John Julius Norwich, previously the author of a magnificent two-volume history of Venice, and currently Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund and a lifelong aficionado of that city, in this volume looks at Venice through the eyes of such as, Napoleon,  Lord Byron, Richard Wagner, Henry James, Robert Browning, and  the painters James Whistler and John Singer Sargent, and so many others, famous and not so famous, and some infamous.

It is illuminating to read Norwich's account of Venice's political travails and to see how harshly the city was treated by its French and Austrian rulers and how nobly and nonviolently the "lotta legale" (legal struggle) was conducted against Austrian despotism.
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BOOK REVIEW
VENICE AT LOW EBB: A SAD GRACE

Los Angeles Times
By Merle Rubin
Special to The Times
October 20 2003

The story of Venice in the 19th century is not a happy one in the estimable opinion of historian John Julius Norwich, who is certainly well qualified to pronounce upon the subject. Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund and a lifelong aficionado of that city, Norwich is the author of a magnificent two-volume history of Venice: a richly textured, colorfully told saga that takes the reader from its earliest days to the end of the 18th century.

In his new book, "Paradise of Cities," Norwich employs a rather different approach to writing about Venice in the 19th century:

"Everyone knows that the life of the Most Serene Republic, having endured over a thousand years, was in 1797 brought to a sudden and humiliating end by the army of the young Napoleon [A]fter a few miserable years of being tossed like a shuttlecock backwards and forwards between France and Austria, Venice was placed by the Congress of Vienna firmly in Habsburg hands, in which — with one short, glorious, but quixotic interruption — she remained for another half century. Finally, in 1866, she was absorbed into a united Italy. Her independence was gone, never to return; gone, too, were the Doge and Golden Book, the courtesans and the Carnival Venice in the nineteenth century was a poor, sad shadow of what she had been in the eighteenth; how, then, could the story of that century best be told? "

Norwich's solution is to portray 19th century Venice through the experiences of various foreigners — most famous, some not — who were there briefly, protractedly, repeatedly or permanently, from Napoleon, who conquered but never really cottoned to the place, to Frederick Rolfe, the self-designated Baron Corvo, a ne'er-do-well English expatriate author, scholar, poseur and sponger, who led a marginal existence in more ways than one.

In between, Norwich looks at Lord Byron (whose sexual excesses in Venice shocked even his broad-minded friend Shelley), John Ruskin (who referred to Venice as the "paradise of cities"), Richard Wagner (who found the relative silence of its watery streets conducive to composing), Henry James (who set his novella "The Aspern Papers" there), Robert Browning (whose poem about the Venetian composer Galuppi serves as the coda to Norwich's book), the painters James Whistler and John Singer Sargent, plus a handful of less famous figures who were part of the expatriate scene.

Midway through the book, there is a chapter on Venice's noble but unsuccessful attempt to shake off the Austrian yoke in 1848.

Beautifully illustrated, "Paradise of Cities" contains much that will instruct, divert and delight. There is the spectacle of Byron in full evening dress leaving a sparkling social gathering, dismissing the gondola and diving into the water to swim to his next engagement. And the amusing figure of one of his hostesses, Contessa Maria Querini Benzon: "By 1817, however," Norwich informs us, "her figure was not what it had been — owing in large measure to her passion for hot polenta. During winter months, hefty slices of this typically Venetian delicacy would be concealed in her ample bosom, and those sitting next to her in her gondola would be astonished to see wisps of smoke curling up from her cleavage."

It is illuminating to read Norwich's account of Venice's political travails and to see how harshly the city was treated by its French and Austrian rulers and how nobly and nonviolently its liberal leader Daniele Manin conducted his "lotta legale" (legal struggle) against Austrian despotism.

Norwich also pays tribute to Ruskin, who lovingly depicted the city's architectural glories in painstaking drawings and poetic prose and who was the first to warn of the dangers Venice faced from water erosion...

Norwich is a historian of uncommon urbanity: scholarly and erudite but never pedantic. His style is as graceful and easy as it is knowledgeable...