In Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Le Città Invisibili (invisible cities), the Nice Khan expresses shock that among the many many fantastical tales Marco Polo has advised him in regards to the extraordinary locations he has visited or imagined, he has by no means as soon as talked about his homeland. “The place else did you suppose I used to be speaking about?” says Polo. Requested by the emperor to provide a full account of Venice “as it’s”, he demurs: “Maybe I’m afraid that if I speak about Venice it’ll be misplaced to me. Or maybe, by speaking about different cities, I’ve already been dropping it, little by little.” It’s a persuasive trope: town on water, labile and fragile, solely ever to be glimpsed as a scintillating reflection of one thing else.
Appropriately, possibly, Jonathan Keates’s luxurious and authoritative historical past of Venice doesn’t start initially, however fairly at a historic re-enactment of the start. Now we have tickets to see Verdi conduct the primary efficiency of Attila at La Fenice (as the previous chair of the Venice in Peril Fund—and an official of the Order of the Star of Italy—Keates clearly attracts loads of water on town’s social and cultural scene). It’s 1846, the twilight of Venice’s Babylonian captivity below the Habsburgs; however the dawning of a unified Italy continues to be twenty years away.
Within the opera, Venice is portrayed because the legendary creature she has at all times in some senses been. (Due to the silty oblivion of the Venetian lagoon, little survives from her earliest days, so there’s nothing a lot left to contradict the parable.) Within the fifth century, plenty of small settlements in and across the lagoon are swelled by tides of refugees, pushed from Aquileia and elsewhere by rampaging Huns. By across the yr 600, this ragtag neighborhood may have coalesced into some kind of mounted political entity, with some kind of affiliation to the Byzantine exarchate; and, as of about 700, a pacesetter, or Doge, appointed by distinctively, although not scrupulously, constitutional means.
Crafty statecraft
On the whole phrases, what comes subsequent is extensively recognized: commerce, wealth, enlargement, a repute for crafty statecraft and flagrant double-dealing; an adroit skill to play East off towards West, culminating within the Oedipal assault on Constantinople in 1204; lashings of pretty artwork (each plundered and created in-house); a collection of conflicts with Italian metropolis states, and the probably ill-advised acquisition of a mainland empire; a interval of diminishing returns and genteel decline as town turns into the Las Vegas of early-modern aristocratic Europe—cue Vivaldi, Casanova, masks, syphilis, Byron and so forth; Napoleon, Austria and the Risorgimento; Ruskin, Whistler and Sargent; the environmentally catastrophic industrialisation of the mainland on the flip of the twentieth century, and up to date makes an attempt to shore up this lovely, precarious place utilizing state-of-the-art flood defences—which have did not work not less than as soon as—and, most lately, a ban on the big cruise ships which have prowled around the archipelago prior to now few years like grazing dinosaurs.
What comes subsequent is… a interval of diminishing returns and genteel decline as town turns into the Las Vegas of early-modern artistocratic Europe
In all of this Keates proves an unfailingly urbane and largely reliable cicerone. This sort of assured, patrician, big-picture historical past has fallen out of favour considerably; there are a few events when La Serenissima falls into the identical entice as, for instance, Christopher Hibbert’s “biography” of Rome: that of conflating character and future.
It appears not a lot mistaken as unhelpful to explain Marino Faliero, the “unhealthy doge” who was executed in 1355—his successors in workplace would at all times have an executioner following them round as they pursued their public duties, to remind them that, spherical right here, nobody was greater than the state—as “surly and unforgiving”. A extra helpful remark might need been that his tried coup would absolutely have succeeded however for the unfailing self-interest of the patrician households who stuffed the pages of the so-called Libro d’Oro, the stud ebook of Venetian the Aristocracy, from which the republic’s main officers had been chosen. (This follow led to some diminishing returns, too.)
As for the way town’s historical past is inscribed in what the customer really sees, Keates appears sound, if somewhat workmanlike. The large names, the Bellinis and the Tiepolos, the Stravinskys, the Peggy Guggenheims, all get a point out. However as somebody who appears acutely conscious that not less than some ladies loved freedoms in Venice that had been unavailable elsewhere, he might need squeezed in just a few phrases on the 18th-century painter Giulia Lama, say: not a prolific artist however a great one, and the creator, amongst different issues, of a collection of highly effective and voluptuous male nudes.
Whereas Keates laconically acknowledges the significance of the Biennale and the movie competition in sustaining Venice’s cultural vitality, La Serenissima shares with different such books an implicit distaste for many issues trendy. (He’s significantly down on Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 movie Don’t Look Now.) However I feel extra might need been made from composer Luigi Nono, architect Carlo Scarpa (each Venice born), Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, and the various different good folks for whom Venice has been a refuge and an inspiration, a spot to dream and create, over the previous century or so.
• La Serenissima: The Story of Venice, by Jonathan Keates. Revealed 16 November by Head of Zeus, 496pp, 100 color & b/w illustrations, £40 (hb),
• Keith Miller is an editor at The Telegraph and creator of St. Peter’s (Harvard College Press)
