Venice Portfolio: Creating the Myth of Venice

Introduction

“When twenty-five years after his first visit, the well-known English traveler and Catholic, Henry Vollam Morton, chose to stay a second time in Venice, he took a hotel quite near the San Zaccaria vaporetto stop on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the so-called Calle delle Rasse. Eager reader of sites that he was, he immediately wanted to find out what the name of the street in which he was to spend the next couple of weeks meant, and he came across two things typically Venetian. What he first learnt was that the calle took its name from the type of weather-resistant black cloth imported from the Serbian landscapes of Raska or Rassia and used for the covering of gondola roofs, a cloth which, at one time, had been the main trade of the row. The calle thus proved to be a rightfully Venetian site, a place not merely situated in a city of gondolas but also metonymically designating it: not just a mere part of the city’s syntax but also already part of its semantics. In addition to this, however, H.V. Morton also learnt that, in the eighteenth century, a rasse-like fabric formed the basis for the production of some kind of ribbon, a ribbon strong enough to hold together long thin slats of wood, which were then arranged in such a way as to produce a type of blind which, from that time on, became known all over Europe as ‘Venetian’.
‘While discovering the meaning of rasse, I solved a mystery which may perhaps have puzzled others: why window-blinds of a type never seen in Venice should be called ‘Venetian’. The explanation is that during the eighteenth century, when this kind of blind was first made, the slats were bound with a strong canvas similar to rasse known as Venetian.’
The name of the calle thus also referred him to the central element in the construction of such a blind, i.e. to the instrument with which you can shut out, or let in, the view. Reading a city is to try and raise its blinds. Any travel writer’s fantasy is to see himself as ‘master of the rasse’, as the one manipulating the strings in order to make his readers see the, or at least his, view. Detecting, discovering, unveiling are his main activities. So are explaining, interpreting, attributing meaning. With the choice of his hotel, Morton had quite inadvertently hit the very centre of the semiotic mechanism governing travel writing: the more you manage to manipulate the strings, the more you will be able to let in new signifiers, which you will then combine with the signifieds already deciphered so as to complete the semantic profile of the place” (Mahler 29-30).

Although rather long, I believe that this anecdote from the beginning of Andreas Mahler’s essay “Writing Venice: Paradoxical Signification as Connotational Feature” very neatly sums up the experience of being a writer in Venice, particularly the bit which states that “Any travel writer’s fantasy is to see himself as ‘master of the rasse’, as the one manipulating the strings in order to make his readers see the, or at least his, view. Detecting, discovering, unveiling are his main activities. So are explaining, interpreting, attributing meaning” (Mahler 30). The traveler’s joy comes not only from his or her own experience, but also in relating that experience to eager listeners and readers. However, no story or picture can ever quite fully capture the experience of travel and so the traveler has to make decisions about which anecdotes and photos he or she will present to his or her audience. When the traveler decides which parts of the travel experience to talk about, he or she is in effect creating a myth of the city, for by not delving into all parts, but only into the parts which make up an interesting story, the traveler is not truly recreating the city, he or she is recreating a mythical city which exists only in the stories which the traveler tells to listeners or readers. Collective travelers’ stories all about the same aspects of the city will eventually lead to the myth of the city becoming more recognizable than the true story. And so the myth continues to be perpetuated by future travelers because that is what people now want to hear. Although all travelers repeat the myth of Venice, it is the ways in which they tweak the myth to suit their own tastes and purposes that keep it fresh and interesting to audiences and which help it to continue to grow and thrive. How different travelers, from Lord Byron to Henry James to my classmates and I, have repackaged the myth of Venice, and attempted to make it their own, is the focus of this portfolio.

