Venice has a cruel habit of defeating her admirers. Even her most confident suitors, who arrive via water taxi intent on enjoying all her charms and treasures, return home heavy with second-rate vongole and the humiliation of that unseen Titian. I was left in tears on a Venetian quayside when, after a long day of sight-seeing, I thought I had missed the once-a-day boat crossing to San Francesco del Deserto, the mystical island that Saint Francis had visited on his way back from Africa.
Luckily, there’s a cure for our heartache: Venice for Pleasure. This irreverent guidebook by the English art historian J.G. Links promises “a guide to the pleasures of Venice without its pains”, which, in our era of frantic mini-breaks — of Instagramming and TikToking our way around as many must-see landmarks as possible — is a marvel and a revelation.
“Very few travellers seem to enjoy their first visit to Venice,” Links cautions. “They are awed, dazzled, overwhelmed… [but] above all, they are exhausted by it; physically, mentally and emotionally, its assault is too much for the ordinary human being to withstand.” This is a book for that wild curiosity: a tourist in pure pursuit of pleasure. If they follow Links, they may end up skipping their three-hour tour of the Doge’s Palace, but “Venice will have woven its spell around them, and they will be captives for life.”
Links asks just one thing: that everyone be a walker, “or, at least, a dawdler”. And that is because his guide consists of four narrated walks around Venice, from the shimmering Zattere to the lonely Cannaregio. The streets, Links says, have “a miraculous spring in the paving which makes fatigue almost impossible”. And he is careful to stop at “as many cafes as possible” for coffee or apéritif, from where he enchants us with stories and architectural details about nearby palaces, churches and bell towers contemplating collapse.
With Links as a guide, the idea that Venice is somehow not real — that it is a circus, a Disneyland, a fossil — is banished. On my own strolls, I have seen drowsy postmen loading Amazon parcels onto little delivery boats at dawn; babbling Venetians spilling out of a bar onto the canal, eating baccalà mantecato and drinking wine from paper cups; families fleeing the stink of the summer to the furthest beach on the Lido; a seagull losing a brawl with a lagoon squid, turning the water jet black; a distressed elderly gentleman who has misplaced a valuable miniature he was hoping to sell. This is not a city without a soul.
There is another side to Venice: the merciless tour guides; the menageries of Murano glass animals; the overpriced, often-disappointing food (there is nothing worse than that fearful “delicacy”, the Venetian soft-shell crab, plucked from its squalid existence on the lagoon floor for your displeasure). Even Jan Morris, a lifelong admirer, admitted to feeling that tourism was “in some sense a prostitution of a great city, a degradation, a shame”.
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