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Venice: Pure City
The Venetians' language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This latest work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its listeners to that sensual and surprising city.
His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo; and the ever-present undertone of Venice's shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.
Ackroyd's Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd's portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—enjoying Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo; and the ever-present undertone of Venice's shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.
Ackroyd's Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd's portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—enjoying Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
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First published October 1, 2009
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About the author
Peter Ackroyd
187 books1,499 followersPeter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
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July 15, 2014
The City as Spectacle
Do come in, Ladies and Gentlemen, come in and savour a visit to the gentle and mythical Venice, the city of Dreams, the ideal city. Watch it from your own seats, and all for a good price.
You will enjoy a 360º view. You will have not experienced anything like this before.
This way, Ladies… In the stand over there you can chose a beautiful mask which you can wear while you relish the spectacle. We have all forms and colours. Suit your fancy. Welcome to the Carnival, the legendary Carnival of Venice. We have the real gondolas for you, like the ones in Venice but better. No need to get wet. From our gondolas you can visit Saint Marc, the Doges palace, the Fenice…., the full lot. Welcome to your dream travel.
In the stand I see a lovely mask. All blue, like the lagoon, in a sapphire blue… This is the one I fancy and put on happily and proceed to the Pavilion.
And so Peter Ackroyd invites us through his book and his TV series--reproduced in DVD format to be watched in the comfort of your sitting room-- to this VeneziaRama.
For we are not to feel self-conscious as visitors twice removed. We are to imagine ourselves as tourists, or even pilgrims traveling in adoration of extravaganzas. What does it matter if you look at the image, or at the image of the image, or at the reflection in the mirror, or at a projection of the mirrored image? Reality has many layers. And it is all in the mind.
Sitting in a half gondola, made of painted black cardboard, I caress the red satin of the soft and cushioned seat, and see that my black cask is placed near others. Placed parallel, they all face a cylindrical screen placed in the middle of the pavilion. Lights in all tones but with blues and reds coming through with greater brilliance bring out different reflections on the golden poles and gilded frames inside this magical realm. I am enraptured by the display.
Music begins with shrilling violins that blend in with the rumour of water and signal that the fantastic central cylinder is to start turning. And even the Music seems circular as it sings with “fierezza” the rhythms of The Four Seasons as if a full year were to pass in just forty minutes.
We are ready.
We see Saint Marc, and our eyes enter the basilica and the mosaics and the dimmer light inebriate us and they come up close to move away immediately and meanwhile Ackroyd tells us of the wealth and the commerce of art and luxury, with brocades and silks, and pigments, and the stones which are brighter than our looking eyes. And we can smell the spices. Sweet cinnamon and clove.
We learn that the water is in the stone as well. Those façades, those buildings… They are not what they seem. This is not marble, but Istrian stone, the look-alike, but then it is authentic material. If Venice has emerged out of the waters, this stone, composed of lime, originates from the seas, and most likely, will eventually return to them.
If the origins are in the water, it is also this water, or horizontal and giant mirror, which compounds its existence. Now it is that I notice that the walls of the pavilion are all mirrors too, like vertical lagoons. They multiply and the numerous images become more real because they are more present because more immediate. And yet, they also evanesce like mist in the looking glass of the city of mirrors.
Venice the city of mystery and the city of miracles. Because how on earth, or should I say, how on water can we have all those buildings standing on foundations made up of piles of wood, oak and larch and elm, submerged on mud and sand and eventually cement? This is the city that defies nature as its 14k tons of campanile stand on a petrified forest as Ackroyd says.
Venice, the city of artifice, the city of Art. We could spend hours on this, if not a life time. All the colour and atmosphere and sensuous space and golden warm light…. But Ackroyd in his film goes fast through this and choses brown. Not Tiepolo with his Pink. Not the enigmatic Giorgione. Not the inventor of the postcard Canaletto. Not Titian who left his mark in almost all European courts. Not Carpaccio with the most famous dog in the history of painting. Not Bellini who invented the gilded gleam. No, he chose Tintoretto, with too many browns, and all because Ackroyd has been captured by the dazzling, by this painter’s prestezza. To my relief, Ackroyd’s text does better justice and, appeased, I see a restored and complete parade of these legendary Venetian painters.
We move on and the screen disappears and now we see a stage. Who said that Venice was theatrical? Ackroyd announces the Arrival of the Ambassadors, as if we had Carpaccio’s painting of the Legend of St. Ursula in front of our eyes. On the stage there is a row of chairs and the persons walk in and sit down. These foreign Ambassadors are all men. We recognize them easily. First the Musicians and Lorenzo da Ponte acts as master of ceremonies and brings in the joyful Mozart. He is followed by Gluck, Liszt, Wagner and Stravinsky. Diaguilev hops in as well, behind Igor. They are received by Monteverdi and Vivaldi. Next arrive the Writers, and these are welcomed by Tasso. We again easily recognize Goethe, Byron, Ruskin, James, Rilke, Pound, Proust and.. Brodsky. Thomas Mann also shows up and goes towards an empty chair next to the already sitting Goethe but then sees that he can also settle next to Wagner and there he goes quickly. Proust looks somewhat désappointé; he would have also liked that seat. Shakespeare did not come, but a Moor enters and deposits William’s portrait on a chair. The third group is formed by the Painters and is led by Dürer, but he is followed by El Greco, Turner, Manet, Whistler and Sargent. These all look around in awe and cannot believe their eyes.
On the next turn of the cylinder, the women finally arrive. I see many virgins but not those of the St. Ursula Legend. These Virgins of sweet and fleshy faces are sensuously dressed in silks and damask and ravishing colours. Not too far away there is a myriad of courtesans. These do not need the rich costumes and pose for us in chaste nudity. The violins now recede and we can hear instead the mellifluous voices. The girls from the Ospedali are singing glorious choirs. Hospices kept the orphans or conservati and thereby exported the term Conservatory to music schools elsewhere. All these girls could become nuns or whores. One’s future at the flip of a coin.
A vendor arrives, trumpeting his bringing delicious Neapolitan pizza. Neapolitan? Asks my companion. Ackroyd has posted that Venetian food is no good and the peddler has come from another Pavilion, from further south.
While we finish our tasty pizzas, the cylinder turns around again and another stage comes to the fore and this time it is Carpaccio’s Departure of the Ambassadors, the next scene in the Pageant. We see most of the personalities seen before leaving, except for a few, who led by Wagner embark on a gondola and retreat to the Isola di San Michele. With him go Stravinsky, Diaguilev, Pound and Brodsky. And there they stayed.
The show resumes and we hear of the cooperation and opposition to Byzantium and to the Constantinople turned Muslim. We hear dates. We learn that Venice turned her back to the East and, reluctantly but successfully, looked then towards the West. That is when it embarked on an inland project and colonized sections of the continent and ports in the Adriatic coast. Similarly to her volte-face all the episodes of history also turn around. The comings and goings that gave economic basis to this city of goods and finance also brought her undoing. The covetous city could be become the Treasure instead and awaken covetousness. A ghost of Napoleon planes over the pavilion, turns off the lights and we stop hearing the water.
Silence and Darkness.
But muffled murmurs can be faintly distinguished. These are human whispers. Is Ackroyd muttering something to someone? There must be secrets hidden here. Could this be a center of spies? Or is it diplomacy? Can I hear swords clashing? Can I glimpse dark alleys where cloak and dagger situations are staged?
Light comes suddenly back as I see Ackroyd snapping his fingers and the distressing historical panorama is broken up and the disconcerting Chronology-Rama evaporates. The Spectacle is restored. Venice becomes the land of tourists, and here we feel at home. We belong here.
But we also realize that by populating it, we desert her. As Ackroyd says, the paradox is that tourists empty a place by their presence.
And as we exit the Pavilion, Carpaccio’s dog says goodbye to us.
June 11, 2021
"Outwardly Venice mirrors the romance and idealism of a favourite memory of ourselves. It's like the look of love. But it can also make us realise our identity too is built on shifting tides of water. It can reveal us to ourselves without our carnival mask. Its ghost world of reflections shimmering in evanescent light is a reminder of the fragile nature of every earned security. And it's as eloquent of what is missing as it is of what is here. Its flowing and ebbing tides move things about. Thus it can urge us to look forward; but it can also bring back the people we have lost, the love we never made, the battles we didn't fight, the memories we never made." Glenn Haybittle.
I think there's no question a visit to Venice will provide you with new knowledge about yourself. Perhaps this is true of all travelling. But there's no other city which quite gives you the feeling Venice does; it's the feeling, I think, of walking out onto a stage. Suddenly you are faced with a sweeping hush of expectation. You have to find your voice; the full range and accessibility of your feeling. The epic theatrical grandeur of Venice glitters with disdain for compromise, indifference. I think it's safe to say that if Venice leaves you indifferent you have lost touch with the beating heart of sensibility. Venice, at any given moment, can root you in your deepest longings; can make you exalt in human achievement; can, by pressing so close its unstable footing, make life more precious.
More than any city I know Venice empties of life at night. Venice experienced lockdown long before the rest of us. The city is deserted when the tourists have left or gone to bed. The otherworldly razor sharp acoustics of the city are most evident now. A footfall a hundred yards away sounds like the next moment of your life. The slopping of the water against stone sounds like something that is happening inside you. And there's the sense of being shadowed everywhere you go. The best two films about Venice - Death in Venice and Don't Look Now - have both portrayed it as a sinister place, a place of ghosts and sickness. A place that brings death closer.
