If Venice Dies

July 11, 2016
Few urban landscapes are as recognizable as Venice’s, but as Settis, an art historian and former director of the Getty Research Institute, writes, tourists now outnumber inhabitants and dozens of municipal institutions have decamped to the mainland, replaced by luxury hotels and “a tourist monoculture.” Meanwhile, around the world, prefabricated doge’s palaces flanked by a few desultory canals have been “constructed with cheap building materials, but nonetheless presented as the epitome of luxury.” These cut-rate imitations are often more tourist-friendly than the real thing. Plans are even afoot to build a theme park of Venice on one of its own outlying islands. “The virus of the simulation has wormed its way into Venice and has ensnared it,” Settis writes, “like a mirror that swallows up the face of whoever looks into it.” He observes that as cities worldwide are swept up in the “rhetoric of heights”—the race to build ever taller skyscrapers—people are herded into anonymous cubicles, sapping the vitality of the streets below. Settis laments the commodifying, transactional effect of capitalism on communities’ ideas about their identities, purposes, and aesthetics, and this brief book is at once a moving eulogy for Venice and a resounding manifesto, enriched by a dense web of historic, literary and cultural allusions.