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

Preamble

For the love of my city I have gathered these pages

As I stepped out of the Santa Lucia station and saw Venice for the first time, it was like recalling a memory I had never had.  In the early morning sunlight, under the clear cold sky, the green dome of San Simeone Piccolo stood out amidst all the browns, reds and yellows of the tiled roofs, and the Grand Canal’s broad band of water bent glassily away into the distance. The more I looked, the more I seemed to recognise - so deeply have the images and elements of Venice been woven into the fabric of our civilisation.  A world without Venice, like a world without Shakespeare, is unthinkable.

As a result, it is hard to see the city for itself rather than as an assemblage of set pieces.  Initially, Venice deconstructs into your previous knowledge of it.  Fuller understanding and appreciation come only as your experience of the city re-enacts its complex history of accretion and connection.

This is not easy.  At every turn, the mesmerising allure of the city’s beauty compels you to stop and stare.  But to stare is to remain a captive of the arresting image, and of your preconceptions which conditioned it. To gain a deeper knowledge you must move on: you must walk.  Walking builds the two dimensional views into the three-dimensional city.

Providentially, Venice is a city built for walkers: within its compact confines, people set the scale for everything.  Confirming this, you find that there are no broad highways in Venice; whatever the name - whether called ramo, ruga or salizzada - they are all narrow streets and dark alleys. Though straight, they are short and doglegged, so where you are going, or where you have come from, always remain hidden.  In Venice, even the shortest journey is an adventure; perhaps it is no coincidence that the greatest explorer of all, Marco Polo, was a son of this city.

Without motorised vehicles on its streets, an eighteenth century air prevails, almost as if the Venetians had tried to stop the clock of history during the endless carnival of their last giddy heyday.  Then, as now, the city existed for its tourism.  Today, without that age’s carts or wagons, Venice is a place of eerie near-silence,  The loudest noises are human: the porters’ occasional warning cries, the crowd’s muffled hubbub, the constant dull ringing of heels on the paving stones.

This is one Venice, a labyrinth of backstreets.  But there is another, the Venice of the waterways. 

Water is the defining element of the city: imagine Venice with its canals filled in.  Throughout its history, the city has been wedded to the seas by more than just the symbolic marriage ceremony which was carried out annually by the Doge.  A millennium and a half ago, the water which washed around the mud flats in the lagoon was a defence against the hordes of invaders on the mainland, and the initial impetus for the birth of the city.  Surrounded by the element, Venice bred sailors and navigators, who soon formed the backbone of a formidable navy.  With that in time came power, then empire, then wealth.  The glory which we gaze on in Venice rose from the city’s watery origins.

Its form was shaped by water too.  Pressure of space on the hundred or so islands which make up Venice dictated that buildings were high and contiguous, and reached to the water’s edge; gardens were soon an unconscionable luxury.  Today, excluding the public parks to the east, the number of trees in Venice is so small they could easily be counted.  The numerous campi, once true fields surrounded by houses, are all now paved over.  With time water has added further marks of its dominion.  Over centuries, the action of air and moisture has smoothed sculpture and stained stone, until the entire fabric of the city has become an enormous canvas on which water has laid down its masterpiece.

The intricate grid of canals provide Venice with its other streets, broader and better suited for transport than the earthbound ones.  Motor launches excepted, they are even more silent.  Ranging from the rii, the narrowest streams hidden away between high palaces, through the workaday channels along which the barges filled with fruit or refuse or furniture pass, up to the greatest of them all, the Grand Canal, which slices the city in two like a twisting dragon, the canals form one great network, over which is superimposed another - that of the streets and alleys - with hump-backed bridges marking like knots where the two threads cross for a moment before passing on their different ways.  Combined, they spread an intricate cat’s cradle of paths across the city, binding it together so successfully that in the place of an archipelago you see only an island.

In this city without direction or differentiation, there are two landmarks which are signposted everywhere: the Rialto bridge, and Piazza San Marco. They are the twin poles of the city.  The one represents commerce, the other the state - San Marco was originally simply the chapel to the adjoining Palazzo Ducale.  Wherever you walk, you will come across the characteristic yellow signs indicating the way to them.  Often it requires an act of faith to follow.  They are widely spaced; the alleyways down which they lead you are small and lonely; there are no shops, just high walls with closed doors and shuttered windows; there are no fellow travellers.  Persist, though, and eventually you reach a larger street. Follow it, and the growing crowd, and suddenly, you have reached the Rialto.

