\nJean-Paul Sartre and R\u00e9gis Debray were infuriated by the very existence of Venice. Decaying in a pretty, romantic, way, instead of an ugly, nitty-gritty way, Venice is inauthentic, they charged. Also effeminate and castrating, Sartre added. Venetians are the sort of people who admire Titian, they both pointed out scornfully, and Idiots of Venice (Debray’s term for Venetophiles), with their worship of art, are as bad as church-goers. Worst of all, being in Venice is not conducive to philosophical and political discontent leading to depression or, in the case of Debray, guerilla warfare. (218)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n*Robert Benchley, legendarily, in a telegram to Harold Ross.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I actually have a stack of books to review here, but before I attempt to get to them, a quick, light one. (First, a note on how I pick books to read. I have scads of religion\/history books that are always waiting, but every time we go to the library – once a week during…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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I have scads of religion\/history books that are always waiting, but every time we go to the library – once a week during…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/streets-full-of-water-please-advise.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-04-29T00:05:36+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/2007\/04\/28\/hotel.gif"}],"author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/streets-full-of-water-please-advise.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/streets-full-of-water-please-advise.html","name":"\"Streets Full of Water. 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Please Advise.” *"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Hotel\"](\"https:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/2007\/04\/28\/hotel.gif\")
<\/a> The book is – okay. To be clear: I’ve never been to Venice, and while I hope to go someday, I’m not in any way obsessed. But I am interestested in history in general, in Italy, and I also have a weird interest in the history of tourism (perhaps because of its partial roots, especially in the European context, in pilgrimage). So this seemed like it might be a fruitful read. Eh. Oh, I did learn a lot about what people through history have thought of Venice, but the book seemed scattered, and didn’t give you a good sense of the city, surprisingly enough. In the end, as the one reader review on Amazon indicates, it’s saturated by a rather twee sensibility. I suppose it is hard to write a travel book like this one without making oneself come off as far more privileged than your poor schlep of a reader who can never hope to go to Venice four times a year. I guess this book proves that it’s hard, because Martin doesn’t quite succeed. Even though the intention is to mildly mock the Venetophile’s obsession, the end effect is that the Venetophiles are mighty pleased with themselves. <\/p>\n