"It is a curious fact," writes Peter Ackroyd, "that
in Venice public matters were held in inviolable secrecy, while private affairs
became public knowledge almost at once." Venice: Pure City testifies to the paradox at the heart of a locale
that has long balanced a love of spectacle, fashion, and luxury with an
ever-present anxiety over looming threats from enemies both natural and human.
As Ackroyd reminds us, Venice may be unique, but
it's hardly singular: "The Latin term for Venice was always Venitiae." Venice must be thought
of as essentially plural, "a federation of islands or cities." Beginning
with the founding of the city by a group of refugees fleeing the Huns, Ackroyd
describes Venice as a "various and unsettled scene (…) always shifting and
unstable." This is why, according to Ackroyd, the progress of Venetian
history is one long attempt to find stability and continuity in the midst of
this mutable landscape. Over time, entire islands were submerged, destroyed, or
overwhelmed by plague. For Ackroyd, the secret nature of the Venetians can be
discerned in this environment. There would always be, he suggests, "somewhere
in the Venetian soul, the threat of punishment and disaster."
At some moments in Venetian history, this led to
some rather draconian law enforcement measures: a culture of informants and
betrayal reigned in the city, resulting in a dialectic of surveillance and
concealment. The consequences, Ackroyd points out, could be felt even at the
heart of Venetian governance: when foreign ambassadors would make diplomatic
proposals, whether in peacetime or in war, the doge "was forbidden by law
to make any specific reply"; he could only "float in generalities,"
according to Sir Henry Wotton, a 17th-century English ambassador to
the city. The portrait Ackroyd offers of the city's legal system is so
capricious that one wonders how Venice managed to maintain control over its
sizable empire for several centuries.
Venice: Pure City presents a thickly mythologized city of metaphors,
reading the city as a vast semiotic network of mirrors, waters, stones, lions,
bells, boats, and masks. At times this method succeeds, as when Ackroyd points
out that the famous stones of Venice are made of limestone quarried in Istria,
which "comes from the action of the sea, made up by the unimaginable
compound of billions of marine creatures." This gives the reader a fresh
take on the relationship between the city and its watery environment. He is
sensitive to the city's protean qualities, as when he puts his finger on the
special beauty of the pigeons infesting the Piazza San Marco: "The birds
are part of the spirit of the place. They are the grey stone come alive and
rendered soft to the touch." But Ackroyd elaborates these themes in
language that is sometimes too overblown to take seriously: "A thousand
cities of Venice comprised the city, just as a thousand flames may make up one
fire." Groan.
Encyclopedic and engaging, Venice: Pure City is worthwhile reading for the unrepentant lover
of Venice; however, those who find the cultivation of the myth of La
Serenissima grating would do better to seek out a more playful engagement with
the city, such as Jan Morris's Venice, or the masterful poetic imagining of Calvino's Invisible Cities.
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