Venice, A Travellers Companion

An anthology of writings about Venice, including those of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning and Horace Walpole. The book features maps, engravings and notes on the history and buildings and on everyday Venetian city life.

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Views of the city of lagoons and gondolas; Henry James was passionate: 'You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it...', whereas Mark Twain found St Mark's 'so ugly...Propped on its long row of thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seems like a vast, warty bug taking a mediaeval walk.' Reactions to Venice have been, throughout the ages, astonishingly different. John Julius Norwich has produced a dazzling anthology from the writings of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning, and Horace Walpole, among many others. From the days of the sixth century, when lagoon-dwellers lived 'like sea-birds' in huts built on heaps of osiers, to the Venice of eighteenth-century revellers and nineteenth-century art lovers - the city's many different guises are all portrayed as its inhabitants and visitors saw them.