A few weeks ago, I marveled that Winterson's The Passion was written 20 years ago. I've been on the lookout for her forthcoming article about Venice (the backdrop for The Passion, although Winterson had not yet visited Venice when she wrote the book 20 years ago) for The Times. Well, here it is, and it is delicious:
"I watched two Americans crammed against the metal rail of a vaporetto, videoing the Grand Canal. But once home, there will be nothing to show. Left behind, there is only Disney Venice; a fake, a pretend, a tourist attraction. Go there, and it is possible to find the real city, but you can’t take it home with you. Venice is quantum, a Schrödinger’s cat of a city, simultaneously dead and alive, true and false, solid and watery, firm and disappeared.
Which is why writers love to write about it. Venice offers endless imaginative possibilities, and replays the compliment of a writer’s adoration by giving herself over to language more freely than in any other medium. Pictures and photographs easily become clichés, and film of Venice is always what we have seen already."
Since she had not been to Venice and had to conjure it from her imagination for her first book, she relied on three key texts for research that she still touts as the best three resources today: James Morris' Venice, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and my all-time, hands-down, simply cannot do with out book on Venice that has been dog-eared and abused many times over, Ruskin's The Stones of Venice.
Conjuring plane tickets now...
