Best Books About Venice

"Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time. Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should. The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure photographs made them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as perfect as a film set, and the panorama across the water from the Palazzo Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. "

As always the Rough Guide  is a great introduction to Venice.  Beyond the hotel and restaurant tips, the Rough Gudie, but it really comes alive when describing the city.  There are suggestions for many days' walking -- much better in fact, than several 'walking'  tour guides we also consulted. Good maps are essentuial and give a sensible layout of this maze of a city. The 'Brief History' is excellent job, and then you're ready to  delve deeper and that's what the rest of this hub is about. 

This is an abridged version of Ruskin's  original which ran to  3 volumes. It's a delightful book -- both for the highly opinionsated views and for the extraordinary pomposity with which they are tossed at the reader. John Ruskin was a  respected yet controversial art and architecture critic in the 19th century. It's impossible not to discover more about art and architecture from his book. At  times his turns of phrase or absurd positions are enough to make the New Yorker comic pieces of  Woody Allen's or Steve Martin seem dour.  Ruskin is unaquainted withed  humility and can be no opinion  besides his. For example - "I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five orders: but there are only two real orders; and there can never be any more until doomsday."

This spark gives   clarity and vitality to  his descriptions and keeps the pages turning.. I was fortunate enough to discover  this book while  in Venice, so I was able to search out his examples of the 5 worst buildings in Venice, and similar Ruskinisms. -- One brief example: "The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The Lombard covered every church which he build with the sculptured representations of bodily exercises - hunting and war. The Arab banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their minarets, 'There is no god but God'. Opposite, in their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, is VENICE."

Ruskin's Venice : The Stones Revisited by Sarah Quill. This makes the   perfect and beautiful companion book to John Ruskin's eccentric views of this city. Using Ruskin's text as a guide Quill also wanders the city capturing Ruskin's ideas, while producing her own view of this captivating island fantasy.

The Blue Guide to Venice

Jan Morris The World of Venice

CIA World Factbook for Italy

John Julius Norwich -- A History of Venice - shorter than his Byzantium triology, but just as readable

Joseph Brodsky - Watermark - essays by the poet  from a winter spent in Venice

Vikram Seth - An Equal Music - set in Venice,  portrays the intimate workings of a string quartet.

Thomas Mann - A Death in Venice

Dorothy Dunnett -- Niccolo Rising (House of Niccolo) one of several of her books that take place in Venice

Ian McEwan - The Comfort of Strangers - the eerieness of Venice and its mouldering nobility set the backdrop for this twisted tale.  The movie with Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken is unforgettable