From spies to sea-level rise, Venice’s history is enthralling

livemint.com:

Venice. By Dennis Romano. Oxford University Press; 800 pages; $41.95 and £31.99Visiting the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s largest art fairs that opened on April 20th and runs until late November, often evokes a disconcerting emotion. You come to see the works on display in the exhibitions that sprawl across the city, only to leave feeling guilty at having paid too little attention to the work of art that is Venice itself.Bedazzled by its loveliness and wondering at its sheer implausibility, outsiders have seldom managed to make objective appraisals.

Dennis Romano, an emeritus professor at Syracuse University in New York, embarked on this new history of the city with the notion that “deromanticising Venice does not strip it of its power. It makes the achievements of the lagoon city and of all Venetians more fascinating and remarkable still."The result is a triumph. Ignore the vacuous subtitle of his book (“The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City").

This is contemporary historical writing of the highest quality: clear, entertaining and yet academically rigorous. Mr Romano has already written four books on the city’s long and turbulent history. With his fifth he has done for Venice in the 21st century what John Julius Norwich, an English historian and travel writer, did for the city in the 20th.

As time goes by, this monumental chronicle should gradually replace its distinguished forerunner as the history of choice for readers in English who want to better understand Venice’s rich past.Norwich’s work told the story of the Venetian Republic, which endured for more than 1,000 years until swept out of existence by Napoleon in 1797. This is a more comprehensive account. It covers the entire story from Venice’s elusive