So, Peter Ackroyd's book. It's always going to be interesting reading about Venice but essentially this book read like a commission rather than an inspired labour of love. All the best observations about Venice came from writers Ackroyd quoted. I can recall only once him providing me with a new insight and I've now forgotten what this was. There's a much better book about Venice waiting for an inspired author to write it.
I think there's no question a visit to Venice will provide you with new knowledge about yourself. Perhaps this is true of all travelling. But there's no other city which quite gives you the feeling Venice does; it's the feeling, I think, of walking out onto a stage. Suddenly you are faced with a sweeping hush of expectation. You have to find your voice; the full range and accessibility of your feeling. The epic theatrical grandeur of Venice glitters with disdain for compromise, indifference. I think it's safe to say that if Venice leaves you indifferent you have lost touch with the beating heart of sensibility. Venice, at any given moment, can root you in your deepest longings; can make you exalt in human achievement; can, by pressing so close its unstable footing, make life more precious.
More than any city I know Venice empties of life at night. Venice experienced lockdown long before the rest of us. The city is deserted when the tourists have left or gone to bed. The otherworldly razor sharp acoustics of the city are most evident now. A footfall a hundred yards away sounds like the next moment of your life. The slopping of the water against stone sounds like something that is happening inside you. And there's the sense of being shadowed everywhere you go. The best two films about Venice - Death in Venice and Don't Look Now - have both portrayed it as a sinister place, a place of ghosts and sickness. A place that brings death closer.
So, Peter Ackroyd's book. It's always going to be interesting reading about Venice but essentially this book read like a commission rather than an inspired labour of love. All the best observations about Venice came from writers Ackroyd quoted. I can recall only once him providing me with a new insight and I've now forgotten what this was. There's a much better book about Venice waiting for an inspired author to write it.
November 10, 2012
Ackroyd is a lush, expansive writer and his main theory, that the geography and political situation of Venice, surrounded by water and set between the West and the East has been decisive in the development of its particular culture and form of government is a very beguiling one. There's a true cornucopia of information in this book, it pours out in a glittering mass that enchants and instructs, but it isn't always situated in history very precisely, there is no timeline to give the whole thing a thread that runs through. He does divide it into various parts but they are not terribly clear-cut categories: Commerce and Trade are surely interchangeable, and what does The Living City convey? Well, it ain't dead, that's for sure. In the end I felt he was going round and round and then coming back to where he'd started: absolutely! typical of anyone's walking experience in that most labyrinthine of cities, but not how I want to read a book for information. Oi'll give it severn. (Brummie accent)
March 9, 2019
On the cover of my copy of this book there is a praze from “The Times” that says only one word: “Sumptuous” - and if I was to describe this book with only one word then this is the one I would use.
Sumptuous was Venetian republic during the thousand years of its history, and surprisingly sumptuous is Peter Ackroyd prose. It kept me mesmerized and glued to its pages that cover everything from the city’s origin, through its long lasting greatness, until its final decline and uncertain future. There is a clear chronological order in the events described, but it reads more like an ethnography of the city and its people then an account of its history.
I must admit that I have never been to Venice, but I enjoyed reading about it more than I can express. And what I learned, helped me to understand the strange bits and pieces that I actually did know about Venice before. And the most important bit of this puzzle is that, in Venice - appearance was everything.
It was a city of performance and ornament (its famous son Vivaldi comes to mind), where the art of rhetorics was in highest regard. Venetian diplomats were known for their cunning and skill to the extent of being “dishonorable in their pursuit of Venetian honor”. Venetian polity with its intricate rules for choosing the representatives was “like the mammalian life in Australia, a unique phenomenon born out of relative isolation”. The republic kept it’s citizens under strict control and demanded an absolute loyalty. No citizens could leave the city without permission. In 14th century there was 4 policeman for every thousand inhabitants - there was very little privacy in this tightly exploited area. Few other places developed this degree of order and no other city had so effectively silenced its inhabitants so Venice was better than most at keeping secrets.
There was a strict dressing code. Only the doge was permitted to wear gold, the width of sleeves, the color of clothes, hair socks, hatts, cloaks, perfumes, all were a symbol of status and had a symbolic meaning. Perhaps not-surprisingly, it is the shimmering city of Venice that is the place of birth for commedia dell’arte. It is also where the first public opera was performed, and where the first european theater was created. Apparently though, literature was not an efficient mean of keeping up the appearances, since no great literature comes from Venice. The two great names, that we all know, Marco Polo and Casanova both wrote memoirs.
In 1789, continuing an unbroken line of rulers since AD 697, the 120th and the last doge of Venice was elected. Then came Bonaparte and forced the city to reform. There were no more doges, and the bridge to the mainland put a definitive end to Venice as an island.
Venice was never “founded” it was created, and it keeps being created by the continuous generations restoring its architecture to its former glory. But Venice as it once was is perhaps gone forever. Since the loss of it’s independence and a permanent connection to the mainland citizens of Venice started moving out. And the current rate it is predicted that by 2030 there will be no Venetians left, living in the city. So what is the future of this brilliant, floating, shimmering city? Will it be a museum or will it be taken over by the sea - that remains to be seen.
Sumptuous was Venetian republic during the thousand years of its history, and surprisingly sumptuous is Peter Ackroyd prose. It kept me mesmerized and glued to its pages that cover everything from the city’s origin, through its long lasting greatness, until its final decline and uncertain future. There is a clear chronological order in the events described, but it reads more like an ethnography of the city and its people then an account of its history.
I must admit that I have never been to Venice, but I enjoyed reading about it more than I can express. And what I learned, helped me to understand the strange bits and pieces that I actually did know about Venice before. And the most important bit of this puzzle is that, in Venice - appearance was everything.
It was a city of performance and ornament (its famous son Vivaldi comes to mind), where the art of rhetorics was in highest regard. Venetian diplomats were known for their cunning and skill to the extent of being “dishonorable in their pursuit of Venetian honor”. Venetian polity with its intricate rules for choosing the representatives was “like the mammalian life in Australia, a unique phenomenon born out of relative isolation”. The republic kept it’s citizens under strict control and demanded an absolute loyalty. No citizens could leave the city without permission. In 14th century there was 4 policeman for every thousand inhabitants - there was very little privacy in this tightly exploited area. Few other places developed this degree of order and no other city had so effectively silenced its inhabitants so Venice was better than most at keeping secrets.
There was a strict dressing code. Only the doge was permitted to wear gold, the width of sleeves, the color of clothes, hair socks, hatts, cloaks, perfumes, all were a symbol of status and had a symbolic meaning. Perhaps not-surprisingly, it is the shimmering city of Venice that is the place of birth for commedia dell’arte. It is also where the first public opera was performed, and where the first european theater was created. Apparently though, literature was not an efficient mean of keeping up the appearances, since no great literature comes from Venice. The two great names, that we all know, Marco Polo and Casanova both wrote memoirs.
In 1789, continuing an unbroken line of rulers since AD 697, the 120th and the last doge of Venice was elected. Then came Bonaparte and forced the city to reform. There were no more doges, and the bridge to the mainland put a definitive end to Venice as an island.
Venice was never “founded” it was created, and it keeps being created by the continuous generations restoring its architecture to its former glory. But Venice as it once was is perhaps gone forever. Since the loss of it’s independence and a permanent connection to the mainland citizens of Venice started moving out. And the current rate it is predicted that by 2030 there will be no Venetians left, living in the city. So what is the future of this brilliant, floating, shimmering city? Will it be a museum or will it be taken over by the sea - that remains to be seen.
June 22, 2016
[4.5] Which is to say it was the right book for me - although I can see why it may not be for everyone, especially those with no background in the history of Venice. If you already have some chronological political history as a framework, a thematically organised general history can be a great way to fill in gaps and find interesting social & cultural material, but as an introduction, it may feel jumbled. "Jumbled" may, however, in this instance, be appropriately evocative: travel-writing about Venice, including that by many eminent authors and ambassadors quoted in this book, persistently returns to the idea of "dreamlike", and Venetian street-numbering is apparently impossible for visitors to make sense of.
Peter Ackroyd - unlikeably curmudgeonly interviewee though I find him in the papers - has always seemed, from his books, to be on my wavelength. He also can hardly look at a view without imagining how it may have looked at different times through history, and has a bit of an obsession with genius loci. He's written about Oscar Wilde, John Dee, drag, Chatterton, underground rivers (plus a graphomaniac quantity of other historical and psychogeographical topics). I loved London: the Biography (and if I hadn't not looked at it for years, having had to get rid of it because it got covered in squashed pears due to a poor packing decision, it might still be in my favourite books) - and I found this similarly enthralling, spending an entire day reading about half of it, with a level of attention & enjoyment I only get with two or three novels a year. As I think the London book was, this is a kind of fusion of history and literature, something kin to creative non-fiction: as well as historical facts, there are many drawings-together of ideas on an aesthetic and felt level, many of which I found both epiphanic and understandable. Ackroyd knows where hard facts end and felt sense begins; it's the reader who also does, and who is comfortable with their mingling in one text, who will get the most out of this book. If you require pure information and haven't got a mystical bone in your body, this is not the book for you.
Even the book's faults suit me though: many reviewers complain of repetition. There is indeed repetition, but when reading information-dense non-fiction I fear forgetting, and that the reading is thus on some level futile; I'm not sure whether the repetition in practice helps me remember more or for any longer, but it certainly alleviates the worry. Ackroyd's style is such that I don't feel annoyed or patronised by repetition - and it's enjoyable so that the reading has a point in the moment, beyond the issue of remembering. Most repetition was just enough - but whilst I do see a place for mentioning Jungian / elemental affinities of water, in the second half of the book it was too frequent, and about a third of the references to water's connection with emotion could have been removed.