Like the city, the Rialto bridge is hard to see for what it is.  The subject of countless paintings in the past, and co-opted endlessly today as a easy emblem - of romance, of Italy, and of Venice itself - the image is so overlaid with associations that the physical reality disconcerts.  For what was the only bridge across the Grand Canal for centuries, the grimy stone structure with its decaying lockup shops - looking like a row of suburban railway arches thrust up and bent in the air - is bathetic.

Shabby rather than splendid, it is, above all, functional, allowing three streams of traffic to pass, and was once able to cope with even the tallest ships’ masts at high tide.  This clash between expectation and experience is representative of all Venice: what for us are key and symbolic images imbued with dense historical references are for the Venetians just scenery.

If the encounter with the Rialto bridge is fraught with cultural baggage, how much more so is the first sight of the Piazza San Marco.  In part the impact is so powerful because in an anomalous city the Piazza is itself an anomaly.  Even its name is unique: every other open space in Venice except the nearby Piazzetta is called a campo.

As you enter the Piazza San Marco through one of the galleries which flank it on three sides, the sudden sense of space and of sky is a shock.  Elsewhere in Venice you are conscious of the omnipresent walls which shadow and rear up around you.  Their constant embrace adds to the sense of the city’s intimacy, which, like all unremitting intimacies, can border on the oppressive.  Here, in the Piazza, it is as if Venice had peeled itself back, as if the buildings had suddenly fled, leaving you alone in this huge, yawning space.

The architecture conspires in this effect.  Although on one level an act of typical imperialist barbarousness, the destruction of the church of San Geminiani at the west end of the Piazza - ordered by Napoleon to allow the design of the loggie to be continued all the way round - showed an acute sense of architectural dynamics.  The apparent uniformity of the converging loggie makes them into a kind of visual vice, squeezing you down to the eastern end to confront the ultimate goal of the tourist: San Marco and its majestic campanile.

The perspective of the loggie, abetted by the linear design of the paving, throws the eye onto the ornate richness of the cathedral’s facade.  The horizontality of the Piazza, itself breathtaking enough in this city of undulating pathways, is then negated by the huge vertical stump of the campanile.

To the south of the cathedral, part of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen, the gentle flush of its pink facade peering round the base of the campanile. The visitor’s gaze and footsteps are alike drawn to it.  As you approach, the Piazzetta appears, a miniature version of the Piazza, and with it the basin of San Marco.  Beyond, lies the unreal vision of San Giorgio Maggiore, a church on the waters.  As you walk past the two columns of San Todaro and the lion of St. Mark, up to the water’s edge where the rows of gondolas are tethered to a forest of bleached poles, the water slapping their black sides, once more you are assailed by doubts about the possibility of relating this unique and well-known scene to your ordinary steps which brought you there.

The Piazza San Marco, the Piazzetta and the Riva degli Schiavoni are the most famous images in this city of famous images; but the miracle of Venice is not just that such scenes exist, but that any random path will map out a trail rich in historical associations and architectural and artistic treasures.  No other city offers this protean ability to compose itself for each visitor.

To experience the city is to wander through it, taking in every house and alley.  When we remember other cities, we remember the highlights.  Venice is all highlights.  To recall Venice faithfully is to recall our paths through it.  For the perfect tourist, memories of Venice would become co-extensive with memory.

No wonder then that the city can itself seem like memory.  Its many wandering paths which connect every campo, calle and canal are like the hidden paths within our minds which link together all our knowledge and experiences, forging what we call our life.  Venice has its secret corners which we find, then lose however much we search, only to chance upon them again some day when they strike with a combination of familiarity and freshness, just as a long-submerged image will surface with a vividness which astounds us.  It has those perfectly composed vistas, tantalisingly visible across a maze of canals and bridges, but without any obvious path to them.  They hover like names on the tip of our tongue, or like anchorless memories, evoked by a smell or a taste, frustratingly present but ungraspable.

On my first trip to Venice, I was converting the famous images I had inherited into personal memories.  In the process, I discovered countless other sights that would be uniquely mine, because they were determined and created by my experience in walking round the city.  When I returned, it would necessarily be a different Venice I saw, one which now carried the overlay of my previous visits.  The unchanging views of the city would act as fixed points between which I could start to thread a complex web of knowledge and memory.

The pattern of that tapestry would be profoundly affected by one further element, a book about the city, which itself was the product of a dense interplay of knowledge and experience.  That book was Giulio Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons.  As I read it for the first time, it was like stepping out into another new but familiar Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti