Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
The Nervous Republic
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire
by Garry Wills
Simon and Schuster, 415 pp., $35.00
Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State
by David Rosand
University of North Carolina Press, 188 pp., $39.95
The Tombs of the Doges of Venice
by Debra Pincus
Cambridge University Press, 257 pp., $80.00
The history of Venice began, according to one legend, with Attila the Hun. In the year 452, as the nomad chieftain and his horde swept down the Italian peninsula toward Rome, a few bands of refugees along the Adriatic coast withdrew to the low, silty islands of the Venetian lagoon to shelter among the reeds until the Scourge of God had passed. Out of this havoc, on this shifty soil, their descendants gradually built a city, powerful, beautiful, and eternally nervous. For Venice, long after achieving its self-styled designation as the Se-renissima Res Publica, the Most Serene Republic, never lost either its initial give-and-take with the sea or its refugee sense of insecurity.
Review, 4140 words
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