Given the wonderful visit after last year’s Florence training sessions, it was pretty easy to justify going back to Venice again. And this year’s visit was similarly influenced by a couple of books about the city.

Bridge of Sighs

I’ve become quite a Richard Russo fan over the past few years, devouring works like Empire Falls and Straight Man – but a definite favorite this past year was Bridge of Sighs. Most of the story takes place in upstate New York, but Noonan, a painter, escapes the parochial small-town setting for the international art world of Venice. Like many tourists, we headed over to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (located right on the Grand Canal) to check out one of modern art’s most famous collections, and a highlight of that artistic scene. But even more fascinating was crossing over the Bridge of Sighs itself. As I’m sure most already know, the bridge connects prison cells on one side with the lavish courtroom chambers of the Doge’s Palace on the other. For many prisoners, its windows offered their last look on the outside world. The bridge itself plays a key role in the novel (beyond the title) — and I won’t spoil that for those of you who haven’t yet read it. I’d only suggest that its contemplation about life is fully on par with last year’s Venice offerings. (And the grandeur of the Doge’s Palace far exceeded what I was expecting!).

Given last year’s posting, you might also guess that another title I picked up and read was Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice, the first of her many books featuring the wonderful Commissario Guido Brunetti, a detective in the Venetian Questura. In Leon’s novels, setting and ambiance are every bit as important as the plot, and Brunetti himself is a Venetian detective with a passion for food and drink, music and art, and Greek and Roman classics (read in their original languages). Her novels have generated so much interest that there is now a guidebook entitled Brunetti’s Venice (written by Toni Sepeda, an academic teaching art history and literature), which provides walking tours that use passages from the novels (plus Sepeda’s own insights) to highlight the sights and sounds of this fascinating city.

We did the first two walking tours – the first starting at La Fenice and ending at Rialto Bridge, and following the path that the detective walked that first night in the first novel, as he decided “to take advantage of the star-studded sky and the deserted streets” in the early morning hours. The second took us from the famous bridge (home to the money changers in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice), through the fish and vegetable markets, to the (fictional) location of Brunetti’s home in the San Polo district – reading excerpts all along the way. Commissario Brunetti was a wonderful traveling companion…. & he didn’t cost much when we stopped in his neighborhood restaurant haunts!