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Jan Morris - The World of Venice
John Julius Norwich -- A History of Venice
Blue
Guide Venice (6th Ed) 
| The
Rough Guide Venice and Veneto... Up to the usual Rough Guide
standards, this is a great introduction to Venice. Its
restaurant and hotel suggestions are good, but it really shines in
describing the city, and offering suggestions for many days' walks
-- much better in fact, than several 'walking' guides we also
consulted. Good maps complement a sensible layout of this maze
of a city. The 'Brief History' does an excellent job,
and prepares you for delving deeper with an extensive reading
list. "Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time.
Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the
European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the
slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should.
The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure
photographs made them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as
perfect as a film set, and the panorama across the water from the Palazzo
Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. The sense of familiarity soon
fades, however, as details of the scene begin to catch the attention - a
strange carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an
impossible corner, a window through which a painted ceiling can be seen.
And the longer one looks, the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes
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The
Stones of Venice John Ruskin This is an abridged
version of the original 3 volumes, but a delightful book -- both for
the opinions expressed and the wonderful pomposity with which they
are presented. It's impossible not to learn about art
and architecture from this book, but it also (perhaps not
intentionally) makes Woody Allen's or Steve Martin's New Yorker
pieces seem like downers. The man has no humility and there is
no opinion other than his. For example - "I have said that the
two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the roots of all European
architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five orders: but
there are only two real orders; and there can never be any more
until doomsday." Yet somehow the clarity and
vitality of his description allows you to continue
reading. I was fortunate enough to pick this up in
Venice, so I was able to search out his examples of the 5 worst
buildings in Venice, and similar Ruskinisms. -- One brief
example: "The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and
system to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of
Christendom; that of the Arab was to punish idolatry, and to
proclaim the spirituality of worship. The Lombard covered
every church which he build with the sculptured representations of
bodily exercises - hunting and war. The Arab banished all
imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from
their minarets, 'There is no god but God'. Opposite, in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy,
they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and
the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman
empire; and the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of
both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed
fragments of the Roman wreck, is VENICE." |
| Ruskin's
Venice : The Stones Revisited by Sarah Quill (Photographer)
Beautiful companion book to Ruskin's eccentric view of this city. |
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