First, though, it may be necessary to quickly define the, or what in this portfolio is accepted as the, typical myth of Venice. The typical myth of Venice as defined for this portfolio is best described by John Martin and Dennis Romano in their essay “Reconsidering Venice”:

“the myth of Venice has…played an important role in shaping Venetian society, politics, and culture. [Scholars] have, in short, not only specified the fundamental attributes of the myth but also shown how the myth served particular functions and interests…the central elements of the myth were the beauty of the city, the stability of its government, the greatness of its empire, the piety of its citizens, and, finally, its liberta, its exceptional ability to preserve its independence from foreign power…The identification of the power of the myth as a discourse also had a tremendously important effect on the study of Venetian art and music, whose portrayal of the city’s history, legends, and, yes, myth could now be fruitfully analyzed. From the mosaics and the music of San Marco to the rich and variegated cultural life of the city’s churches, monasteries, guilds, and confraternities, art, music, literature, and theater have come to be seen as vehicles that celebrated and reproduced Venetian culture” (Martin/Romano 8-9).

For the purposes of this portfolio, the most important aspects of the myth as described by Martin and Romano are the facts of Venice’s beauty and the Venetian culture represented by the art, music, literature, and theater. The myth of Venice that I will be exploring is part what is told about in guidebooks, part what is said about it by scholars, and part what is simply experienced by being in the city.

Why Venice?

What is it about Venice that seems to inspire mythmaking more than other cities? Why is it this city in particular of which Henry James writes, “Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and you will find three or four high-coloured ‘views’ of it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of photographs”? Why speak this way of Venice rather than London, Paris, or Amsterdam, or for that matter, New York or Beijing? What is that specific essential quality of Venice that so particularly inspires the imagination?

Perhaps it is Venice’s uniqueness. With its canals as its principal “roadways” there is truly no other city like it in the world. So in that instance, this alien aspect of Venice that is so strange compared to the typical city roaring with wheeled vehicles, Venice is not only unique, but exceptionally foreign, making it a place that is an even greater escape than any other popular vacation destination. As Thomas Coryat writes in Coryat’s Crudities about his travels “But I will descend to the particular description of this peerelesse place, wherein if I seeme too tedious, I crave pardon of thee (gentle Reader) seeing the variety of the curious objects which it exhibiteth to the spectator is such, that a man shall much wrong it to speake a little of it” (Coryat 315).

There is also the fact that for centuries Venice was the intersection between the Eastern world and the Western world and the city today still maintains many of the vestiges of this past. The greatest example of this cross between East and West is the Basilica di San Marco, with its Eastern-influenced Byzantine mosaics that look down upon Western-influenced Roman Catholic Masses. Other instances of this cross between East and West include the many statues and symbols in Venice that hearken back to the Western-oriented Roman empire, which Venice wished to be associated with to increase their own standing, while in the midst of these Romanesque objects stands the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, with the zodiac used by sailors for navigation right on its face; astronomy was always a science more centered in the Middle and Far East, than in the Ptolemy-worshipping West. In present day, with all the turmoil in the Middle East, travelers who wish to view Byzantine mosaics and get a taste of Eastern influence without actually putting themselves in harm’s way by being tourists in a dangerous country can come to Venice and look upon these Eastern artifacts, while still being safely ensconced in the “more civilized” West.

There is also the fact of Piazza San Marco, said by many to be the most beautiful square in the world, containing not only the magnificent Basilica di San Marco, but also the stately and beautiful Palazzo Ducale, with the campanile soaring above it all and the lagoon perfectly picturesquely framed between the pillars of San Marco and San Teodoro. Coryat says about the piazza that it is “the fairest place of all the citie (which is indeed of that admirable and incomparable beauty, that I thinke no place whatsoever, eyther in Christendome or Paganisme may compare with it)” (Coryat 314).

Perhaps ultimately though the reason that Venice is a city about which myths are always being made is because it is a city that was founded upon a myth. Although history states that the first Venetian settlers had fled to the lagoon to escape barbarians ravaging their farms and towns on the mainland and had to work hard to make homes on the many water-logged islands of the lagoon, the Venetian story is that the city rose from the water on the feast day of the Annunciation, which is the feast celebrating the day the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and asked her to be the mother of Jesus. This myth also serves to raise Venetian importance as it aligns the city’s birth with the announcement of the coming of the single most influential human being in history. A city which bases its founding on such a grand myth is a city which will always gladly lend itself to being made mythical.

