Venice and Veneto

  • Where to find Blue Guide Venice

    Where to find Blue Guide Venice

    For reasons best known to themselves—actually probably not even known to them but only to a faceless and not very clever algorithm—Amazon UK choose to bury Blue Guide Venice in their search results to make it unfindable. The brilliance of programming and AI might suggest that if you search on…

  • Drink & Think VENICE: the author’s choice of bars and cafés

    Drink & Think VENICE: the author’s choice of bars and cafés

    We asked author Robin Saikia to explain which bars he recommends in his invaluable Drink & Think Venice – The Story of Venice in Twenty-Six Bars and Cafés. Here are his descriptions of 10 of them: Each chapter of Drink & Think Venice begins with an introduction to one of…

  • WHAT TO SEE IN VENICE: TIPS for a great visit

    WHAT TO SEE IN VENICE: TIPS for a great visit

    Venice offers a huge wealth of museums, churches, architecture and other sights to see and visit.  Here, by district (“sestiere”) are the highlights selected in Blue Guide Venice, the definitive guide to the Most Serene City: 1. SESTIERE OF SAN MARCO Some highlights of the sestiere of San Marco. For much more detail…

  • Alessandro Vittoria: Most rare in marble portraits

    Alessandro Vittoria: Most rare in marble portraits

    In his famous Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari describes the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria as ‘most rare in marble portraits’. From humble beginnings, Vittoria (1525–1608) went on to become one of the greatest Italian sculptors of his age. who was alessandro vittoria? Vittoria was born in Trento, a city in…

  • The playwright Ferenc Molnár, by his grandson

    The playwright Ferenc Molnár, by his grandson

    The latest title in the Blue Danube imprint, which focuses on literature, history and travel in Central Europe, is Venetian Angel, a short novel by Ferenc Molnár, now translated into English for the first time.  Molnár was a famous pre-war dramatist whose many plays included one on which the Rodgers…

  • Venice attempts to stem the tide

    Venice attempts to stem the tide

    (and some news from Rome and Florence) by Alta Macadam The long-discussed entrance restrictions to Venice are finally to become operational on 25th April. The system is designed to limit the numbers of day-trippers, who come to the city for just a few hours (often as part of a tour…

  • Blue Guides: Now in colour

    Blue Guides: Now in colour

    Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is now in full colour, the first of a new look for the core series. Since 1918, when the first Blue Guide appeared, the books have been through a number of redesigns but the quality of the text remains completely unchanged. The detailed focus on…

  • Venice in Peril

    Venice in Peril

    The UK-based Venice in Peril Fund is one of several international charities devoted to safeguarding the future of this unique city. Guy Elliott, Chairman of Venice in Peril, outlines some of its recent projects. The Venice in Peril Fund was founded in 1971, succeeding an earlier fund instituted in 1966…

  • The Venetian Empire at Sea

    The Venetian Empire at Sea

    The Venetian Empire, or Stato da mar, depended on a huge number of galleys, galleons and galleasses to protect its trade routes to the east. As Jan Morris has pointed out, ‘in an age when seamen preferred to spend their nights ashore’ the Republic soon set about establishing control of coastal…

  • The Venetian Republic in times of plague

    The Venetian Republic in times of plague

    The Venetian Republic had to take steps to contain infection in the city as early as the 15th century. Their dependence on trade, bringing merchant ships from the East, meant that they were particularly vulnerable to the spread of disease (just as we are told today that globalisation has favoured…

  • Letter from Italy

    Virtual museum tours: some of the best For professional guides in Italy this is, of course, a period in which they suddenly find themselves without work. However many museums, while closed to the public, have made it possible not only to consult their catalogues or browse the collections online but…

  • Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits

    Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits

    “Lorenzo Lotto. Portraits” is the title of an exhibition currently running at the National Gallery in London. It has come from the Prado in Madrid, in slightly slimmed-down form. Not all of the works on show in the Prado can be seen in London (the catalogue is teasingly tantalising in…

  • Fleming and Honour Remembered

    Fleming and Honour Remembered

    Susanna Johnston, John Fleming and Hugh Honour Remembered. Gibson Square, London, 2017. John Fleming and Hugh Honour’s A World History of Art (1982 and later editions, the 7th as recently as 2009) was one of those books one had to have on one’s shelves. My copy, now 30 years old,…

  • Season’s Greetings

    Season’s Greetings

    This Advent we’ve chosen twelve different depictions of the Nativity, which we have discovered in the course of Blue Guides research trips around Italy—plus one final one from our latest title in preparation. 1. The ox and the ass and the baby in the manger from an early Christian sarcophagus…

  • Venice before Easter

    Venice before Easter

    Easter always marks the moment in the year in Italy when there are the most visitors: from then the crowds will remain a fixture until midsummer. So a visit to Venice in these first spring days can be all the more rewarding. But at any time of year there are…

  • Italian Venice: A History

    Italian Venice: A History

    R.J.B Bosworth, Italian Venice: A History, Yale University Press, 2014. R.J.B. Bosworth is addicted to the mingling and competing atmospheres that make up the history of Italian cities. In his book on Rome, Whispering City (reviewed here), he showed how the conflicting pasts of the ‘Eternal City’ were continuously rearranging…

  • Venice and the Politcs of Washing

    Venice and the Politcs of Washing

    W.D. Howells, Venetian Life, first published in 1866, and Polly Coles, The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice, Robert Hale, 2013. A recent review of Polly Coles’ The Politics of Washing claimed that it was the most perceptive book on Venice since W.D. Howells’ Venetian Life. In a field…

  • Comments on Blue Guide Venice

    Comments on Blue Guide Venice

    Venice has been one of the world’s leading destinations for the cultural traveller since the 18th-century Grand Tour. View the book’s contents, index and some sample pages, and buy securely from blueguides.com here »

  • The wonderful Palazzo Grimani, Venice

    The wonderful Palazzo Grimani, Venice

    Tucked away in a quiet nook in the sestiere of Castello is Palazzo Grimani, newly opened to the public, after years of restoration. I arrived late one afternoon, just as dusk was falling. As I climbed the wide stairway to the first floor, the sound of ethereal music floated down to…

  • Burano in February

    Burano in February

    As work on the new edition of Blue Guide Venice gets underway, and as I start planning my next trip there, my thoughts turn to the island of Burano. On a sunny day in February—and if we’re lucky there will be some sunny days this month—the colours of Burano’s houses…

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