Venice / Veneto at the Bookstore

Venice Observed
by Mary McCarthy

Amazon Reader's Review: "This is one of McCarthy's most delightful books, although it may also be her least controversial. Venice Observed might be the best single travel book ever written on Venice, and McCarthy's tone is leisurely and informative, her style witty and engaging. Her asides about her personal experiences in the city complement her grander historical and artistic musings: you never feel alienated from her prose (the way you can in her earlier The Stones of Florence). Her anecdotes about the doges, Tintoretto, Veronese, the Councils, etc. greatly enhanced one's understanding of the city, and her musings on the art are thoughtful and illuminating."

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A History of Venice
by John Julius Norwich

At once the most comprehensive and the most engaging history of Venice available in English, this book will be treasured by all those who share the author's fascination with "the most beautiful and magical of cities."

"As a historian Lord Norwich knows what matters. As a writer he has a taste for beauty, a love of language and an enlivening wit.... He contrives, as no English writer has done before, to sustain a continuous interest in that crowded history."
-- Hugh Trevor-Roper

"Will become the standard English work of Venetian history."
-- C. P. Snow, Financial Times

"Lord Norwich has loved and understood Venice as well as any other Englishman has ever done. He has put readers of this generation more in his debt than any other English writer."
-- Peter Levi, The Sunday Times (London)

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Italian Neighbors: Or, a Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona
by Tim Parks

Parks, a lively English novelist (Goodness, 1991, etc.), plunges us into the passionate but genial world of his Italian neighbors on the Via Colombare in a village south of Verona. Be warned: to enjoy Peter Mayle's books on Provence, you need never have been there, while Parks draws you so intimately into life with his bubbling but blinkered and edgy Italians that some hands-on experience with Italy would help for full enjoyment of his pages. Parks and his pregnant wife, Rita, in minor peril from their first day, enter their new apartment and are attacked by a shouting madwoman who claims that the apartment was built for her by its late tenant. The Veronese summer stifles life until the first midnight breeze (which carries mosquitos with it into the bedroom), and the hunting dog Vega--kept ever outdoors in the backyard--howls and scrabbles the whole night through. Every night. Parks describes life at the pasticceria and what drinks one may drink during various hours of the day without being sneered at as a village idiot. On the Via Colombare, peasant life meets urban, and one's gardening smarts are open to deep derision or mild approval. Buildings must be earthquake-proof, with ceramic-on-concrete floors that carry the sound of a dropped coin or a toilet flush in the night like an act of terrorism ringing everywhere. So it goes--and, after ten years, Parks is still there. Always zestful, sometimes gripping--but perhaps mostly for those who remember winter chestnuts toasting over a coal brazier. Much verve.

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An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona
by Tim Parks

When expatriate novelist Parks wrote about living in Italy in Italian Neighbors (1992), he focused on the process of acclimation and his often tricky relationships with adults. Now, in another charming and fluidly composed volume of keen observations, amusing anecdotes, and creative musings, he considers the "world of children," especially of his own inventively bilingual son and daughter, who, Parks must concede, will grow up thoroughly Italian in spite of being half English. Childhood in Italy is a fecund topic for Parks, a perfect conduit for analyzing all the quirks of Italian society. As Parks attempts to define what exactly makes Italians Italian, he discusses everything from bureaucracy to lullabies, attitudes toward pregnancy and large families, food preferences, the worship of conformity, the "mama mystique," typical vacations, adultery, school events, and textbooks. Thus the concept of "Italian education" works on two levels. While Parks is describing how Italians teach each other to be Italian, he's also teaching us outsiders all about their richly textured culture. This is an intelligent and sunny book, glimmering with all the contradictions and joys of daily life.