Recreating Venice for People at Home: Establishing My Venetian Myth

In my blog titled “Maria in Venice”, which I wrote for friends and family back home, I found myself almost immediately resorting to the tried and true myth of Venice when deciding what to write about for each post. One of the most interesting things I found when I read back over my earliest blog posts was the way many things are described as “just perfectly Italian.” In Kim Moreland’s essay “Bringing “Italianicity” Home: Hemingway Returns to Oak Park”, she states that
“Hemingway consciously signified what Roland Barthes terms “Italianicity” upon his return from Italy to Oak Park. Barthes notes the difficulty of naming the “signifieds of connotation,” offering, as the best means of doing so, a construction employing the suffix “-icity” that “derive[es] an abstract noun from [an] adjective” (Barthes 48). Thus “Italianicity is not Italy, it is the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting” (Barthes 48). In other words, Italianicity connotes rather than denotes Italy; it is the abstract sense of Italy, rather than its concrete reality” (Moreland 52).
As Hemingway presented an almost clichéd version of Italy to his friends and family when he returned from his time overseas, so too did I fall into the trap of signifying “Italianicity” in my blog at times, by sticking to pat versions of the same Venetian myth, rather than going deeper and trying to uncover for my friends and family the true Italy that lay beneath. I provided, rather than a full example of absorption into Italian culture, a “condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting” or, to keep true to Venice, everything from gondolas to the campanile.

What I discovered, however, and what I believe that Byron and Casanova at least knew, was that the most important thing to keep in mind was that I was writing for an audience. So, for instance, while I found Gregory Dowling’s lecture on the different Tintoretto paintings, and the differences between each of them, fascinating, that tour only comprised one brief paragraph in my blog because, as most people I know who would be reading my blog are not art historians, that discussion would not have been that interesting to them. The night tour of the basilica of St. Mark, on the other hand, had an entire post dedicated to it, because the basilica is such a staple of Venice which people know about and so that is what they want to hear about. However, by focusing on the more well-known aspects of the city, such as San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale, and the Biennale, rather than delving more deeply into aspects of the culture such as not touching the fruit at the vendor’s stands and the way most dogs are well-trained enough to run around without leashes, I have stuck to crafting once more the tried and true myth of Venice, the Venice of the stunning basilica with its golden mosaics, the beautiful and imposing Ducal Palace, and the quiet romance of a gondola ride. These are the things people expect to read about in a travel blog about Venice and so that is what I supplied.

Even while I was recycling the typical Venice that, as James suggests, everyone has already talked about, I was equally creating my own version of the myth by means of what I selected to talk about. For instance, even though I spoke both of the Doge’s Palace and San Marco, I found in rereading my posts that St. Mark’s basilica makes many more appearances in them than the Doge’s Palace. Although both make their obligatory appearance into my recreation of Venice, my own personal tastes lead me more strongly towards the basilica and so, because I find that more interesting than the Ducal Palace, its importance in my blog, and thus in Venice itself as I am creating it for my readers, becomes much greater. As Mahler suggested, the travel writer is “the one manipulating the strings in order to make his readers see the, or at least his, view”, which is exactly what I did through my blog. I raised the blinds on both the Doge’s Palace and San Marco, but because of my own interests, I raised the blinds higher and left them up for longer on the view of the basilica.

This focus on the basilica itself is also another specific example of “Italianicity” permeating my writing, because one of the pat images of Italy, and, I think, Europe in general, is the massive, echoing cathedral with its splendid ceilings and priceless pieces of art. Because churches such as this are fairly rare within the United States, people traveling to Italy, or reading about others’ travels to Italy, are particularly interested in seeing and hearing about these cathedrals. Yi-Fu Tuan states that “architectural space reveals and instructs”. In America, churches are typically just more institutionalized buildings with some religious symbols thrown in, which speaks to the way in which Americans see church as just another obligation, similar to a job in an unimaginative office space. The space in the Italian cathedrals, on the other hand, not only reveals the power of the states that built them, but also instructs those that enter the church for worship to feel small and insignificant before the Lord. As with Venice itself, it is their uniqueness, compared to churches in the United States, which makes them particularly fascinating to readers “back home”.

