Venice from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregorHarvard University Press, 2006

I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book, with plenty of well-chosen pictures. It’s well-written, and it was interesting to read about Venice’s palazzos and churches and the art they contain — McGregor is good at close-readings of buildings and of paintings — but I wanted fewer names and dates and more life, more of a sense of the city and how people live in it and have lived in it, how people move through it and have moved through it. Still, I’m glad to have read this book: I loved the long excerpt from Marin Sanudo’s 1514 diary entry about the fire that started in the Rialto; I loved the parts of the last chapter about the Venice of the Grand Tour, of the Ridotto and La Fenice, and about the transformation of Venice into a more pedestrian city.