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A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and...Goals!
by Tim Parks

Parks (Italian Neighbors; Tongues of Flame) sets a daunting task of analyzing the life and mindset of a soccer fan in the wake of Nick Hornby's runaway hit, Fever Pitch, which is to many one of the finer books on soccer. He takes the reader on a tour of Italy, supporting his adopted home team of Hellas Verona through a season in Serie A. Parks in part sets out to examine the Italian national consciousness through the lens of Verona supporters. "The north-east of Italy, Verona in particular, is stigmatized as irretrievably racist. It is also considered bigoted, workaholic, uncultured, crude and gross." Hellas Verona have prided themselves on never having a black player on the pitch (until recently). Their fans shout monkey chants whenever an opposing black player touches the ball. It's a disgraceful part of soccer behavior that is well worth exploring, and this is when Parks is at his best. "I suggest... that the frequent talk about `defeating' racism on the terraces is a mistake. The word `defeat' only provokes the hardliners. They don't come to the stadium to think of themselves as defeated." When he applies his social criticism, he is able to engage on many levels, but when Parks gets caught up in play-by-play analysis he loses focus and his story. He travels with the team's fans in old creaky buses, singing songs and drinking beer. Parks's fanaticism toward lowly Hellas Verona is not unique, and the supporters are not the worst of Italy. Parks's prose often sings with the bravado of the terraces, but the result is at best a draw.

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The World of Venice: Revised Edition
by James Morris (Author)

Amazon Reader's review: "You'll be fascinated by this book if you've never been to Venice and don't expect to ever go (you'll probably change your mind before getting very far into the book, though); if you haven't been yet but will go soon; or if you've already been there. In my own case, I read the book in preparation for a trip to "the Serenissima". Once I was there, I had the odd experience of feeling I knew the place intimately, even though I had never personally seen it, and I didn't know where anything was. I also enjoyed seeing the city and its monuments greatly, having been armed with scores of legends and anecdotes about them. And now that my trip is over, I'm anxious to re-read much of the book, so that I can compare my own experience of the city with Morris's.

Morris's is an intimate, thorough, and honest portrait of Venice. Although she is biased in favor of the city (she calls it "the most beautiful city on earth, only waiting to be admired", and she admitted in a reading I attended that it was her favorite of the dozens of cities she's written about), she describes in great detail the flaws and annoyances of the place. Her style of writing is magnificent and perfectly parallels the character of the city. She uses some vivid and very creative metaphors; one of my favorites was her description of an old painting as "an orgy of fleshy limbs and cherubs".

My main complaint about The World of Venice is that it's too thorough. Especially if you haven't been to the city, the endless lists of the "minor monuments" of the city, the countless fortress islands in the Venetian lagoon, and all of the Titians and Tintorettos to be found around the city, are tedious. At times I really had to make an effort to wade through the minutia.

Another disappointment is the book's method of describing the history of Venice. You learn the city's history in bits and pieces and in random chronological order through the anecdotes throughout the book. There is no overall view of the history of the place, and in general the book seems to assume that you already know it all anyway. I still recommend reading the book, but do a little reading elsewhere on Venetian history first."

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The Palace: A Novel
by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran (Author)

Take Dante Alighieri's passion for the divine Beatrice, marry it to the picaresque adventuring of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, hand the whole thing over to the Brothers Grimm for some fine-tuning, and you might end up with something remarkably similar to Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's The Palace. This is the tale of young Gabriele del Campo, a soldier in Garibaldi's army during the 19th-century Italian Risorgimento. While languishing as a prisoner of war, this former stonecutter meets Colonel Vitelli, a nobleman who educates him in the ways of the upper classes. After many near-death experiences in prison, Vitelli and Gabriele are liberated and agree to meet again in Venice, but the colonel never arrives. While he awaits his friend, del Campo begins a rapid transformation from rustic stonecutter to man of means, aided by an astounding run of luck at the gambling tables and a friendly gondolier named Giovanni, who becomes his valet, advisor, and companion.

But what is a fairytale without a love interest? In The Palace, that role is assumed by the phantom figure of Donna Donatella, the daughter of a prominent landowner for whom Gabriele did some work before the war. Though he glimpsed her only once and has never seen her again, del Campo dedicates his life and newfound wealth to creating a palace fit for his dream girl. St. Aubin de Terán invests her story with wit and not a few surprising twists--for in the end, Donna Donatella may well have been supplanted in Gabriele's heart by the very monument he has built to celebrate her. Charming, subtle, and evocative, The Palace is a remarkable novel that explores the mercurial frontier between passion and obsession

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Death At La Fenice
by Donna Leon