The lower ratings for Venice: Pure City are understandable because, relative to Ackroyd's London books, the numbers of English-language readers with the right level of pre-existing knowledge - people who know something yet haven't heard all this before - is inevitably lower. My confidence in the book was bolstered by an Amazon review by a Venetian now living in the UK who thought the book evoked the city perfectly - without that I might have hesitated to read it because Ackroyd is otherwise such a London animal. (I had vacillated between this and Jan Morris' Venice - the latter is highly praised but appealed less because, despite revisions, it has that distinctive mode of mid-twentieth-century British travel books: they are to me a subgenre and style in themselves, requiring a particular mood - whereas Ackroyd is Ackroyd and, though I think one can have a surfeit of his books, for me there's always some kindred connection. )
I found what I sought, a greater understanding of Venice's cultural allure - a historically grounded elaboration of what I glimpsed in Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, something I'd mysteriously missed despite relevant interests in aestheticism, and having once had to study parts of the city's history. It's always an idea of something (or someone) I fall for, I can't be truly interested in something without an idea of it that appeals to me - and a good part of subsequent engagement with the topic is in seeing how reality compares with the idea. I never had much of an idea of Venice before, and therefore studying it was often a bore, lots of details without any larger magnet to draw me in. Yet the book has also enhanced my understanding of the political history: I need and like this kind of broad-sweep history to give proper context to the details.
I now see the Venetian political system as the Scandinavia of its day: exemplary, stable, efficient, communitarian, with individuality subordinated to the greater good - yet with quite a lot of freedom in certain ways, provided one did not undermine the political status quo. (This assumes a certain amount of state violence and corruption to be endemic to the age; Venice had these like everywhere else in early modern Europe, it was just more organised about them. Venetian patricians seem to have been remarkably long-lived and healthy compared to their counterparts elsewhere, making the government in effect a gerontocracy. Ackroyd considers this to have contributed to the government's stability and conservatism; he contrasts it with the more chaotic environment of medieval England, where men in their twenties and early thirties often held power, using it impetuously. As I've got older, I've thought that age might be an overlooked factor in such things and was glad to see it written down here, even if it could do with a more systematic investigation.)
Like contemporary Scandinavia, the Venetian Republic probably also worked as it did because of a small population with a distinctive geography and history, making it hard to replicate elsewhere - although no-one seriously tried. (I wonder also about a genetic founder effect - that there was a significant enough number of people predisposed to the right qualities to make the system work. The apparent frequency of musical talent, that it was worth training schools full of orphans to become great musicians and singers, also seems to hint at a founder effect.)
Ackroyd says that Venice did not produce individualist writers like Machiavelli, yet the thousand-year Venetian republic is as good a way as any to show which of the principles outlined in The Prince did and did not work. (Whether or not a citizen army was the right choice, as he believed, Venice's geographical defence advantages meant this was not really an issue.) Doges were never 'stars' like Florentine princes: the very essence of the system made them functionaries. The entire system worked on roughly "Machiavellian" principles, and achieved their end, a stable state, for centuries, not merely for the duration of one leader's career. It is also a long time since I read him, but he perhaps did not pay as much attention as the Venetians to keeping the populace happy, by means of entertainments that acted as safety valves, and involving ordinary people - such as guilds and members of the Castellani and Niccolotti gangs - in official state functions, honours they would be reluctant to lose by making trouble. [More to add here]
The idea that literary artists, intellectuals and individualists were not much to be found in Venice is of course open to question and further examination. (The city's most characteristic occupations are presented as law, trade, manufacturing and money-making; its recreations visual art, music, sensuality and collecting. Printing far more significant than native writers; the university in its territory, Padua, strongest in applied subjects such as medicine, law and sciences, not humanism; Galileo was rewarded most for the useful invention of the telescope. It may have been interesting to look for "un-Venetian" individuals, but in its existing form, the book does its job of creating atmosphere, and the subsuming of such people into general trends in the book manifests the ethos of the city itself.) History-writing beyond the most basic facts is always essentially provisional - it's simply more obvious in Ackroyd than in many contemporary writers, and the obviously interpretive appearance of his interpretations means one isn't lulled into a false sense of security. (Seeing how this book fleshed out or corrected information from TV documentaries, and reminded me of things I studied in the past, was also part of the process of historical texts disagreeing with and complementing one another.) Ackroyd is interested in writing the Macaulay and Gibbon type of narrative history, and to understand this makes sense of his work. There is similarity in the style, but the overarching generalisations are contemporary in content: e.g. The “fall” of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or a triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced. That is the flaw in all moralistic interpretations of historical events. We must discount the possibility of ever discerning a purpose in human affairs, except that of blind instinct reaching its fulfilment, and we must admit that any ultimate purpose will be for ever beyond our understanding.
Ackroyd can't help drawing below-the-surface parallels to his beloved London (and overtly mentioning the occasional difference), nor to referring to some of his own favourite topics (Venice as the most artificial of cities - and therefore the citiest of cities - its love of masks and surfaces, for instance has obvious parallels with aestheticism and the old underground gay culture). I was looking for an appealing way of looking at Venice, and these are just the sort of things that would draw me in - as well as its inbetween-ness, being neither one nor the other, not quite West or East or North or South but something of each, intending to stay on everyone's good side for practical reasons but sometimes being a little too assertively different for that to happen in reality. A more systematic comparison of pre-twentieth century Venice and London would be interesting, but presenting the idea in the first place is interesting (and must be even more to people who know both places in person).
Sometimes, though, things that are true of most cities generally, or most cities at a particular time, are presented as too distinctively Venetian. Having just been reading in Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age about the theatrical nature of bawdy courts, how they illustrated London life at the time and may have inspired Shakespeare, I saw in Ackroyd's Venice very similar behaviours and legal complaints construed as part of the Venetian atmosphere - things most likely occurring in all early modern European cities, with parallels today - and earlier - should one care to find them.
There was less here than I hoped on post-seventeenth-century Venice - less than he has on earlier politics, trade and religion - but Ackroyd at least made up for that by arguing against the more hackneyed notions of decline: that trade often did perfectly well in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century - with the real ignominy only in the decades of Napoleonic and Austrian rule (although the events of 1848-9 showed Venetians to be brave in a manner quite contradictory to their popular image). His grounding in aestheticism and familiarity with the artificial v. authentic binary opposition led to a good point which should have been more obvious to me before: that tourism is also a city fulfilling its function. But he is evidently as sad as anyone that so many native Venetians have left the city due to the high price of housing and small range of jobs, and that it is becoming a place of holiday homes and expats.
Whilst Discworld's Patrician Vetinari was obviously heavily Venetian-inspired, I've now forgotten if I ever saw quite how Venetian Ankh-Morpork was in its general feel, and in details of life. (Ackroyd mentions black-clad assassins, rumours of specially trained cohorts of; and that there was a guild of prostitutes.) Odd too to be reintroduced here to the word 'patrician' as a part of serious history, and not in the eye-roll-worthy context I've often seen it the last few years, as some robotically arrogant internet teenager's nuance-free assertion of superior cultural taste.
Did I previously notice, and then forget, the extent of Venice's dislike of the Pope, and its keeping the Inquisition at arms length? Regardless, here it was striking, with its basis around the possession of an apostolic saint, Mark, therefore making the city in its own view equal to Rome: the Vatican was merely another Italian temporal power. Venetian Christianity was a little unconventional, but insisted on keeping up appearances with communal adherence to Catholic form:
When an Englishman, visiting a Venetian church, did not kneel at the elevation of the host he was taken to task by a Venetian senator. The Englishman said that he did not subscribe to the doctrine of the real presence, to which the Venetian replied, “No more do I. But kneel as I do, or else leave the church.” (It is commoner for non-academic history books to lack footnotes than for them to have them, but this is one of the many instances in Venice: Pure City when they would have been very welcome. The bibliography is far too long to guess at sources.)
The chapters which seem most conclusionary are several before the end; it's a little odd to structure a narrative history like a gig, with an apparent ending followed by random-seeming encore choices, and - though there's so much I've left out here, I find myself ending in the same place as Ackroyd, with arts and music. I don't think he's inclined me to like Venetian painting and classical music much more than I did before, but he's provided a satisfying way of making sense of them, as when Francesco da Mosto's Venice documentary interpreted Canova's (to me plasticky, boring) hyper-perfect white sculptures as a reaction against the human disfigurement and decay of the near-epidemic syphilis in 18th century. I like portraits of individuals; a lot of Venetian art is group-based in line with the city's communal, almost Jante-Law ethos. The Venetian method was to paint straight on to the canvas without drawing first, much less likely to produce the Holbein-style clear outlines I like. There is a lot in here about layering of colour, the way painters reflected the nature of light & colour in the city itself. Vivaldi, meanwhile, was shamelessly commercial, selling slightly-differentiated signed music manuscripts to rich tourists, and it thus seems no debasement at all for the Four Seasons to have become the western world's favourite hold music. I've been listening to Vivaldi whilst writing this, applying new understanding of his music:
the music of Venice is the music of performance and of display. It is never the music of meditation or of sorrowful introspection. It relies upon improvisation and dramatic interpretation. Once more it is the love of surface, and the rich deployment of the effects of the surface, that define the Venetian sensibility...
