{"id":111,"date":"2006-12-24T13:33:17","date_gmt":"2006-12-24T17:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books-test\/?p=111"},"modified":"2006-12-24T13:33:17","modified_gmt":"2006-12-24T17:33:17","slug":"venice-from-the-ground-up-by-james-hs-mcgregorharvard-university-press-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/venice-from-the-ground-up-by-james-hs-mcgregorharvard-university-press-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Venice from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregorHarvard University Press, 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read about this book in a <a href=\"http:\/\/harvardpress.typepad.com\/hup_publicity\/2006\/10\/venicebride_of_.html\">post<\/a> on Harvard University Press&#8217;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&#8217;s a very well-produced book, with plenty of well-chosen pictures. It&#8217;s well-written, and it was interesting to read about Venice&#8217;s palazzos and churches and the art they contain &#8212; McGregor is good at close-readings of buildings and of paintings &#8212; but I wanted fewer names and dates and more <i>life<\/i>, 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&#8217;m glad to have read this book: I loved the long excerpt from Marin Sanudo&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press&#8217;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&#8217;s a very well-produced book, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}