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Best-Ever Writing on Favourite World Cities – Venice

Looking for great, exciting writing that illuminates the cities you visit?  Then check out Oxygen Books’ innovative city-pick series featuring some of the best-ever writing on favourite world cities. It’s already been called ‘superb .. like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes’ (London Times), ‘wonderful’ (London Guardian) ‘sublime’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) and praised for its ‘super-relevant destinations’ (Lonely Planet Magazine)

Each paperback book includes over fifty writers, fiction and non-fiction, past and especially present, including newly translated writing. So far there are titles on New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin – St Petersburg, Istanbul and Jerusalem/ Tel Aviv follow soon. For more details, visit www.oxygenbooks.co.uk , ( available in North America at www.bookdepository.com ). In the meantime, enjoy a little taste of Venice, here from Henry James’ Wings of the Dove (1902):

“Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it can be at all managed–you know what I mean–some fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves, with a cook, don’t you know?–with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement. [...] Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us back to our truth of a moment ago–the fact that, more than ever, this October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship.”

Here from Jane Langston’s The Thief of Venice (1999)

“At the east end of the thronged square the Basilica of Saint Mark loomed out of the grey fog like a dream of oriental splendour. In the mist the brilliant colours of the mosaics and the marble columns seemed a little washjed out, as though every tourist snapshot had stolen here a blush of rose, there a glitter of gold. On the balustrade above the central protal the bronze horses pawed gthe mist, two with the left foot, two with the right.”

Simon Luff, Diary (2006)

“Coming out of the dim, leather-smelling cave of the handbag shop into the unique dazzle of a Venetian afternoon. Yes, it’s the light, the light and…so much else.. But the light above all. I don’t think even Canaletto got it right. Not quite.”

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice (2009)

“Piazza San Marco, so lovely in photographs or at dawn, so pigeon-congested once the day got going.”

Now you can buy city-lit PARIS p&p free in the US and Canada at www.bookdepository.com

Great news for our US and Canadian customers - all city-pick titles are available on www.bookdepository.com But that's not all: there are also some nice discounts and everything is post and packing free. What's not to like!

The novel that's got young Venetian lovers declaring their passion with padlocks

Thousands are copying the protagonists of Federico Moccia's bestseller I Want You by attaching padlocks to bridges, including Venice's Rialto bridge, writes The Guardian's Tom Kington.

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Lovers hang padlocks on Rome's Ponte Milvio. Photograph: Eric Vandeville

City officials up and down Italy who are wondering why their bridges are being weighed down by padlocks have clearly not been keeping up with Italy's latest teen literature sensation. Federico Moccia's bestseller Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You) features a young couple attaching a lock to Rome's Milvian Bridge as a sign of eternal love.

The thousands of sweethearts who have decided to imitate this touching gesture are among the 2.5 million readers of the book, which charts the romantic entanglements of brooding young Romans who hang out in the upmarket streets of the Parioli district.

The 2006 book was a follow-up to Moccia's first blockbuster romance Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo (Three Metres Above the Sky), which bombed on its release in 1992, only to become a cult hit with Roman students 12 years later.

Tapping into the kind of tortured adolescent passion that has made the Twilight series so successful in the US and beyond, Moccia's career went stratospheric when Italian teen heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio was cast to play the lead in the books' big- screen adaptations.

However, the critics were savage, damning both novels as insipid, clunky and clinical exploitations of teen angst, and poking fun at Moccia, now 49, for writing about Rome's beautiful youth despite being himself a plump, balding, middle-aged man.

But Moccia has had the last laugh with healthy global sales thanks to translations into Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese, although it is not yet available to an English-speaking readership. "These are universal stories," he said on Wednesday . "And that is why the padlocks are now appearing on bridges right around the world, including Brooklyn Bridge."

But not everyone is happy about this new fad, with Italian officials claiming that the love padlocks are damaging stonework, and daily newspaper La Repubblica calling the locks on the Rialto bridge in Venice "vulgar".