It has associations with the glitter of Venetian glass, and the glittering light upon the water...
The music of Venice has a certain sweetness. It was often light and clear... it could be suggested that it contains little interior life. There could be no Beethoven in Venice. It has an irresistible flow. It has the rhythm of the sea, not of the wheel. It provokes astonishment and admiration rather than contemplation.
I never had words before for why I thought it was just okay; maybe, now I have them, what I meant was that it was an empty, fairly pretty noise - but it's also a more interesting one now.
As with much of this book, not something that all readers will see eye-to-eye with, but it was the lens I was looking for.
Peter Ackroyd - unlikeably curmudgeonly interviewee though I find him in the papers - has always seemed, from his books, to be on my wavelength. He also can hardly look at a view without imagining how it may have looked at different times through history, and has a bit of an obsession with genius loci. He's written about Oscar Wilde, John Dee, drag, Chatterton, underground rivers (plus a graphomaniac quantity of other historical and psychogeographical topics). I loved London: the Biography (and if I hadn't not looked at it for years, having had to get rid of it because it got covered in squashed pears due to a poor packing decision, it might still be in my favourite books) - and I found this similarly enthralling, spending an entire day reading about half of it, with a level of attention & enjoyment I only get with two or three novels a year. As I think the London book was, this is a kind of fusion of history and literature, something kin to creative non-fiction: as well as historical facts, there are many drawings-together of ideas on an aesthetic and felt level, many of which I found both epiphanic and understandable. Ackroyd knows where hard facts end and felt sense begins; it's the reader who also does, and who is comfortable with their mingling in one text, who will get the most out of this book. If you require pure information and haven't got a mystical bone in your body, this is not the book for you.
Even the book's faults suit me though: many reviewers complain of repetition. There is indeed repetition, but when reading information-dense non-fiction I fear forgetting, and that the reading is thus on some level futile; I'm not sure whether the repetition in practice helps me remember more or for any longer, but it certainly alleviates the worry. Ackroyd's style is such that I don't feel annoyed or patronised by repetition - and it's enjoyable so that the reading has a point in the moment, beyond the issue of remembering. Most repetition was just enough - but whilst I do see a place for mentioning Jungian / elemental affinities of water, in the second half of the book it was too frequent, and about a third of the references to water's connection with emotion could have been removed.
The lower ratings for Venice: Pure City are understandable because, relative to Ackroyd's London books, the numbers of English-language readers with the right level of pre-existing knowledge - people who know something yet haven't heard all this before - is inevitably lower. My confidence in the book was bolstered by an Amazon review by a Venetian now living in the UK who thought the book evoked the city perfectly - without that I might have hesitated to read it because Ackroyd is otherwise such a London animal. (I had vacillated between this and Jan Morris' Venice - the latter is highly praised but appealed less because, despite revisions, it has that distinctive mode of mid-twentieth-century British travel books: they are to me a subgenre and style in themselves, requiring a particular mood - whereas Ackroyd is Ackroyd and, though I think one can have a surfeit of his books, for me there's always some kindred connection. )
I found what I sought, a greater understanding of Venice's cultural allure - a historically grounded elaboration of what I glimpsed in Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, something I'd mysteriously missed despite relevant interests in aestheticism, and having once had to study parts of the city's history. It's always an idea of something (or someone) I fall for, I can't be truly interested in something without an idea of it that appeals to me - and a good part of subsequent engagement with the topic is in seeing how reality compares with the idea. I never had much of an idea of Venice before, and therefore studying it was often a bore, lots of details without any larger magnet to draw me in. Yet the book has also enhanced my understanding of the political history: I need and like this kind of broad-sweep history to give proper context to the details.
I now see the Venetian political system as the Scandinavia of its day: exemplary, stable, efficient, communitarian, with individuality subordinated to the greater good - yet with quite a lot of freedom in certain ways, provided one did not undermine the political status quo. (This assumes a certain amount of state violence and corruption to be endemic to the age; Venice had these like everywhere else in early modern Europe, it was just more organised about them. Venetian patricians seem to have been remarkably long-lived and healthy compared to their counterparts elsewhere, making the government in effect a gerontocracy. Ackroyd considers this to have contributed to the government's stability and conservatism; he contrasts it with the more chaotic environment of medieval England, where men in their twenties and early thirties often held power, using it impetuously. As I've got older, I've thought that age might be an overlooked factor in such things and was glad to see it written down here, even if it could do with a more systematic investigation.)
Like contemporary Scandinavia, the Venetian Republic probably also worked as it did because of a small population with a distinctive geography and history, making it hard to replicate elsewhere - although no-one seriously tried. (I wonder also about a genetic founder effect - that there was a significant enough number of people predisposed to the right qualities to make the system work. The apparent frequency of musical talent, that it was worth training schools full of orphans to become great musicians and singers, also seems to hint at a founder effect.)
Ackroyd says that Venice did not produce individualist writers like Machiavelli, yet the thousand-year Venetian republic is as good a way as any to show which of the principles outlined in The Prince did and did not work. (Whether or not a citizen army was the right choice, as he believed, Venice's geographical defence advantages meant this was not really an issue.) Doges were never 'stars' like Florentine princes: the very essence of the system made them functionaries. The entire system worked on roughly "Machiavellian" principles, and achieved their end, a stable state, for centuries, not merely for the duration of one leader's career. It is also a long time since I read him, but he perhaps did not pay as much attention as the Venetians to keeping the populace happy, by means of entertainments that acted as safety valves, and involving ordinary people - such as guilds and members of the Castellani and Niccolotti gangs - in official state functions, honours they would be reluctant to lose by making trouble. [More to add here]
The idea that literary artists, intellectuals and individualists were not much to be found in Venice is of course open to question and further examination. (The city's most characteristic occupations are presented as law, trade, manufacturing and money-making; its recreations visual art, music, sensuality and collecting. Printing far more significant than native writers; the university in its territory, Padua, strongest in applied subjects such as medicine, law and sciences, not humanism; Galileo was rewarded most for the useful invention of the telescope. It may have been interesting to look for "un-Venetian" individuals, but in its existing form, the book does its job of creating atmosphere, and the subsuming of such people into general trends in the book manifests the ethos of the city itself.) History-writing beyond the most basic facts is always essentially provisional - it's simply more obvious in Ackroyd than in many contemporary writers, and the obviously interpretive appearance of his interpretations means one isn't lulled into a false sense of security. (Seeing how this book fleshed out or corrected information from TV documentaries, and reminded me of things I studied in the past, was also part of the process of historical texts disagreeing with and complementing one another.) Ackroyd is interested in writing the Macaulay and Gibbon type of narrative history, and to understand this makes sense of his work. There is similarity in the style, but the overarching generalisations are contemporary in content: e.g. The “fall” of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or a triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced. That is the flaw in all moralistic interpretations of historical events. We must discount the possibility of ever discerning a purpose in human affairs, except that of blind instinct reaching its fulfilment, and we must admit that any ultimate purpose will be for ever beyond our understanding.
Ackroyd can't help drawing below-the-surface parallels to his beloved London (and overtly mentioning the occasional difference), nor to referring to some of his own favourite topics (Venice as the most artificial of cities - and therefore the citiest of cities - its love of masks and surfaces, for instance has obvious parallels with aestheticism and the old underground gay culture). I was looking for an appealing way of looking at Venice, and these are just the sort of things that would draw me in - as well as its inbetween-ness, being neither one nor the other, not quite West or East or North or South but something of each, intending to stay on everyone's good side for practical reasons but sometimes being a little too assertively different for that to happen in reality. A more systematic comparison of pre-twentieth century Venice and London would be interesting, but presenting the idea in the first place is interesting (and must be even more to people who know both places in person).
Sometimes, though, things that are true of most cities generally, or most cities at a particular time, are presented as too distinctively Venetian. Having just been reading in Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age about the theatrical nature of bawdy courts, how they illustrated London life at the time and may have inspired Shakespeare, I saw in Ackroyd's Venice very similar behaviours and legal complaints construed as part of the Venetian atmosphere - things most likely occurring in all early modern European cities, with parallels today - and earlier - should one care to find them.
There was less here than I hoped on post-seventeenth-century Venice - less than he has on earlier politics, trade and religion - but Ackroyd at least made up for that by arguing against the more hackneyed notions of decline: that trade often did perfectly well in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century - with the real ignominy only in the decades of Napoleonic and Austrian rule (although the events of 1848-9 showed Venetians to be brave in a manner quite contradictory to their popular image). His grounding in aestheticism and familiarity with the artificial v. authentic binary opposition led to a good point which should have been more obvious to me before: that tourism is also a city fulfilling its function. But he is evidently as sad as anyone that so many native Venetians have left the city due to the high price of housing and small range of jobs, and that it is becoming a place of holiday homes and expats.
Whilst Discworld's Patrician Vetinari was obviously heavily Venetian-inspired, I've now forgotten if I ever saw quite how Venetian Ankh-Morpork was in its general feel, and in details of life. (Ackroyd mentions black-clad assassins, rumours of specially trained cohorts of; and that there was a guild of prostitutes.) Odd too to be reintroduced here to the word 'patrician' as a part of serious history, and not in the eye-roll-worthy context I've often seen it the last few years, as some robotically arrogant internet teenager's nuance-free assertion of superior cultural taste.