Cyanide poisoning during the second-act intermission of La Traviata leaves the eminent conductor Helmut Wellauer dead, survived by a constellation of suspects from prima Flavia Petrelli (whose lesbian liaison with a wealthy American archeologist, Brett Lynch, Wellauer was threatening to expose) to director Franco Santore (furious over Wellauer's refusal to honor a bargain to find a job for Santore's protégé)--and including of course Wellauer's suddenly wealthy, and much younger, widow Elizabeth. The investigating officer, Guido Brunetti, Vice-Commissario of the Venice Police, brings to his first case tact, persistence, and a useful sympathy with young women--which becomes suddenly pertinent when he unearths Wellauer's prewar involvement with a family of three star-crossed girls. Deftly plotted and smoothly written in the Ngaio Marsh cultural mode, but recommended even for readers who, like Brett Lynch, don't care for Verdi.

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Dressed for Death: A Guido Brunetti Mystery
by Donna Leon

You're dressed for death when you're wearing a red dress, red pumps, and red lingerie--especially if you're Leonardo Mascari, director of the Venice branch of the Bank of Verona, fatally beaten in the Venetian suburb of Mestre. The evidence suggests that Mascari is a member of Venice's sad community of transvestite prostitutes, but Commissario Guido Brunetti (Death in a Strange Country, 1993, etc.) doesn't believe the evidence. After discovering Giancarlo Santomauro of the Lega della Moralitŕ in the apartment of a male prostitute who recognizes Mascari's picture but says he doesn't, Brunetti realizes he's up against something considerably more sordid than a sex killing. He's soon on the track of a simple and nasty scheme involving tax fraud and a protection racket on a heroic scale. But knowing isn't proving, and as the crooks begin eliminating each other, Brunetti, already battling political pressures in his office, wonders if he'll ever be able to make a convincing case against any of the honorable men who are left standing when the blood has cleared. One of the most appealing of recent detectives, Brunetti stars in a case that brings out his canniness and his compassion--and shows his creator spreading her wings more powerfully than ever.

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Acqua Alta
by Donna Leon

An American living near Venice, Donna Leon has crafted an imaginative series of mysteries set in the waterborne city, all starring police detective Guido Brunetti. In this, the fifth installment, Brunetti sets out to investigate an assault on an American archeologist who herself is investigating a museum exhibition of Chinese antiquities. The moods of Venice and the reflections of the canny, emotional detective are the most affecting qualities of the book.

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Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged
By John Keahey

Venice has always faced the constant danger of literally sinking into its own lagoon. Award-winning journalist Keahey has written the definitive book on this fascinating problem, explaining how the city and its 177 canals were built and what has led to the present crisis.

Hardcover, 320 pages

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Venice: Lion City
by Garry Wills

This is a tour de force: a rich, colorful and evocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembles in its combination of art and sea empire. Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the history of the city. It is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color.

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A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance
by Marlena De Blasi

On a visit to Venice, de Blasi meets a local bank manager who falls in love with her at first sight. After "the stranger" (as she coyly calls him throughout the book) pursues her back to her home in St. Louis, Mo., she agrees to return to Italy and marry him, leaving behind her grown children and her job as chef and partner in a cafe. Although the banker, Fernando, lives in a bunkerlike postwar condominium on the Lido rather than the Venetian palazzo of her dreams, and some of his European ideas about women clash with her American temperament, the relationship works. She survives his criticism of her housekeeping and his displeasure at her insistence on remaining a serious cook (in modern Italy "No one bakes bread or dolci or makes pasta at home," he tells her), and they marry. Then one day Fernando surprises her by announcing that he is quitting his job at the bank where he has worked for 26 years. They leave Venice, he espouses her interest in food and they now direct gastronomic tours of Tuscany and Umbria. De Blasi's breathless descriptions of her improbable love affair can be cloying, but she makes up for these excesses with her enchanting accounts of Venice, especially of the markets at the Rialto. She conjures up vivid images of produce "so sumptuously laid as to be awaiting Caravaggio" and picturesque scenes of the vendors, such as the egg lady who keeps her hens under her table, collects the eggs as soon as they are laid and wraps each one in newspaper, "twisting both ends so that the confection looks like a rustic prize for a child's party." In a final section entitled "Food for a Stranger," de Blasi (Regional Foods of Northern Italy) includes recipes for a few of the dishes with which she charmed the stranger.

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