Customer Reviews

Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide

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This is an unusual book. To my knowledge, it's a whole new art form. It has the elements of a Hallmark gift book and at the same time those of an underground travelogue. The beauty of Venice is given in prose that rivals that of Maupassant (pp 117-124) whether it is about the vistas, the architecture or scatological issues unique to the city (pp.69-77).

The writer clearly loves his topic and the translator the art of translation. (Not having read the original, I presume Shaun Whiteside has coined new words to express Scarpa's intent, for instance: pulchroactive - love it!)

There are ruminations on street names. There is advice for the casual traveler on canal crossing fares. There is description of the faded glory, the decaying infrastructure, the art and the past glory of Venice.

This is a fascinating, idiosyncratic volume. Will Gotham/Penguin be producing similar volumes on other small but famous cities?

The author tells us straight out what this book is and is not. It is not a travel guide. He exhorts us not to explore Venice in typical travel guide fashion. This advice is worth the price of the book alone. He tells us the sections of Venice that are loaded with tourists and encourages us to go elsewhere. The author is creative and he seeks for us to be creative in our approach to visiting and getting to know the "real" Venice. Other tidbits in the book are helpful. Scarpa points out that most Itlaian cities are divided into sections, or areas, referred to as "quarters". He teaches us that in Venice there are not four quarters (quartieri)like most Italian cities, but, instead, six sections of Venice referred to as ""sestieri". (page 10) Additionally, if you know some Italian language and plan to use it in Venice, the author helps us a little with that by taking Italian words for features of Venice and correlating them with words from the Venetian dialect we are likely to encounter upon our arrival. Travel guides and Italian phrase books generally lack dialect. His poetic description of how buildings are held up or how foundations of buildings in Venice are constructed is not too architectural or scientific, but, descriptive, poetic, yet interesting and insightful. It painted a picture in my mind and I learned something that will stay with me.

For someone who has been to Venice and absolutely love the city, I found this book to be a big disappointment. It was light on content, I found the chapters...heart, hands, nose, to to be stretching a thin point.

He tried to be poetic but it came out contrived. An example: "In Venice the same clould drops slanting bucketloads on a campo, but hits the narrow calli with well-aimed arrows of rain; the drops suddenly ease away, and yet this gutter floods, the canal beyond is covered with little cirlces, as though a billion anglers were casting off at the same moment.