Venice, A Traveller`s Reader

Product Description

Henry James wrote of Venice: ` 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 meditative walk`. Reactions to Venice have been, throughout the ages, astonishingly different. John Julius Norwich has put together a dazzling anthology, drawing on the writings of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning & Horace Walpole, among many others. The pieces range from the sixth century, when the early lagoon-dwellers lived `like sea-birds in huts, built on heaps of osiers` to the exquisite city of eighteenth-century revellers & nineteenth-century art lovers. The city`s many diferent guises are shown as both its citizens & visitors saw them. This wonderful volume from the Traveller`s Reader series also contains maps, engravings & notes on history, art, architecture & everyday city life.