With Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd is at his most magical and magisterial, presenting a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of the ultimate city. "Ackroyd provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself. . . . How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city's real and literary tropes and touchstones is itself a kind of tribute to La Serenissima, as Venice is called, and his seductive voice is elegant and elegiac. The resulting book is, like Venice, something rich, labyrinthine and unique that makes itself and its subject both new and necessary." —Publishers WeeklyThe Venetians' language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This lat¬est work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and surprising city. His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. And the ever-present undertone of Venice's shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions. Ackroyd's Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd's portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—reading Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
I would like to thank my two research assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien, for their invaluable work on this project. I would also like to extend my thanks to my editor, Jenny Uglow, and my copy-editor, Jenny Overton.
i1.1 Cristoforo Sabbadino,
i1.2 Perspective plan of Venice (detail). Musée du Louvre, Paris/Cameraphoto/Bridgeman
i1.3 The mosaics in Saint Mark’s cathedral, late 14c. Alinari/Rex Features
i1.4 The Madonna, cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, early 13c. akg-images/Cameraphoto
i1.5
i1.6 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti),
i1.7
i1.8
i1.9 Simon Marsden, The columns of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore, Piazzeta San Marco. The Marsden Archive, UK/Bridgeman
i1.10 Gentile Bellini,
i1.11 Piazza S. Marco, c.1880–90. Roger-Viollet/Rex Features
i1.12 Gentile Bellini,
i1.13 Francesco Guardi,
i1.14 Vittore Carpaccio,
i2.1 Paolo Veronese,
i2.2 Plan of the Arsenal. Museo Correr, Venice/Bridgeman
i2.3 Franceso Segala, a Venetian warship, on the Mausoleum of Girolamo Michiel, c. 1558–59. Basilica of Sant’Antonio, Padua/Bridgeman
i2.4 Sign for the Marangoni family of shipbuilders, 1517. Museo Correr/Alinari/Bridgeman
i2.5 Jan van Grevenbroeck,
i2.6 Jan van Grevenbroeck,
i2.7 Jan van Grevenbroeck,
i2.8 Jan van Grevenbroeck,
i2.9 Venetian glass in the Pauly showrooms, Milan, 1910. Alinari/Rex Features
i2.10 Lace workers on Burano, 19c. Collezione Naya-Bohm, Venice/Bridgeman
i2.11 Ferdinando Ongania,
i2.12 A funeral gondola, 1880–1920. Collezione Naya-Bohm, Venice/Bridgeman
i2.13 Giovanni Pividor, The railway bridge across the lagoon, from
i2.14 The remains of the Campanile,
i2.15 “Windows of the Early Gothic Palaces,” from John Ruskin,
i3.1 Giovanni Bellini,
i3.2 Joseph Heintz,
i3.3 Pietro Uberti,
i3.4 Jacobello del Fiore,
i3.5 The lion’s mouth. Palazzo Ducale/Bridgeman
i3.6 The Pozzi prison, from
i3.7 Vittore Carpaccio,
i3.8 Pietro Longhi,
i3.9 Pietro Longhi,