Did I previously notice, and then forget, the extent of Venice's dislike of the Pope, and its keeping the Inquisition at arms length? Regardless, here it was striking, with its basis around the possession of an apostolic saint, Mark, therefore making the city in its own view equal to Rome: the Vatican was merely another Italian temporal power. Venetian Christianity was a little unconventional, but insisted on keeping up appearances with communal adherence to Catholic form:
When an Englishman, visiting a Venetian church, did not kneel at the elevation of the host he was taken to task by a Venetian senator. The Englishman said that he did not subscribe to the doctrine of the real presence, to which the Venetian replied, “No more do I. But kneel as I do, or else leave the church.” (It is commoner for non-academic history books to lack footnotes than for them to have them, but this is one of the many instances in Venice: Pure City when they would have been very welcome. The bibliography is far too long to guess at sources.)
The chapters which seem most conclusionary are several before the end; it's a little odd to structure a narrative history like a gig, with an apparent ending followed by random-seeming encore choices, and - though there's so much I've left out here, I find myself ending in the same place as Ackroyd, with arts and music. I don't think he's inclined me to like Venetian painting and classical music much more than I did before, but he's provided a satisfying way of making sense of them, as when Francesco da Mosto's Venice documentary interpreted Canova's (to me plasticky, boring) hyper-perfect white sculptures as a reaction against the human disfigurement and decay of the near-epidemic syphilis in 18th century. I like portraits of individuals; a lot of Venetian art is group-based in line with the city's communal, almost Jante-Law ethos. The Venetian method was to paint straight on to the canvas without drawing first, much less likely to produce the Holbein-style clear outlines I like. There is a lot in here about layering of colour, the way painters reflected the nature of light & colour in the city itself. Vivaldi, meanwhile, was shamelessly commercial, selling slightly-differentiated signed music manuscripts to rich tourists, and it thus seems no debasement at all for the Four Seasons to have become the western world's favourite hold music. I've been listening to Vivaldi whilst writing this, applying new understanding of his music:
the music of Venice is the music of performance and of display. It is never the music of meditation or of sorrowful introspection. It relies upon improvisation and dramatic interpretation. Once more it is the love of surface, and the rich deployment of the effects of the surface, that define the Venetian sensibility...
It has associations with the glitter of Venetian glass, and the glittering light upon the water...
The music of Venice has a certain sweetness. It was often light and clear... it could be suggested that it contains little interior life. There could be no Beethoven in Venice. It has an irresistible flow. It has the rhythm of the sea, not of the wheel. It provokes astonishment and admiration rather than contemplation.
I never had words before for why I thought it was just okay; maybe, now I have them, what I meant was that it was an empty, fairly pretty noise - but it's also a more interesting one now.
As with much of this book, not something that all readers will see eye-to-eye with, but it was the lens I was looking for.
August 10, 2011
'Venice and Venice's Image are inseparable.'
The variations in response to this book VENICE: PURE CITY by Peter Ackroyd are puzzling at best. Perhaps the history of the writer's output has polarized the readers. Perhaps the integration of emotional and intellectual responses in the history of the rise and present sate of Venice makes the book uncomfortable for some. This reader became immersed in the mysteries that surround the history, the socialization of a swamp, the creation of a city on water, the ingredients that create the flavor of Venice visually, aurally, the particular types of influences of art (painting and music and architecture et al) and the interaction of this city with the great minds of our time such as Wagner, Proust, Henry James, Freud, Thomas Mann, Benjamin Britten, John Singer Sargent and on and on and on -it is simply a feast for the mind in Ackroyd's brilliant prose and in the many drawings and photographs and reproductions of the art and the city that grace this book.
Yes, there are likely more focused and accurate history books that take the reader on a chronological voyage through the rise and development of Venice, and if that is what the reader desires there are many books available that do just that. But what Ackroyd does that is so fascinating is to relate the history thematically, bouncing back and forth with contemporary knowledge of the Venice we know as played against the Venice of the past - all smoke and mirrors and delectable commentary. There is more to discover about the blend of society and the church and the wars and the peculiar aspects of a part of Italy that is actually not joined physically to that country. Ackroyd gives fine insights to the immigrant status of the sectors of Venice that few others have the courage to define.
But perhaps the true appeal of this book is that it feels to be written for the same passionate reason that many of us, past and present, feel about La Serenissima. It is a difficult response to define much less to put into written book form. It is a feeling, a magnetic draw that once instilled in the mind and heart is very difficult to sever. As a critic in the LA Times comments '"Ackroyd -- the marvelously erudite and staggeringly industrious English writer -- [has compiled] an encyclopedic amount of general and arcane factual information and then [arranged] it less chronologically than thematically -- much as one might encounter it in the course of a long walk over fascinating terrain in the company of a knowledgeable but never pedantic companion. It's an experience rendered all the more agreeable by the independent turn of Ackroyd's critical imagination and lapidary quality of his prose." Perhaps then this book is for Romantics who love history - but who love Venice even more.
Grady Harp
The variations in response to this book VENICE: PURE CITY by Peter Ackroyd are puzzling at best. Perhaps the history of the writer's output has polarized the readers. Perhaps the integration of emotional and intellectual responses in the history of the rise and present sate of Venice makes the book uncomfortable for some. This reader became immersed in the mysteries that surround the history, the socialization of a swamp, the creation of a city on water, the ingredients that create the flavor of Venice visually, aurally, the particular types of influences of art (painting and music and architecture et al) and the interaction of this city with the great minds of our time such as Wagner, Proust, Henry James, Freud, Thomas Mann, Benjamin Britten, John Singer Sargent and on and on and on -it is simply a feast for the mind in Ackroyd's brilliant prose and in the many drawings and photographs and reproductions of the art and the city that grace this book.
Yes, there are likely more focused and accurate history books that take the reader on a chronological voyage through the rise and development of Venice, and if that is what the reader desires there are many books available that do just that. But what Ackroyd does that is so fascinating is to relate the history thematically, bouncing back and forth with contemporary knowledge of the Venice we know as played against the Venice of the past - all smoke and mirrors and delectable commentary. There is more to discover about the blend of society and the church and the wars and the peculiar aspects of a part of Italy that is actually not joined physically to that country. Ackroyd gives fine insights to the immigrant status of the sectors of Venice that few others have the courage to define.
But perhaps the true appeal of this book is that it feels to be written for the same passionate reason that many of us, past and present, feel about La Serenissima. It is a difficult response to define much less to put into written book form. It is a feeling, a magnetic draw that once instilled in the mind and heart is very difficult to sever. As a critic in the LA Times comments '"Ackroyd -- the marvelously erudite and staggeringly industrious English writer -- [has compiled] an encyclopedic amount of general and arcane factual information and then [arranged] it less chronologically than thematically -- much as one might encounter it in the course of a long walk over fascinating terrain in the company of a knowledgeable but never pedantic companion. It's an experience rendered all the more agreeable by the independent turn of Ackroyd's critical imagination and lapidary quality of his prose." Perhaps then this book is for Romantics who love history - but who love Venice even more.
Grady Harp
January 3, 2013
I love Venice, and I have enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's work in the past, so I was very pleased and excited when I got this book. But as I read it I became more and more frustrated and disappointed.
Mr. Ackroyd is trying to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix of fantastic romance and hard-nosed commerce, its architecture, its people, and its effect on visitors over the years. It's a laudable goal, but I'm afraid the book falls short. The problem is one of organization: because this was written in parallel with a British television documentary series Ackroyd worked on, the book's chapters cover different aspects of the city, like television episodes. But what works in episodic television doesn't work in print. The book is terribly unfocused, and lacks any kind of narrative or thematic spine.
Without a straightforward historical narrative, the reader drowns in interesting but disconnected historical trivia. There is no battles-and-dates history, few historical characters (other than the abstract collective "Venetians"), not even any of the economic minutiae beloved of modern historians. What we get is Ackroyd constantly gushing about shimmering surfaces, masks, and the color of the water.
Nor would the book be of much use to anyone visiting Venice. It describes the modern city only as the commodified ghost of past glories. James Morris's Venice is far more useful as a practical guide even though it's fifty years old -- and manages to give one a better sense of the city's history and development.
Now, Peter Ackroyd is a skilled writer, and the book is certainly "readable," but it left me unsatisfied.
Mr. Ackroyd is trying to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix of fantastic romance and hard-nosed commerce, its architecture, its people, and its effect on visitors over the years. It's a laudable goal, but I'm afraid the book falls short. The problem is one of organization: because this was written in parallel with a British television documentary series Ackroyd worked on, the book's chapters cover different aspects of the city, like television episodes. But what works in episodic television doesn't work in print. The book is terribly unfocused, and lacks any kind of narrative or thematic spine.
Without a straightforward historical narrative, the reader drowns in interesting but disconnected historical trivia. There is no battles-and-dates history, few historical characters (other than the abstract collective "Venetians"), not even any of the economic minutiae beloved of modern historians. What we get is Ackroyd constantly gushing about shimmering surfaces, masks, and the color of the water.
Nor would the book be of much use to anyone visiting Venice. It describes the modern city only as the commodified ghost of past glories. James Morris's Venice is far more useful as a practical guide even though it's fifty years old -- and manages to give one a better sense of the city's history and development.
Now, Peter Ackroyd is a skilled writer, and the book is certainly "readable," but it left me unsatisfied.
March 6, 2014
fileopenonlaptop = it'll take a while.
It is lovely wandering through this history of Venice with the estimable Mr. Ackroyd thrilling the shell-likes with tidbits and trivia, making sure that we haven't walked past something that deserved a closer look.
The human brain, according to psychologists, tell us that nuggets of information have to be heard six times before the brain stores it away complete, so when training, the trick is to pop those items in along the course but from contrasting angles, or couched inbetween differing verbal neighbours. Ackroyd's delivery is somewhat similar in construction: he doesn't repeat himself in entirety, yet he does endeavour to make sure the reader comes away with some facts under the belt.
---------------------
Bucintoro: On Ascension day the Doge would climb aboard and marry the sea for another year.
So many lovely pictures and photographs that I have tried to find other visuals for the status updates.
3* Hawksmoor
4* The Canterbury Tales
4* Shakespeare the biography
4* Chatterton
1* The Lambs of London
5* Dickens
3* The House of Dr Dee
3* Poe: A Life Cut Short
2* The Plato Papers
3* The Fall of Troy
3* Venice: Pure City (2007)
5* Tudors (2013)
FMI - to go back through and add publishing year to the above titles
For Alison SamuelOpening: They voyaged into the remote and secluded waters. They came in flat-bottomed boats, moving over the shallows. They were exiles, far from their own cities or farms, fleeing from the marauding tribes of the North and the East. And they had come to this wild place, a wide and flat lagoon in which fresh water from the rivers on the mainland and salt water from the Adriatic mingled. At low tide there were mud-flats all around, cut through with streams and rivulets and small channels; at high tide there were small islands of silt and marsh-grass.
It is lovely wandering through this history of Venice with the estimable Mr. Ackroyd thrilling the shell-likes with tidbits and trivia, making sure that we haven't walked past something that deserved a closer look.
Well, the verb I used up there ↑ was 'wandering' and yet this journey is brisker. At 8% I had already been in and out of the Basilica to view the sea-themed mosaics.
Saint Theodore astride a crocodile,
St. Mark's Square.
The human brain, according to psychologists, tell us that nuggets of information have to be heard six times before the brain stores it away complete, so when training, the trick is to pop those items in along the course but from contrasting angles, or couched inbetween differing verbal neighbours. Ackroyd's delivery is somewhat similar in construction: he doesn't repeat himself in entirety, yet he does endeavour to make sure the reader comes away with some facts under the belt.
---------------------
Bucintoro: On Ascension day the Doge would climb aboard and marry the sea for another year.So many lovely pictures and photographs that I have tried to find other visuals for the status updates.
3* Hawksmoor
4* The Canterbury Tales
4* Shakespeare the biography
4* Chatterton
1* The Lambs of London
5* Dickens
3* The House of Dr Dee
3* Poe: A Life Cut Short
2* The Plato Papers
3* The Fall of Troy
3* Venice: Pure City (2007)
5* Tudors (2013)
FMI - to go back through and add publishing year to the above titles
March 15, 2020
Ah, Venice! The most serene city.
Readers looking for a detailed history of Venice won't find it here. While it's impossible not to glean an overall understanding of the city's history, this book is mainly about the personality of the city and its inhabitants. It focuses more on the culture than on the events that make up its character. And character it is, for the book treats the city as if it were a person.
Another thing to be aware of is the writing is not the typical matter-of-fact style of non-fiction. There is a flair and abstractness that some may find irritating. And it is steeped in the author's personal opinion. While he seems to appreciate Venice, he doesn't hold back when he is describing something he doesn't like.
And the quotations. Oh, the quotations. I'm sure the writer scoured absolutely every written work that mentioned Venice and pulled something out to insert.
It's not a bad book, but I can see where some may find it off-putting. I wouldn't recommend it as a first book, or even second book, to read about Venice. But, if you have already read one or two and are looking for something to augment your understanding of Venice, then this would be one to consider.
Readers looking for a detailed history of Venice won't find it here. While it's impossible not to glean an overall understanding of the city's history, this book is mainly about the personality of the city and its inhabitants. It focuses more on the culture than on the events that make up its character. And character it is, for the book treats the city as if it were a person.
Another thing to be aware of is the writing is not the typical matter-of-fact style of non-fiction. There is a flair and abstractness that some may find irritating. And it is steeped in the author's personal opinion. While he seems to appreciate Venice, he doesn't hold back when he is describing something he doesn't like.
And the quotations. Oh, the quotations. I'm sure the writer scoured absolutely every written work that mentioned Venice and pulled something out to insert.
It's not a bad book, but I can see where some may find it off-putting. I wouldn't recommend it as a first book, or even second book, to read about Venice. But, if you have already read one or two and are looking for something to augment your understanding of Venice, then this would be one to consider.
August 6, 2011
What a pity Peter Ackroyd doesn't have anything interesting or original to say about Venice. This is just a series of seemingly unrelated and unsubstantiated assertions, without the benefit of any argument or evidence. Poor. I, too, could make far-reaching and sweeping generalisations about Venice, but why would I? And who would believe me? I don't believe Peter Ackroyd and I don't know why any publisher felt that there was a need for this book.
January 21, 2012
If you like the adroit mental wanderings of a poetic social historian then Peter Ackroyd's book about Venice is a good choice. I'm being a bit harsh with the 3 stars, because I genuinely enjoyed the book. The problem is that it's hard to say exactly what he is trying to accomplish. Certainly he has tried to explain the soul of the city. He picks and chooses historical, cultural and geographical details and then extrapolates on their meaning. So often I would think "Where is he going with this?" His verbal journeys are fascinating, but leave you feeling a bit lost and unsatisfied.
Here are the fun things that I have learned reading this book:
Venice was in many ways the birthplace of capitalism.
Venice was a totalitarian state as well as a republic from early in its history.
Personal freedom has long been important in Venice, as long as it didn't oppose the state.
Venetian politics have been very conservative over the centuries.
The influence of Eastern culture on Venice is subtle but pervasive.
Venetian church leaders were often at odds with Rome.
Venice is the least Italian of Italian cities.
The first mass-produced product were books and Venice was a big publishing city.
Venice was a stopping point for many of the crusaders and in this way it became an early tourist mecca.
Polenta is Venetian and their food is generally not very interesting.
Not much serious literature was produced by Venetians, but a lot of writers from other places stayed in Venice for extended periods.
Tintoretto was the most Venetian of painters producing massive numbers of paintings at lightning speed. (He was not the greatest Venetian artist, just the most typical.)
Venetians are excellent salespeople, even the artists.
Venice is about facades and artifice. The outward appearance of things (the facade of the house, the clothes you wear, and so on) is more important than what is going on inside.
Venetian fashion during the Renaissance was often bizarre and impractical, such as woman wearing stilt-like shoes.
In Venice it is very quiet at night.
If the current trend continues, there will be no one living in Venice by 2030.
Here are the fun things that I have learned reading this book:
Venice was in many ways the birthplace of capitalism.
Venice was a totalitarian state as well as a republic from early in its history.
Personal freedom has long been important in Venice, as long as it didn't oppose the state.
Venetian politics have been very conservative over the centuries.
The influence of Eastern culture on Venice is subtle but pervasive.
Venetian church leaders were often at odds with Rome.
Venice is the least Italian of Italian cities.
The first mass-produced product were books and Venice was a big publishing city.
Venice was a stopping point for many of the crusaders and in this way it became an early tourist mecca.
Polenta is Venetian and their food is generally not very interesting.
Not much serious literature was produced by Venetians, but a lot of writers from other places stayed in Venice for extended periods.
Tintoretto was the most Venetian of painters producing massive numbers of paintings at lightning speed. (He was not the greatest Venetian artist, just the most typical.)
Venetians are excellent salespeople, even the artists.
Venice is about facades and artifice. The outward appearance of things (the facade of the house, the clothes you wear, and so on) is more important than what is going on inside.
Venetian fashion during the Renaissance was often bizarre and impractical, such as woman wearing stilt-like shoes.
In Venice it is very quiet at night.
If the current trend continues, there will be no one living in Venice by 2030.
February 3, 2012
Venice certainly has an interesting history. Peter Ackroyd reviews Venice in slices. He warms up with a brief history lesson but then breaks Venice down into multiple and overlapping parts, City of Saint Mark, Ship of State, Republic of Commerce, Living City, Sacred City, et cetera, which are each broken down further into several subchapters. Then he covers that angle of Venice from beginning to present day. So some aspects of Venice are covered several times but from slightly different angles. I'm not real keen on the way this moves the reader back and forth through time continually. My brain prefers chronologic order, but the repetition is helpful in a way (he doesn't truly repeat himself because he is using the information in a different context) to remind you of major themes. For example, the merchant nature of the city has affected everything from local politics to foreign relations to map making to past and present perceptions of the city. That sort of thing. You are not soon going to forget that Venetians are merchants nor that they are outwardly gregarious but inwardly quite reserve nor the role religion has played in forming Venice. An unusual (to me) method of relating the information but it does serve a purpose.
November 29, 2021
Für ein Werk von knapp 600 klein gedruckten Seiten ohne Fußnoten und langen Katalog ist diese eingängig geschriebene Biografie Venedigs erstaunlich oberflächlich. Das liegt in erster Linie daran, dass sie weder ernsthaft thematisch, noch chronologisch strukturiert ist, so dass sich bestimmte Themen immer wieder wiederholen. Sie krankt auch daran, dass der Autor - der fast ausschließlich aus Englischen und US-Amerikanischen Quellen schöpft Schriftsteller und nicht Historiker ist, weswegen er sich zu teils sehr kühnen Thesen herleiten lässt, die nicht zu belegen sind (die schwarze Kleidung der Renaissance leitet er z.B. von Kleidern der präromanischen Siedler ab) und vieles als genuin venezianisch entdeckt, dass im katholischen Europa der damaligen Zeit allgemeiner Usus war, etwa der auch in Spanien und Süditalien übliche Brauch, viele Töchter lebenslang in verschlossene Klöster zu verbannen, um das Erbe zusammenzuhalten und Mitgiften zu sparen. Schade, denn Peter Ackroyd schreibt wirklich gut.
