One of Italy's brightest literary lights reinvents travel writing with a seductive, intoxicating celebration of the magical saltwater city
"Venice is a fish," writes Tiziano Scarpa. "It's like a vast sole stretched out against the deep. How did this marvelous beast make its way up the Adriatic and fetch up here, of all places?"
Paying homage to his native city in a lyrical and evocative style, Venice Is A Fish: A Sensual Guide by Tiziano Scarpa guides readers down tiny alleys, over bridges, and through squares, daring us to lose ourselves, forget the guidebooks, and experience Venice as Venetians do.
Venice Is A Fish provides no hotel ratings or museum hours. Instead, in a delightful initiation, Scarpa tells us how to balance while standing on a gondola; where lovers will find the best secret hiding places; the finer points of etiquette and navigation during a auga alta; and how to best defend ourselves from the pitiless beauty of one of the world's most stimulating cities. Open Venice Is A Fish, and Scarpa's magnificent images, secret history and hidden lore unfold like a treasure map of the senses.
Read an excerpt from Venice is a Fish:
Venice is a fish. Just look at it on a
map. It's like a vast sole stretched out
against the deep. How did this marvellous beast make its
way up the Adriatic and fetch up here, of all places? It
could set off on its travels at any time, it could call in just
about anywhere, following its fancy: it could migrate,
travel, frolic as it has always liked to do: Dalmatia this
weekend, Istanbul the day after next, summer in Cyprus.
If it's anchored hereabouts, there must be a reason for it.
Salmon wear themselves out swimming against the
current, climbing waterfalls to make love in the
mountains. Sirens and swordfish and seahorses go to the
Sargasso Sea to die.
Other books would laugh at what I'm telling you.
They speak of the birth of the city from nothing, its
resounding commercial and military success, its
decadence: poppycock. It wasn't like that, believe me.
Venice has always existed as you see it today, more or
less. It's been sailing since the dawn of time; it's put in
at every port, it's rubbed up against every shore, quay
and landing-stage: Middle Eastern pearls, transparent
Phoenician sand, Greek seashells, Byzantine seaweed all
accreted on its scales. But one day it felt all the weight
of those scales, those fragments and splinters that had
permanently accumulated on its skin; it felt the weight
of the incrustations it was carrying around. Its flippers
grew too heavy to slip among the currents. It decided to
climb once and for all into one of the most northerly
and sheltered inlets of the Mediterranean, and rest
there.
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