"That seems really excessive," said Moccia. "If you go to Venice, you'll find that they have bigger things to worry about."

www.theguardian.co.uk

 

'So much more than your average pocket guide ...the perfect companion' Real Travel Magazine on city-pick Venice

 

Back at the Venice Biennale with Jeff in Venice's Geoff Dyer

  

It is impossible to say anything about Venice that has not been said before, says the eponymous hero in my novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Including that remark, replies Laura the woman he has fallen for, thereby completing Mary McCarthy's self-reflexive observation in Venice Observed. Venice is more thoroughly surrounded by quotation marks than any other place on earth. It is, as academics like to say, a textual as well as an actual city, one comprising all the prior novels and poems that have been set there. To visit the city is simultaneously to read it. This is dramatised by Jeff and Laura's visit to the graves of Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky (who, in Watermark, quotes a devastating putdown served up by Susan Sontag in the course of their visit to Pound's sort-of-widow, Olga Rudge).

Maybe I missed it last time, but there's now a little plaque honouring Brodsky at Zattere, overlooking Guidecca. Such details aside, the Venetian experience remains entirely resistant to change. Any variants are generated by the season or the particular nature of the festivities that happen to be in progress while one is there. The opening of the Art Biennale – that's what the fictional Jeff, a journalist, is there for – permits no variation at all. The artists in their respective countries' pavilions or featured at the Arsenale change, but the experience always conforms to an identical template. I went back this year for the first time since 2007, curious – and more than a little anxious – about seeing it through the latest literary prism (my own). Narcissistic? Of course. How could it not be in a city built on water and perpetually gazing at its own loveliness: an endless succession (this is McCarthy again) of reflections, echoes and mirrorings?

Jeff is way down the art totem pole. That is a major difference between us. I am not on the totem pole at all, and am completely dependent on my wife, who works at a London gallery, for access. She had got me accredited as a journalist, but I had no intention of filing anything. Obliged, at the place where Anselm Kiefer was launching the latest in his fleet of rusty u-boats, to give the name of the publication I worked for I honestly admitted my status by writing "Plus One". Over the first of many bellinis, at the first party of many parties, I said to my wife that, like people who ask a magician to keep doing a trick until they see how it is done – thereby destroying the magic that provokes this desire for serial repetition – we had surely come one time too many.

As usual a lot of the art was garbage ("a waste of one's eyes"), but there were wonderful things too. I suspect that the garbage-mediocrity-greatness ratio is as fixed as the Venetian experience itself; all that changes is the complexion of the component parts (less porn this year, a bit more politics?). And the great things are all-redeeming – in a setting that, in any case, requires no redemption. Such as? The huge bamboo spiral thingy built by Doug and Mike Starn, towering over the neighbouring Guggenheim like some Asian remake of Tatlin's unmade Monument to the Third International. There was a party there, and we ended up perched at the top, swilling bellinis, marvelling at the health and safety implications of our precarious yet stable nest.

Christian Marclay's The Clock was being shown in two locations – double time! – but whenever I found myself at either place it was always in the temporal midst of a sequence that I'd already seen in London. Time itself came in quotation marks. Still, I found myself thinking with increasing frequency, I am having a quite fantastic and beautiful time, drinking bellinis, shooting the breeze and making off-the-cuff remarks which might well have been self-quotations.

When the book came out it was widely assumed to be a satire of the art world – which surprised me, since I thought I was setting out my idea of a good time, a good time I was now in the process of repeating, almost scene for scene and word for word. (Incidentally, while one can be unintentionally funny or ridiculous one cannot be accidentally satirical – satire's crippling affliction and limitation. I did not intend to write satire, therefore the book is not satirical.)

Venice really is the most wonderful place on earth, I said to someone, or possibly no one. We were on the terrace of the Bauer Hotel at the party thrown by Dasha Zhukova and I felt very happy be to be there, untouched by any sense of contradiction or guilt about the way that a few hours earlier I had proposed lobbing a couple of beer bottles at her boyfriend Abramovich's boat as a protest about the way that he had amassed his wealth and had used it (in the form of this gleaming over-boat) to obstruct people's view, especially the view of people who did not have the great good fortune to be at his girlfriend's party, enjoying a view of the Grand Canal from the terrace of the Bauer, swilling all this free champagne.