My use of photos (see Appendix A) and videos (see link on the side of the blog) also contributed greatly to my recreation of the myth of Venice for people reading my blog because one does not take a picture of the pigeon and dog poop lining the streets; instead, one takes pictures of the basilica, the piazza, and the canals, all the things which are represented on innumerable postcards because they are considered the true signifiers of Venice. The videos in particular are representative of creating the myth of Venice because I did not take videos of Italians shopping at the Billa, I took videos of the Venetian soccer game and the Salute celebration, situations which are more exotic than grocery shopping, experiences which people at home would not have the opportunity to enjoy in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

All of these objects together, my photos, my videos, and most importantly, my blog itself, create a myth of Venice that represents the typical myth but at the same time is unique to me.

My Contemporaries’ Recreations of the Venetian Myth

As I prepared this portfolio about recreating the myth of Venice, it only made sense to explore how my classmates, who were writing their own blogs, recreated the myth, since we were all here discovering the city simultaneously. Having not had much of a chance to really read my classmates’ blogs over the semester, I was truly blown away by the depth of analysis included in everyone’s posts. It was fascinating to go through and see how everyone not only discussed the myth of Venice, but also disseminated it, so that although at times blog posts were simply descriptive, as a blog is typically designed to be, there was always analysis included which broke down the myth of Venice and tried to get at the real city, or at least tried to further understand the myth and why it existed.

However, while everyone in some way discussed the myth of Venice, because it was such an important part of our class discussions, everyone covered different aspects of it. Even when people covered similar aspects of it, such as Caylen and Natalie both discussing our gondola ride, each person put their own unique spin on the topic (see Appendix B). This falls in with my thesis that although all travelers repeat the myth of Venice, it is the ways in which they tweak the myth to suit their own tastes and purposed that keep it fresh and interesting to audiences and which help it to continue to grow and thrive. A simple but interesting example of the ways in which we all repeated the same concept but each brought something different to the table is in the names which we all chose to give our blogs. On Blogger (which incidentally every single person used, despite the plethora of blog sites out there; this likely speaks to the quality of Blogger blogs), you must not only set up your blog with its title, but you must also choose your own website address. What I found fascinating was that, even with almost limitless choices before us, we all kept to pretty similar address names; the majority not only used their name in the address, but the word “Venice” as well. In fact, Dane, Caylen, and I all used the address “nameinvenice.blogspot.com” for our blogs. Clearly we were all thinking along similar lines in first establishing our blogs, but it is where each individual blog goes from there that is fascinating (see Appendix B for select excerpts).

Due to the fact that we all see many of the sites, usually together, I assumed that most of the blogs would stick to the same topics, the basilica, the clock tower, the different museums, etc. However, while most of these topics were covered in one way or another, different people pointed out different aspects of the topics, as well as publishing some blog posts that were completely individual to their own experiences, such as Dane’s “Walking in Dorsoduro” post and Shannon’s post about “My Parents in Venice” (see Appendix B).

Reading through my classmates’ blog posts provided another view, not only of the ways in which people recreate the Venetian myth, but also of our collective Venetian experience of the past eleven weeks.

Historical Recreations of the Venetian Myth

Although it was Henry James who famously suggested that there was nothing new to say about Venice, he also, within the same paragraph, suggests that
“It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there would be something new to say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having no information whatever to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme” (James 3-4).

It is clear that James sees no problem with the myth of Venice. In fact, he suggests that this is as it should be and he believes that “it would be a sad day indeed when there would be something new to say.” This is not to suggest, though, that he does not believe that different writers will not bring their own bent to the same story of Venice, because while James is blatantly fond of the place, he admits that “It is possible to dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent manner” (James 7). In fact, he says that “There are travelers who think the place odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous” (James 7) because “the sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries” (James 7). So while James suggests that there is nothing new to say about the city, he also admits that people will “discover” things that are new to them, which each person, who brings back a “collection of photographs”, will describe in their own way.

