In these brilliantly realized, linked tales, the real Venice is revealed – not the iconic tourist destination the city has become, but the mysterious society that resides behind its elegant doors and shuttered windows. With a sly and affectionate delicacy, Jane Turner Rylands, an American expatriate who has lived in Venice for thirty years, portrays a dozen Venetians– a construction foreman, a countess, a gondolier, a postman, an architect, a Baronessa, an English lord – as they pursue their respective interests. And in turn, through the perspective of those who live and work in this most alluring of cities, Venetian Stories illuminates canals and palazzos, churches and gondolas, large concerns and small rituals, with an uncommon intimacy.

From the author of the acclaimed Venetian Stories, a captivating new collection about Venice from the perspective of its residents. A professor writes lectures on Venetian literature for American millionaires. A baroness falls in love with the architect restoring the ancient palazzo of her husband’s family. An ambitious gallery owner sells a young artist’s work faster than he can paint it. A salesman finds a way to trip up a narcissistic race car driver who seems to be able to get away with anything. As her characters negotiate the conflict between tradition and a rapidly changing city, Jane Turner Rylands draws us deep into a society all but unknown to outsiders.

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Venetian Heritage--whose mission is to safeguard Venetian cultural legacy as manifested in architecture, music, and fine art--this stunning volume highlights the organization's work in restoring, preserving, and promoting the cultural heritage of Venice. This book showcases the most impressive restoration projects of the last twenty years, from the eighteenth-century façade of the Church of Jesuits and early-Renaissance façade of the Church of San Zaccaria in Venice, to the Chapel of the Blessed Giovanni Orsini and the Romanesque portal of the Cathedral of Saint Lawrence in Croatia. Beautifully photographed in breathtaking detail, this volume tells the story of the crucial role that Venetian Heritage has in preserving the art of Venice both in Italy and in the areas once part of the Republic of Venice.

An inspector rages against the announcement that police HQ is to relocate – the way so many of the city’s residents already have – to the mainland... An aspiring author struggles with the inexorable creep of rentalisation that has forced him to share his apartment, and life, with ‘global pilgrims’... An ageing painter rails against the liberties taken by tourists, but finds his anger undermined by his own childhood memories of the place... The Venice presented in these stories is a far cry from the ‘impossibly beautiful’, frozen-in-time city so familiar to the thousands who flock there every year – a city about which, Henry James once wrote, ‘there is nothing new to be said.’ Instead, they represent the other Venice, the one tourists rarely see: the real, everyday city that Venetians have to live and work in. Rather than a city in stasis, we see it at a crossroads, fighting to regain its radical, working-class soul, regretting the policies that have seen it turn slowly into a theme park, and taking the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink what kind of city it wants to be.

Originally published in 1966. This book is primarily a literary study of Rousseau's account of his diplomatic experiences in Venice, contained in book 7 of the Confessions and written in 1769. The author analyzes Rousseau's methods of achieving an artistic rendering of psychological truth in autobiography, as exemplified in his treatment of the events of 1742–1749. Professor Madeleine Ellis contributes to an understanding of Rousseau as a creative artist and positions him vis-à-vis the classical and romantic movements. Ellis collates the text of the Confessions with contemporary correspondence and other documents to show how discrepancies between the two have artistic implications. These implications lead her to define Rousseau's principles and methods as a man of letters and the interrelations of art and truth in his memoirs. In revealing that Rousseau, the memorialist, gives an artistic rendering of psychological truth, Ellis shows Rousseau's attitude toward truth. She does this by following a path of analysis unexplored by previous critics but indicated by Rousseau himself when he says, "It is the story of my soul that I have promised . . . I record not so much the events of my life as the state of my soul as they happened." Ultimately, the objective of this study is to illustrate the artistic means—literary and rhetorical—employed by Rousseau and their implications for the truth he proposed.

Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of classic stories set in Venice, by an international array of brilliant writers. The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunting "Don't Look Now," Anthony Trollope's wartime romance "The Last Austrian Who Left Venice," Vernon Lee's spine-chilling "A Wicked Voice," and a scene from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James's tale of passion and betrayal in a Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. The famed Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova weighs in with escapades from his notorious Memoirs, alongside enthralling selections by Baron Corvo, Marcel Proust, Camillo Boito, and Jeanette Winterson. In its multifaceted portrait of La Serenissima, Venice Stories showcases a lineup of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate.

While on vacation in Italy, Sonia decided to marry Francesco, a beautiful young man she’d only just met. They fell in love in Venice, the thrilling city of water, and it was as if they were under a magic spell. They should have lived happily-ever-after, but all too soon Sonia runs away, back to her hometown. She hadn’t factored in the linguistic and cultural isolation of life in Venice, but what really drove her away was that she, with no family of her own, just couldn’t get used to her husband’s warm, loving clan. When her husband comes to find her, she rejects him again. Can there be any hope for a future between two so very different people?