I love Venice, and I have enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's work in the past, so I was very pleased and excited when I got his book Venice: Pure City. But as I read it I became more and more frustrated and disappointed.
Mr. Ackroyd attempts to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix of fantastic romance and hard-nosed commerce, its architecture, its people, and its effect on visitors over the years. It's a laudable goal, but I'm afraid the book falls short.
The problem is one of organization: because this was written in parallel with a British television documentary series Ackroyd worked on, the book's chapters cover different aspects of the city, like television episodes. But what works in episodic television doesn't work in print. The book is terribly unfocused, and lacks any kind of narrative or thematic spine.
Without a straightforward historical narrative, the reader drowns in interesting but disconnected historical trivia. There is no battles-and-dates history, few historical characters (other than the abstract collective "Venetians"), not even any of the economic minutiae beloved of modern historians. What we get is Ackroyd constantly gushing about shimmering surfaces, masks, and the color of the water.
Nor would the book be of much use to anyone visiting Venice. It describes the modern city only as the commodified ghost of past glories. James/Jan Morris's Venice is far more useful as a practical guide even though it's fifty years old -- and manages to give one a better sense of the city's history and development, to boot.
I grew up in New Orleans, another water-girt city that trades on its romantic history and cultural importance, and I've always been struck by the tendency of outsiders to describe it as a single consistent object at all points in its history -- as if the city where Jean Lafitte sold smuggled goods is the same city that Walker Percy wrote about, and as if either of them is the place you can fly to this afternoon.
Descriptions of Venice (also Florence and Rome) all focus on the past, ignoring the place that currently exists and the people who currently live there. Even as authors decry the "Disneyfication" of places like Venice and New Orleans, they participate in that process by focusing entirely on the glorious past.
If I were a footloose youngster just out of college, looking for adventure with a laptop and a backpack, I'd head for a city like Venice or Florence -- but I'd stay in the modern city, the suburbs tourists avoid. Spend time in Mestre or Marghera, on the mainland end of the causeway to Venice; or the west side of Florence out by the airport and the University. I know that one finds some of the best "real New Orleans cooking" in suburbs like Marrero and Kenner, and I suspect one can find a lot of "real" Venice or Florence in the overlooked postwar housing tracts.
And what is "authenticity," anyway? A Venetian of the city's medieval days of imperial glory wouldn't recognize polenta (made from New World maize) -- does that mean that the signature dish of Venetian cuisine isn't "really" Venetian?
I certainly understand the desire to preserve the past; I feel it very strongly myself. Old things and old ways get to be old because they work. But there's a narrow line between preserving the past and mummifying it. Instead of regretting that Venice no longer sends out galleys to shoot the hell out of the Turks, we should appreciate it for what it is: a modern city with a thriving tourism industry, inhabited by people who are world-class experts at getting people to pay for the experience of being there.
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