Ariel by Derek Johns

Author:Derek Johns [Derek Johns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571331659
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

These resonant words welcome the reader to the city. (The giving of latitude and longitude figures became something of a trademark in later writings, by the way. It’s as though, having been almost everywhere, Jan always needed to situate precisely the place she now happened to be in.)

The early chapters of Venice do indeed constitute a history:

So the Venetians became islanders, and islanders they remain, still a people apart, still tinged with the sadness of refugees. The squelchy islands of their lagoon, welded over the centuries into a glittering Republic, became the greatest of trading States, mistress of the eastern commerce and the supreme naval power of the day. For more than a thousand years Venice was something unique among the nations, half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia.

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