Book Review: Italian Venice

Italian Venice: A Historyby R. J. B. BosworthYale University Press, 2014Oxford professor R. J. B. Bosworth is entirely right when he diagnoses a certain com'era e dov'era sameness in most histories of Venice, a great many of which revel in rival gangs, ribald revelers, and ornery doges for a thousand years and then fall largely silent around the time Napoleon Bonaparte came along and ruined everything.Bosworth chafes against this conception, quite rightly. "Time has not stood still in Venice," he writes, "Tides that began in the long history of the Republic have been pushed and pattered by the force of events and new structures since."Those events and new structures are the backdrop of Bosworth's rivetingly excellent new book, Italian Venice, which gives readers a Venice they'll scarcely recognize, a dirty, grubby, real-world city that strives and lies and compromises its way through Italian unification, two world wars (when was the last time you read a Venice book that included photos of bomb-damaged buildings? Virtually no authors are willing to so disrupt the dream's serenity), and the key postwar years between the collapse of fascism and the arrival of the all-encompassing reality-altering modern mega-tourism of the modern era. Bosworth gives us a gripping story of intensely fallible, oddly compelling people. Instead of the usual suspects - Goethe, Byron, Ruskin - we get a gallery of lesser-known figures like Daniele Manin, hero of the Risorgismento, or Venetian Patriarch (and future Pope John XXIII) Roncalli, or - the roguish star of the book, a character Bosworth clearly both hates and loves - wheeling-dealing Venetian mogul and magnate Giuseppe Volpi.As its title indicates, Italian Venice stresses the inclusion of Venice in the social and political affairs of the broiling 20th century. Bosworth has researched these years to a degree unprecedented in any work in English, and the picture he paints is one of an uneasy meshing between a city that for centuries held sway as a world power and a newborn political order that dreamed of such dominion. And Bosworth always remembers to step back and take the broad view, which fills his book with wonderful inhalation-moments:

What, then, can be discovered more generally of the Fascist impact on ordinary Venetians during the 1930s? How did totalitarianism, Italian-style, work there? Very partially is the answer. Contrary to propaganda about an all-embracing ideology and an all-powerful party, a recent study of everyday life in the city has demonstrated that poorer Venetians continued to rely on a 'currency of favours and connections and networks of family, friends and acquaintances' that Fascism scarcely infringed. As late as January 1935 an essay prize organised for nine and ten year olds produced entries that displayed 'a distinct apoliticism and ambivalence' rather than what organisers had hoped would be effusive Fascism.

He also has a sharp ear for good quotes - an indispensable talent when dealing with a subject like Venice, which has provoked Grade-A quotes by the gondola-load for 500 years. He moves his story from the disenchantment Venice felt with the rise of fascism to the disenchantment Venice felt with its strutting avatars:

By 1940 the Biennale's visitors had halved again to 89,000 (down from an already modest 175,000 in 1938). Although a residue of pro-Fascists, including, for example, Coco Chanel, still brought some social panache to the city beaches, 'Mussolini's Italy,' an ever closer partner in the Axis with Adolf Hitler's Germany, steadily last appeal as a site for cosmopolitan partying. More and more people now decided that Mussolini and Hitler were 'twin dictators' and quite a few disliked the sight. As Margot Asquith underlined in an article in Vogue, 'We do not believe in mock Mussolinis, silly shirts, self-advertising upstarts. We detest dictators.'

And most refreshingly, Bosworth spares some space - in fact, his standout chapter, "The many deaths of post-war venice: 1948-1978" - for the city's most formative current era of depression, disorganization, and, eventually, re-organization to accommodate cruise-ships bursting with gawping American tourists. Any overview of this modern period, however brief (and I of course nominate Bosworth to write a full-dress narrative of post-1980s Venice), must naturally touch on the calamitous flood of November 1966, and Bosworth does it justice:

Tankfuls of heating oil had seeped into every canal throughout the city, and when the water drained away each building was found to be heavily stained. The pungent smell of oil took days to disperse. Even more drastic was the salt, which, it became clear in the weeks that followed, had worked its way into man palazzi and churches, resulting in the sullying of precious medieval, Renaissance and baroque artworks. Venice, it would eventually be realized, had come close to suffering the fate of Atlantis, supposedly swallowed by the sea.

The undercurrent of Italian Venice is what Bosworth refers to as a "history war" being fought between the prettifiers of Venice's history and those who seek to illuminate it warts and all, and he's under no illusions as to which side is winning - or even the possible benefits of the imbalance:

The victorious history has much to be said for it. It portrays a shiningly beautiful Venice that glitters in the sunshine and smells of the sea in a way unknown in other cities, with enough complexity refracted into the fluctuating images that dance amid the lapping waters. Married thus indissolubly to beauty, this history allures and sells.

But Venice-history books not indissolubly married to beauty alone become all the more important in the face of such celebratory kitsch. Bosworth has written an outstanding example of such a book, and he's also written a stirring defense of the enterprise. That "victorious history" may have things to be said for it, but, as he writes, "it is also a history that has rejected the rigour of a discipline that seeks to record the crimes, follies and tragedies, the pomposities and greed, the bathos, the parochialism of humankind, together with the joys and successes."There's no small shred of parochialism in Italian Venice, and given the gaudy temptations of the subject, that's high praise indeed.