Venice

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‘The best book about Venice ever written’ Sunday Times

Venice is neither a guide nor a history book, but a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life, set against the background of the city’s past. Analyzing the particular temperament of Venetians, as well as the city’s waterways, its architecture, its bridges, its tourists, its curiosities, its smells, sounds, lights and colours, there is scarcely a corner of Venice that Jan Morris has not investigated and brought vividly to life.

Jan Morris first visited the city as young James Morris, during World War II. As she writes in the introduction, ‘it is Venice seen through a particular pair of eyes at a particular moment – young eyes at that, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth.’ This is an impassioned work on this magnificent but often maddening city.

Jan Morris’s collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Sydney, Oxford, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and Spain. Since its first publication, Venice has appeared in many editions, won the W. H. Heinemann award and become an international bestseller.

‘No sensible visitor should visit the place without it . . . Venice stands alone as the essential introduction, and as a work of literature in its own right.’ Observer

‘No sensible visitor should visit the place without it . . . Venice stands alone as the essential introduction, and as a work of literature in its own right.’ Observer

Morris, Jan

A Leap into the Light

Derek Johns on Jan Morris, Conundrum

I first met Jan Morris in the offices of the publisher Random House in New York in the early 1980s. I was a junior editor there, and was invited to meet someone I considered to be one of the most...

Dominion over Palm and Pine

David Gilmour on Jan Morris, the Pax Britannica trilogy

When people ask me what they should read about the Empire, I suggest they go to the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire, where they will find a mass of recent research...

Melancholy but Marvellous

Ariane Bankes on Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

The capital of nowhere – could anywhere be more tantalizing? For those of us increasingly blasé or wary about visiting ‘somewheres’ the world over, many of them the target of hordes of other...