A few weeks ago I ordered Margaret Plant’s Venice: Fragile City, 1797-1997,[1] and it arrived today. Wonderful as the book is to behold, and eager as I am to plunge into its five-hundred-odd pages, I cannot suppress a craving to find fault with it, for it concerns two centuries following the Republic’s demise. Put differently, I would rather dedicate myself body and soul to a book spanning two-hundred years of Venice’s glory—say, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century. Such a book would be faultless, or so I would wish. After all, history is about our cravings. I only wonder who are those whose passions this book is meant to soothe. The bastards!

Footnote

1. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.