Throned on her hundred isles

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).

In 1611 the old Wykehamist Thomas Coryat, who had walked from Somerset to Venice, became fascinated by the number of religious liturgies on offer in the city. He had to be rescued from the Ghetto by the British ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, after getting into a blazing row with indignant rabbis. Anyone who crosses into the Ghetto today by the bridge from the Fondamenta d’Ormesini will pass over the same canal that the ambassador’s gondola happened to be navigating when the hard-pressed Mr Coryat attracted his attention. For, as the author points out, ‘the layout of Venice’, in contrast to most cities, ‘has not changed very much in the last 500 years’.