The dark water was dappled with lights from water taxis; it was beautiful, magical, romantic and full of promise, and the fact that I had already written up such a romance did not diminish this reality-remake of it at all. Then, through a daisy chain of introductions, we met a magician called Mark Mitton who, in spite of the jostling of the champagne-lashed crowd, produced a deck of cards and treated us to a display of close-quarters tricks. At one point he took my wife's wedding ring from her hand, made it disappear and reappear half-a-dozen times until finally it vanished completely – only to show up again in a sealed envelope in my jacket pocket. The night had jumped out of quotation marks, as if by magic.

The Guardian 11 June 2011

Need the perfect guidebook to Venice? Look no further than Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

If you're off to this year's Venice Biennale, take Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities – it will bring the place magically to life says The Guardian's Jonathan Jones

 

Real yet unreal ... Italo Calvino's Venice is the paragon of cities. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Italo Calvino's 1974 novel, Invisible Cities, is the perfect paperback to have in your pocket, or – let's annoy the luddites – downloaded on to your e-reader if you happen to be visiting this year's Venice Biennale.

Invisible Cities is a metafictional guide to Venice, an elegy to a succession of exotic and remote cities that are all versions of Venice, according to the Venetian traveller Marco Polo – who in Calvino's book describes them to the emperor Kublai Khan. He never mentions Venice, instead he describes all the other fantastic places he claims to have visited. But when Khan asks him to speak of Venice he replies: "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"

So Venice is the city of Hypatia, where you expect to find beauty but instead see crabs biting the eyes of drowned men; it is Chloe, a place full of strangers whose eyes meet momentarily in shared fantasies that no one ever acts on, so as not to spoil this great city's "voluptuous vibration"; it is Sophronia, a city of two halves, one a fairground, the other a collection of classical marble monuments. When the temporary part of the city ends its seasonal visit it is dismantled and taken away – and the fairground that remains all year must wait for the moveable monuments to return.

All of these places are described in calm, authoritative language by Marco Polo in Calvino's compelling book. Each one is a poetic image of some aspect of urban life: though the book is abstract, you will constantly find yourself picturing the streets of your own city or cities you have visited as you read. Despite being just longer than a hundred pages, Invisible Cities touches inexhaustibly on the essence of the human urge to create cities, be in cities, speak of cities. If all the cities are Venice, it is because Venice is in some sense the perfect distillation of the idea of a city. Ever since the Renaissance, when Shakespeare imagined the lives of its merchants, Venice has floated in the world's imagination as a paragon of cities, real yet unreal.

But there is another good reason to take Invisible Cities to the Venice Biennale. Mike Nelson's installation in this year's British Pavilion is itself a fiction of invisible cities, weaving together the architecture of east and west, evoking places at once ancient and modern, luring you into a fable of urban life and death. Calvino is also the perfect accompaniment to Nelson's work because ever since he created his masterpiece of modern art, The Coral Reef, at Matt's Gallery in London in 2000, the artist has been consciously creating physical, experiential, three-dimensional equivalents of the type of magical fiction that Calvino so masterfully brought to life. In fact, Nelson's key influence is Jorge Luis Borges, whose name he once told me how to pronounce correctly, when I interviewed him. But in Venice, the writer he resembles is surely Calvino, and a critic's praise of this sublime Italian author also applies to Nelson's singular achievement as an artist: as Gore Vidal said of Calvino, Nelson has found "the place where the spiders make their nests ..." and there learned to make his own webs "to which all things adhere".

The Guardian, 3 June 2011

Check out the latest city-pick 2011-12 catalogue here (includes our new titles New York, Istanbul and St Petersburg)

Oxygen Books new catalogue has just arrived from the printers and we think it looks brilliant! All our current titles, plus city-pick New York, Istanbul and St Petersburg in special postcard-style format.

