The Itineraries

Each location, each  reference, as it was noted was checked individually on the spot by personal inspection in the various places.

In Lorenzetti’s book, the itinerary is all-pervasive.  Not only do the twelve explicit paths through Venice form the bulk of the work, the general principle of the itinerary runs through the rest of it like a hidden thread.

The idea was a stroke of genius, at once obvious yet audacious.  Lorenzetti wrote a book which said: turn left and you will see a beautiful building; walk on a little further, and you will find a church,  He took tourists by the hand and guided them.  Hitherto, travel books had done anything but that: they did not guide, they rambled loquaciously over a certain physical, historical and artistic region.  If most of the principal sights of a town were covered, it was in no very systematic way.  Lorenzetti’s achievement was to take the huge and rich collection of experiences we call Venice, and to weave them into a tapestry of brilliant colours and - most importantly - bold designs.

In this, he was undoubtedly aided by the city itself.  Nowhere else in the world is so much concentrated into so confined a space.  It is as if by some miraculous form of cultural osmosis, the lagoon itself has leached out of the myriad islands which make up Venice all trace of mediocrity or ugliness, leaving only a sifted sediment of masterpieces. As a result, it is not only easy to find adjacent works of art, it is almost impossible not to.  Every building has an equally interesting neighbour, every church has a famous campo, every canal two or three historic palazzi.

Lorenzetti’s task, then, was to select from all the possible routes past these masterpieces, and to construct a path which was both coherent and practical.  After all, however much the itineraries may smack of artistic surfeit, they are intended as realistic and useful.  If we find them too demanding, it can only be that we belong to a race of cultural dwarfs after one of giants.

The choice of the Piazza San Marco for his first itinerary was easy.  It is not just physically the centre of the city, the largest open space, but has long been the historical centre, where secular and sacred sit together in artistic convocation, the ducal palace and the procuratie alongside the ducal chapel of San Marco itself.  Moreover, both of those two main buildings offer such a wealth of art within their confines, that if the tourist could see nothing else, visiting them would provide memories enough.  So rich in fact are they, that Lorenzetti not only provides one of his characteristic little fold-out maps of the whole itinerary, but he also offers four others showing the internal disposition of the buildings.

Thereafter, with the exception of the final itinerary, he remains committed to the Piazza San Marco as his starting point.  But granted this pivot, in the second itinerary Lorenzetti ranges as far away from the circumscribed world of the first as he possibly can, perhaps offering a contrast to the claustrophobic examination offered there.  Now the tourist is encouraged to stride out right to the easternmost tip of the main island.  The accompanying map seems to partake of this vertiginous foray: the red, spidery line of the path veers madly away, almost out of control, until it is finally reined in and returns to the safety of the Piazza San Marco.  It is almost as if Lorenzetti had not yet learned how to curb the powerful concept of an itinerary: it charges away and is barely saved from a headlong dash into the lagoon itself before Lorenzetti finally masters it and brings it back home.

Perhaps in reaction to this, the third and fourth itineraries are more compact again; they delight in diving through mazes of tiny backstreets.  After showing us the macroscopic scale of Venice, Lorenzetti seems to be concentrating on the almost invisible details, on the microscopic life it exhibits.

More confident now, Lorenzetti takes off on three more wide-ranging walks in the fifth, sixth and seventh itineraries.  Moreover, none of them ends up back at the Piazza San Marco.  Instead, like children who have learnt to cross the road, the tourists are allowed to take the vaporetto back to the landing stage outside San Marco.  The map of the seventh itinerary is notable for the number of canals indicated in addition to the thin red line.  Hitherto, the plans have sketched only brutally truncated forms of the canals; from now on, we are allowed to see a little more of that other logic which underlies the city.  Once more, it is as if Lorenzetti has grown to trust us with this extra knowledge, this extra responsibility.

Appropriately enough, after all these far-flung excitements, the eighth and ninth itineraries stay nearer home: the former investigates the very kernel of the city, wrapped around on three sides by the Grand Canal, while the ninth restricts itself to the equivalent region on the opposite bank.

