Best Non-Fiction Books About Venice
While researching The Rossetti Letter I read many books on Venice and Venetian history, everything from academic studies to memoirs and contemporary diaries. Many were excellent but the books below I found exceptional. For those looking to expand their knowledge of Venetian history or enrich their experience of the city, the following volumes will not disappoint.
1. Venice Observed by Mary McCarthy
This may seem an unusual first choice, but if you have time to read only one book on Venice, this is the one I recommend. I read it after having read the two classic tomes on Venetian history, Venice—A Maritime Republic by Frederic C. Lane and A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich, and I was impressed by McCarthy’s ability to convey the salient points of Venetian history in a succinct and engaging 158 pages.
2. The World of Venice by Jan Morris
While Venice Observed is a breezy skim across the high points of Venice’s past, The World of Venice is a rich, leisurely, multi-layered, shimmering kaleidoscope of a book that combines Morris’s impressions of the city along with its history. She delivers the facts with such grace you’ll never be aware that you’ve just been given a lesson. In her own words, The World of Venice is a “highly subjective, romantic, impressionistic picture less of a city than of an experience.” How lucky we are to have such a guide. I don’t believe any other city has ever been so lovingly described by such an ardent, informed and articulate admirer. It’s a literary feast, one which you will want to savor.
3. Watermark by Joseph Brodsky
This subtly titled memoir by poet, involuntary Russian exile, English professor, poet laureate and Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky is based on his repeated visits to Venice, usually in winter. From the beginning, when he arrives alone at the desolate Venice stazione (“At night, infinity in foreign realms arrives with the last lamppost, and here it was twenty meters away”) you are a participant, a secret sharer, in his highly personal journey through Venice’s labyrinthine geography, a geography as much of the heart and mind as it is of place. Easy to read, easy to finish in a couple of hours (with a few time-outs to wonder at so much good writing in such a short book—he wasn’t a Nobel prize-winning poet laureate for nothing), it’s easy to slip Watermark back onto your bookshelf and go on with your life. A few days or weeks or months later you’ll notice its peculiar, persistent haunting presence, and realize that it has taken up residence in an obscure but permanent place in your brain, so that any time you think of Venice you will recall the banked excitement of a potential sexual adventure, or the faded grandeur and centuries-old ennui of a deserted palazzo, or the erotic thrill of riding in a gondola at night with such sensory and emotional vividness that you may well believe these memories are your own.
Thank you, Joseph.
4. A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich
Weighing in at 673 pages, Norwich’s History is the grandfather of all Venetian history books. Originally published in 1982, it’s getting a little long in the tooth, but its popular appeal has not diminished, nor has it, to my knowledge, been bested for sheer comprehensiveness and readability. If you want to know who was Doge in 1535, or the inner workings of the vast Arsenale, or who the Venetians fought (answer: everyone), this is the book for you: Doge after Doge, war after war, it’s all here.
5. Virgins of Venice by Mary Laven
Laven, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, has crafted a scholarly yet very compelling exposé of late Renaissance Venetian convents, and the tradition among noble families of immuring their daughters, often against their will. The convents, however, were not exactly centers of religious piety—they were hotbeds of rivalries, jealousies, illicit love affairs, and political intrigue, along with every other sort of worldly activity humans can dream up. It’s a fascinating look at the way Venetian society viewed and restricted women—and at the women who often chafed under those restrictions.
These are my favorites. What are yours?
