But Jonathan Keates’s adoring tribute is blind to the city’s faults, particularly the trade in slaves
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskOne is the role of women. After a stint as queen of Cyprus, for instance, Caterina Cornaro survived lethal dynastic machinations to preside over a court in Asolo, near Venice, which attracted some of the finest minds of the late 15th century.
Some of the best-known paintings of Venice feature exotic animals and figures in turbans and robes. Modelled on a church in Constantinople, St Mark’s Basilica is highly unusual among Italian cathedrals. Even today, Venice has unique global connections. Where else would you find an island community of Armenian monks?
Faced with recounting more than a thousand years of the city’s rich and tangled history, Mr Keates has taken the understandable decision to just leave out the boring bits. Like a savvy gondolier with a boatload of the more intelligent sort of tourist, he steers from topic to topic, giving his readers enough information for a basic understanding of each before slipping down the nextHis love of the city radiates from every page.
Mr Keates offers a long list of the goods that Venetian merchants brought back from their Black Sea colony of Tana, near the mouth of the Don. Yet he neglects the trade in slaves. Venice’s deep involvement in the trafficking of human beings, also repeatedly deplored by the papacy—not least because many of the victims were sold to Muslims—gets a single page of text.
In similarly breezy fashion, he asserts that, in the Stato da Mar, “subject populations were content enough to become, by adoption, sons and daughters of St Mark, living in relative safety and public order.” Tell that to the exploited, expropriated Cretans who revolted 27 times during the four and a half centuries of Venetian rule. As poor Gaspara Stampa would have agreed, love can be thrilling, but blind.