If Venice Dies
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- €12.99
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- €12.99
Publisher Description
“This powerful book of cultural criticism” by the renowned art historian “shines a harsh light on” a historic city’s destruction in the name of profit (The Washington Post).
What is Venice worth? To whom do its irreplaceable treasures belong? This eloquent book by art historian Salvatore Settis urgently poses these questions, igniting a new debate about urban stewardship and cultural patrimony at large. As Venice grows increasingly unaffordable and inhospitable to its own residents, Venetians are abandoning their hometown at an alarming rate. At last count, there was only one local for every 140 visitors.
As it capitulates to tourists and those who profit from them, Venice’s transformation into a lifeless shell of itself has become emblematic of the future of historic cities everywhere. In this blend of history and cultural analysis, written with wide-ranging erudition and élan, Settis makes a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice.
“Anyone interested in learning what is really going on in Venice should read this book.” —Donna Leon, author of My Venice and Other Essays and Death at La Fenice
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Few urban landscapes are as recognizable as Venice's, but as Settis, an art historian and former director of the Getty Research Institute, writes, tourists now outnumber inhabitants and dozens of municipal institutions have decamped to the mainland, replaced by luxury hotels and "a tourist monoculture." Meanwhile, around the world, prefabricated doge's palaces flanked by a few desultory canals have been "constructed with cheap building materials, but nonetheless presented as the epitome of luxury." These cut-rate imitations are often more tourist-friendly than the real thing. Plans are even afoot to build a theme park of Venice on one of its own outlying islands. "The virus of the simulation has wormed its way into Venice and has ensnared it," Settis writes, "like a mirror that swallows up the face of whoever looks into it." He observes that as cities worldwide are swept up in the "rhetoric of heights" the race to build ever taller skyscrapers people are herded into anonymous cubicles, sapping the vitality of the streets below. Settis laments the commodifying, transactional effect of capitalism on communities' ideas about their identities, purposes, and aesthetics, and this brief book is at once a moving eulogy for Venice and a resounding manifesto, enriched by a dense web of historic, literary and cultural allusions.
