Rome | Venice | Florence
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VENICE
BOOKS | DVDs
The City of Falling Angels - John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants. It is Berendt and only Berendt who can capture Venice-a city of masks, a city of riddles, where the narrow, meandering passageways form a giant maze, confounding all who have not grown up wandering into its depths. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. Its architectural treasures crumble—foundations shift, marble ornaments fall—even as efforts to preserve them are underway. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house, where five of Verdi's operas premiered. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire...
The World of Venice - Nobody writes better books about destinations (as opposed to travel guidebooks) than Jan Morris, and this is one of her best, a fascinating exploration of the history, sights, seasons, arts, food, and people of an incomparable city. “A highly intelligent portrait of an eccentric city, written in powerful prose and enlivened by many curious mosaics of information...a beautiful book to read and to possess” (The Observer)...
The Stones of Venice - John Ruskin, Victorian England's greatest writer on art and literature, believed himself an adopted son of Venice, and his feelings for this city are exquisitely expressed in The Stones of Venice. This edition contains Ruskin's famous essay "The Nature of Gothic," a marvelously descriptive tour of Venice before its postwar restoration. As Ruskin wrote in 1851, "Thank God I am here, it is a Paradise of Cities." This sensitively abridged edition conveys the essence of Ruskin's masterpiece—a book written for the lover of architecture, the lover of Venice, and above all, the lover of fine writing...
A Traveller's History of Venice - A concise but highly readable book delving into Venice's rich history. This archipelago city's location has bridged Western and Eastern cultures from the barbarian invasions to modern times. Mentzel mines this special history to tell some compelling stories, including those about the legendary Giovanni Casanova, the city's imperial rise and episodic flooding, the four bronze horses captured from the Hippodrome in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and brought to Venice, and the return of St. Mark the Evangelist's body from Alexandria. Other highlights include a chronology of major historical events, a list of doges (government leaders) from the seventh through the 18th centuries, and descriptions of churches, synagogues, historic buildings, museums, bridges, and outer islands. Black-and-white maps and Peter Geissler's elegant line drawings illustrate the book...
The Traveling Gourmet: Venice and Its Regions - The Traveling Gourmet offers the perfect introduction to one of the world's most celebrated cities and its regions, with plenty to delight both the inquisitive tourist and the dedicated food-lover. In addition to the author's lively account of points of local interest, for each town or region visited, Italian chef Toni Vianello presents a selection of mouthwatering recipes. Specialties include dishes such as zuppa di go (a soup made with tiny fish from Venice's lagoon), and radicchio alla griglia (a salad from Treviso where the lettuce owes its quality to the purity of the town's water). Specially commissioned photographs capture the beauty of the sights and the appetizing colors of local products, inviting readers to bring the flavor of Venice into their own home. Venice and its surroundings are a feast for the senses. The ancient splendors of the mythical Serene City, the stunning vistas of the Dolomite mountains, the romance of Verona--discover their magic in this unique guide to the culture and cuisine of one of Italy's most beautiful regions. Includes 50 recipes...
Venice from the Ground Up - Venice came to life on spongy mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from barbarian invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen, salt gatherers, and traders who settled there crafted an amphibious way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. In an astonishing feat of narrative history, James H. S. McGregor recreates this world-turned-upside-down, with its waterways rather than roads, its boats tethered alongside dwellings, and its livelihood harvested from the sea. McGregor begins with the river currents that poured into the shallow Lagoon, carving channels in its bed and depositing islands of silt. He then describes the imaginative responses of Venetians to the demands and opportunities of this harsh environment—transforming the channels into canals, reclaiming salt marshes for the construction of massive churches, erecting a thriving marketplace and stately palaces along the Grand Canal. Through McGregor’s eyes, we witness the flowering of Venice’s restless creativity in the elaborate mosaics of St. Mark’s soaring basilica, the expressive paintings in smaller neighborhood churches, and the colorful religious festivals—but also in theatrical productions, gambling casinos, and masked revelry, which reveal the city’s less pious and orderly face. McGregor tells his unique history of Venice by drawing on a crumbling, tide-threatened cityscape and a treasure-trove of art that can still be seen in place today. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city’s evolution chapter by chapter and visitors can explore it district by district on foot and by boat...
Traveller's Companion to Venice - An anthology of over 200 excerpts and short pieces about the Italian city from the sixth century to the present. They describe the origins in late Roman times, first impressions, various places and features, customs and morals, music, courtesans, eating and drinking, and ceremonies...
Venice: Tales of the City: An Anthology - A beguiling collection of prose and poetry in celebration of La Serenissima, with contributors that range from Giovanni Boccaccio and Gabriele D'Annunzio to Mark Twain, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Raymond Carver. Elusive and fantastical, Venice is a many-layered confection of history. The writers here have captured what is most important to them, in pieces that span the founding of the city to the present day. The voices, entirely diverse, are both international and native: we meet, along with others, Pietro Aretino, Max Beerbohm, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Ezra Pound, George Sand, Antonio Sforza, James Whistler, and Elio Zorzi. Variously Merchant City, Haunted City, City of Art, City of Love, and City of the Soul... Venice is portrayed here in all her moods and manifestations...
Dead Lagoon: An Aurelio Zen Mystery - Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants. Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts-dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting...
This is Venice - I adore these books, and I don't care that they're picture books for kids. On the heels of the runaway bestsellers This is New York and This is Paris, Universe is pleased to reissue another title from M. Sasek's beloved and nostalgic children's travel series. Like the other Sasek classics, This is Venice is a facsimile edition of his original book from the 1960s and is still timely and current in every way. The brilliant, vibrant illustrations have been meticulously preserved, remaining true to his vision more than 40 years later and, where applicable, facts have been updated for the twenty-first century, appearing on a "This is...Today" page at the back of the book. The stylish, charming illustrations, coupled with Sasek's witty, playful narrative, makes for a perfect souvenir that will delight both children and their parents, many of whom will remember this book from their childhood. T his is Venice, first published in 1961, presents indelible impressions of romantic, watery Venice, where under a brilliant blue sky Sasek the gondolier navigates the winding canals to visit such famous and glorious landmarks as the Palazzo Grassi, Piazza San Marco, Doges Palace, and the Accademia di Belle Arti.
DVDs
Ancient Mysteries: Miraculous Canals of Venice - Show me someone who doesn't love to hear Mr. Spock narrate the mysteries of the universe and I'll show you someone who is dead inside. This A&E documentary narrated by Leonard Nimoy examines the complex history of Venice and the first Venetians—barbarian hordes attempting to raid the Roman Empire and led by fierce leaders such as Attila the Hun. Ancient Mysteries: Miraculous Canals of Venice is an intriguing look at the circumstances leading the first inhabitants to create this incredible city atop the lagoon on which it still stands...
Summertime - Plenty of films, from Everyone Says I Love You to Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade to Casino Royale, use Venice as a setting, but if you're going to see one movie set in Venice, make it David Lean's Summertime. Katharine Hepburn stars as Jane Hudson, an Ohio secretary on the verge of spinsterhood. Carefully saving her money, Jane takes an extended trip to Venice, half hoping to find the romance that has always eluded her. Luck of luck, she meets handsome Renato Di Rossi (Rossano Brazzi), who sweeps her off her feet. Jane's flight on Cloud Nine comes to a flaming crash when she learns that Renato is married and the father of a large family. Picking herself up and dusting herself off, Jane is determined to keep her romance alive, and hang the consequences...
The Merchant of Venice - Al Pacino as Shylock! Jeremy Irons as Antonio! Joseph Finnes as Bassanio! Of all Shakespeare’s classic plays, The Merchant of Venice has been among the least frequently tackled by filmmakers, who perhaps are uncomfortable with its apparent anti-Semitism and harshness of tone. This adaptation, written and directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), confronts the play’s less savory aspects head on. As played by Al Pacino, the moneylender Shylock revels in the bargain he has made with the openly contemptuous merchant Antonio: If the loan is not paid back on time, he will extract a pound of flesh from the borrower... Filmed in Venice, this Merchant has been beautifully mounted with regard to sets and costumes, is one of the most accessible Shakespeare adaptations in many years, and makes a worthy introduction to one of the Bard’s greatest works...
Casanova - The late, great Heath Ledger plies his trade about as far from Brokeback Mountain as one can get in this sassy and energetic romantic comedy, set in mid-18th-century Europe. Ledger portrays everyone's favorite Italian lothario as a rake caught up in the period’s repressive sexual politics (and with nary a flash of his Oscar-nominated turn as Ennis in that other love story about a couple of cowboys, which interestingly opened in theaters just a few weeks before Casanova). The year is 1753, and the celebrated lover is so well known in Venice that he’s lampooned in stage plays and puppet shows. But his moral transgressions are not so blithely regarded by the Inquisition’s chief enforcer, Pucci (Jeremy Irons, who apparently never said "no" to a script set in Venice), who is determined to throw the suave seducer in prison...
Death in Venice - Based on the famous novel by Thomas Mann, Luchino Visconti's classic Death in Venice stars Dirk Bogarde as a German composer who is terrified that he has lost all vestiges of humanity. While visiting Venice, Bogarde falls in love with a beautiful young boy (Bjorn Andresen). The relationship is ruined by Bogarde's obsession with the boy's youth and physical perfection; the composer realizes that the child represents an ideal that he can never match. The character played by Dirk Bogarde is evidently intended to be Gustav Mahler, whose haunting music is featured on the film's soundtrack.. Want to read the actual book (novella, really)? Try this collection of Thomas Mann stories.
