Jan Morris's Venice: 'less of a city than an experience'

In this book, and throughout literature, the place seems to exist in a half-real world of the imagination

Part of the thrill of first arriving in Venice is one of recognition. It isn’t the strangeness that registers – it’s the familiarity. When Robert Benchley famously telegrammed “streets filled with water please advise”, the joke relied on his lack of surprise. Of course he already knew what he would find – and knew that everyone else would too.

When I first visited myself, 15 years ago, it felt like stepping onto the set of a film I’d seen countless times. Chugging down the Grand Canal on Vaporetto No 1 was as much about spotting sights I’d already seen as finding fresh splendours. The beauty of this, the “holiday-place of all holiday-places”, was entirely expected. Henry James was worrying over the same idea back in 1882 when he wrote of the difficulty of writing anything “new” about the city:

Venice. It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there.

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit … sat down to muse.

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