Venice Tales

Venice Tales is the first comprehensive collection of short-stories on Venice by Italian authors. The book encompasses a broad chronological span, beginning from the Middle Ages (Boccaccio), through to the early modern period (Sansovino), the Enlightenment (Casanova, Goldoni), to the modern and contemporary eras (Marinetti, Montale, Calvino, Scarpa and others).

A dream-like city uniquely built on water, Venice was a hub of trade with the East and the seminal cosmopolitan city. Venice was proudly independent politically from the word go and was at the forefront of several arts and industries: glass-making and ship-building, as well as music and the fine arts. A site of Carnivalesque joie de vivre, luxury, and licentiousness on the one hand, Venice also became widely synonymous with darkness, melancholy, and a wish for death. In short, the siren call of Venice has always seduced literati, visitors, and tourists alike.

Venice continues to haunt and inspire the imagination of authors and artists the world over and yet few Italians have dared taking on the city in their works of literary fiction. It is possible that Venice's worldly exotic allure proved daunting and evanescent to many. As these Venice Tales vividly demonstrate, those who did not fear to tread into Venice as a literary subject produced inspired, incandescent, ironical, evocative, tragic, and utterly magical vistas on this unique city which, despite eliciting such wealth of literary, artistic, musical, and theatrical feats, remains to this day largely elusive, fluid, and thoroughly impossible to pin down.

Helen Constantine, ,Katia Pizzi, Senior Lecturer in Modern Italian Studies, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Modern Italian Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and formerly Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Dr Pizzi has published extensively on the culture, literature, memory, and history of cities, especially Trieste and the Italian north-eastern borders. Her research interests include modernism, technology, and cities of the future.

1. Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio2. Of Venetia, the Noblest City, Francesco Sansovino3. Italian Memoirs, Carlo Goldoni4. The Story of my Life, Giacomo Casanova5. A Manifesto Against Passéist Venice, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti6. Two Venetian Prose Poems, Eugenio Montale7. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino8. Venice is a Fish, Tiziano Scarpa9. Silver, Paola Tonussi10. Venice is the Lagoon, Roberto Ferrucci11. The Man Who Sleeps in Churches, Andrea Perin12. A Ghost in Venice, Giuseppe O. Longo13. Lagoonary, Isabella Panfido14. The Valleys of Venice, Giancarlo Gemin