Walks with Lorenzetti: venice

Just as A Partial India was a re-working of my travel notebook for India, so Walks with Lorenzetti re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice. A Partial India and the notes it is based on try to capture the unrepeatable impact of seeing India for the first time. Walks with Lorenzetti is quite different. Although it was a particularly intense few days in Venice, it was far from my first trip there. I brought with me other memories of the city and elsewhere, as well as various kinds of relevant knowledge built up over the years before.

Walks with Lorenzetti therefore goes beyond simply re-working one of my travel notebooks. It weaves in other major strands, including three of the city's greatest creators and their art: the music of Vivaldi, the paintings of Canaletto, and the writing of Goldoni. Above all, it follows in the footsteps of another book: Guido Lorenzetti's Venice and its Lagoon, a forgotten masterpiece that deserves to be better-known. I hope the following pages will help to achieve that.

Foreword

Preamble

Introductory Chapters

The book
The itineraries
The man

The Twelve Itineraries

I - First act: eighth itinerary
II - First night movement: Allegro più ch’è possible
III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi
IV - Second act: ninth itinerary
V - Second night movement: intermezzo
VI - Second portrait: Carlo Goldoni
VII - Third act: third itinerary
VIII - Third night movement: capriccio
IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto
X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary
XI - Fourth night movement: finale
XII - Fourth portrait: itinerant biographies

Recollections

The personal tempest

Venice and its Lagoon

Souvenir

Venezia Nuova - sonnet sequence

Pensione Calcina

Picture Postcard

Monday, 20 July 2020

Foreword

This is not a guide book to Venice. It is a guide book to a guide book, a translation of Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons into a cityscape which the reader is invited to explore, as Lorenzetti’s book invites the tourist to explore Venice. It is also a partial record of my own encounters there.

In the same way that Lorenzetti’s book can be read and enjoyed without knowing Venice, so I hope that it will be possible to read this book without knowing Lorenzetti. But the experience of Venice inevitably illuminates and vivifies Lorenzetti immeasurably more than the book, great as it is, does the city. Similarly, direct acquaintance with Lorenzetti may help the reader to follow my paths through his work.

The epigraphs to each chapter and the quotations are taken from John Guthrie’s English version of Venice and its Lagoons published by Edizioni Lint Trieste. I have translated the excerpts from Goldoni’s memoirs and plays. The bare facts of this work are derived from countless books and, above all, from Lorenzetti. The errors are my own.

I wish to thank here all my family and friends who directly or indirectly have made this work possible, and with whom I have spent such memorable times.

Glyn Moody

Walks with Lorenzetti