The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
I love Jan Morris, having been blown away by two quite different projects of hers: the first, her epic 3-volume evocation of the British Empire which summons up the complexity and hugeness of the thing in a series of detailed vignettes; the second, her single-volume meditations on individual cities, most notably Oxford and, famously, Venice. If I found this book a little disappointing it is because it falls in between the two: the Venetian Empire was a somewhat piecemeal and scattered thing, with no great narrative (the Venetians were losing territories in one place while gaining them in another) to tie its disparate locations together; the book proceeds as a sequence of sketches of Crete, Cyprus, the Aegean islands, etc. which are useful in themselves (travelling in these parts, you often come across things which the guidebooks label 'Venetian' without expanding further) but don't add up to a satisfying book overall. Another problem is the Venetians' extreme flexibility when it came to ethics, which allows Morris a good few opportunities for sarcasm, but which gets in the way of any kind of sympathy or admiration for them. Without a strong master narrative or emotional engagement, Morris' purple passages drift rather aimlessly.Not but what there isn't some good stuff in here, but it's hardly major Morris.
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