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[Adrian Scottow/Wikimedia Commons]
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The Book of Venice
Edited by Orsola Casagrande
(Comma Press, £9.99)
“VENICE demands a lot of you. It requires infinite patience, unlimited devotion, if you really want to love it. It demands a lot because it thinks it has a lot to give. Which is often the case.”
So muses a character in post-Zoom reflective mood in Annalisa Bruni’s 25th April 2020, one of 10 contemporary writers featured in this collection of pieces about the iconic — arguably too iconic — Italian city.
The Book of Venice is a welcome eruption of incandescent working-class voices breaking through the sedimentary sludge of syrupy travelogues and self-obsessed novels by, usually foreign, writers. If you’re expecting vignettes in the style of William Ruskin, Thomas Mann, EM Forster or even Jan Morris, you will be abruptly and pleasingly disabused.
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