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A Wanderer in Venice
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE PIAZZA AND THE CAMPANILE Tbe heart of Venice--Old-fashioned music--Teutonic invaders--The honeymooners--True republicanism--A city of the poor--The black shawls--A brief triumph--Red hair--A band-night incident--The pigeons of the Piazza--The two Procuratie--A royal palace--The shopkeepers--Florian's--Great names--Venetian restaurants--Little fish-- The old campanile--A noble resolve--The new campanile--The angel vane--The rival campanili--The welcome lift--The bells--Venice from the Campanile. S MARK'S Square, or the Piazza, is more than the centre of Venice: to a large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore among its arcades. No other city has so representative a heart. On the four musical nights here--afternoons in the winter--the Piazza draws like a magnet. That every stranger is here, you may be sure, and most Venetian men. Some sit outside Florian's and the other cafes; others walk round and round the bandstand; others pause fascinated beside the musicians. And so it has been for centuries, and will be. New ideas and fashions come slowly into this city, where one does quite naturally what one's father and grandfather did; and a good instance of such contented conservatism is to be found in the music offered to these contented crowds, for they are still true to Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini, and with reluctance are experiments made among the newer men. In the daytime the population of the Piazza is more foreign than Venetian. In fact the only Venetians to be seen are waiters, photographers, and guides, the knots of errand boys watching the artists, and, I might add, the pigeons. But at night Venice claims it, although the foreigner is there too. It is amusing to sit at a table on the outside edge of Florian's great quadrangle of chairs and watch the ...
250 pages, Paperback
First published April 14, 2009
About the author
E,V. Lucas
373 books16 followersEdward Verrall Lucas, recognised as an author as E.V. Lucas, was a versatile and popular English writer. His nearly 100 books demonstrate great facility with style, and are generally acknowledged as humorous by contemporary readers and critics. Some of his essays about the sport cricket are still considered among the best instructional material.He is remembered best for his essays and books about London and travel abroad; these books continue through many editions. He is particularly noted for his biography of Charles Lamb.
He was born in Eltham, Kent into a Quaker family, and educated at Friends Public School in Saffron Walden. He worked first in a Brighton bookshop and then on a Sussex newspaper followed by The Globe; rising without university education to the Punch magazine 'table' in 1904. He became a prolific writer, providing extensive content for Punch and a column "A wanderer's notebook" for the Sunday Times.
He was responsible for A. A. Milne teaming up with E. H. Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He wrote under pen names EVL, VVV, E. D. Ward, and FF for film criticism. Some of his early work was in collaboration with Charles Larcom Graves (1856–1944), another Punch writer.
Rupert Hart-Davis collected and published a collection of his essays on cricket, Cricket All His Life, which John Arlott called "the best written of all books on cricket.
From 1924 he was chairman of the London publishers Methuen and Co.. According to R. G. G. Price's A History of Punch, his polished and gentlemanly essayist's persona concealed:
a cynical clubman … very bitter about men and politics … [with] the finest pornographic library in London.
He was born in Eltham, Kent into a Quaker family, and educated at Friends Public School in Saffron Walden. He worked first in a Brighton bookshop and then on a Sussex newspaper followed by The Globe; rising without university education to the Punch magazine 'table' in 1904. He became a prolific writer, providing extensive content for Punch and a column "A wanderer's notebook" for the Sunday Times.
He was responsible for A. A. Milne teaming up with E. H. Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He wrote under pen names EVL, VVV, E. D. Ward, and FF for film criticism. Some of his early work was in collaboration with Charles Larcom Graves (1856–1944), another Punch writer.
Rupert Hart-Davis collected and published a collection of his essays on cricket, Cricket All His Life, which John Arlott called "the best written of all books on cricket.
From 1924 he was chairman of the London publishers Methuen and Co.. According to R. G. G. Price's A History of Punch, his polished and gentlemanly essayist's persona concealed:
a cynical clubman … very bitter about men and politics … [with] the finest pornographic library in London.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 11, 2012
I think that if you carried it with you, had enough time and read as you visited the various parts of and places in Venice, it would prove very informative. I read it after leaving Venice and hence did not finish it actually 'reading'. You would probably need more time than we had in Venice to make good use of it.
Did Not Finish
December 30, 2020Lucas is one of those older travel writers you're supposed to like, but I couldn't get into him.
February 22, 2012
La crónica del viajero es tal cual lo hacían en la época victoriana. Creo que es un libro para leerlo lentamente a través de los años.
May 31, 2012
Beautiful, exquisitely detailed descriptions of Venetian art and architecture. A bit dated.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews