Italian Venice: A History

"The end of the Most Serene Republic of Venice happens when it cedes to Austria. We have Napoleon, Austria, and Italy, all foreign powers—and certainly Venice sees Italy as every bit as much a foreign power as Austria, possibly even more. It’s a bit of history that’s probably less well handled in most guidebooks because it’s quite complicated, but it has quite an effect on what the city looks like. There’s the filling in of some canals, the straightening of some roads, the building of some fairly gloomy social housing. There’s a Teutonic effort to rationalize the city, though if ever there was an absolutely futile project it would be trying to make sense out of Venice. The book also deals with the fact that Venice, as well as being fabulously rich, was piss poor. The poor in Venice were much poorer than the poor in other places. There was very little running water and not much in the way of facilities. The fishermen and people who operated Venice were living in very low-quality, medieval accommodation, sharing a well. Life expectancy was low and I think life was brutish and short. This book is very good on the extent of urban poverty. It is also very good on the still current quite big issue, which is migration out of the city. The whole world is full of people moving into cities, but when you get highly developed as Venice did you move out. That probably starts in earnest after the Second World War, but it had happened before. There was the building of Mestre, and then of Marghera, the chemical port. “There’s definitely a whole world of Venetian gloom, but it seems absolutely joyous to me” The book introduced me to an amazing man called Giuseppe Volpi. He was called the ‘Last Doge’ and I’d never heard of him. He was a businessman of terrific acumen and was made Count of Misurata by Mussolini. He also became governor of Tripolitania, which is Libya. He set up the Venice Film Festival and the Biennale and massively changed tourism in Venice as well as setting up a lot of industries. So he set up Marghera, which is both negative in that it has caused terrible petrochemical pollution, but also provided employment. He had a huge effect on changing the place. I found Italian Venice absolutely brilliant. It is a very, very good book to read when you’re there. Some of the stories! One of the things that’s mentioned in every guidebook on Venice is Molino Stucchi, this great big Gothic behemoth of a building on the end of the Giudecca. It’s now got a Hilton in it and, on top of it, there’s a Nutella bar. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t allowed to mention the Nutella bar in my Venice guide. It seemed to me one of the things that everybody would be most interested in. I’ve never been to a Nutella bar before, but if you like Nutella…But that mill was built by an Austrian to feed Venice, and he was beset by a series of terrible personal misfortunes. Eventually, it burnt down, he died, everything went wrong, and it sits there as a great ghost town factory. That end of the Giudecca has also got the woman’s prison and one other prison. It’s not a surprise that it’s the most communist of Venice’s sestiere because it’s quite rough. That’s why I would recommend Bosworth’s book. He writes brilliantly, it’s not humorless, and it deals with some of the nitty-gritty of population loss, of poverty, of economic reforms and changes. There are also some big political events. There is the revolt against the Austrians. Then there’s the acceptance of Italy and the effect of Italy coming in and extraordinary stories about the wars, both the Great War in which there was some shelling, but Venice was used for R&R, and the Second World War, when Venice did resist fascism for quite a long time but then gave in to it. There’s the terrible end of the ghetto and the effect of Nazi rule on Venice. You might say Venice escaped lightly, but it was still massively significant, which, in a way, takes me on to the next book."