When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of the western world. The Venetian Republic had lasted over 1,000 years — longer than ancient Rome — without a revolution, a coup d’état or a successful foreign invasion. Yet after 1797 it was never to be independent again: it was given to Austria, taken back by France, allotted once more to Austria and finally, in 1866, handed over to the young Kingdom of Italy.
Most visitors to Venice are interested in its distant past, in the struggles to build a city on the mudbanks, in the glories of its gothic architecture, in the scuole decorated by Carpaccio and Tintoretto, even in the decadence of the 18th century with its alliterative seductiveness of carnivals and Canaletto, courtesans and Casanova. Yet less colourful eras must have their historians, and R.J.B. Bosworth, who has written distinguished books on Mussolini and Fascism, is a knowledgeable guide to the last century and a half.
Excessive enthusiasm has never been a characteristic of the Venetians. Few of them were either zealots of the Counter-Reformation or ‘Rome or Death’ patriots of the Risorgimento. Similarly, as Bosworth points out, Venetians were generally moderate, both in their adoption of Fascism and in their anti-Fascist retribution following the fall of Mussolini. ‘Venice survived the violent depradations of Nazi-fascism with relatively little loss and barbarity.’
The author writes informatively of the industrialisation of the lagoon and the liberal politics of the post-unification decades; he also has interesting things to say about such neglected figures as Giuseppe Volpi, the entrepreneur and initiator of the city’s film and music festivals. Yet unfortunately the text too often becomes less a history of the place than a chronicle of its events based on a methodical study of the pages of the newspaper Il Gazzettino — of what was happening at the Biennale or the various festivals, of which operas were being performed at the Fenice.
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