The tenth and eleventh itineraries explore the remaining region so far untouched.  The latter concentrates on that area encompassed by the first of the two great oxbow bends which go to make up the reverse ‘S’ of the Grand Canal, while the former takes a long path through the southernmost part of Venice.  The map of the tenth itinerary is noteworthy for the way the appearance of part of the island of Giudecca makes the Grand Canal look like some subsidiary to the Giudecca Canal below it - as if the Venice we know had been embedded in a larger, embracing one.

Lorenzetti’s last itinerary is another master-stroke.  Perhaps poking gentle fun at our new-found mastery of his paths through the city, he concludes with one that is particularly challenging: the twelfth itinerary requires the tourist to walk down the Grand Canal.  One problem is that such an itinerary involves two paths, one along each side of the canal.  Lorenzetti solves this by the simple expedient of using the left-hand pages of his description for the left-hand bank, and the right-hand pages for the other.  Each spread’s facing pages mirror the facing banks.  The map of the Grand Canal itinerary is also striking: with its numbers running along both sides, it resembles an anatomical drawing of some giant segmented millipede; its legs are the stubs of the canals which empty into it

Given the itinerary’s origin in a desire to impose form on a dizzying profusion, the walk along the Grand Canal is the logical conclusion. Just as each itinerary is like a thread which binds together a series of sights and objects, so the central cord of the Grand Canal binds together each of them into a larger fabric.  It is a fitting end to Lorenzetti’s grand design; but he still has much to tell us, and the obsession with itineraries grips him still.

Even before the twelve formal itineraries, Lorenzetti had preceded them by three others: the first an itinerary through the idea of Venice, the second through its history, and the third through its art.  Now he follows those twelve named itineraries with yet more: some which wind their logical and unswerving way through the art collections of Venice, room by room, picture by picture; still others which sail out into the lagoon, taking in successively the islands of San Michele, Murano, Burano and Torcello.

At Murano, the old urge to embark on a codified walk re-asserts itself: pointing out that Murano is curiously similar to Venice in its general aspect, Lorenzetti uses this as an excuse to provide another mini-itinerary, complete with a small, and rather half-formed map.  Once on Torcello, he admits defeat: so little is left on this island - a street, a piazzetta, and the glorious but lonely cathedral - that even he cannot conjure up an itinerary from it all.  Just as the islands in the lagoon seem to be fainter and fainter echoes of Venice itself, so the itineraries they give rise to fade away to nothing.

As if exhausted, almost admitting defeat, Lorenzetti makes his final itineraries covert and disguised: the obsessive indexes, that is, walks through the alphabet, new ways of ordering the information he has already gathered, explained and structured.  Aptly enough, this great work of paths and directions closes with that ultimate itinerary, that walk through the itineraries themselves, the General Index.

Walks with Lorenzetti

The Book

Those who may wish to retrace and know all those testimonies of art and those recollections of its past that Venice preserves in its churches, its palaces, its galleries and in its very streets, may find help here, in this book of mine.

Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons looks and feels like a bible.  It is dense and compact, and its thousand pages of thin and fragile paper invite a reverential handling.  The resemblance is no accident: this is indeed a bible, the bible of Venice   It is not just a guide to the city, but to its origins, its history, its art, and its traditions.  As befits a bible, it offers a complete cosmology.

The first edition of this monumental work appeared in 1926.  It was 30 years before the second edition was printed - posthumously, but based largely on Lorenzetti’s revisions, and edited by his wife Maria Lorenzetti Ciartoso.  An English translation had to wait another five years.  It has a dark blue dust jacket, while the original Italian version has one of deep red.  Otherwise the format is identical.

After about 100 introductory pages of almost continuous text, the character of the work changes dramatically.  Most striking are the series of fold-out maps which occur throughout the work, like adumbrations of a pop-up children’s book.  The maps show regions of the city: the canals and lagoon are represented by a series of roughly parallel wave-like blue lines, bounded in black, around and over which a thin red line snakes.  Each map has one such line, apparently tracing out an itinerary through the city.  Apart from a few major churches and campi, there are no indications of exact location, just the floating, weaving line.  It is numbered irregularly along its length, starting at the Piazza San Marco from which all but one of the itineraries start, and reaching to anything between 40 and 90 or more.

