Venice

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If you’ve got someone to woo, then a 40-minute gondola ride through the quiet canals from Bacino Orseolo will seduce even the stoniest of hearts. Trips start from 80 euros – the official city rate – rising to 100 euros from 19:00. The average gondola costs nearly 40,000 euros to buy, each smart watercraft being painstakingly assembled from 280 hand-made pieces, using eight types of wood. San Marco, the city’s unofficial centre, is home to the stunning Byzantine architecture of St Mark’s Basilica and the world-renowned La Fenice Theatre. Despite the high density of visitors, the area’s historic design and epic scenery are unforgettable. Castello is home to a picturesque waterfront and old markets. Discover local naval heritage at Museo Storico Navale, explore narrow streets to see laundry drying in the breeze and visit beautiful churches, tiny bars and second-hand bookshops. Dorsoduro, full of iconic architecture and stunning palazzos, is quieter than San Marco, yet has fantastic restaurants and hip bars. The old industrial quarter’s vibrant student scene is ideal for a cheap night out. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

Venice by Jan Morris | Waterstones

Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles." (The City: 18) But the most remarkable thing about this book is the writing. The prose is like wonder washing over one: That’s an awfully good phrase to hang it on, in that I don’t think there is another city that has remained as much as it was, say, 150 years ago. That’s unusual and it’s because of the extraordinary topography in that Venice has no suburbs. Almost every other city of any importance or size that one knows has a centro storico and then either there’s a downtown, or there are suburbs that dilute. It is also very good on the still current quite big issue, which is migration out of the city. The whole world is full of people moving into cities, but when you get highly developed as Venice did you move out. That probably starts in earnest after the Second World War, but it had happened before. There was the building of Mestre, and then of Marghera, the chemical port. Another extraordinary museum, less for paintings but for odd things, is the Naval Historical Museum, which is up by the Arsenale. It’s an extraordinary collection of model boats and shells. One of my favorite things is a series of working drawings for First World War battleships. They’re huge, complex, and very neat, and they did all this without a felt pen. They must have been waiting for the ink to splotch at any moment, and for the whole thing to be wasted.The silver reliquary of St Nicholas [in Bari] ...has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the purest spring water." (The Lagoon: 30) For more cheap hotels in Venice Italy, consider The Gritti Palace a Luxury Collection Hotel Venice. This luxury five-star hotel offers one of the most beguiling views overlooking the Grand Canal, plus the Gritti Epicurean School, Riva Yacht experiences and the Gritti SPA branded by Sisley Paris. The Grand Canal ... follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto - the origin of the Rialto." (The City: 11) Themis-Athena wrote: "Good grief. There are still PLENTY of books on this list that don't seem to have anything to do with Venice whatsoever! Other Venetian waterways ... have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub." (The City: 12)

Judith Mackrell Recommends the Best Venetian Reads - Waterstones Judith Mackrell Recommends the Best Venetian Reads - Waterstones

Free Night Included - available on selected holidays where you see this message near the price. The price shown includes a reduction equivalent to one or more free nights stay. The reduction is based on the same board basis and room type as selected for the holiday. These offers are subject to change and available for a limited time. Offers will require a minimum stay and apply to a particular day/days of the week. Changing travel dates may invalidate the offer and/or result in a holiday price change (e.g. if the flight cost is higher/lower). Offer may be changed/withdrawn without notice. Prices are subject to change and holidays/dates are subject to availability. Flying Hero Class - description sounds like it's a book about passengers on a plane. Are they en route to Venice? Absolutely. It’s dark and numinous and glittering and oriental. Even Ruskin, who loved it more than his mother, hates the cresting that goes around it. He’s full of frightful fury about various people’s work to it. But it’s right up there with Hagia Sophia as one of the great Byzantine, early Christian buildings.All Quiet on the Western Front - it's been some years since I read it, but I don't recall Venice in it. Anyone read it more recently? The book, first published in 1960, was originally titled 'The World of Venice', and the richness of its description makes Venice feel like an enclosed world, intoxicating, enthralling and claustrophobic and crowded: ( "the little subsidiary passages that creep padded and muffled among the houses, like the runs of city weasels.") This Venice as a place different and apart from the rest of the world, even from its own hinterland, the idea of it as a place of intrigue and carnival, which is a holiday from normal life more so than most cultural city destinations. (Although the recent level of prominence of the carnival and its masks for tourism are apparently a fairly recent innovation). Sudden coveys of youths" is rather marvellous phrasing. But much later, Chapter 21 hits a stride of particularly striking, almost too-rich descriptions: Let’s get to your final book, which is a book in Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti crime fiction series, Death in a Strange Country. Italy was the cradle of humanism, particularly in Padua and Rome, and the buildings of ancient Rome were being unearthed. People were trying to work out the lost wisdom of the ancients and the architecture was under their feet. Raphael famously recorded the paintings of the Domus Aurea in Rome. Palladio looked at these emerging buildings and, in the early 16th century, developed a new language of classicism which was of huge significance.

Best Books About Venice (24 books) - Goodreads

That’s not to say that city breaks to Venice are just for architecture fans – both the ancient city’s narrow streets and Venice’s outer islands are full of offbeat attractions. There are contemporary art festivals and scores of talented artisans, such as gondola makers, keeping age-old traditions alive. And, best of all, on holidays to Venice you can even have a go yourself – there are opportunities to try glass blowing, mask painting or a paper-making class. But he was a marvelous painter and an amazing thinker. His ideas were behind the Natural History Museum in Oxford being built, and the O’Shea brothers carving those extraordinary capitals. Someone would bring a plant from the botanical gardens in the morning, and these Irish masons would carve that plant into the building. A lot of those ideas about the Gothic, Ruskin cuts in Venice. He spends a lot of time drawing and measuring. He’s very careful, trying to tabulate the world. He has a lot of ideas about when arches became Byzantine, and when they became Romanesque. He is quite often quite wrong. But the idea is a powerful one, that Venice, as a Gothic city, is an act for good.His ideas then have a tremendous life in diaspora, particularly around Britain. You get buildings like Templeton Carpet Factory in Glasgow, the Meadows building at Christ Church, or St. Pancras station in London. There are a number of buildings that use the language of Venice in English architecture. It is a political thing, it is saying, ‘This is how you do good.’ It is also a bit of a historical guide as it was originally written 60 or more years ago. Morris updated it a few times, but the last of those was almost 30 years ago, and even in as apparently timeless cities as Venice, things change, so again little use as a practical tool. Hidden along Venice’s side streets behind an unassuming facade, this unique bookstore is home to a treasure trove of new and used books creatively housed in gondolas and bathtubs. Climb the staircase made out of damaged books to enjoy an idyllic view, and don’t miss out on taking a photo at the fire escape, which opens out to the canal. Also, try to spot one of the many resident cats the bookstore has adopted. The fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby." (The Lagoon: 26)