Venetian Dreaming (Paperback)

~ (Author) "How was I going to find a place to live in Venice?..." (more)
Key Phrases: moto ondoso, olive ascolane, acqua alta, Grand Canal, San Marco, New York (more...)

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 the Hardcover edition.

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 the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (September 1, 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 (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #676,999 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A wallow in Self-pity, June 7, 2002

By	James Knodell (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Venetian Dreaming (Hardcover)

If you're hoping to find a book that takes you along on a personal and joyful discovery of Venice -- this isn't the book for you.

Paula Weideger has produced a memoir that's nothing more than a wallow in self-pity and a collection of acid-laced comments on the people who have had the great misfortune of passing through her orbit.

Between the occasional paragraph relating some tiny snippit of Venice's history or describing some particularly beautiful or obscure discovery; one has to endure Weideger's on-going tirades against her landlady, the perceived slights of nearly everyone who crosses her path, the social pretensions of her Venetian acquaintances, and diatribes concerning the tourist schlock for sale in local shops. All the while -- loudly exclaiming her newly found and undying love for the city.

Otherwise -- Weideger fills the pages whining about the continuous stream of ingrates taking advantage of her at every turn, her unhappiness at not getting her way in all things, badmouthing the looks or fashion sense of nearly everyone, and relating tales of her social exploits which are nothing more than marathons in name dropping.

There's very little here that's thought provoking, or even interesting -- unless you're the type who enjoys non-stop windging (in which case, you'll love the blatant play for the reader's sympathy at the end of the book.)

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worst Book Ever Set in Venice, August 9, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Venetian Dreaming (Hardcover)

Henry James said something to the effect that everything that can be said about Venice already has been. Unfortunately, that didn't stop Paula Weideger. This is undoubtedly the worst book set in Venice I have ever read or hope to read. "Set in," Venice, not "about" it: the only thing this book is about is its monumentally unappealing author. Previous reviewers have adequately described the persona Paula Weideger presents here-a spiteful, self-obsessed, incapable whiner who drags her mysteriously complaisant husband halfway across Europe essentially on a whim, who, in spite of her pride in her research about the city, is continually surprised by facts available in any decent guidebook (it takes three trips before she even notices that there is something bizarre about the Venetian address numbering system), who wastes her readers' time with an account of her computer tribulations, and who doesn't have a good word to say about anybody.

Is there anything good to say about her? Early on, it's possible to entertain the idea that Weideger is up to something clever. Just as "Paul Theroux," the disagreeable first-person narrator of Paul Theroux's books, is a fictional character related to Paul Theroux but not identical to him, perhaps Weideger has created an even more disagreeable character called "Paula Weideger," to breathe some fresh, ironic life into the I-found-paradise-in-Italy genre.

Not a chance. Theroux's game requires conscious craft and some authorial distance from the persona. Weideger has neither: her writing is so unselfconscious it's confessional. That's why reviewers have reacted so strongly to her as a person: instead of writing about Venice she's committed one extended act of unintentional self-revelation. It's like a blog between hard covers.

But wait, there's more. No previous reviewer has remarked on the real problem with this book-the sheer incompetence of the writing. I don't mean that the sentences are badly put together; for the most part they aren't. But that's journalism. A travel memoir calls for the tools of fiction-observation and curiosity. Weideger has neither. She seems to think that the way to tell you what something is like is to pile up physical descriptions, rather than selecting the details that convey significance. Naturally, this external style fails miserably when it comes to describing people. Weideger doesn't even seem to realize that it's possible to characterize people in terms of their beliefs and motives rather than their clothes. There's no better example than Weideger's husband, who's so undercharacterized we never even know why he accompanied her to Venice when he assertedly really didn't want to.

Possibly worst of all, Weideger has no sense of humor whatsoever (an earlier reviewer's remark to the contrary was dipped in sarcasm).

To give her her due, like a stopped clock she can't help but have the occasional insight. The church of the Gesuiti, across the canal from where she lived, is every bit the neglected marvel she says it is (it's still living down the bad rap it got from William Dean Howells in the nineteenth century). And Carnevale, commercial though it is, is vivid enough to bring her prose briefly into something like life. But do yourself a favor. Don't waste your time or money on this book. Read Jan Morris, or Martin Garrett, or Paolo Barbaro, or any decent guidebook instead. Better yet, go to Venice and see what Weideger missed.