Except for these maps, and the title page, which uses the dark red colour of the Italian dust jacket, the text is in monochrome throughout. The bulk of the book refers to the maps, structured around the numbers that appear on them.  Each number heads a sentence or paragraph, or sometimes gives rise to sections which run for pages.

Complementing the text are nearly 300 illustrations, the majority of which are photographs from Lorenzetti’s day, while 40 are historical engravings.  The latter are mostly taken from works by eighteenth century view painters such as Canaletto.  The cramped format of the pages, the type of paper, and the reproduction processes available for the first edition of the book imposed great constraints on the resulting quality and detail of the illustrations.  As a consequence, the provenance of an image - its maker and even its medium - is not always clear.

The absence of any sure distinction between engraving and photograph results in a convergence between past and present representations of Venice.  This effect, born of limitations in the printing process, in fact reveals a deep truth about the unchanging nature of the city.  Put another way, the photographs of churches and palazzi look, because of the indistinct outlines and pervading greyness, as if they were taken in the eighteenth century.  Paradoxically, the general absence of people in those same photographs also makes them appear to be from some distant time in the future when Venice has been abandoned for reasons unknown, and become a deserted site of ghostly memories.  Lorenzetti’s illustrations, like the city they portray, are temporally unlocated.

Moreover, disparate as their subject matter and original sources are, the printing process renders the illustrations with a kind of equality which endows them with one viewpoint and style which can best be called Lorenzettian.  Within that essential unity, it manifests itself in many ways.  It can be moody and romantic, like the haunting picture of gondolas tied up on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the setting sun reflects in the waves’ splashed water on the paving stones; or like the magical painting of ships on the Giudecca canal, all diffused light and misty atmosphere.  It can be almost abstractly-classical, like the view of the library on the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, half Vermeer, half Escher.  It can be powerfully grotesque as in the close-ups of the Colleoni monument or of the Capello effigy.  Or even bleakly expressionist, for example in Tintoretto’s ‘Agony in the Garden’, which is simplified to a harrowing study of black on black.

The illustrations are found throughout the whole book, as if Lorenzetti felt obliged to mirror the city’s visual generosity.  Even where the texture changes at the back of the book, with its 125 pages of indexes, there remain a few leavening images.

In their unvaried columnar format, and their relentlessness, the indexes offer a stark contrast to the main text’s constant variation.  The scale and scope of them are impressive: in all there are 244 books, 1458 artists, 1293 places, 1306 important and historic buildings, 192 monuments, and 298 illustrations meticulously detailed in their respective lists.  Venice seems to demand such obsessive naming and numbering from its devotees: when Ruskin came to produce a popular, abridged edition of The Stones of Venice, his huge sprawling study of the city, indexes still took up a third of the book.

This impulse to index, which Lorenzetti clearly shares, seems born of a desire to capture the sheer richness and multiplicity of the city.  It is as if he had felt that it was not enough for the tens of thousands of facts which he had sought out, hoarded and ordered, to be revealed and detailed on the itineraries which form the greater part of the work: he had to try to provide that information in as many ways as possible.  His indexes are different views of the same facts, like different cross-sections of a deeply complex object.  Together they offer alternative routes through the maze of his words.

The book impresses not just by this exhaustive content, but also by virtue of its sheer physicality.  Its more than one thousand pages, its dizzyingly small point sizes, its profusion of numbers, words, illustrations and lists, and the sheer density of their combination make it feel like a huge tome which has somehow been magically reduced, or, rather, like two or three huge books which have been crammed miraculously into this tiny space.

This feat of compaction, this achievement of a quart’s worth in a pint pot, was no empty act of intellectual virtuosity.  For all its riches, compression lies at the heart of the book, which is one whose form is fully determined by its content.  Its chosen instruments of explanation, the explicated walks through the city, are meant to be followed literally, not just metaphorically; Lorenzetti’s book is designed for practical use - to be carried, like a bible, and as a true guide, wherever you go in Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti