MAGAN�S WORLD:THE GUIDEBOOK I took to Venice last summer was 50 years old, and yet captured the city-state perfectly. Perhaps currency is less of a priority in travel guides than we might think, although calling Jan Morris's Venice a guidebook is like calling the Old Testament a self-help book. It is more of a distillation of the sensual and philosophical core of the archipelago, with languorous descriptions, gossipy asides and deliciously nutty insights.
Morris returned last year to Venice to mark the 50th anniversary of her book (it’s been continuously in print since 1960), and to her slight disquiet noticed the Rough Guide to Venice described it as “insufferably fey and self-indulgent”. But it is precisely these attributes that make it great. It is over-the-top and, as such, perfectly in tune with the city’s extravagant notions of itself.
Morris describes the arrival of spring “as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender”. This is matched by winter, when “a harsh, raw, deep miasma overcomes the city for weeks at a time”, and the odd fierce wave sweeps in off the canals and “throws the moored boats viciously against the quays. The nights are vaporous and tomb-like, and the days dawn monotonously grey”.
Morris paints for us both the glorious facades and the grimy underbelly of the city. She summons in words the triumphal arches designed by Palladio and decorated by Tintoretto for Henry III of France, who was conveyed to the city in a ship rowed by 400 Slav oarsmen, with an escort of 14 galleys and rafts of glass-blowers working at floating furnaces. This is balanced by a scene of criminals pillaging Titian’s house even as he lay dying of the plague in 1576.
The book favours the scandalous, unsavoury side of history, knowing that Venice can trumpet its pomp and glory well enough on its own. At its height, the Serenissima was like a mob-ruled Las Vegas, with four times more prostitutes than patrician ladies: 11,654 in total, “of whom 210 were carefully registered in a catalogue by a public-spirited citizen of the day, together with their addresses and prices”.
The longevity of Venice as a tourist destination is one of her primary interests. She captures perfectly the various waves of recent tourist: Henry James devotees, Gucci-clad heiresses, African counterfeit handbag sellers and the linen-clad, mahogany-skinned tycoons with their super-yachts and sleek secretaries.
But long before any of those, Venice had a roaring tourist trade, with 100,000 people flocking to festivals in the medieval age and even an organisation of tourist police in the 13th century “to inspect hotels for cleanliness and comfort, and speed the lost visitor (in any of several languages) towards the more expensive shops”. Morris even guides us towards a modern-day inn that “was temporarily closed in 1397 when its landlord was condemned for giving short measures”.
Visiting a place through Jan Morris’s eyes is always enlightening, even if it is through the gaze of half a century ago when she was still James Morris. She turned 80 in 2006, and the Irish travel writer Paul Clements decided to mark the event with a book in which the great figures of travel writing shared their thoughts on her.
Clements quotes one critic describing her as “like the flautist who stands before a city executing brilliant runs, trills and arpeggios, conjuring a miasma of sound and colour that you can only applaud for its virtuosity”.
And Paul Theroux wrote that “she is historian, diarist, journalist, and at her best combines these attributes into an intense and lasting impressionism. She is the most painterly of travellers and can be the most precise.”
As Clements says as his focal scoir, “Brava, Maestra!”
Jan Morris: Around the World in Eighty Years, ed Paul Clements (Seren, 2006)
Venice by Jan Morris (Faber Faber, revised edition 2004)
manchan@ireland.com