In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the project of Venice may be said to be complete. It has been called the “Disneyfication” of Venice. Venice has been true to its destiny. That is all. It is still a working city but it has acquired a new character. There are those who speak of “decline” or “decay” but there is no real evidence for this. In some respects Venice is the most successful city in the world. Cities are of their nature artificial. Venice will simply take the urban concept to a new height. The nineteenth-century American writer, Francis Marion Crawford, put it best when he declared that “it would not surprise those who know her, to come suddenly upon her and find that all human life was extinct within her, while her own went on, as strong as ever.” It is no good pretending that the tourists do not see the “real” Venice in the way that tourists do not see the “real” London or the “real” Paris; the tourist Venice is the essential, quintessential, Venice.
Some tourists are more famous than others. Everyone who is anyone has now been replaced by anyone who is everyone, but in the past the famous and the notorious have been drawn to the city as a stage on which they could perform. Shelley came to lament, and Byron came to ejaculate. Aretino came to celebrate, and Ruskin to denounce. Nietzsche, Proust and Dante all visited the city. Petrarch came here on many occasions, and declared it to be “the most marvellous city that I have ever seen.” Turner and Whistler painted Venice, as have hundreds of other foreign artists. In his “Ten O’Clock Lecture,” in describing London, Whistler conjured up the image of another city:
And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses become palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy land lies before us …
By the late nineteenth century there was not an inch of Venice that had not been painted.
It has also been a city of literature, if not exactly a literary city. There are forty references by Shakespeare to Venice and its dominions, not all of them complimentary. Two of his plays,
All tooke me for a citizen of Venice:I knew the formes, so well.
He is also well aware of the predatory habits of the Venetians:
For your Venetian, if he sees a manPreposterous, in the least, he has him straight;He has: he strippes him.
The early nineteenth-century English poets were instrumental in creating what might be called the mythography of Venice. Byron composed two historical dramas set in the city, but his enduring contribution to Venetian sentiment is to be found in poems such as
In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,And silent rows the songless gondolier;Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,And music meets not always now the ear:Those days are gone …
Yet romance can turn to romanticisation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there appeared a number of somewhat whimsical and self-indulgent travelogues or diaries devoted to the picturesque possibilities of the city. Many writers have composed the same sentence under a Venetian sky—the solemn movements of the gondolier, the market boats at dawn laden with fruits and vegetables, the beautiful children, the marble tables of Florian’s, the honeysuckle against a crumbling wall, the solemn mellow tone of the great clock in the piazza, the clangour of the bells of the campanile …
