Venice is the only city on earth going backwards

Amanda Marie

Well I agree that the citizens of Venice deserve to have their chance at modernization, I've also seen the poetical side of Venice, that historical mysticism that historians yearn to keep alive. Venice cannot possibly be the dead, corpse of a city you describe. The streets are filled with life! It takes no great imagination to see the past here. It's a place where one can see what used to be sand transformed from glass into a horse in less than a minute before your eyes! For me it inspired a story, for others a dream...if indeed it did inspire a dead city with no life or culture for yourself, than perhaps it's time you re-visited the city with a poet's eyes. Gracie.

David

I can't work out if this piece is sincere, or merely tongue in cheek provocation. I note that the famous Marinetti quote in which he recommends filling in the Grand Canal and driving racing cars along it is not included above. Perhaps this is because it is normally used to demonstrate just how completely nutty this inspirer of fascism was. The more industrialised, visually banal, and homogenous the world becomes, the more imperative it is that we value, maintain, and preserve cities such as Venice. I admit that reconciling the traditions of such a place with the demands of modernity and mass tourism presents an enormous challenge, but the idea that this unique city should simply be brought up to date for the sake of 'convenience' seems to me grossly insensitive. We should not allow romantic commonplaces about Venice to obscure the fact that it is a city which preserves in a mercifully intact state some of the important moments in Western - indeed world - visual culture. To see buildings, paintings and sculpture in such abundance and in their original, largely unspoiled context is an experience without parallel anywhere in the world. It has been suggested that the architectural fabric of the city is so closely woven as to be considered a single, immensely complex building. To insert faddish pieces of modern architecture into this seems to me rather like a restorer painting a pair of Nike trainers onto, say, a damask-clad senator by Carpaccio. Yes, it may sometimes be inconvenient to have to live in a city which often resembles a large open-air museum, but that's just too bad, I'm afraid.

Sara Harpenden

Stephen Bayley is right to jibe at some of the gawping tawdriness of modern tourism which seems to have become the chief reason for Venice's continued preservation. My own pet irritation is the concerts given in churches and scuole grandi, in which Vivaldi's Four Seasons so inevitably and repetitively feature, and in which the performers are got up in absurd perruques and other eighteenth-century trappings, as if it would somehow diminish the experience to pointlessness for them to appear in modern concert dress and vary their programme a little. But behind the shallow smile of 'hellovenezia' I think there is something worth keeping in Venice as a museum - a rare glimpse of a European urban skyline pierced only by spires and campaniles - and a small vision of what a modern mercantile city-state like Hong Kong might have been like if it had grown up in centuries past. And there are enough other great cities - such as London, Rome, Jerusalem and Istanbul - where the archaeological strata lie just beneath the surface of a crowded modern life, to make it worth sparing the quaint counterpoint of Venice preserved.

jorge ryder

architects cannot just stay away from prime space... talk about Canaletto: what has happened to London speaks for itself ... the fact that Venice has become an important spot in the Comtemporary Art map is the opposite of supposedly only going backwards...