A companion to the best-selling Venezia by Tessa Kiros

Since the extensive floods of 1966, inhabitants of Venice's laguna areas have come to share in, and reflect upon, concerns over pressing environmental problems. Evidence of damage caused by industrial pollution has contributed to the need to recover a common culture and establish a sense of continuity with "truly Venetian traditions." Based on ethnographic and archival data, this in-depth study of the Venetian island of Burano shows how its inhabitants develop their sense of a distinct identity on the basis of their notions of gender, honor and kinship relations, their common memories, their knowledge and love of their environment and their special skills in fishing and lace making.

The master ship builders of seventeenth-century Venice formed part of what was arguably the greatest manufacturing complex in early modern Europe. As many as three thousand masters, apprentices, and laborers regularly worked in the city's enormous shipyards. This is the social history of the men and women who helped maintain not only the city's dominion over the sea but also its stability and peace. Drawing on a variety of documents that include nearly a thousand petitions from the shipbuilders to the Venetian governments as well as on parish records, inventories, and wills, Robert C. Davis offers a vivid and compelling account of these early modern workers. He explores their mentality and describes their private and public worlds (which in some ways, he argues, prefigured the factories and company towns of a later era). He uncovers the far-reaching social and cultural role played by women in this industrial community. He shows how the Venetian government formed its shipbuilders into a militia to maintain public order. And he describes the often colorful ways in which Venetians dealt with the tensions that role provoked—including officially sanctioned community fistfights on the city's bridges. The recent decision by the Italian government to return the Venetian Arsenal to civilian control has sparked renewed interest in the subject among historians. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal offers new evidence on the ways in which large, state-run manufacturing operations furthered the industrialization process, as well as on the extent of workers' influence on the social dynamics of the early modern European city.

This book focuses on the question of how Venice designed and exported its own identity through all kinds of its goods. What are Venetian commodities? More than any other medieval or early modern city, Venice lived off of the trade of portable goods. In addition to trading foreign imports, the city also engaged in intense local production, manufacturing high quality glass, crystal, cloth, metal, enamel, leather, and ceramic objects, characterized by their exceedingly rich forms and complex production processes. Today, these objects are scattered in collections throughout the world, but little remains in Venice itself. In individual instances, it is often difficult to tell whether the objects in question were actually made in Venice or if they originated in Byzantine, Islamic, or other European contexts. This book focuses on the question of how Venice designed and exported its own identity through all kinds of its goods.

A ghost story, a swashbuckling romance, a puzzle... Jean-Pierre Petitfeu and his wife, Claire, have spent time each year in Venice, ever since they lost their ten-year-old son in a boating accident. Each year they take familiar walks and eat in their favorite restaurants, swept away again and again by the beauty and history of Venice. On the first day of their twelfth visit, Jean-Pierre discovers, hidden behind the cornice of a wall in their room, an old manuscript, the memoir of a man named Giovanni Pietro Pofoco, who lived in Venice at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rich with death and passion, Pofoco’s memoir reads like an adventure story full of sex and violence, with idealism at war with the corrupt establishment. Presumably Pofoco died in the early fifteen hundreds, although as we read more of this remarkable story, we may come to doubt that he died at all. “Lovers of Venice, of history, of complexity will delight in these repeated rambles across ancient waterways and down winding streets. The novel is an intriguing palimpsest in which several characters’ journals provide layers of experience and inquiry.” —Sheila Ortiz Taylor, novelist “Braendlin’s Through a Venetian Looking Glass is an original and nuanced evocation of Venice populated with compelling characters that ricochet around one another over centuries. Read it, love it, bring it to Venice, read it again.” —William Luhr, Ph.D., Professor of English and Film, St. Peter’s University

Discusses the relation of Venetian color to social, cultural, and environmental factors

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.

Bookbound. Hardcover books lie flat for ease of use. Acid-free, archival paper. A detail from G. B. Arzentis Birds Eye View depiction of early 17thcentury Venice adds continental sophistication to this journal. Embossed, iridescent highlights, ribbon bookmark.