Venice Tales is the first comprehensive collection of short-stories on Venice by Italian authors. The book encompasses a broad chronological span, beginning from the Middle Ages (Boccaccio), through to the early modern period (Sansovino), the Enlightenment (Casanova, Goldoni), to the modern and contemporary eras (Marinetti, Montale, Calvino, Scarpa and others). A dream-like city uniquely built on water, Venice was a hub of trade with the East and the seminal cosmopolitan city. Venice was proudly independent politically from the word go and was at the forefront of several arts and industries: glass-making and ship-building, as well as music and the fine arts. A site of Carnivalesque joie de vivre, luxury, and licentiousness on the one hand, Venice also became widely synonymous with darkness, melancholy, and a wish for death. In short, the siren call of Venice has always seduced literati, visitors, and tourists alike. Venice continues to haunt and inspire the imagination of authors and artists the world over and yet few Italians have dared taking on the city in their works of literary fiction. It is possible that Venice's worldly exotic allure proved daunting and evanescent to many. As these Venice Tales vividly demonstrate, those who did not fear to tread into Venice as a literary subject produced inspired, incandescent, ironical, evocative, tragic, and utterly magical vistas on this unique city which, despite eliciting such wealth of literary, artistic, musical, and theatrical feats, remains to this day largely elusive, fluid, and thoroughly impossible to pin down.
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