Do check it out here: Download Oxygen Books catalogue 2011-2012

If you'd like a copy sent to you please send your name and address details to: malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com

 

 

 

 

 

city-pick Venice and Soho's Polpo - an ideal Venetian combination says The Lady Adventurer

Very Venetian: Soho's Polpo restaurant

John Berendt, City of Falling Angels (extracts in city-pick Venice)

Venice inspires. From Canaletto to Casanova to the travel-dreamer imagining a sleepy afternoon gondola ride or a Bellini in Harry’s Bar. For anybody who longs to be in the city built on a lagoon, you can immediately, if temporarily, transport yourself to the canals, piazzas and back-street bars with a book and a bacaro.

City-pick Venice is an anthology of writing dedicated to Venice which brings together the words of, amongst many other great writers, Jan Morris, DH Lawrence, Mark Twain and Geoff Dyer. I asked Heather Reyes, the editor, what it is that captures the imagination of artists, film-makers and particularly writers: “I suppose the main thing about Venice that inspires writers is its utter difference from anywhere else in the world. I think all cities make one marvel at what human beings are able to achieve, but Venice even more so. The sheer technological achievement (especially 'back then') of not only building a city in water but making it such a beautiful city is awe-inspiring.  I think the colours of the buildings and the particular light one gets from the proximity of water also add to the sense of beauty and 'difference' which inspires writers - and the fact that Venice offers a very different 'sound world' from other cities. Yes, there is plenty of noise in some parts, but without road traffic to contend with, the ears are given different human music - voices, echoes, the splash of water. And the fascinating and very particular history of the city has inspired many writers. The city has attracted many famous visitors and residents (permanent or temporary) in the past - as well as the present - and these provide ideal subjects for the historical novelists, along with the wealth of lush detail in costume, architecture, and traditions.”

Londoners can also have their taste buds inspired by indulging in the Venetian tradition of cicheti – small plates of food to accompany drinks – at Soho bacaro Polpo. My visit was a Campari Spritz blurred heaven as plate after plate of treats including Fritto Misto (battered seafood), Polpette (meat balls), chicken liver toast and a tasting portion of wonderful seafood spaghetti arrived. It’s crowded and conversation bounces off of the bricks and wooden tables ensconcing you in the world of the Venetian bar. Stepping back outside it’s a momentary surprise to find that you never left London at all.

Further details:

• City-pick Venice is available now. Visit www.localbookshops.co.uk to buy it from your nearest, independent bookshop.
• www.polpo.co.uk

 

 http://bit.ly/gBfDfg .

 

Ladyadventurer.co.uk

'This new style of travel book ... read city-pick Venice before hailing the next vaporetto water taxi' Florence Newspaper

 

A travel book with a twist - a review of Venice (City-Pick Series)

Wednesday, 16 March 2011 00:00

Amy Cox

With costumed children and confetti decorating the sidewalks, the beginning of March can only mean one thing here in Italy: Carnevale. Those planning to visit the birthplace and heart of the celebration itself should consider reading “Venice” (2010), the latest edition of the City-Pick series edited by Heather Reyes, before hailing the next vaporetto water taxi.

This compilation of writings from over 60 authors paints a multifaceted picture of the richness contained in the decadent palaces, murky canals, and dazzling light. Reyes combines the voices of famous visitors and true Venetians alike to provide a new type of travel book that contains vivid impressions instead of the typical list of museums, restaurants, hostel prices, or directions. Excerpts from the works Charles Dickens, Henry James, Simone de Beauvoir and others help to eloquently re- veal the true pulse of the famous city.

“Venice” plunges the reader into the labyrinthian streets and canals of La Serenissima in a manner that the average guidebook simply fails to achieve. The col- lection covers every subject from flooding during acqua alta to the notes of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” played at La Fenice opera house. At times the disjunctive narrations and Reyes’ contextual comments can distract the reader from composing a cohesive idea of Venice. However, this new style of travel book is perfect for those who seek more than an introduction by Rick Steves. “Venice” invites the reader to slip into a gondola for a few pages and enjoy the ride

Will the last Venetian to leave Venice please turn off their gondola light.

 
Activists in Venice have defeated a plan that would have shut the ancient fish market, writes Tom Kington in The Observer. Now the fight will continue to reverse the ravages of mass tourism.

After a remarkable week, Michela Scibilia is breathing a sigh of relief. The Venetian activist has been at the forefront of a successful battle to safeguard the future of one of the city's best loved institutions, the fish market at the foot of the Rialto bridge where locals have shopped for their food for 1,000 years.

