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Sweeping look at the city of Venice
By Adam Begley |
February 17, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
SOME visitors to Venice, dazzled by its beauty, are struck speechless; a great many more, to judge from the ceaseless flood of books, have the opposite reaction. The library of literature inspired by the city and its wealth of masterpieces was already vast 131 years ago, when Henry James wrote his essay entitled "Venice." "It is a great pleasure to write the word," James began, "but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it."
Thomas F. Madden has tried to cram all of Venice between the covers of one book; the subtitle, "A New History," is clearly meant to draw readers' attention. This is what its publisher calls the "first full portrait of the city in English in more than 30 years." But if it's new, it's not innovative. Madden has written a conventional narrative history, sweeping in scope and blandly authoritative. Though he's a historian who teaches at St Louis University, he seems more proud of his storytelling than his scholarship.
And what a story it is. The first Venetians were refugees; to escape the barbarians ravaging the Roman Empire, they settled an archipelago of marshy islands safely out of the invaders' reach - in the middle of a lagoon. From these modest beginnings, a new empire emerged. Built on maritime trade - a free flow of goods and capital unique in the feudal, agrarian world of the Middle Ages - the Republic of St Mark extended its power out through the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean. But the prodigious wealth accumulated on the Rialto by the merchants who constructed the city's glittering palazzi is ultimately less impressive than the political stability of the Republic (La Serenissima), which endured for more than a millennium, shielding Venetians from both conquest and tyranny.
Breezy, cheerful, evenhanded, Madden debunks myths about Venetian decadence, and brushes aside ugly whispers about greedy, unscrupulous merchants. When a colorful character pops up (Marco Polo, Casanova), he makes the most of it in his brisk, no-nonsense prose. And he knows when to press the fast-forward button: "The twists and turns of this long and complex war need not detain us here; suffice it to say that it was a typically Italian affair, full of treachery, violence and shifting allegiances."
Fifteen hundred years after its panicky birth, the island refuge is now overrun by about 20 million barbaric visitors a year even though its population is about 60,000.
Yet Madden tells us the spirit of Venice "is still vigorous and vibrant." Though he devotes a paragraph or two to the "devastating flood" of 1966, climate change and the threat of rising sea levels are relegated to a single sentence. But his optimism can't conceal what every tourist intuits: Venice, its beauty embalmed, is lying in state. Madden calls it an "exquisite corpse."
Thomas F. Madden has tried to cram all of Venice between the covers of one book; the subtitle, "A New History," is clearly meant to draw readers' attention. This is what its publisher calls the "first full portrait of the city in English in more than 30 years." But if it's new, it's not innovative. Madden has written a conventional narrative history, sweeping in scope and blandly authoritative. Though he's a historian who teaches at St Louis University, he seems more proud of his storytelling than his scholarship.
And what a story it is. The first Venetians were refugees; to escape the barbarians ravaging the Roman Empire, they settled an archipelago of marshy islands safely out of the invaders' reach - in the middle of a lagoon. From these modest beginnings, a new empire emerged. Built on maritime trade - a free flow of goods and capital unique in the feudal, agrarian world of the Middle Ages - the Republic of St Mark extended its power out through the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean. But the prodigious wealth accumulated on the Rialto by the merchants who constructed the city's glittering palazzi is ultimately less impressive than the political stability of the Republic (La Serenissima), which endured for more than a millennium, shielding Venetians from both conquest and tyranny.
Breezy, cheerful, evenhanded, Madden debunks myths about Venetian decadence, and brushes aside ugly whispers about greedy, unscrupulous merchants. When a colorful character pops up (Marco Polo, Casanova), he makes the most of it in his brisk, no-nonsense prose. And he knows when to press the fast-forward button: "The twists and turns of this long and complex war need not detain us here; suffice it to say that it was a typically Italian affair, full of treachery, violence and shifting allegiances."
Fifteen hundred years after its panicky birth, the island refuge is now overrun by about 20 million barbaric visitors a year even though its population is about 60,000.
Yet Madden tells us the spirit of Venice "is still vigorous and vibrant." Though he devotes a paragraph or two to the "devastating flood" of 1966, climate change and the threat of rising sea levels are relegated to a single sentence. But his optimism can't conceal what every tourist intuits: Venice, its beauty embalmed, is lying in state. Madden calls it an "exquisite corpse."
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