Venetian Dreaming
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Who hasn't longed to escape to the enchanting canals and mysterious alleyways
of Venice? Globetrotting writer Paula Weideger not only dreamed the dream, she took the leap. In Venetian Dreaming, she charts the course of her love affair with one of the world's most treasured cities.
Weideger's search for a place to live eventually takes her to the Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, one of the rare Venetian palaces continuously inhabited by the family that built it. She weaves the past lives of the family Donà with her own adventures as she threads her way through the labyrinthine city. Art and architecture are a constant presence. Yet even more strongly felt is the passage of time, the panorama of the seasons as reflected in special events -- Carnival, the Film Festival, September's historic regatta, midnight mass at San Marco. We follow Weideger as she explores the Ghetto, the expatriate community, and the lives of locals from noblemen to boatmen. Along the way she encounters everyone from the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim to the Merchant Ivory crowd, and experiences some high drama with the Contessa, her landlady. The resulting memoir is a wry and illuminating, intelligent and tender account of the once grand heritage and now imperiled future of Venice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On her second visit to Venice, Weideger (Travel with Your Pet) was so enthralled by the fabled city that she decided she had to live there. She convinced her reluctant partner, Henry, an Englishman with whom she made her home in London, to spend a year in an apartment in the rundown 17th-century Palazzo Don dalle Rose. Much of her overlong, workmanlike memoir concerns this apartment and her difficulties with the owners of the palace, descendants of the family of the doge who built it; the travails of getting her computer hooked up to the Internet; her problems with the language; and the frustrations of finding her way around Venice. She gets the upper hand with her landlords, who are no match for a tenant who grew up in New York City; meets important people, including some connected with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection; writes unflattering descriptions of most of her new acquaintances; visits museums and churches; and records her impressions of a few art works. The book is most interesting when Weideger turns the mirror away from her personal travails: she offers nice observations on the Jewish community and its cemetery, the history and construction of gondolas, and the city's long-standing battle with the sea and the pros and cons of the controversial MOSE, a proposed flood control barrier. Weideger's book lacks the charm and humor of expatriate memoirs like Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, but it appeals as a personal glimpse of one of Italy's most unusual cities.
