Venice

Views of the city of lagoons and gondolas; Henry James was passionate: ‘You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it…’, whereas Mark Twain found St Mark’s ‘so ugly…Propped on its long row of thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seems like a vast, warty bug taking a mediaeval walk.’ Reactions to Venice have been, throughout the ages, astonishingly different. John Julius Norwich has produced a dazzling anthology from the writings of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning, and Horace Walpole, among many others. From the days of the sixth century, when lagoon-dwellers lived ‘like sea-birds’ in huts built on heaps of osiers, to the Venice of eighteenth-century revellers and nineteenth-century art lovers – the city’s many different guises are all portrayed as its inhabitants and visitors saw them.