"If the people who still live here are going to protect this city, we have to pull together, and I think that's finally happening," said the head of the growing residents' association 40xVenezia.

It was a victory that will pass unnoticed by the millions of tourists who visit Venice every year, but that does not diminish its significance for locals. "They understood we were serious," said Scibilia, 44, a graphic designer and mother of two. "We are standing firm against all choices made without consulting Venetians first." And last week's victory was just a start, they claim.

The fish market was threatened by plans to expand docks for the enormous cruise ships that tower over St Mark's Square like skyscrapers. This would have forced the Rialto market's main suppliers to leave Venice for the mainland. The furious response from residents saw a dramatic U-turn by the mayor, Giorgio Orsoni. At a press conference last week he conceded: "The fish market at Tronchetto will not be moved."

Matteo Secchi, the head of protest group Venessia.com, explained: "The plans were being passed around at the council for the expansion of the cruise ship terminal at Tronchetto, on the landward side of Venice, near the station. To do that they would have moved the wholesale fish market from there to the mainland, leaving the Rialto market without a supplier."

For the Venice-born campaigner, the idea of the Rialto trying to sell frozen fish sticks to discerning locals would amount to a death sentence for the market painted by Bellini and would mark a loss to Italy's heritage on a par with the recent collapse of buildings at Pompeii. "And for what? We would have got more 300-metre long cruise ships causing havoc in the Giudecca canal," he said.

Scibilia's organisation is just one of a number of local online pressure groups bringing together local traders and professionals who are issuing a list of demands to the city's rulers that they believe can help ward off rampant tourism and halt a slide in the city's population.

Venessia.com has been responsible for a series of noisy – and often very funny – actions designed to highlight the plight of a Venetian population which has come to feel increasingly besieged over the years. In 2009 the 100 activists, who are backed by more than 1,000 members, rowed a coffin down the Grand Canal when Venice's population sank below 60,000 from over 150,000 in the last century. "We are now down to 59,500, it's slowing slightly as we get down to the 'zoccolo duro', the hard core," he said.

Last November, the group dressed as cartoon characters and set up a joke "Veniceland" near the station to make the point to tourists how the growth of hotels and the disappearance of small shops and affordable housing is pushing local residents out and turning Venice into a theme park.

"Unfortunately a lot of tourists thought we really had opened a theme park," admitted Secchi.

But after claiming victory at the Rialto, Venice's cyber activists have taken heart and are now writing a manifesto for the future, complete with demands including turning the city's former naval yards – the Arsenale – over to residents.

"Thankfully the town hall has now said 'no' to plans to build yet another hotel, but how about setting up a school that teaches kids on holiday to steer a gondola and the other local boats?" said Scibilia.

"We are watching this carefully," said Secchi. "We want shipbuilders to be given space. After all, we were masters of the trade for centuries but are now forced to buy our vaporetti from builders in Ancona."

Venessia.com's football fans are also keeping a wary eye on the new Russian owners of Venice's football team, who are planning to move the team to the mainland.

"We are furiously protesting about the redevelopment of the old barracks, the Caserma Manin, where the council promised 38 flats for locals, but which will now only be used by visiting students," said Secchi.

The flight of businesses as rents soar was summed up by the departure to Vicenza of Guerrino Lovato, the city's expert maker of carnival masks, said Secchi. "Rents are out of the control and the council, which owns lots of property, should be giving a cheap home to the craftsmen."

Scibilia's next big campaign is to compel the council to keep the doors open to the public at the historic Fontego dei Tedeschi palazzo near the Rialto, which used to house a post office before Benetton purchased it. "Benetton are under instructions to keep it as a public space, and they must be made to keep that promise," she said.

According to Scibilia, a new sense of unity is inspiring local activists. Secchi's group does the rowdy protests; 40xVenezia attracts the better behaved professionals. "That's fine. We are like the Rolling Stones to their Beatles," he said.

city-pick Venice, featuring over fifty writers on Venice, includes a piece by Venice writer Michelle Lovric on an earlier Venessia.com action.