I FIRST VISITED VENICE IN 1970, AS A STUDENT, AND I CAN still remember the touch of condescension in the voice of the manager of a small Venetian hotel as he directed me towards the smallest and cheapest of the boxes he offered his guests. Yet despite this qualified welcome, Venice cast its spell. It is above all a city to explore on foot – by far the best way to understand any city if the traffic will allow one, but especially appropriate for Venice with its numerous passageways, unexpected squares, lapping water, and feast of decorated doors and windows. Here was my first chance to catch some of the moods of this most ambiguous of places.
Since then the city has been woven in and out of my life. I have taken A-level art historians there as part of the final week of an Italian summer school (by then, in the heat of August, the Lido won out over art) and over the years have introduced my growing family to the city. It is an especial pleasure to dedicate this book to my daughter Issie, who first came to Venice when she was very small indeed but now can visit it on her own. May the city survive for her to introduce it to yet another generation of the family!
There are, of course, too many books on Venice. Perhaps no other city has so fragmented itself in the imagination. As the historians John Martin and Dennis Romano have recently written, ‘There are simply too many Venices, too many unknown dimensions. Just when one believes one is beginning the story line, Venice transmogrifies and, both in spite of and because of the richness of its archives and artistic treasures, is again a mystery, an enigma, an indecipherable maze of interweaving stories, false and true.’* My only excuse for adding another story, another book, lies in serendipity (it has, above all, been fun to write) and my own interest, primarily as an ancient historian, in how a particular set of artistic treasures from the classical world interacted with two thousand years of European history.
CHARLES FREEMAN,
November 2003