I’ve never forgotten that feeling of first approaching Venice from the lagoon. She smacked me in the face and then she floored me, and I will admit to being enthralled, and not a little love-struck. It was the vast, shimmering splendor of the city that captured me at first; but then, once I’d stepped off the boat, I was captivated on a more intimate level—as she enticed me into her spooky, shadowy lair and never released me.
It’s a sensation that most visitors share, for who doesn’t love Venice—even with her crowds of bewildered selfie-stick tourists; her I-saw-you-coming prices in the restaurants; or even the occasional, drain-like pong in a side alley? She is one of the most visited cities in the world with good reason. People travel there for romantic weekends, for the opera, the palaces, the churches and museums.
Maze of alleys
For cocktails at Harry’s Bar, for drifting along peaceful canals in a gondola, or for getting lost in the maze of alleys that fiendishly weave their way across the city. It’s a place of film festivals, art festivals, or where Hollywood stars go to get married. It’s mysterious, historic and famously sinking into the sea. There’s really nowhere else like it on earth.
But as intimately as travel can acquaint one with Venice, the city is perhaps just as well-known from novels, art and film. From these sources, we have come to accept that Venice is a place of carnivals and courtesans; of Stygian fogs and dark twisting backstreets where something sinful or criminal is sure to lurk. Pick up any novel that’s set in Venice and certain words will leap at you from the blurb: Decadence, seduction, mystery, forbidden love, corruption, excess.
And then there is the word that appears with such regularity that it could constitute its own literary sub-genre—“crumbling.” Crumbling Venice could be anything from moldering palaces and peeling piazzas through to the disintegration of the characters themselves. It seems that Venice is fixed in our imaginations as a place of decay. It’s not only gothic in its architecture—it’s gothic in its nature.
When did this love for “crumbling Venice” begin, and why has it taken hold with such tenacity? By the time Victorian historian and art critic John Ruskin encountered the city in the 1840s, he thought Venice was so neglected that she might melt into the lagoon “like a lump of sugar in hot tea.” It’s true that Ruskin feared any further deterioration, but what appalled him to an even greater extent was any attempt to modernize the city. He wanted a Venice that was set in aspic, a time-capsule for posterity.
- Lit Hub
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