Venetian Dreaming [Paperback]

Paula Weideger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2003

Who hasn't longed to escape to the enchanting canals and mysterious alleyways of Venice? Globetrotting writer Paula Weideger not only dreamed the dream, she took the leap. In Venetian Dreaming, she charts the course of her love affair with one of the world's most treasured cities.

Weideger's search for a place to live eventually takes her to the Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, one of the rare Venetian palaces continuously inhabited by the family that built it. She weaves the past lives of the family Donà with her own adventures as she threads her way through the labyrinthine city. Art and architecture are a constant presence. Yet even more strongly felt is the passage of time, the panorama of the seasons as reflected in special events -- Carnival, the Film Festival, September's historic regatta, midnight mass at San Marco. We follow Weideger as she explores the Ghetto, the expatriate community, and the lives of locals from noblemen to boatmen. Along the way she encounters everyone from the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim to the Merchant Ivory crowd, and experiences some high drama with the Contessa, her landlady. The resulting memoir is a wry and illuminating, intelligent and tender account of the once grand heritage and now imperiled future of Venice.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Similar to Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, this travel narrative offers a look at daily life in Venice from the perspective of a native New Yorker who knows only a little Italian. A frequent contributor to Town & Country, Weideger had always dreamed of living in Venice, and readers can feel her anxious delight as she describes every detail of her apartment in the Palazzo Dona dalle Rose a Venetian palace she had read about in a history book. Weideger deftly weaves Venetian history and the history of the Dona family (who still occupy the palace) throughout her yearlong explorations of the city's churches, markets, foods, and art. At times, the author as well as the narrative struggle with the landlord's rude attempt to dislodge Weideger to make room for members of a Merchant-Ivory production team. Unfortunately, those tense exchanges taint what is otherwise a wonderful portrayal of Italian life. Reading about how Weideger negotiates the rules, language, and etiquette of life in Venice would be helpful to anyone who plans to visit the city, and tempting for those who don't. Appropriate for all public libraries. Mari Flynn, Keystone Coll., La Plume, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

It was the chill dank of living through a London winter that led Weideger to the dream of living in Venice, and her story opens with a wry, very Year in Provence-style search for a place to rent in the most bewitching city in the world. She finally lands a place in the Ca' Dona, the only palazzo in Venice continuously owned by the same family. Weideger is at her best when she is describing, in her plainspoken but thoroughly engaged voice, the architecture, culture, and history of La Serenissima. She builds emotional bridges between her childhood in the Bronx (and going to boarding school from Long Island) with the insular, ancient, and courtly style of contemporary Venetian life. The narrative bogs down some, however, when she details her protracted and sometimes vicious struggle with her landlords, or when she sketches the byzantine politics of the Peggy Guggenheim collection and various Save Venice groups. She closes with a true-life melodrama: she's in a car accident just before she's to leave Venice, and the trauma of recovery is intermingled with her sense of loss. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671047302
• ISBN-13: 978-0671047306
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,248,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On a bookshelf at Marco Polo airport, June 23, 2004

By 

LuckyDog (Decatur, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venetian Dreaming (Paperback)

I read this book on the plane back to the USA from Venice, where I had been (for the first time) for about a week on combined business and pleasure. I was captivated by the city and was hungry for anything more to read about it, so I picked up Venetian Dreaming at Marco Polo airport before boarding. I was surprised by the extremely negative reviews of the book, although I can understand the reasons for their criticism. I had read a fair amount about Venice and its history before the trip and wandered the city through crowds and quiet back streets and canals for a few days. From that perspective, it was interesting simply to read a description of many of the same places and a few more facts that weren't in the guidebooks.

At the next level, it was interesting to read an account by someone who acted on the fantasy many visitors to Venice have and move there for an extended period of time. Here we find Weideger moving to a city where she knows no one and trying to establish a social network. As a professional writer, she has the potential to move into literary and artistic circles, and she attempts to do so with some success. I too was struck by her brutal characterization some of the people she meets. Actually, I should say her attempts to do so, because Weideger has a journalistic style of writing that lacks depth in characterization.

I was reminded somewhat of A Sun Also Rises which to me was a boring book about bored inhabitants of an artistic colony who are searching for something to do. However, Weideger's colony is more interesting because Venice provides a focus of past glories and present problems in contrast to Hemingway's troupe of self-indulgent drunks. Yes, Weideger is trying to work her way into the inside of Venice, and yes, she lives in an artificial world because, after all, she hasn't just move to Venice, she also is going to write a book about it. But in doing so, we meet characters who are part of what is left of Venice, and in contrast to what some reviews have implied, some of these characters are interesting and admirable.

And then on another level, we become acquainted with Weideger herself. No, she doesn't seem very happy. And apparently a precondition for continuing to live together with "H." is that she can't really write about their relationship. But do we care? And we find that Weideger's lack of flexibility alienates her from her landlords, yet she doesn't seem to have any insight into this. Again, her journalistic style makes it easy to take sides with her landlords, who are interesting people.

Finally, we are left with a matter-of-fact account of one writer's year in a world that stopped turning in 1797 with the death of the Venetian Republic. It's not an uninteresting read.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Should have left this book in her dreams, October 26, 2003

By 

bensmomma "bensmomma" (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Venetian Dreaming (Paperback)

A better title would have been "My Evil Venetian Landlords". Paula Weideger recounts her off-again, on-again, life in Venice renting an apartment in a 17th-century palazzo. Those of us obsessed with Venice will read anything set there, but this will give you relatively little about Venice and relatively more than you want to know about Ms. Weidger's ability to get the best of her landlord.

If you or I lived such a life, and kept a diary about it, the diary might be just as full of the petty annoyances of our day-to-day lives: squabbles with the landlords, constant annoyance with malfunctioning appliances, down-the-nose observations about the fashion choices of other women, and a general self-obsession. It's what diaries are for, in a way. Weideger's error is not in having written 300+ pages of self-obsession but in publishing it.

I'm not sorry I read it (that's how much of a Venice-lover I am), but the rest of you might be better off heading for the local library than opening your wallet for this one.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars How not to be popular in Venice...., July 17, 2002

By 

anon y. mouse - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venetian Dreaming (Hardcover)

Venice is my favorite city, and I am always interested in the lives on those who have been fortunate enough to live there - sort of to "test drive" if I could do the same thing. But the author goes out of her way to alienate and offend so many people that I don't really think there's much to be learned from her.
Even the descriptions of Venice are so fraught with her insecurities, opinions and prejudices that you don't get a good sense of the beauty and wonder of the city. Just lengthy diatribes about her landlord, her computer, her apartment, her neighbors, her problems with this person and that person etc. etc.
Anybody fortunate enough to have the flexibility to live in a different city for a period of time should take a little bit of flexibility and a decent sense of humor with them. The author seems to lack both, and this makes the book very difficult to read without wincing.