Venice has been thronged down the centuries by so many writers and artists, it’s a wonder anyone found the time or inclination to address other subjects. Even Wordsworth neglected his daffodils to sigh about “Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty”, and on his deathbed one of Keats’s final utterances was “To Venice!” (He was delirious; he was still in Rome.)
Rousseau’s comment is typical: “What ecstasy when I opened my eyes . . . My first thought was to believe myself in Paradise.” And Proust was, well, Proustian: “When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become my address.”
After all this gushing and hyperventilating, excellently selected by Marie-José Gransard, I started to have a bit of sympathy for the Futurist radical Marinetti, who advocated wholesale demolition: “Fill in all the stinking little canals with the rubble of those crumbling, leprous palaces. Burn all the gondolas, those rocking chairs for cretins . . . Trains and trams will travel at full speed on the highways built on your canals.”
The whole point about Venice, however, is that it exists in the past. It’s a place of melancholy and nostalgia, mystery and darkness, what Gransard calls the accumulation of “gloomy deteriorating palaces with their decadent relicts of the ancient aristocracy”.
The city defies modernity, though not innovation. The first publishing houses were founded in Venice, in the 15th century. Venice also had the first quarantine hospitals, the first opera house open to the paying public, the first set of playing cards and the first fork, for dainty eating, but you do have to go back to Napoleon to find the last wave of reform.
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Historians always complain that when Napoleon took the city in 1797, he sacked the galleries and churches and sent the pickings back to the Louvre. However, he also established hospitals, schools, libraries and public gardens; he dredged the canals and updated the lighting in the alleyways; and he addressed the treatment of orphans: “They were now allowed to have family names and the practice of marking them with a branding iron was finally abandoned.”
In any event, the four horses of St Mark, which people made such a fuss about, were returned in 1815. What’s surely far more upsetting is that Napoleon and Joséphine’s residence, the Palazzo Moretta, remained “so attractive, Silvio Berlusconi attempted to buy it in 2010”.
But then Venice has always been a randy place. In the 16th century, when the population was 130,000, there were 12,000 courtesans, each registered in the handy Tariffa delle Puttane di Venezia. Casanova was born locally: “Women are my ruling passion,” he declared without fear of successful contradiction. In his opera Don Giovanni, Mozart of course set the erotic adventuring to music, though to this day authorities squabble about which house in Venice the composer actually resided in — the commemorative plaque could be in the wrong street.
Lord Byron arrived in 1816, “trying to escape debts and avoid moral public condemnation after . . . a scandal involving his sister”. He remained among the Venetians for three years. “I like the gloomy gaiety of their gondolas and the silence of their canals,” he explained. The shadowy nooks and corners were ideal for trysts, and the disguises and masks of the annual carnival allowed “one’s identity, nationality and gender to be hidden”. How on earth did the author of Don Juan and Childe Harold have the energy left to swim from the Grand Canal to the Lido, “where he would gallop on horseback for hours on the beach”? I’m not surprised he died of rheumatic fever at the age of 36, though by then he was in Greece, having presumably done the breaststroke all the way.
“Orson Welles was pursued to the train station for omitting to settle his bills
“The whole city hangs in the heavens,” said James McNeill Whistler to John Singer Sargent. “I found that we were gliding up a phantom street,” wrote Dickens. Even the Brutalist architect Le Corbusier was spellbound. Venice was “a gift from God . . . which must never be destroyed”. The fairytale eeriness and mistiness, which seems to place the city behind gauze curtains, was best captured by Nicolas Roeg in his 1973 film Don’t Look Now. The classic Venice movie, it plays elaborate tricks with memory and premonition and brilliantly evokes the “abhorrent, green, slippery city”, to use DH Lawrence’s phrase.
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It is easy to list the literary and cultural legacy of Venice, to go through a catalogue of its poets and artists: Vivaldi played his harpsichord on “a terrace overlooking the lagoon”; Dostoevsky studied the mosaics in St Mark’s Basilica, which recalled for him “the Russian Orthodox tradition”; Shakespeare set two plays in Venice and stole several Italian plots; Kafka visited briefly and wrote a postcard home to Prague saying: “It is raining heavily.”
Hemingway, recuperating in Venice after having been caught in a mortar blast, “when he was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to other soldiers”, drank three bottles of Valpolicella first thing in the morning; Orson Welles, pursued to the station by angry bar owners when he’d omitted to settle his bills, threw cash from the train window as it departed.
But what I find chiefly interesting about this book are the themes of love and death that continuously emerge. Henry James, who made prolonged visits between 1869 and 1907, found Venice “soft and deep and slumberous” and in The Aspern Papers wrote a story that echoes the fate of Byron’s love letters, which are retained by the character’s wizened mistress until after her death when her niece supposedly destroys them.
Secrets must be kept, and James himself was always, Gransard reminds us, “fastidiously concerned about propriety and maintaining a respectable and respected front”. When an old flame of his, Constance Fenimore Woolson, committed suicide in Venice in 1894, James attempted to drown her voluminous undergarments in a canal, but they kept bobbing back, “like vast black balloons”.
AE Housman came to Venice for the gondoliers, as did Baron Corvo. The letters and photographs left behind in Corvo’s lodgings were so incriminating that the spoilsport British consul threw them out of the window into the Grand Canal because “what a haul it would have been for a blackmailer”. The paedophilia of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Britten’s great opera adaptation and the Dirk Bogarde/Visconti film, suggests a miasmal atmosphere, linking or merging love, death, sex, youth and old age, but it never was the case that in Venice anything goes. “Cole Porter is now seldom mentioned in Venice, possibly because he had to leave the city in haste following a scandal involving the mayor’s nephew,” says Gransard.
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Dante fatally contracted malaria in the marshes; Louis Aragon tried to kill himself in Venice after an unhappy love affair; Stravinsky and Diaghilev are buried on the cemetery island of San Michele, as is Ezra Pound and his mistress Olga Rudge, who died ten years ago aged 101 but not before I’d visited her in my role as unscrupulous biographer. I managed in short order to crack her lavatory seat and put my knee through a Fernand Léger painting. I’m still embarrassed to remember this. Rudge showed me a blouse. “I wore that when I played the violin for Mussolini,” she said — with no embarrassment whatsoever.
Wagner died in Venice, possibly while banging the dinner gong with his maid, Betty Birkel. The composer had first come to the city when “running away from a difficult marriage and a complicated love affair with Mathilde Wesendonck”. He had a piano shipped from Zurich and in Venice found the sound he wanted for his operas: “Those deeply melancholic melodies . . . are carried from a distance across the water, and the echoes fade away to the horizon,” Wagner said. His house, the Palazzo Vendramin, is now the Venice Casino.
Today everybody fancies being dead in Venice and urns are often found floating in the Grand Canal. A new law has come in stipulating that ashes have to be scattered at least 700 metres from the shore. On San Michele, bones are disinterred after 12 years and “consigned to a municipal ossuary”. Overwhelmed by the deceased, Venice is also in peril from tourists – 25 million a year, with an inevitable spread of fast food outlets and nasty souvenir shops. There are turnstiles at the entrance to St Mark’s.
Tragically, the Grand Hotel des Bains, as used for a key location by Visconti, is closed, “a casualty of property development”. Marinetti’s apocalyptic vision may very well be coming to pass.
Venice: A Literary Guide for Travellers by Marie-José Gransard, IB Tauris, 316pp, £17.99. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
