Our book today is a gorgeous “coffee table book” from 1980 with the Vendome Press: Islands and Lagoons of Venice, with text by Peter Lauritzen and stunning photography by Fulvio Roiter. The book lavishly, lovingly celebrates the vast, strange world of the other Venice, the 200 square miles of lagoon, inlets, and islands sprawling around the city. In centuries long gone, those islands and tide-brakes were called the bulwarks of the fatherland, sacros muros patriae, speckled with dozens of delicate mini-ecosystems and niches tucked into clay flats near the shoreline called barene and sandy shoals called velme – mostly hidden places filled with all kinds of shy birds and strange locals.

The pictures and the narrative touch on these waters and the various jetties and islands dotted around them, places like Lio Piccolo, the Lido, Sant’ Erasmo, Torcello, Altino, Burano, San Michele, and Chioggia, and Lauritzen was right, back in the late 1970s, to cite the atavistic nature of such places:

The Lagoon preserves much that belongs to an earlier, prehistoric, almost legendary past. Stretches of barene survive to suggest the original appearance of Venice itself, while fishing communities like Burano and those farther south recall the Lagoon’s original inhabitants who rescued Saint Mark himself from shipwreck.

In fact, Lauritzen’s narration is consistently readable, which is hardly the normal state of affairs in books of this kind, especially when the photos are as powerful and intimate and beautiful as Roiter’s. Lautitzen insists throughout the book that the city and its lagoon eerily balance each other:

The Lagoon presents many varied contrasts with the city it embraces. Where Venice is often closed and secretive behind brick and crumbling plaster, the reaches of its surrounding water are open. Yet in its own way the Lagoon also remains mysterious and unapproachable, while Venice publicly glories in its theatrical qualities. The Lagoon is empty, the city crowded. The essence of both is light, but in the city it is the reflected and refracted light of highly polished, jewellike surfaces, mirrors, and mosaic, silk, gold leaf, satin, and marble. The Lagoon’s colors are as diffuse as its horizons; yet for the eye tired of stone and stucco, the islet-studded water seem filled with the vivid hues of growing things.

I’ve spent a great deal of time poking around the islands of the Lagoon, unhurriedly rambling with my beagles over every inch of lovely, eerie Lazzaretto Vecchio, Sant’Angeo della Polvere with its tangle of trees and ruins, and most of all Sant’ Erasmo, site of a good many of my most pleasant Venetian memories. The test I always use for books like Islands and Lagoons of Venice is simple: is it good enough to make me wistful? This wonderful book succeeds easily.