"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin

Ravenna is a fascinating town. Founded as a safe retreat for the Roman emperors when Rome became vulnerable to barbarian attacks (a little like how Venice was founded as a refuge from later barbarian attacks), and the capital for Theodoric the Gothic king who held it as a more or less independent fief under Constantinople's hegemony it became the centre for the Italian foothold of the Byzantine emperor until it was eventually taken first by the Lombards and later by the Franks under Charlemagne. It thus spent four hundred years being the meeting place for the developing Latinate culture associated with the Roman Catholic papacy and the developing Byzantine culture associated with Constantinople. This culture clash led, as so often, to learning; it was the centre for an important early medieval medical school as well as the city in which Boethius flourished (and later died). 

Famous names kept appearing. As well as those above were Byzantine emperors Justinian, Leo the Iconoclast, and Irene, and others including Belisarius and Stilicho, Pope Gregory the Great , Gerbert of Aurillac and "the famous Queen Radegund" who is presumably the same as the saint celebrated in Canterbury's St Radegund's Car Park.

I found it hard going. As with many books such as this, I found that there was too much information. Ravenna is a fascinating city and there are some compelling personalities but to condense four hundred year into as many pages means that the canvas is overcrowded with incident. This happened and then this and then this; it was history as an overwhelming flood.

Furthermore, sometimes the sequencing seemed awry. For example, in chapter 28 Herrin tells us that the death of Johannicis was "monstrous" (when the emperor who ordered it is deposed) but it is not until chapter 30 that we revisit what happened and find out the manner of the death. I was frequently confused.

But in these books there are always little nuggets. I didn't realise that the Lombards were identified by their long bears (longobardi). Nor did I know that, according to the "Anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna" "the sun does not hide behind huge mountains during the night, or sink belowe the waters of the Ocean, but returns to its seat in the East ... from Germania and Britannia, via the Baltic islands of the Fini, to the Caucasus, Scythia, Sarmatia and the Caspian Gates to Bactrian India." (Ch 27). And the iconoclasts in 726 were prompted by "a terrifying subaquatic volcanic eruption in the Segean [which] threw up a new island between Thera and Therasia ... [in which] monstrous deposits of ash and solid lava were borne to the shores of the Aegean in a tsunami" (Ch 32)

Selected quotes:

• "The pattern of son following father into the same priestly profession is one common to early medieval Europe; popes Boniface, Felix III and Agapitus were all sons of priests, and Silverius (the short-lived pope of 536-7)was the son of Pope Hormisdas." (Ch 15)
• "Two canons were devoted to appropriate Christian art, the first stipulating the human depiction of Christ rather than his symbolic representation as the Lamb of God, and the second forbidding any artistic representation that might generate improper feelings." (Ch 28)
• "The first Christian icons adopted the same format of small wood panels, similar to the portraits of ancient gods that have survived in the dry conditions of Egypt." (Ch 32)
• "The veneration of images of Christian holy figures ... had always been distinguished from idolatry ... The invisible God could never be represented and was always to be worshipped spiritually." (Ch 32)
• "A particular Byzantine institution, a bride-show ... Officials were duly sent around the empire to find only the most beautiful girls, who had to conform to particular measurements - the Cinderella story of the shoe that fits makes its appearance here." (Ch 36)
• "Irene ... removed her son from power by having him blinded." (Ch 37)

Ultimately I felt that this book failed to do justice to an absolutely fascinating period of history, with the establishment of the Christian church and the early battles for orthodoxy, with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and with the arrival of the Islamic caliphate.

November 2021; 400 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Venice" by Jan Morris

 Jan Morris writes beautiful prose. This hymn to Venice, from someone who has lived there, is, as you would expect, a lyrical and haunting evocation of the beauty of one of the world's most visited tourist destinations, and a fascinating history of a city state that was a republic and maritime empire throughout the middle ages, but it is also shrewd and practical and funny. 

This isn't a tourist guide. I have been to Venice as a tourist and I would not have packed this book. This is a piece of the best sort of travel writing, the sort where the traveller becomes part of an alien landscape and has deep interactions with the inhabitants and begins to struggle to an understanding of what it must be like to live in such a place. This is that perfect sort of travel book ... except that it focuses on a single place and it is all the better for that.

There are some fascinating bits about the Venetian language. The word 'Arsenal' which was the name for the Venetian shipyard which used assembly-line techniques (celebrated by Dante in the Inferno) to produce, at peak, a fighting galley every day, comes from the arabic 'dar es sinaa' which means 'house of art'. The Arabic word 'sikka' (a die) became 'zecca' (a mint) and thence 'zecchino' (a coin) which is the origin of the Venetian unot of currency, the sequin. (The City: 17)

It is enlivened with historical anecdotes:

• "One bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch."  (The People: 9)
• "The Grand Canal ... follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto - the origin of the Rialto." (The City: 11)
• "The earliest of all state banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century." (The City: 19)
• "The fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby." (The Lagoon: 26)
• "St Nicholas of Myra ... was particularly revered by the Venetians, if only because at the Council of Nicaea he had soundly boxed the ears of the theologian Arius, from whose very heresy, adopted by the Lombards, some of the earliest Venetians had fled into the lagoon." (The Lagoon: 30)
• "The silver reliquary of St Nicholas [in Bari] ...has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the purest spring water."  (The Lagoon: 30)

But the most remarkable thing about this book is the writing. The prose is like wonder washing over one:

• There are stupendous descriptions:
• "A mesh of nets patterns the walls of a fisherman's islet, and a restless covey of boats nuzzles its water-gate." (Landfall)
• There are utterly original metaphors:
• "An air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes." (The People: 2)
• "The gondolier ... utters a series of warning cried when he makes a manoeuvre of this sort, throaty and distraught, like the call of an elderly and world-weary sea-bird." (The City: 12)
• "Other Venetian waterways ... have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub." (The City: 12)
• "The modern Venetian ... examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider." (The City: 17)
• "Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles." (The City: 18)
• The are profundities:
• "It is a difficult world, is it not, and heavy with disillusionment?" (The City: 18)
• "Do we not know them well, whenever we live, the aesthetic conservers on the one hand, the men of change on the other? Which of these two philosophies is the more romantic, I have never been able to decide." (The City: 22)
• And there are other, unclassifiable, moments of joy:
• "You will hardly ever see a girl dressed for pottering, in a sloppy sweater and a patched skirt, or in that unpressed dishabille that marks the utter emancipation of the Englishwoman."  (The People: 5)
• "The lanes of Venice often have lovely names - the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the Furst Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley ... the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind." (The City: 13)
• "It is astonishing to me how so drab a frame can contain so glittering a masterpiece." (The Lagoon: 26)
• "No history seems to be attached to these places - they are not even surrounded, as an estate-agent once said to me of a peculiarly repellent half-timbered house, 'by the amenities of tradition'." (The Lagoon: 29)
• "London has her own 'Little Venice, in Paddington, where a notice on one irreverent householder's gate warns visitors to 'Beware of the Doge'." (The Lagoon: 30)
• "Other cities have admirers. Venice alone has lovers." (The Lagoon: 30)

This is a book of magic with enchantment on every page.

Jan Morris also wrote about the neighbouring Italian city of Trieste

Many thanks to my wonderful friends Danny and Mary for buying this book (and Trieste, above) for me. Other selections from the 'Mary and Danny' book club include:

• Watling Street by John Higgs
• Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• How to Connect with Nature by Tristan Gooley

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Miracle at Sant' Anna" by James McBride

 It's World War II. The Americans are fighting their way up Italy. Four soldiers (three African Americans and one Puerto Rican) get lost in the mountains. They find a traumatised Italian orphan in a destroyed church and seek refuge in an Italian village. The partisans are in the hills and there are Germans all around.

And in the midst of the distorting horrors of war, miracles occur.

There is no sentimentality about this book. The soldiers, and the Italians, and the partisans are all fully rounded characters, with strengths and weaknesses. There are moments of brutality and moments of comedy and many moments of great honesty.

Some great moments:

• "There is a saying in Florence that Florentines don't agree on anything. They simply say no to everything and continue saying no again and again ... Fourteen centuries of continually getting their asses kicked ... have, if nothing else, taught Florentines the value of silent virtue and cautious negativity." (Ch 5)
• "I think your cheese slid off your biscuit." (Ch 6)
• "When they pulled out their pistols, they touched the trigger and told the hammer to hurry." (Ch 7)
• "Put down that heavy sack and come over here, 'cause Somebody Special wants you. And He don't have no anger. He don't know no pain. He don't give no orders. He's a pain-getting-rid-of-er. That's His job. To get rid of your pain faster than this lemonade can do down your little red lane. Why? Ain't no why! He ain't gotta explain Hisself! He'll hurl your enemies down to low stones like he hurled Satan outta heaven, 'cause He's mighty. He's the baddest kitty kat in the firmament! He's got the mojo and the sayso. He knows truth. He knows justice. He knows your pain. And He will heal your pain right now, for free, if you just trust in Him. Ain't no cost to it! Ain't no buy-now-pay-later to this." (Ch 7)
• "I want your soul. You got an appointment to keep and I'm the secretary!" (Ch 7)
• "White folks own the world, goddammit. We're just rentin'" (Ch 12)
• "Chasing tail like they couldn't wait to get back to the womb." (Ch 14)
• "Everything he did had an error in it. He was a mistake, as his father used to say, a mistake that made more mistakes that were followed by still more mistakes." (Ch 20)

James McBride also wrote Deacon King Kong

This review was written by the 
author of Motherdarling

"Let the Games Begin" by Niccolo Ammaniti

 It took me a little while to realise that this was a comic novel. It is dazzlingly original, Monty Pythonesque, with a large cast of bizarre characters and a plot that never stops being inventive. 

Told (mostly) from the alternating perspectives of a furniture salesman who has a secret life as leader of a very small Satanic cult and a best-selling writer, but with occasional forays into other PoVs, the plot involves the Satanic leader's attempt to impress rival cults by a spectacular media-worthy sacrifice. He decides to murder a pop musician at a bacchanalian party involving all of Italy's celebrities at a huge private park in Rome. Meanwhile the writer, who is just trying to keep famous and, wherever possible, have sex with beautiful women, has been invited to the party.

There are some incredible one-liners:

• "Somaini would have liked to pout, but the Botox wouldn't let her." (C 26)
• "She was as sexy as a lettuce leaf without any dressing." (C 34)

There are some very original and modern similes and metaphors:

• "Zombie's face had the same complexion as a boiled cauliflower." (C 25)
• "He felt vulnerable and confused, like a non-European Union citizen at the residents' permit office of the police department." (C 44)

I suppose the intent of the book is to poke fun at, satirise and attack our celebrity-obsessed modernity: 

• "'Tell me a VIP. Anyone at all. Come on. The first name that springs to mind.' ... 'The Pope'. 'Oh, come on. A VIP, I said. Singers, actors, football players ...'" (C 11)

My problem was that I found the ever-more-weird convolutions of the plot that were deemed necessary to keep the frivolity going exhausted me.

Selected quotes:

• "Any balanced relationship, where he was not the star, caused unpleasant side effects: dry mouth, headspins, nausea, diarrhoea." (C 4)
• "Ciba was overwhelmed with waves of pleasure, by endorphins trickling from his head downwards, swishing through his veins like petrol in a pipeline. ... the pleasure channelled its way into the urethra, in the epidydymides, into the femoral arteries and exploded inside his reproductive organ, which filled with blood, causing him a ferocious erection." (C 12)
• "It often happened that he would stop talking, as if someone had unplugged him." (C 14)
• "He had had so many ideas when he was young. Travel by train across Europe. Go to Transylvania to visit Count Vlad's castle. See the dolmen and the sculptures on Easter Island. Study Latin and Aramaic. He hadn't done eny of these things. He has gotten married too young to a woman who loved holiday villages and sifting through factory outlets." (C 15)
• "If ethical and aesthetic principles no longer exist, looking like an idiot disappears as a consequence." (C 38)
• "Do me the favour of leaving me alone, and if you see me on the street, change streets." (C 38)
• "the dark years of accountancy." (C 45)
• "He would have liked to scream, spit out all his wrath, but he just threw open his mouth, and squeezed his head between his hands." (C 59)
• "Appetite was the expression of a replete and satisfied world, on the verge of surrender. A people that tastes instead of eating, that nibbles instead of feeding themselves, that's already dead but doesn't know it. Hunger is a synonym for life." (C 64)

September 2020; 328 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Caravaggio" by Andrew Graham-Dixon

This biography of the artist Michelangelo Merisi (1571 - 1610), known as Caravaggio from the town outside Milan where he was born, is subtitled 'A Life Sacred and Profane'. "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3). As well as being a painter of startling originality and huge later influence he was repeatedly in trouble with the law for fighting in the streets; his murder of a man (probably during a duel) led to a capital conviction and his fleeing from Rome, eventually to Malta where he was soon again in trouble with the authorities requiring him to break out of jail in Valletta. So there was no shortage of incident during his 38 years and AGD tells a rattling good yarn. However, this is about a painter and the art was the most important thing in Caravaggio's life, and AGD describes and explains the masterpieces in a way that enhanced my appreciation of this fabulous artist. These masterpieces are illustrated by a surprisingly large number of high quality colour plates and it is not the fault of the book that Caravaggio's extremely tenebristic style makes it difficult to see many of the details described.

AGD attempts to explain C's style by describing the context of the world in which he grew up. Milan, a city notorious for pimps, prostitutes, thieves and violence, was in thrall to Archbishop Borromeo, a priest of a Savanorolan bent, who used the confessional to operate a hierocratic police state. He encouraged the practice of 'composition' recently made popular by Jesuit leader St Ignatius Loyola (revived from methods employed by St Francis of Assissi) which aimed to get believers to “visualize Christ's sufferings ... as if you were actually present at the very time ... you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.” (p 32) Thus art was an aid to devotion. AGD suggests that these practices had led to the development of realism in early Renaissance art: "artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building.” (33)

In particular Borromeo encouraged the practice of 'sacred mountains' which were places where pilgrims could go and encounter crib-like Biblical scenes in which usually terracotta figures were arranged in theatrically-set groupings. “The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize nor generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself.” (p 39) “The way in which he [Caraviaggio] paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture” (p 40)

Descriptions of Caravaggio's art include:

• "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3)
• “His use of light and shade was so original that it gave painters nothing less than a new grammar and vocabulary.” (p 41)
• “The painter’s intense sensuality ... his feel for the flesh and blood of the human body and ... hius sensitivity to the suggestions implicit in the least exchange of glances.” (p 42)
• “an art of paroxysm and abandonment, filled with images of turmoil in dark places.” (p 52)
• “Tintoretto's brooding, monumental religious canvases, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark - lightning strikes of supernatural illumination that shiver like spiritual electricity - are the only late sixteenth-century Italian paintings to prophesy elements of Caravaggio's own mature style.” (65)
• “Caravaggio is not merely the painter of rogues, crooks and the enchantresses of the street. He is the painter as vagabond.” (110)
• “Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest in theories of art.” (118)
• “The transience of nature is linked to precariousness. Entropy and the fear of falling are connected in Caravaggio's mind.” (135)
• “Whomsoever the Medusa looks at, she freezes, preserving them forever in a single, charged instant of being. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio’s art does too.” (159)
• “In these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only on the essentials of the scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail.” (184)
• “Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawing for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint ... No other artists of his time used such incisions.” (185)
• Bellori said: “he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark.” (186)
• “Caravaggio's dark and monumental oil paintings would certainly have looked extremely Venetian in the chapel of a Roman church in 1600, because only in Venice, where dampness and humidity discouraged fresco painting, was it common to see such large works of religious art carried out in oil on canvas.” (204)
• “God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, it but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo.” (223)
• “Earlier artists had often envisaged the portrayal as a chaotic crowd scene, confusing the eye with a multitude of soldiers and panicking disciples. Caravaggio’s new technique of emphatic chiaroscuro was the perfect editing device for avoiding such unnecessary complications. He uses it here as a ruthless means of exclusion, spotlighting the figures at the very centre of the drama ... In his interpretation, the whole story becomes an elemental conflict between good and evil, innocence and malignity.” (229)
• “Michelangelo's prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare ... a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation.” (236)
• “Many of the technical departures of the artist’s later work are related to his circumstances: he stops painting from models, in all but a few cases, because he has no time to find them or money to pay them, and he paints quickly because he has to move on.” (331)
• “Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man's body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.” (346)
• “The snapshot immediacy of the image, with its extremely innovative effects of cropping and occlusion, is suggestive of alienation and abandonment.” (538)
• “He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth.” (438)
• “Pier Paolo Pasolini ... was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles.” (441)

Other great moments:

• “Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman.” (p 16)
• “While Bacchus symbolises inspiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo.” (84)
• “Counter-Reformation Rome was a city in which all manner of thieves, rogues and scoundrels thronged. Their presence was a symptom of social crisis. Recurrent plague not only destroyed lives, but ravaged economies in the cities and states where it struck.” (100)
• “Aristotle's distinction between tragedy and comedy ... held that tragedy should focus on the actions of the elite - kings and princes - while comedy should concern itself with the behaviour of those at the very bottom of the social heap.” (107) This comes from Aristotle's Poetics.
• “The polyphonic and monodic modes are at opposite ends of music’s emotional spectrum. Polyphony subsumes the individual voice within a choral harmony, reflecting the desire to conjure up an essentially otherworldly sound, such as the singing of the angelic host. Words are hard to distinguish in the layers of polyphonic singing. Syntax dissolves and sense is sacrificed for an effect of transcendence. By contrast, monody puts precise meaning and specific human emotions at the heart of music. The single melodic line, the solo voice, is easily understood ... It might be said that while polyphony aspires to heaven, monody expresses man.” (128)
• “According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ.” (155)
• “The centre of the city was dark. Overshadowed by unbroken lines of tall buildings, its congested lanes and alleys were rarely penetrated by direct sunlight. Despite the sunshine of southern Italy, most daily life took place in deep shadow, in a form of civic space not unlike the bottom of a well.” (338)

As I think you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliant book.

July 2020; 444 pages

"Playing with Fire" by Tess Gerritsen

This thriller starts brilliantly. The protagonist, Julia, a second violinist, finds an unpublished waltz in a Rome junk shop run by "a little gnome of a man with eyebrows like snowy caterpillars." The shop is unnaturally cold and as she reads the music "the hairs suddenly rise on my arms". As she leaves the shop she notices "twin gargoyles perched above the pediment" and a "brass Medusa-head knocker". Spooky!

Back home in America she starts to play the music as her three year old daughter, Lily, plays with the cat. When the music has stopped she discovers that the cat has been stabbed with the garden fork that the daughter is holding. All this happens in the first eight pages and, if you aren't utterly hooked by now, you will be when Julia plays the music again and finds herself stabbed with broken glass. There is mental illness in her family (her mother killed her baby brother) and psychiatrists start testing Lily to see whether there is any reason for her to be doing this. Julia is starting to believe that it is the music that is causing the problems (it uses "devil's chords [which were ] ... considered evil and banned from church music" in the middle ages), perhaps supernaturally, and she starts an obsessive quest for the composer. Julia's husband Rob (he absolutely has to be an accountant so there can be instant and easy conflict between a numbers type and an arty type) is worried by this obsession, convinced of his daughter's sanity (shades here of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and, suspecting that Julia herself might be imagining the attacks, wants to send her to a mental hospital.

This is gripping stuff.

And then we suddenly break from this thrilling tale to go to Venice in 1936 where Jewish violinist Lorenzo is practising for a duet with Laura Balboni, falling in love as the fascist storm clouds gather. Lorenzo is, of course, the author of the music. This is a sweet interlude, with menacing overtones, but the change of pace is so sudden. I was racing along scherzo furioso and suddenly we switch to adagio dolcissimo.

It never really regains the intensity of those first few chapters. We switch back to Julia and thriller mode as she travels to Venice to find the answers and out of the blue she is being shot at by hoodlums and there appears to be a conspiracy against her. Classic thriller territory. Which, given the excitement and the potential of the start, was actually a little bit disappointing.

August 2016; 314 pages

"The Politics of Washing: Real life in Venice" by Polly Coles

Polly and her Venetian husband and their four children left their English village to live for one year in Venice. This is a memoir of their experiences.

It is the day to day realities of everyday life that make this so fascinating. Venice has no cars, so delivering a washing machine involves a boat ride followed by a sack-barrow and a lot of trouble if there is a stepped bridge and if you live on the fourth floor because almost everyone in Venice lives in flats. Italian schools have a presumption that the teacher is always right so a teacher admitting that there is indiscipline in their class is challenging the parents to do something about it; the headteacher and his deputy utter bare-faced lies to maintain their position of power even though the solution proposed by the parents makes more sense than the status quo. When there is acqua alta (high tide) everyone goes about their daily business in wellies, even browsing in half-flooded bookshops. And everywhere there are the tourists.

The population of Venice has shrunk to 60,000; many Venetians are forced out by the high rents charged by landlords who can make more money from tourists. The tourists (16.5 million per year) outnumber the residents. In high season tourists clog the narrow streets and fill the waterbuses. So the residents hate the tourists and by extension almost all foreigners; xenophobic comments are made at Polly's children and she gets charged double the price for a coffee in a bar where she is not known. It seems unsustainable.

But what makes this really fascinating memoir a work of art is the lyrical quality of her prose. Open the book at random and you will encounter a brilliant sentence.

Selected quotes:

• "Here on this dank November afternoon I am witness to a crumpling up of time"
• "One aged crone shuffles, shoeless ... right-angled over her stick ... It is her saggy-stockinged feet that most strike me."
• "A flurry of heat and effort and luggage."
• "The diamond kites slide down from the skies, like charmed snakes."

Beautiful and brilliant. April 2015; 206 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Botticelli Secret" by Marina Fiorato

Luciana Vetra, "part time model and full time whore" poses for Flora in Botticelli's Primavera. Little does she know when she purloins an unfinished sketch of the masterpiece that she is unleashing a trail of murder and treachery. For the painting holds a secret that her and novice monk Brother Guido must unravel if they are to stay one step ahead of the killers.

This is a brilliant romp through renaissance Italy visiting Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Milan and Genoa.  The heroine is a fabulously feisty strumpet with a wonderful line in earthy epithets; the monk gives the unlikely-to-be-requited love interest and the book learning; the whores mother is a brilliantly complex character in whom the political and the maternal instincts are often at war.

There are points when it was disturbingly similar to the book that I am writing with its themes of secrets hidden within a painting, a child whose noble birth has been concealed, priests and churches and betrayal. But Fiorato has provided me with a lesson in how to write with verve and vigour and never to get bogged down in over-complicating character, scenery or plot.

And it is so much better written than the da Vinci code! March 2015; 548 pages

"Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King

This is the story of the biggest dome in the world, the dome on the Duomo (the 'House of God', the cathedral) in Florence and the man who built it, without internal scaffolding, defying all expectations and critics, when no one knew how it could be built.

My wonderful wife, Steph, and I went to Florence this year; above is my picture of the Duomo showing Brunelleschi's dome. Now that I have read the book I want to go back to see it again; now I understand what is so incredible about the construction. Mind you, now that I understand more about the unorthodox details of the construction and I know how heavy just the lantern on top of the dome is, I am not sure I want to clamber up into the roof space and stare out from the lantern at the rooftops of Florence. Scary!

There is a lot in the book that I didn't properly understand. There were a lot of technical challenges to overcome. Just hoisting massive blocks of stone to the required height was difficult with the technology of the day (the main system was powered by an ox trudging round and round and there was a complicated system of gears including a type of clutch so that stuff could also be lowered while the ox trudged in the same direction). It was difficult to understand how the mason's could reach the overhanging bricks they were building. The problem with a dome or an arch is that it isn't really stable until the keystone is put in at the end; this is why arches are usually built on top of a wooden construction which is then taken away when the arch is finished. Brunelleschi didn't do this (it would have taken too long to source all that wood). How did they build it without it falling down? The other problem is that a dome converts the downward weight of the roof into an outwards thrust which is usually countered using buttresses. Brunelleschi used no buttresses. Instead he used circular rings of stone like coopers use iron staves around barrels. I still didn't really understand.

Not only does the book fascinate with the details of the unprecedented construction but it also has brilliant vignettes of Florentine life. There is a wonderful story about Brunelleschi playing a practical joke on a carpenter to convince him that he had swapped identity for 24 hours with someone else. The bemused carpenter ended up leaving Florence and making his fortune in Hungary. Time and again, King provided wonderful details and I wanted to know how he could find out so much about a time so long ago. 

In every way this book was brilliant. This year I have also read Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper which was also excellent. These two books are both among my top five non-fiction for 2014 and I shall definitely seek out more by this brilliant author.

December 2014; 167 pages

I have now also read the wonderful and brilliant The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies in the chaos of the Franco-Prussian war, the Siege of Paris and the Commune of Paris, Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and many more.

"A Question of Belief" by Donna Leon

An Italian-based police procedural murder mystery set in Venice. Commisario Brunetti is that rarity among detectives, a happily married cop. His wife, daughter of a Count, is a university lecturer on English Literature and the Commisario reads Marcus Aurelius and Tacitus. In the August heat wave, dreaming of going with his family to the still-snowy mountains where he will have to wear a cardigan, he investigates his Inspector's aunt who is busily paying huge sums of money to a fraudulent faith healer and a civil servant who seems to be involved in making the wheels of justice run even slower for a really cheap rent on his palatial Venetian apartment. Then the civil servant is brutally murdered.

Beautifully written, with great regard for local geography and local characters and a clear feeling for the ambiguous way in which Italians view the law, Leon's novel is utterly routed in the drama of the everyday.

December 2014; 262 pages

"Leonardo and the Last Supper" by Ross King

Ostensibly a history of a painting, this book has so much more. We learn about the wars between the Italian city states of the renaissance as the French armies sweep south (successful because warfare in mediaeval Italy was an almost bloodless affair of mercenary posturing) through Florence to take Naples, only to be defeated by Syphilis. We learn of the hothead preacher Savanorola and his cataclysmic regime in Florence. We learn of the Dominicans and the Franciscans and of Pope Alexander Borgia and his warlord son Cesare.

Most of all, of course, we learn about Leonardo. He was an illegitimate left-hander, probably gay, who was so enthusiastic about everything that he was almost constitutionally unable to actually finish anything. However, he had such enormous talent that his patrons continued to patronise him and the few artworks he actually produced were revolutionary in their impact upon art (even if, with the Last Supper, his experimental techniques meant that it deteriorated within a few years of its unveiling). And we learn about his models, including his apprentice whom he nicknamed 'devil' for his thieving and bad behaviour but whom he tolerated till his death, probably because he had a crush on him. We learn about his belief that you can tell a story from hand gestures and how he collected those gestures from watching people having arguments and how he used them in the painting. We learn about the techniques of fresco and the new use of oils that Leonardo pioneered. We learn how he composed the painting, about the religious ideas that went into it. We investigate the iconography of fruit.

By the way we watch the iciest of cold water being cascaded upon the Da Vinci code. Sophie sees the figure on Jesus' right is a woman and believes it to be Mary Magdalene rather than St John. "Leonardo was skilled at painting the difference between the sexes" states the DVC. In fact, as King shows, Leonardo rejoices in androgynous figures including another St John who is a dead ringer for the St John in the Last Supper. Both may be women, or both may have used the devilish apprentice; Leonardo seems to have liked effeminate looking young men.

This is a brilliant, fantastic and absorbing study in which the painting of a single work of art is used to enlighten a whole historical period. Wonderful. May 2014; 275 pages

Also read these reviewed books by Ross King:

• Brunelleschi's Dome about the building of the dome over the Duomo in Florence, but also lots about renaissance Florence
• The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and the rest; Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and much much more!

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

"The Path to the Spiders' Nests" by Italo Calvino

This is the story of Pin, an urchin whose sister is a whore, during the Second World War when Italy was occupied by the Germans and communist partisans fought in the hills.

It is a strange book, with curiously mannered and slightly stilted prose (which could be due to the translation) about this odd little boy who wants so much to be part of the adult world and who can't be a part of the world of children. His adventures are magical, like the adventures in a fairy tale: he meets Red Wolf, a hero of the resistance, in prison; he falls in with a partisan brigade containing the oddest misfits in Italy; his compulsively bad behaviour leads him to the sort of self-destruction worthy of a greek hero. And yet curiously nothing really happens.

Strange but fun

May 2010; 185 pages

"The Periodic Table"by Primo Levi

Levi is an Italian Jew from Turin who studied chemistry and worked as a chemist throughout the second world war, including (having been captured as a partisan) just outside Auschwitz. This book tells stories from hislife which are linked to one element or another. Thus, in one job he uses potassium to purify benzene and almost burns the lab down; at anothertime an acquaintance gives him a piece of uranium he had acquired from Germans feeling to Switzerland at the end of WWII.

It reminded me a little of Faulk's A Fool's Alphabet in its somewhat artificial structuring (but it is at least chronological) but more of Richard Feynman's Surely you're joking Mr Feynman which is a much more amusing scientific autobiography .

Nevertheless, this was an interesting read.

August 2009, 232 pages

"Garibaldi; invention of a hero" by Lucy Riall

This is not really a biography at all but an examination of why Garibaldi became this extraordinary hero who could, almost single-handedly, overthrow the Bourbon Kingdom of Two Sicilies.

Riall's thesis is that Garibaldi was invented by Mazzini to fit the current model of a romantic hero. Taking the cue from Walter Scott's historical romances and other romantic fiction, Mazzini and Garibaldi together concocted a persona that was based on the real man but meant much more. Mazzini then used the exploding new medium of journalism to propagandise Garibaldi even whilst he was still a revolutionary gaucho in Montevideo. Garibaldi also took past in this project of mythologisation with his speeches, his writings and,above all, a carefuly cultivated dress. Riall points out that after the disasted of Rome, when Garibaldi tried to get a job with the regular armed forces of Piedmont, Garibaldi's dress was as befitted a slightly elderly middle class general.But when he went on this pirated ship to capture Sicily with his Thousand the last thing he did before stepping aboard was to change his clothes to his trademark red shirt,feathered hat and poncho. Garibaldi manufactured and cultivated his brand and, Riall maintains, this was the secret of his success.

He was the romantic hero come to life.

An intriguing hypothesis but is you want a book about Garibaldi I would start elsewhere.
July 2009, 392 pages

"Garibaldi" by Christopher Hibbert

This is a very easy book to read chronicling the adventures of Giuseppe Garibaldi as he sought to unify Italy between 1848 and 1870.

Italy had been invaded by Napoleon and turned into three major states in the north, the centre and the south. However, the 1815 Congress of Vienna returned the conquered principalities back to their original owners so that Italy was a patchwork of states. Piedmont in the North was ruled by the House of Savoy. The Kingdom of Two Sicilies was run from Naples by the Bourbons. The Pope ruled the Papal States between these two. And the massive Austro-Hungarian empire ruled substantial chunks of Italy including Venice and Tuscany.

Garibaldi was born to a seafaring family in Nice (then part of France but soon to become part of the Kingdom of Piedmont) and then became a sailor. He became converted to the cause of Italian unification as a young man by the Saint-Simonians who preached, among other things, free love. His revolutionary zeal soon led to his escaping to exile in South America.

In South America he took part in a number of revolutions as various countries sought liberation. This was the weakest part of the book. He was known as the 'Hero of Two Worlds' but the book treated these years very briefly.

He returned to Italy after the election of Pio Nono, Pius IX, as Pope. This pope was initially liberal, granting the papal states a measure of self rule (and even railways!) but this back-fired after the pope's prime minister was assassinated. Suddenly an agitator called Mazzini (who started the Young Italians programme which was later emulated by Ataturk as the Young Turks) led a revolution. Pio had to escape his country and by 1848 Rome was in the hands of republicans. The forces of repression (French, Austrians and Neapolitans) converged on Rome, the French (whose Emperor was Louis Napoleon, nephew of the Bonaparte) getting there first. Garibaldi led irregular forces in heroic (and often stupid) attacks on the French; these were ultimately unsuccessful and Rome was retaken by the Pope.

Garibaldi spent years in honourable exile farming on a little island near Sardinia until another opportunity presented itself in 1860. The Two Sicilies under the Bourbons had become as massively repressive police state; they seemed as repulsive as rulers get. Garibaldi led a volunteer army of 'The Thousand' (ish) to invade Sicily and through the cowardice and incompetence of the opposing armies, conquered it. He set himself up as Dictator. Then he crossed the Straits of Messina and invaded the tow of Italy, fighting his way up to Naples. Again he was amazingly lucky. Not only did every possible bullet contrive to miss him but most of his enemies preferred to surrender or run than fight. When they did fight Garibaldi often lost! Finally he entered Naples in triumph and gave it to Piedmont's King Victor Emmanuel.

He then retired again but went on a number of trips including a tour of Britain where (on page 343) "he was taken ... to the Britannia Works at Bedford to see the new steam plough'. He was now a hero across Europe.

He was recalled later to fight in the war of Piedmont and Prussia against Austria that resulted in the ceding to Italy of Venice and then retired again.

Finally, in 1870, Louis Napoleon was defeated and captured at Sedan at the start of the Franco-Prussian war. This led to Victor Emmanuel riding in triumph into Rome where he set up Italy's capital at the Quirinal Palace, formerly the summer residence of the Pope, while Pio Nono locked himself in as "the prisoner in the Vatican".

Interesting asides:
In the invasion of Sicily a Neapolitan ship was commanded by Ferdinand Acton, great nephew of Sir John Acton who had been Prime Minister of Naples under Ferdinand I. The writer Harold Acton was born in Tuscany and claimed that Sir John was his great-great-grandfather.
A hospital worker uses 'chloride of lime' as a disinfectant. Presumably this is calcium chloride.
Garibaldi sailed up the Tyne to an enthusiastic welcome in 1854, well before he had become a hero for uniting Italy. This may have been when my ancestor was named 'Garabaldi (sic) Appleby'.

April 2009 368 pages