Venice: A Traveller’s Reader

Views Of The City Of Lagoons And Gondolas; Henry James Was Passionate: 'you Desire To Embrace It, To Caress It, To Possess It...', Whereas Mark Twain Found St Mark's 'so Ugly...propped On Its Long Row Of Thick-legged Columns, Its Back Knobbed With Domes, It Seems Like A Vast, Warty Bug Taking A Mediaeval Walk.' Reactions To Venice Have Been, Throughout The Ages, Astonishingly Different. John Julius Norwich Has Produced A Dazzling Anthology From The Writings Of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning, And Horace Walpole, Among Many Others. From The Days Of The Sixth Century, When Lagoon-dwellers Lived 'like Sea-birds' In Huts Built On Heaps Of Osiers, To The Venice Of Eighteenth-century Revellers And Nineteenth-century Art Lovers - The City's Many Different Guises Are All Portrayed As Its Inhabitants And Visitors Saw Them.