October 29, 2011
This book helped me understand Venice at a much deeper level. I've visited Venice and was ambivalent: I thought Verona was better. At least now I know more about why Venice is the way it is.
I found Peter Ackroyd's writing to mirror the most serene city. It was haunting, poetic - kept me reading the book when I otherwise might have put it down. It was also very quotable: I was so surprised by some of the quotes that I wrote them down:
"...in the realm of King Money, all subjects are instrinsically equal. Money knows no duty or honour." p. 103
"The worship of the Virgin entailed, even demanded, the glorification of the state." p. 269.
"Money knows no class or barrier." page 358
"Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade." p 359
Venice is paradoxical: it's focus on trade made it much freer than other cities, with a more cosmopolitan mix of inhabitants. But at the same time it was ruled with an iron fist - make all the money you want, just don't threaten the order of things.
It's merchant heritage was even evident in the artists it produced. It's famous painters and composers worked dramatically faster than contemporaries from other parts of Europe. They had to. Their livelihoods depended on having product to sell, not on keeping in the good graces of some noble.
So the book was enjoyable, helped me understand the city better, and helped me understand humankind better as well.
I found Peter Ackroyd's writing to mirror the most serene city. It was haunting, poetic - kept me reading the book when I otherwise might have put it down. It was also very quotable: I was so surprised by some of the quotes that I wrote them down:
"...in the realm of King Money, all subjects are instrinsically equal. Money knows no duty or honour." p. 103
"The worship of the Virgin entailed, even demanded, the glorification of the state." p. 269.
"Money knows no class or barrier." page 358
"Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade." p 359
Venice is paradoxical: it's focus on trade made it much freer than other cities, with a more cosmopolitan mix of inhabitants. But at the same time it was ruled with an iron fist - make all the money you want, just don't threaten the order of things.
It's merchant heritage was even evident in the artists it produced. It's famous painters and composers worked dramatically faster than contemporaries from other parts of Europe. They had to. Their livelihoods depended on having product to sell, not on keeping in the good graces of some noble.
So the book was enjoyable, helped me understand the city better, and helped me understand humankind better as well.
July 21, 2016
A work of synthesis and integration as Peter Ackroyd reads everything that has been written about Venice rather than uncovering new sources or conducting original research, but what he adds to the material is a poet's imagination in making metaphorical connections which colour his - and our - view of this version of Venice.
This is often more like a collection of thematic essays rather than a linear 'biography' of the city: some of it is relatively well-known - the Venice of the nuns and courtesans, the masked balls, the slavery, banking and trade of nascent capitalism; but there are nice illuminating moments too.
Some of the connections can feel a bit forced - Venice is both parsimonious and lavish, according to which idea Ackroyd needs in the moment; both conservative and radically innovative; both patriarchal and allowing women an unprecedented freedom. And my biggest criticism is that there is a defiance of a sense of historicism here as we whizz from the sixteenth- to the nineteenth century often in a single sentence: as if Venice is timeless, somehow outside of time, always the same despite the changes in the world outside.
All the same, this is a gloriously pleasurable read: a book that has absorbed a lot of information and reconstituted it via Ackroyd's vision.
This is often more like a collection of thematic essays rather than a linear 'biography' of the city: some of it is relatively well-known - the Venice of the nuns and courtesans, the masked balls, the slavery, banking and trade of nascent capitalism; but there are nice illuminating moments too.
Some of the connections can feel a bit forced - Venice is both parsimonious and lavish, according to which idea Ackroyd needs in the moment; both conservative and radically innovative; both patriarchal and allowing women an unprecedented freedom. And my biggest criticism is that there is a defiance of a sense of historicism here as we whizz from the sixteenth- to the nineteenth century often in a single sentence: as if Venice is timeless, somehow outside of time, always the same despite the changes in the world outside.
All the same, this is a gloriously pleasurable read: a book that has absorbed a lot of information and reconstituted it via Ackroyd's vision.
February 3, 2011
Now that I have finished the book, I will acknowledge that I learned a lot about the history and culture of Venice. But it was torture to read. While the author is a talented writer, I do not enjoy sentences like "The passion for color existed, like the veneration of light, as a token of energy and bravura" or "It is a city of doubleness, of reflections within reflections, in every sense. The mask is a sign of ambiguity" or "The image in the mirror may in some sense be a guarantee of identity and of wholeness. The root of narcissism lies in anxiety, and the fear of fragmentation, which may be assuaged by the sight of the reflection." Aargh. I would prefer that the author stick to the facts instead of engaging in such meaningless intellectual-sounding blather.
It would have been helpful to include a map of the Adriatic and Mediterranean.
Negativity aside, I would consider reading the author's London: Biography of a City.
It would have been helpful to include a map of the Adriatic and Mediterranean.
Negativity aside, I would consider reading the author's London: Biography of a City.
March 11, 2012
To me this book wasn't as good as Gary Wills' Venice:The Lion City. It felt formulaic. I haven't read Ackroyd's other work but I wondered if he started with an outline of what he wanted based on how he apprached other city storis. If so, it wouls explain why this been doesn't seem to come from the heart.
For an individual and humurous account of Venice, I'd recommend No Vulgar Hotel by Judth Martin.
For an individual and humurous account of Venice, I'd recommend No Vulgar Hotel by Judth Martin.
December 27, 2021
A fine rambling, multi-facted look at this most interesting of cities. Ackroyd touches on many aspects of the city and it people and produces a thorouighly satisfying account of the history and development of Venice. A fine read.
October 17, 2014
My God, does this book need a good editor. The repetition, the contradictions (even within 3 pages of each other) were infuriating. Not to mention, Ackroyd hangs onto his beloved London and seems to unconsciously compare everything, in this case, Venice, to his beloved country of origin....but it is never stated. (Read his London book and one can see the difference.) Granted I am biased towards my love of Venice, but nonetheless I learned very little from this book that I didn't already know from other books of Venice. Overall, way too long in need of a slash and burn edit. In addition some genuine passion for the book's subject would have done wonders to make this worthwhile reading.
December 10, 2014
I'm so glad to be done with this awful, tedious book. Ackroyd's extended, repetitive and at times nonsensical meditation on Venice probably doesn't belong in the nonfiction section, but since he never cites any of his sources, it's really hard to track down where he's wrong or making stuff up.
I read Ackroyd's biography of Thomas More fifteen years ago and quite liked it. My one reservation was that the endnotes were not always sufficient -- sometimes, I wanted a little more information so that I'd have the option to go learn more about the topic he was covering. Now, that book has fifteen pages of notes in about a 6-point font. This book has zero notes, period.
You might think, "Footnotes are irritating pedantry; a skilled writer can make a perfectly good historical argument without them." Sure. There are other ways to acknowledge the sources of your ideas and give sufficient information about historical details to enable your reader to follow your tracks. Long-format magazine writers use these methods all the time. Ackroyd, however, rarely avails himself of any of them. Why, for instance, would you attribute a quotation about the Murano glass industry in 1500 to "one contemporary"? (p. 33) Does it really hurt so much to give the source's name, or the book from which you took the quote? It might matter less if all of his information was accurate, but when he informs us that Piranesi was best known for his images of prisons (p. 79-80) or that pantomime (a word present in both Greek and Latin) takes its name from the commedia dell'arte figure Pantaloon (p. 128) I began to feel that anything and everything in the book could be made up. Reading Ackroyd's account of a picturesque island covered in disinterred bones (p. 330), I explored a bit on Italian websites, only to find that his claim that the island is still used in this way has been inaccurate since the Fascist era.
So, enough about the dodginess of the details. Perhaps the book should be taken as a sort of memoir or appreciation, rather than a work of historical nonfiction. If we are meant to cherish this book on the merits of its writing, it fails again. Ackroyd's prose is repetitive and ornate in a manner that would be much more charming enlivened by the abstruse vocabulary and archaic philosophies of one of the eighteenth-century essayists he often refers to. Though, I should grant him archaic philosophies: references to "Oriental" and "eastern" things in the book belong in a different era. If you mean to say "the Byzantine empire was known for its lurid physical punishments," for instance, don't smear the entire world east of Venice (see e.g. pp. 83, 338-9).
While the organization of the book initially seems promising, each component could have been better written and more concise. The book utterly lacks a conclusion, so the reader ends up just as lost as a tourist in Venice. Let me leave you, in the end, with a couple of particularly meaningless sentences from the last chapter of the book:
"The architecture, or architexture, of the city was conceived harmoniously. [Reviewer's note: contradicts his earlier chapters about how the haphazard styles of Venetian building were falsely made to look uniform by aggressive "restorations."] If it is indeed true that buildings have been raised by the power of music, then the churches and noble houses of Venice have assuredly embodied the melody of the world."(p. 369)
If it is indeed true that Peter Ackroyd wrote the biography I read 15 years ago, then this book assuredly bears the mark of an army of lazy and stoned assistants.
I read Ackroyd's biography of Thomas More fifteen years ago and quite liked it. My one reservation was that the endnotes were not always sufficient -- sometimes, I wanted a little more information so that I'd have the option to go learn more about the topic he was covering. Now, that book has fifteen pages of notes in about a 6-point font. This book has zero notes, period.
