Venice - City of Haunting Dreams
Introduction
"So, o'er the lagoon
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I learned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gloom,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven."
Percy Bysshe Shelly
To many people, Venice is quite simply the most beautiful city in the world. At first sight, it appears like a dream - it's breathtaking architecture and almost overwhelming weight of centuries challenging us to question the pace and purpose of our modern day lives.
It is a city of many contradictions - something grand but faded, magical yet ghostly, beautiful but with a dark, sinister undercurrent running through its canals and a pervasive sense that a second spectral city exists beneath the façade of everything you see. Sense too the silence and spirituality of the great cathedrals and churches, feel the aura of the once mighty Venetian Empire and the decadence of its fall from grace.
Step away from the Grand Canal, let the gaudy masks and plastic souvenirs fade into the background and enter this ghostly world. See the 'Bridge of Sighs' as it must have seemed to the friends of prisoners marched along it, San Michele Cemetery, 'The Island of the Dead', with its barred and locked door set low on the water-line, the peeling walls of a once proud palazzo, the mossy steps of a canal-side residence, a gilded funeral gondola, a solitary cloaked figure walking home from a carnival, St Mark's Square in winter, wreathed in white as mist sweeps in from the sea...
Published in:
- Italy on November 1st 2001 by Penguin Italia
- UK on March 1st 2002 by Little Brown & Company
- USA on March 1st 2002 by Little Brown/Trafalgar House
A selection of images from the book can be found here.
Hardback copies are available through The Marsden Archive priced at £40. Click here to order. No more than 2 copies of each book is available to purchase at one time.