The passage which James wrote about the tourist’s brief experience of Venice compared to the visit of the traveler who stays longer was quite interesting because of the style in which he wrote it (see Appendix C for full text of this James passage). Instead of using either no pronouns, first person pronouns, or third person pronouns, James opts for the second-person singular, using “you” throughout his descriptions of the brief tourist’s experience in Venice. For example, he states that “After you have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions” (James 8). By using “you” instead of “I” or even “he”, James creates the effect of speaking to the reader as if about their own experience, rather than his own, if he had used “I”, or the experience of some other random person, if he had used “he”. By using “you”, James makes the descriptions intensely personal to the reader. This creates an overall sense that the reader has in fact had these experiences in Venice which ties back to what James began his book with, the suggestion that “every one has been [to Venice]” because it is possible to “open the first book and you will find a rhapsody about it,” as in James’s own book. James strengthens the myth of Venice through his descriptions of it, told in such a way that the reader is momentarily convinced that he or she has actually shared in his experience.

Lord Byron is another writer who famously strengthened the myth of Venice. In fact, Byron can be said to be even more influential than James in strengthening the myth because it was Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which talks about the Bridge of Sighs, which effectively created a new landmark for tourists to view.
“I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand. I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sat in state, thron'd on her hundred isles!” –From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv. Stanza 1

With the publication of Childe Harold, Byron became an almost instant celebrity and people hung on his every word. People would consult their Byron while they were in Venice in order to make sure that they were seeing all the “right” sites. This great readership increased the power and authority of the myth which Byron created in his writing, most notable, as already stated, in the case of making the Bridge of Sighs an important Venetian landmark. In the case of Byron, even more so than James, it was the devoted audience which helped to make legitimate the myth which he had formed.

There is a clear difference in the way in which James and Byron propagate the Venetian myth than in the way it is done by present-day writers. The language for one, while descriptive for both sets, is much more flowery and intricate when coming from the hands of the great masters of literature than when it comes from my hands. However, the sites described are still the same. The Doge’s Palace, the basilica, the piazza, the gondolas, the canals, all the necessary facets of the Venetian myth are present both then and now.


Is there a “true” Venice or does it now exist only in myth?


Having come this far in analyzing the myth of Venice in both the present and the past, the final question to ask is this: Is there, in fact, a “true” Venice or does it now exist only in myth?

James Donald, in his essay “Imagining the Modern City”, would suggest that there was, in fact, never a real Venice because cities themselves are only imagined.

“It is true that what we experience is never the real city, ‘the thing itself’. It is also true that the everyday reality of the city is always a space already constituted and structured by symbolic mechanisms. But representation does not quite get the measure of the relationship between those two realities, for it implies that one reality must be a model for the other, or a copy of it. More to the point, maybe, is Ihab Hassan’s invocation of the immaterial city which, he suggests, has ‘in-formed history from the start, moulding human space and time ever since time and space moulded themselves to the wagging tongue’…If it is not quite a representation, maybe…it would be more accurate to think of the city as an imagined environment. This environment embraces not just the cities created by the ‘wagging tongues’ of architects, planners and builders, sociologists and novelists, poets and politicians, but also the translation of the places they have made into the imaginary reality of our mental life” (Donald 8).

Donald suggests that what is typically thought of as “the city” is actually simply the combined stories of the people who have talked about or written about the city. This applies directly to the myth of Venice because it suggests that, in fact, the myth, the collective story which people tell about Venice, is the only true reality of the city.

Conclusion

All travelers repeat the myth of Venice but all travelers present different facets of the myth, depending on what interests them most and the way in which they describe it. Ultimately, it is all of these versions of the same myth that collectively make up, not only the myth of Venice, but, as Donald suggests, Venice itself. The myth is Venice. Venice is its myth. The city cannot be separated from the way people perceive it and that is as it should be. To greatly alter the myth, to greatly alter the city, would be to destroy it, as James maintains when discussing the much-repeated myth. Travelers come to Venice hoping to uncover the real, but the real Venice is in fact the myth, the myth which has been drawing people to this city for centuries.

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Bibliography of Non-Class Readings

Mahler, Andreas. “Writing Venice: Paradoxical Significations as Connotational Feature”. Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice. Eds. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V. 1999.

Moreland, Kim. “Bringing ‘Italianicity’ Home: Hemingway Returns to Oak Park”. Hemingway’s Italy: New Perspectives. Ed. Rena Sanderson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.