You might think, "Footnotes are irritating pedantry; a skilled writer can make a perfectly good historical argument without them." Sure. There are other ways to acknowledge the sources of your ideas and give sufficient information about historical details to enable your reader to follow your tracks. Long-format magazine writers use these methods all the time. Ackroyd, however, rarely avails himself of any of them. Why, for instance, would you attribute a quotation about the Murano glass industry in 1500 to "one contemporary"? (p. 33) Does it really hurt so much to give the source's name, or the book from which you took the quote? It might matter less if all of his information was accurate, but when he informs us that Piranesi was best known for his images of prisons (p. 79-80) or that pantomime (a word present in both Greek and Latin) takes its name from the commedia dell'arte figure Pantaloon (p. 128) I began to feel that anything and everything in the book could be made up. Reading Ackroyd's account of a picturesque island covered in disinterred bones (p. 330), I explored a bit on Italian websites, only to find that his claim that the island is still used in this way has been inaccurate since the Fascist era.
So, enough about the dodginess of the details. Perhaps the book should be taken as a sort of memoir or appreciation, rather than a work of historical nonfiction. If we are meant to cherish this book on the merits of its writing, it fails again. Ackroyd's prose is repetitive and ornate in a manner that would be much more charming enlivened by the abstruse vocabulary and archaic philosophies of one of the eighteenth-century essayists he often refers to. Though, I should grant him archaic philosophies: references to "Oriental" and "eastern" things in the book belong in a different era. If you mean to say "the Byzantine empire was known for its lurid physical punishments," for instance, don't smear the entire world east of Venice (see e.g. pp. 83, 338-9).
While the organization of the book initially seems promising, each component could have been better written and more concise. The book utterly lacks a conclusion, so the reader ends up just as lost as a tourist in Venice. Let me leave you, in the end, with a couple of particularly meaningless sentences from the last chapter of the book:
"The architecture, or architexture, of the city was conceived harmoniously. [Reviewer's note: contradicts his earlier chapters about how the haphazard styles of Venetian building were falsely made to look uniform by aggressive "restorations."] If it is indeed true that buildings have been raised by the power of music, then the churches and noble houses of Venice have assuredly embodied the melody of the world."(p. 369)
If it is indeed true that Peter Ackroyd wrote the biography I read 15 years ago, then this book assuredly bears the mark of an army of lazy and stoned assistants.
December 9, 2011
It seems that Ackroyd, following his incredible success with London: A Biography, saw an opportunity to cash in on his fame as a city Biographer by picking the world's most famous settlement to eulogise about.
If you have not been to Venice yet, this book is next to useless in building a picture of the city and it's history. The story behind the rise of Venice as an economic empire is only thinly revealed, partly due to the book taking a thematic rather than chronological structure, and partly due to Ackroyd's preference to indulge in his highly irritating writing style. I got the feeling that throughout this book, Ackroyd's focus is the attemp to beguile the reader into the magic world of the written word, ahead of the far more rewarding unbounding of the many fascinating stories linked to this former Capital of the world.
Descriptions of the place itself are lucid and dream-like - fine if you come armed with a sound prior knowledge of Venice's topography and history, and have a particular penchant for his highly individualised style. If, however, you are looking to really understand what made this city so central to European history for many hundreds of years, this is not your book.
If you have not been to Venice yet, this book is next to useless in building a picture of the city and it's history. The story behind the rise of Venice as an economic empire is only thinly revealed, partly due to the book taking a thematic rather than chronological structure, and partly due to Ackroyd's preference to indulge in his highly irritating writing style. I got the feeling that throughout this book, Ackroyd's focus is the attemp to beguile the reader into the magic world of the written word, ahead of the far more rewarding unbounding of the many fascinating stories linked to this former Capital of the world.
Descriptions of the place itself are lucid and dream-like - fine if you come armed with a sound prior knowledge of Venice's topography and history, and have a particular penchant for his highly individualised style. If, however, you are looking to really understand what made this city so central to European history for many hundreds of years, this is not your book.
December 21, 2017
This wasn't so much a history (though there's plenty of history in here) but a hymn to Venice. Lyrically written, beautifully evoked, the story of the city from its earliest origins right up to now is told with such feeling, humour and depth of knowledge that this was a joy to read. I've never been to Venice, but now I really want to go. I want to see the light hit off the canals, I want to see the canals change colour, I want to imagine the carnival at its decadent height, and I want to see behind the ornate facades into some of those amazing palazzios at their height.
Favourite quote - in the context of talking about some of Venice's most famous tourists. "Shelley came to lament. Byron came to ejaculate."
Venice is an ambiguous city. A city where nothing is quite what it seems. It is decadent and decaying. It is beautiful beyond words. This book does the city proud. I loved it.
Favourite quote - in the context of talking about some of Venice's most famous tourists. "Shelley came to lament. Byron came to ejaculate."
Venice is an ambiguous city. A city where nothing is quite what it seems. It is decadent and decaying. It is beautiful beyond words. This book does the city proud. I loved it.
October 9, 2016
Discursive, impressionistic, piquant.
January 11, 2018
This turned out to be quite a difficult book to review. On the one hand it was certainly interesting, but it leans heavily towards a psychological examination of the city and its people over time rather than a more traditional examination of the history itself. It is broken up and discussed by specific themes rather than chronologically, so we jump forward and back quite often.
The primary reason for a hesitation in recommending this book however comes from a single section late in the text - when talking about Marco Polo. Marco and his work isn't discussed at great length, nearly an in-passing reference, but he does two things in that reference - first he mentions that these were once considered "just stories" but are now possibly the truth, and mentions, without context, both Ghengis Khan and Prester John in the same sentance as historical figures. He then moves on, without examining this any further.
The history of and the claims in Marco Polo's work, the claims made on behalf of "Prester John" and the history of that particular myth, and the fact that no context is provided for any of that in this work does leave me with the uncomfortable feeling that the rest of the work, where I knew far less and have to take the Author's word without the benefit of other sources, might be less reliable than I had previously thought.
This may be unfair to the author, and a scholar of the entirety of Venetian history may be forgiven for equating an important historical figure and what is commonly believed to be a practical joke and a work of fiction - but I can't help but feel skeptical of the entire work because of it.
The primary reason for a hesitation in recommending this book however comes from a single section late in the text - when talking about Marco Polo. Marco and his work isn't discussed at great length, nearly an in-passing reference, but he does two things in that reference - first he mentions that these were once considered "just stories" but are now possibly the truth, and mentions, without context, both Ghengis Khan and Prester John in the same sentance as historical figures. He then moves on, without examining this any further.
The history of and the claims in Marco Polo's work, the claims made on behalf of "Prester John" and the history of that particular myth, and the fact that no context is provided for any of that in this work does leave me with the uncomfortable feeling that the rest of the work, where I knew far less and have to take the Author's word without the benefit of other sources, might be less reliable than I had previously thought.
This may be unfair to the author, and a scholar of the entirety of Venetian history may be forgiven for equating an important historical figure and what is commonly believed to be a practical joke and a work of fiction - but I can't help but feel skeptical of the entire work because of it.
June 9, 2019
O Peter Ackroyd é um autor tem uma obra bastante vasta que mistura romances e obras de não-ficção para um público bem amplo e que inclui, pelo menos, biografia e história.
Dele já li o divertido Dan Leno e o golem de Londres, romance passado na Inglaterra vitoriana.
Aqui, neste Venice, ele traça a história de Veneza, a muito particular cidade italiana localizada em um conjunto de ilhas dentro de uma laguna. Para quem quer conhecer a cidade ou já a conhece traz muita informação, muita coisa interessante que certamente ilumina muito a quem se propõe a conhecê-la, mas o Ackroyd me pareceu melhor romancista do que biógrafo de uma cidade. Lá pela metade do livro, fiquei meio entediado e devo confessar que chegar ao final demandou mais esforço do que eu imaginava.
Dele já li o divertido Dan Leno e o golem de Londres, romance passado na Inglaterra vitoriana.
Aqui, neste Venice, ele traça a história de Veneza, a muito particular cidade italiana localizada em um conjunto de ilhas dentro de uma laguna. Para quem quer conhecer a cidade ou já a conhece traz muita informação, muita coisa interessante que certamente ilumina muito a quem se propõe a conhecê-la, mas o Ackroyd me pareceu melhor romancista do que biógrafo de uma cidade. Lá pela metade do livro, fiquei meio entediado e devo confessar que chegar ao final demandou mais esforço do que eu imaginava.
April 6, 2022
The language in Venice by Peter Ackroyd is lavish and the vocabulary is a challenge, which I like. The narration by Simon Vance is superb. The book takes you through ancient history to the present focusing on various themes throughout Venice’s life. Overall, though, I found it a very negative view of Venice. I am very much looking forward to visiting this month, so will take away lovely stories and surprising facts and leave the editorializing behind.
January 19, 2026
Like Ackroyd's "London: A Biography" this is a set of thematic chapters about a city. It is long (though not as long as London) but can be read incrementally or by dipping into a topic. The prose is amazing and the book is full of insights. This definitely should not be one's first Venice book or even one's tenth, but after that, and at least a few weeks in the city, this is a stunning work of history and cultural and artistic analysis.
February 15, 2019
A beautifully written and mesmerizing celebration of Venice. Not at all a tourist gloss or a guidebook but an indispensable companion that would probably be enjoyed more after a visit (but before the next visit!).
August 28, 2025
interesante
December 6, 2024
Дуже, дуже детальна історія Венеції, яка тебе огортає і заколисує
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