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.