Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City

By Dennis Romano

Oxford University Press 2023 

“There is no city more written about, more painted, and more misinterpreted than Venice,” wrote Dorothy Menpes one hundred and twenty years ago in her book Venice (richly illustrated by her famous artist father). “Normally one feels that the last word about Venice has been said – the last chord struck upon her keyboard, the last harmony brought out. But this is by no means the case. There are chords still to be struck, and harmonies still to be brought out: her charm can never be exhausted.” 

That inexhaustibility is easily visible just with a stroll down the relevant shelves of your library. Venice: Lion City Gary Wills, Venice: A History by John Davis, Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd, Inventing the World by Meredith Small, Venice: A New History by Thomas Madden, City of Fortune by Roger Crowley, the ubiquitous A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich … all these and a dozen more in just the last few decades, and these are only the books that look at Venice’s centuries of history, not even including all the touchy-feely impressionistic accounts that will sometimes glance at those centuries of history before hurrying on to moved souls and shimmering shadows. Venice has been provoking fascinated outbursts of prose for a long, long time. It’s a crowded, delightful field.

Readers in that field will know the pitfalls: easy sentimentality, derivative factoids, lots of Casanova, a Canaletto on the cover. And those readers will almost certainly have two books on their own Venice shelves at home already: Venice Reconsidered by John Jeffries Martin and Dennis Romano and particularly The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari by Dennis Romano writing solo, an invigorating blend of biography and city history. Readers of those two books might have thought, over the years, “wouldn’t it be great if Dennis Romano joined that crowded field with a big comprehensive history of Venice?” 

Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City is Dennis Romano’s big comprehensive history of Venice. Romano, emeritus history professor of Syracuse University, begins his book, an indispensable addition to the busy shelves of popular histories of the Serene Republic, in the fifth century and brings it all the way down to the present day, when the old city is being threatened by rampant gentrification and rampant climate change. 

Romano writes in full awareness of that crowded field full of earlier authors. “What these writers and countless others have sought to convey is that Venice is, simply put, a miracle,” he observes. “Yet since miracles cannot be explained, such musings rob the history of Venice of its lessons and meaning, obscuring the ceaseless work and harsh realities that building a city on water requires.” What follows in this book’s 700 pages is markedly short on shimmering shadows and cheerfully full of ceaseless work and harsh realities. This is the story of a city where men and women have worked and laughed and dreamed and coveted, and Romano’s curiosity is so omnivorous that he delves into all of it. Most readers have absolutely no idea how fascinating Venice’s history is in its blizzard of details; Romano’s Venice narrates more of those details than any other one-volume book on the subject, everything from warships to glasswork, opera to Ottomans, and all of it built on a compendious bibliography. The booming dye industry, for instance:

Venice’s easy access to dyeing agents from both Asia and the Levant, as well as New World alternatives, meant that dyers were constantly developing new tints, and this fostered growth. But the city’s environment posed obstacles. One was the lack of fresh water. Salt water’s chemical properties can affect the reaction of dyes. Accordingly, much of the rinsing of dyed cloth was relegated to the edges of the lagoon where sweet river water was more abundant. Another problem was water pollution caused by the chemicals used in dyeing. The government tried to push most dyeing to the city’s edges.

Romano’s story is full of vivid personalities (Doge Francesco Foscari gets a generous time on-stage, naturally), and for the Venice that 30 million people visit every year, perhaps no two personalities are more central than Piero Foscari (a distant relation, yes) and Giuseppi Volpi, who in the early 20th century masterminded changes to Porto Marghera that essentially made Venice what it is today. “The long-term impacts for Venice of Porto Marghera’s development are inestimable,” Romano writes. “On the one hand, relocating heavy industry to the mainland, it saved the historic center from becoming the object of indiscriminate modernization. On the other, it created a new disjunction between the city and terraferma …” Suddenly the cranes, the trucks, and the warehouses were over there, leaving Venice proper free to become an idea of itself. “With the building of Porto Marghera, historic Venice had made its choice,” Romano writes. “Its twentieth-century future would count on tourism, not heavy industry.” 

Yes, Romano sometimes gets carried away a bit, as when he writes, “No city on earth has been more profoundly influenced by its natural environment than Venice” (even if you’re ruling out Pompeii, Plymouth, Montserrat would like a quick word). And yes, his book has a Canaletto on the cover. But the book is a long-awaited masterpiece. And the Canaletto is beautiful, of course.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News