marinetti professed to hate the place so much that he planned his own vision of the city with motorways and factories, speeding towards the future. Other detractors included D. H. Lawrence and more recently the French philosopher Régis Debray, who wrote a mostly critical pamphlet Against Venice (Contre Venise) in an attempt to clear away the clichés. But today, for many, Venice remains a cultural centre to which enlightened visitors come for theatre, concerts, exhibitions, art and film festivals, marathons, cooking competitions, boat races and the Carnival, and to experience this strange aquatic city, so unlike anywhere else in the world.

Some have been attracted and others repulsed by the image of Venice as a dangerous location full of mystery and darkness. Dante, one of the first recorded visitors, approaching the city through the lagoon, was struck by the humid, foggy, melancholic, almost hellish scenery. Many centuries later, Dickens described his arrival in a spectral scene which dissolved into the fog like a Turner painting. The tradition of the Gothic novel and horror story was inspired partly by the treatment of prisoners dying slowly in the infamous Venetian prisons, public executions, torture, the power and excesses of the Inquisition, the gloomy deteriorating palaces with their decadent relicts of the ancient aristocracy. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature has a long list of writers, including Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon, who have used the city as a background for tales of mystery, fear, danger and death, not to mention the more than 500 films which have been shot there, of which Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice remain unforgettable.

It can now take less than half a day to travel from London to Venice. Once the railway line reached the city in 1846 it became possible to enjoy a glorious arrival by train. Before then, getting to Venice could take months, encountering difficult and dangerous conditions. The approach by boat through Fusina was slow and unpleasant, cold and dangerous, particularly at night and in the depth of winter. Incredibly, the English seventeenth-century traveller Thomas Coryat walked from his native Somerset in the south-west of England all the way to Venice.

Many who did arrive safe and sound were not immediately allowed in, but were held in lazzaretti (quarantine centres) for as long as two months, as happened to French writer Rousseau. George Sand and Musset were both ill on arrival. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the journey was taxing, as described in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. His protagonist Aschenbach unusually travels by train to Trieste, and then makes an uncomfortable boat journey, followed by a disturbing gondola trip to the Lido. When they had finally recovered, Venice captured the imagination of most visitors.

This literary guide will look at more than 100 writers, including artists, musicians and painters who left a written testimony. The choice is personal and inevitably not comprehensive, but it seemed important to include not only English and American writers, but also French, Russian, Spanish, German and Italian. And what about the Venetians? Mary McCarthy in her 1956 study Venice Observed decided rather unfairly: ‘There aren’t any Venetian writers apart from Goldoni.’ She might have mentioned Casanova, who knew how to tell a good story, and a number of others. I have included some lesser-known Venetians, chroniclers such as Marino Sanudo and Francesco Sansovino. But on the whole they are greatly outnumbered by the outsiders who have written essays, memoirs, diaries, letters, poems and novels dedicated to this extraordinary place which continues to fascinate and inspire. The writings of ambassadors have also been included, as their correspondence and dispatches are both entertaining and informative. This book will perhaps encourage the reader to make his or her own discoveries.

The deluge of writing on Venetian subjects continues: according to a local bookshop, an average of 500 new ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Map
• Acknowledgements
•  1 Introduction
•  2 Faith, Art and Politics
•  3 Haven and Inspiration
•  4 Illusion and Disillusion
•  5 The Grand Tour
•  6 Lust and Love
•  7 Death and Mystery
• Venetian Words and Phrases
• People and their Venetian Locations
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright