"The Venetian Empire" by Jan Morris

Morris travels through the places colonised by the Venetians and provides a history as she does so. This book thus forms a sort of sequel to her Venice.

She has used this combination of travelogue and history before, such as in the brilliant Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and I'm not sure why this book wearied me. Certainly there were plenty of fascinating facts and vivid characters, from the war over the ownership of a donkey to the narrow channel that experiences fourteen tides a day, from the original of Othello, surnamed Moro, which is probably why Shakespeare assumed him to be a Moor to the dreadful Uskoks of Dalmatia: “The Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. ... Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the piece-de-resistance of a celebratory banquet.)” (Adriatica). I learned a lot: we get our word 'argosy' from the fact that Dubrovnik, once called Ragusa, was famous for its merchants and the word 'syncretize' is derived from Crete.

But the glory of a Jan Morris book is her way with words. Her descriptions are stunning:

• “The tumult of it all (fragrance of frying fish from the floating restaurant by Galata Bridge, tinkle of brass bell from the water-seller outside the Egyptian Bazaar, swoop of dingy pigeons around the mosque of Yeni Cami)” (O City, City!)
• “Humped and speckled, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea.” (Aegeanics)
• “During the bitter winter it [Crete] can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with southern sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.” (The Great Island)

Other selected quotes:
“Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made.” (Adriatica)

August 2022; 187 pages

Other Jan Morris books reviewed in this blog include Coronation Everest.

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

"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

"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