Approximately 500 new books on Venice are published every year and this is not the first literary anthology devoted to the city. But Marie-Jose Gransard lectures in Venice about Venice to Venetians, and conducts her students on guided tours of the city. Her selection draws on sources going back over 800 years and across six languages. So the text, based on very wide reading, is crowded with unfamiliar observations and includes the impressions of artists, musicians and diplomats as well as writers. This is not a guide book for the first-time visitor, but for anyone who knows Venice, and cannot keep away, it provides a delightful change.
We are given Ruskin, Byron, Goethe, Henry James, Thomas Mann and Hemingway. But we also have the recollections of Hans Christian Andersen, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Chekhov, Kafka, Nietzsche and Voltaire. We meet Dante, invited to a banquet by the Doge and demanding a larger helping of fish, Rousseau falling asleep at the opera so that he can wake up to the sound of music, and Wagner working on Parsifal and habitually failing to pay his ice-cream bills (a habit that was shared many years later by Orson Welles).
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