Paradise of Cities: Venice and Its Nineteenth-Century Visitors [Paperback]

I rarely give five stars, but when you finish a book but then want to start it again at the beginning right away, then it's a sign of superlative literary skill. This for me is just such a book.

John Julius Norwich is renowned as being the foremost English connoisseur on all things Venetian. His "History of Venice" is the standard history of the state and empire in the English language. But that history ends in 1797, at the fall of the most serene republic after over a thousand years of existence. In his introduction to this subsequent volume, the author admits that one of the reasons for writing this new work was to carry the story onward into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By eschewing his previous approach of concentrating on political events, he decided to approach the history of the nineteenth-century city through the eyes of its visitors, the famous and the not-so-famous. As he says in his introduction, "The purpose of this book is to paint a picture of the century, not to record its chronological progress." And so we have a serries of vignettes of nineteenth-century Venetian life.

Most of them are English. There are individual chapters on Byron, Ruskin, Rawdon Brown and Horatio Brown (not related), Robert Browning, Austen Layard, and Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo). There are three Americans too (all of whom could just as easily be considered as Englishmen - and often were): Henry James, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. The remaining four chapters are taken up by a Frenchman (Napoleon), a German (Wagner) and a Venetian (Manin). (The latter is included by the writer, so as not to overlook the revolt against Habsburg rule, when the Venetians sought to re-establish their own political independence: "How can one possibly write about nineteenth-century Venice without discussing, however briefly, the Revolution of 1848?") That still leaves one more chapter to put someone's name to, but chapter one, entitled "After the Fall", consists more or less of a word-by-word repeat of the epilogue to the author's "Venice: the Greatness and the Fall" of 1981. I do not complain about this, since the author's literary style is so engaging as to be worth repetition.

There are, of course, bound to be omissions. Where is Georges Sand and Alfred de Musset falling into and out of love, where is the witty Chateaubriand, where is Claude Monet. These are all French, so one may perhaps (perhaps!) forgive Lord Norwich these oversights, but the exclusion of Turner is less forgiveable.

The sketches that John Julius Norwich paints in these chapters are lively and interesting. There is never a dull moment, and many of the actors appear in each other's chapters. There are parties and dinners, fights and sexual complications, letters home and diary entries aplenty. But there is alas precious little about Venetians and Venice itself, save (curiously) in the epilogue. Here he lists some of the urban developments (not all of them improvements) during the period under discussion: "At one moment I even considered adding a chapter about the physical changes ... But such a chapter would not have been in tune with the rest of the book."

As I was approaching the volume's end, I pondered whether the author's style could be continued into the twentieth century, with chapters on Benjamin Britten, Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, Gabriel d'Annunzio, Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev. But the author has second-guessed my thoughts. To my proposed list, he adds Cole Porter, Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway (all English-speakers, note) and Carlos de Beistegui (who?) and Elsa Maxwell. But the writer, in his epilogue, categorically states that he does not wish to push his luck and that this will be his last book on Venice. He ends the book on words of warning for the future of La Serenissima, but equally noting that that future appears to be in safe hands.

The book comes with a good series of plates of the characters involved, some in colour. Some of the plates are of the city and are very evocative of the time and place. I offer a word of praise too for the bibliography at the volume's end. Here is a wonderful place to jump off the diving board into more detailed stories of the colourful characters the author has introduced us to in this fascinating and engaging insight into this Paradise of Cities.