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
- an ancient carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred
round an impossible corner, a tiny shop in a dilapidated
building, a waterlogged basement. And the longer one looks,
the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes.
Founded fifteen hundred years ago on a cluster of mudflats
in the centre of the lagoon, Venice rose to become Europe's
main trading post between the West and the East, and at its
height controlled an empire that spread north to the Dolomites
and over the sea as far as Cyprus. As its wealth increased and
its population grew, the fabric of the city grew ever more
dense. Very few parts of the hundred or so islets that compose
the historic centre are not built up, and very few of its
closely knit streets bear no sign of the city's long lineage.
Even in the most insignificant alleyway you might find
fragments of a medieval building embedded in the wall of a
house like fossil remains lodged in a cliff face.
The melancholic air of the place is in part a product of
the discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what
the city has become. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic,
some 200,000 people lived in Venice, not far short of three
times its present population. Merchants from Germany, Greece,
Turkey and a host of other countries maintained warehouses
here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the
Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the
continent; in the dockyards of the Arsenale the
workforce was so vast that a warship could be built and fitted
out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was
perpetually thronged with people here to set up business deals
or report to the Republic's government. Nowadays it's no
longer a living metropolis but rather the embodiment of a
fabulous past, dependent for its survival largely on the
people who come to marvel at its relics.
The monuments which draw the largest crowds are the
Basilica di San Marco - the mausoleum of the city's
patron saint - and the Palazzo Ducale - the home of the
doge and all the governing councils. Certainly these are the
most dramatic structures in the city: the first a mosaic-clad
emblem of Venice's Byzantine origins, the second perhaps the
finest of all secular Gothic buildings. Every parish rewards
exploration, though - a roll-call of the churches worth
visiting would feature over fifty names, and a list of the
important paintings and sculptures they contain would be twice
as long. Two of the distinctively Venetian institutions known
as the Scuole retain some of the outstanding examples of
Italian Renaissance art - the Scuola di San Rocco ,
with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola
di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni , decorated with a gorgeous
sequence by Carpaccio.
Although many of the city's treasures remain in the
buildings for which they were created, a sizeable number have
been removed to one or other of Venice's museums. The
one that should not be missed is the Accademia , an
assembly of Venetian painting that consists of virtually
nothing but masterpieces; other prominent collections include
the museum of eighteenth-century art in the Ca'
Rezzonico and the Museo Correr , the civic museum
of Venice - but again, a comprehensive list would fill a page.
Then, of course, there's the inexhaustible spectacle of the
streets themselves, of the majestic and sometimes decrepit
palaces, of the hemmed-in squares where much of the social
life of the city is conducted, of the sunlit courtyards that
suddenly open up at the end of an unpromising passageway. The
cultural heritage preserved in the museums and churches is a
source of endless fascination, but you should discard your
itineraries for a day and just wander - the anonymous parts of
Venice reveal as much of the city's essence as the highlighted
attractions. Equally indispensible for a full understanding of
Venice's way of life and development are expeditions to the
northern and southern islands of the lagoon, where the
incursions of the tourist industry are on the whole less
obtrusive.
Venice's hinterland - the Veneto - is historically
and economically one of Italy's most important regions. Its
major cities - Padua , Vicenza and Verona
- are all covered in the guide, along with many of the smaller
towns located between the lagoon and the mountains to the
north. Although rock-bottom hotel prices are rare in the
affluent Veneto, the cost of accommodation on the mainland is
appreciably lower than in Venice itself, and to get the most
out of the less accessible sights of the Veneto it's
definitely necessary to base yourself for a day or two
somewhere other than Venice - perhaps in the northern town of
Belluno or in the more central Castelfranco.