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Allan Cameron's avatar

A brilliant essay, perhaps his best! It brings together many threads and manages to tie the right knots. It is an essay that makes you think, and you can say nothing better of an essay than that. Turra's letter was dated 1782, which means that the Republic of Venice had another seventeen of life. In 1799 Napoleonic France and the Hapsburg Empire decided that its territories were an appropriate place to have a battle and it was clear that whoever won would also annex the patrician republic, which was, it's true, a declining power both militarily and financially. While Britain and France generally dominated trade in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century, Venetian merchants had increased trade during periods of warfare between those two powers, because warfare entitled one power to seize the shipping belonging to the other. No doubt it was no longer the wealthy and bustling place it had once been, and yet it was still no slouch. It was a city state that exploited his small empire (la terraferma) and had its own language and literature behind it (Venice was responsible for choosing what would become the Italian language, and they didn’t choose their own but Tuscany’s or rather the literary language established in Tuscany in the fourteenth century two centuries earlier; they did this not out of nationalist verve or desire for Italian unification but to create a larger and more reliable market for Venetian printers – it was that kind of place). It had the highest percentage of owners of musical instruments and was still the centre of the European musical tradition but, like Britain, it was that declining power that refuses to face reality, and I can well imagine that someone like Turra would be in a hurry to leave behind her this stuffy and conventional society unable to defend itself and yet certain that it was still the centre of the globe. She went to the real centre of original thought which was France and she joined the most radical stream (it seems, because I hadn’t heard of her before reading this essay).

I write all this because the argument between her and the journalist demonstrates how prophetic both of them were – her even more than him – because their observations only became reality in the last forty years. Today it is absolutely a city of empty houses owned by the world’s elites and visited by themselves very rarely, but demand means that their assets are increasing in value every year. The population of the city has moved to Mestre and other anonymous dormitory towns surrounding the lagoon, and many of them will be commuting into their old home city to provide services to the endless stream of tourism. After the war, the rent freeze made the population safe for some decades but as people grew old and died, those flats would enter the “free” market and disappear forever from the reach of its local population.

Billheimer takes this original argument into a fascinating exposition on the relationship between humanity and its built environment along with the most important argument of how Western settler colonial societies interact with indigenous peoples – or rather don’t interact but despoil and annihilate instead. But I wanted to add a coda on Venice today as seen by Italians who call it “Disneyland”.

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Martin Billheimer's avatar

Thanks so much!! The Venice history, and especially the choice of an Italian language, is totally fascinating, It really adds so much to what I wrote. I guess my intuition wasn't bad because I knew comparatively little of all of this. Thank you again!!!

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Ted Van Alst's avatar

Another fine, fine piece. Bravo!

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Martin Billheimer's avatar

Gracias, mi hermano!

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