Venice: Pure City

Peter Ackroyd

While wandering around Venice last year, my uncle kept wondering how this city grew. How does a city spring out of water? Peter Ackroyd answers my uncle's question in Venice: Pure City. Venice didn't grow, it was manufactured. Almost two thousand years ago fisherman started building on some marshy islands in the middle of a lagoon, quickly connecting them.

Ackroyd touches on all aspects of the city, as shown by the section titles: "City from the Sea", "The City of St. Mark", "Ship of State", "Republic of Commerce", "Empire of Trade", "Timeless City", "The Living City", "The Art of Life", "Sacred City", "The Shadows of History", and "The City of Myth".

For hundreds of years Venice was an empire. It's main source of income was (and is) commerce and trade. The Venetians controlled the flow of goods from the East to Europe. They controlled much of the Adriatic Sea and had holdings on the mainland around them. Yet Venice itself is a constrained city. It cannot grow. Water binds it on all sides. Until a railroad track was built to the city, the only approach was by water.

With that many people in a confined space, the culture will be different. Everyone know each other's business. The culture becomes very public with lots of hiding places. The city facade is more important than what is inside. In fact, over the years, the outsides of the buildings have been redone many times without any internal changes to the buildings.

Ackroyd states that the city was built to take advantage of light and constructed beauty. It is determined that by the end of the 1700's there wasn't any place in he city that hadn't been drawn or painted. Poetry and books have been written about it. Shakespeare sets two of his plays in Venice. It sponsored Carnivale for almost a thousand years - a time of celebration and masks. Carnivale was revived in Venice in the 1970's. Walk down any commercial street and you will see the Carnivale masks on display in the stores.

Peter Ackroyd has written a fascinating book about all the aspects of Venice - its history, its people, its buildings, its waterways, its religion, its economics, its politics, and its culture. The book is easy to read although not a quick read. There are so many pieces of fascinating information. For example, logs (that had to be imported to a city of stone) were sunk deep into the mud as pilings and support of the city. Now, a thousand plus years later, those same logs are still there doing what they were made to do.

You don't have to be a historian or student of politics or society to appreciate Venice: Pure City. Someone like my uncle, an interested tourist, will appreciate this book. Ackroyd makes a complex city a bit easier to understand.