Venice is the only city on earth going backwards

The peril in Venice is the people trying to save it. But save exactly what for precisely whom? Venice is a corpse. It died in 1797 with the last, preposterous old Doge eased out by the French. Napoleon then insulted the Venetians by calling the Piazza San Marco Europe’s finest drawing-room. Now the drawing-room has become an undisciplined, overpriced, fatigued international playpen. In 1494 an itinerant Milanese canon, Pietro Casola, said there was nothing new to say about Venice. I’m not so sure. They say Venice defeats cynicism. Let’s see.

Those cute street signs in the vernacular? I daresay there are study groups in South Kensington which practise the old language over an ombra or two of Waitrose prosecco, but Venetians themselves are quite happy with modern Italian. Since most ‘Venetians’ live on the mainland, they have to. The signs were only put there very recently by a local authority with an eye to tourism’s lust for folklorico. It is rather like Llangollen Council struggling to express ‘internet cafe’ in the language of The Mabinogion. Which is to say, utterly absurd.

Venice is stuck in reverse, the only city on earth going backwards. Clinging tenaciously to its past, contemporary Venice resists almost every intrusion of modernity — except, that is, tourism: the one that damages it the most. Tourists have been fed images of a Virtual Venice for 300 years. As Henry James observed, ‘Of all the cities in the world it is the easiest to visit without going there.’ That does not seem to stop them. Preserving the fiction has become destructive of the very spirit that made Venice a miracle.

Virtual Venice is so powerful, it is not always easy to see it afresh. Before the booming cadences of Henry James and Ruskin before him, there were nay-sayers, including Edward Gibbon, who visited Venice while he was preparing to write his Decline and Fall.