I'll not begin by putting my 2019 into a global context this
year, as it's all been so depressing that ignoring it and taking
refuge in books about art, Anglo-Saxon burial rituals and
cemeteries has been the only thing to do.
Some years sparkle, and some years just shine consistently and
warmly but don’t exactly catch fire, I’m sure you’ll agree. 2019
started well with good courses and two cunningly
alphabetically-ordered trips to Sicily and Siena. The first was
a long-anticipated feast of mosaic and cosmati work, but less
anticipated was the, well, packs of feral dogs and piles of shit
that you just don't get in the prosperous north. Siena, though,
was one of those trips where you suddenly just 'get' a place and
feel a connection. But it was also a place where I felt a
stabbing pain pain in my calf, which lingered through May and
meant that I had to cancel a guided trip to another
long-anticipated destination – Assisi. I compensated with a
swiftly-booked trip to Mantua in June, revisiting a trip I had
much enjoyed in 2015, except that then Mantegna's Camera degli
Sposi had still been closed, which had rankled and made a return
inevitable. The downside of this trip was a stupid episode
involving the ‘loss’ of my credit-card wallet, the upside was
that it began a sequence of fine and bright hotel rooms with
excellent views. Trip-taking suffered a bit of a slump in the
summer, except for (a fine sunset-facing room in) Cardiff in
July. Educationally the summer slumped too, with my first
failure to get onto a Courtauld summer school in many a year.
The autumn saw trip-joy begin again in earnest with a week in
Ferrara and Bologna, the first with a room with a view of the
Castello from my bed and the second the side of San Petronio,
and the sound of some regular choral music recitals within.
Lingering in Ferrara, previously only visited for single days,
was a treat, and I was happy to put the finishing touches to my
Bologna churches page, although the work never really finishes,
thankfully. Both of these cities also saw a firming up of my
fascination with Italian Monumental Cemeteries, which had been
fired up in Siena too. (I’ve also been visiting some big local
London cemeteries and becoming a bit obsessed with the BBC
archaeology documentaries and ancient burials.) My last trip of
the year was to Venice. It was my first in almost two years, and
a good re-immersion, in the week before the serious flooding. I
spent three hotel breakfasts in Venice just tables away from
Ridley Scott, and did not speak one word to him, which showed
disappointing reticence on both our parts. In more heart-warming
celebrity news I am now, through a complicated connection, the
proud possessor of a copy of I Am C-3PO - The Inside Story,
signed For Jeff by the robot himself.
More prosaically Venice was my first trip with a sexy new camera
(a Fujifilm X-T30 mirrorless) for which I now have a new
very-wide-angle lens, which means that I’ve now got to revisit every
church, especially the ones across narrow streets, to get even
more of them in! Even more prosaically all of my sites will be
moving to new hosting next year, a process begun in recent
weeks, and I hope this will go so smoothly you won’t even
notice.
On a related point, my site-connected email addresses seemed to
get unreliably in 2019 and so I changed the link to my 'real'
email address, and have since had notably more site-related
communications. This may be a coincidence, but if you sent me an
email in 2019 and I've not replied it's likely because I never
received it.
Courses on still life paintings and illuminated manuscripts
begin 2020, and trips already booked include the Jan van Eyck
exhibition in Ghent in March and Florence in April; with guided
trips to Parma and Modena in June and Lucca, Pistoia and Prato
in September.
Anyway, 2020 - let's hope that things really can't get
any worse.
Jeff
My Top 11 Books of 2019
Andrea Perego The Laws of
Time
Diane Setterfield Once Upon a River
Mark Haddon The Porpoise
Jeanette Winterson Frankissstein
Jo Walton
Lent
Neal Stephenson Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Giorgio Bassani
The Novel of Ferrara
Robert Harris The Second Sleep
Virginie Despentes Vernon Subutex One
P.G. Wodehouse A Pelican at Blandings
after 2018's year of Jeeves and Wooster, in 2019 I read
the Blandings books, and this was one of the best.
and the audiobook of
George Saunders
Tenth of December
My Top 11 CDs of 2019
La Luz
Floating Features
Highasakite Uranium Heart
Aldous Harding Designer
Keren Ann Bleue (Deluxe)
Vampire Weekend Father of the Bride
Oh Land Family Tree
Underworld DRIFT Series 1
Maria Taylor Maria Taylor
Burial Tunes 2011 to 2019
Various
German Lute Music A set of 9 CDs of already-favourite music by
favourite players,
but still one for the desert island. Tiburtina Ensemble Cor Europae -
Christmas in Mediaeval Prague
13.11.2019
News of next year's fruitful
Spring rush of Venice novels begins with Donna Leon's new
Brunetti coming out on the 5th of March (in time for my birthday
again) called Trace Elements, and then in April there's
Philip Gwynne Jones's new Nathan Sutherland novel Venetian Gothic.
10.11.2019
for the first
time in ages
10.10.2019
In a bookshop in Bologna last
week I spotted a novel called Medici ~ Ascendancy by
Matteo Strukul, the first in a trilogy. My first thought was:
do we really need another book about the Medici, let alone
three? I looked up the author, he's Italian and has an unusual
background in crime fiction, comics and computer games, so one
might expect something fresh, but his other novels have dealt
with Michelangelo and Casanova. What next? Vivaldi and the
Pietà girls? Pshaw!
4.10.2019
I'm just back from
Ferrara and Bologna
where I went for the working on
Bologna's churches, two
cemeteries and some end-of-season gelato. Mission
accomplished! It's good to take Autumn trips and so return
from the warmth of Italy to the chill of the English autumn,
but the contrast this time, between short-sleeves in the
evening and air-conditioning in my hotel room and putting the
central heating on and searching out the winter coat was too
drastic!
7.9.2019
Those of you
paying attention may have noticed that, despite announcements
to the contrary, I was not in Venice last week. But fear not -
I will be there in the first week in November. The churches
specially open for Biennale shows will still be open and
From Titian to Rubens: Masterpieces from Antwerp and other
Flemish Collections, the exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale
which opened last Thursday, the day I was due to come home,
will still be on. So all is good.
24.8.2019
Tinney Sue Heath's
A Thing
Done
was a novel set in Florence that I liked lots a few years
back. So an offer of her new one was greeted with joy. It's
called Lady of the Seven Suns and deals with the life
of Francis of Assisi from the viewpoint of a rich Roman
patrician woman who becomes an acolyte and a sturdy supporter.
I'm half way through and finding it a gentle but moving read,
from a perspective mixing faith with pragmatism. It's out on
September 1st and I hope to get my review up next week.
Also Michelle Lovric, a friend of
this site in the early days, has a new Venice-set novel for
children just out called The Wishing Bones. The
plot revolves around an orphan, Casanova and the bones of
Saint Lucy, it seems, and promises the return of the author's
lovably stroppy mermaids.
12.7.2019
Cardiff
25.6.2019
Mantua & Ferrara
Reviews April
&
May 2019
Allison Levy
House of Secrets
Florence
Jess Kidd Things
in JarsLondon
30.5.2019
It seems that
guidebooks are waning in popularity, what with the internet
and all. It's still gratifying to get good head-swelling plugs
in them, though, like the new edition of the Rough Guide to
Venice and the Veneto, from which the image on the right
was snatched.
In less-good news, the healing hopes of my last posting turned
out to be misplaced, and a return of sharp pain meant that I
had to cancel the Umbrian hill towns trip at the last minute,
which did not make me happy! A swiftly-booked trip to Mantua,
on a revisit of
a trip I much enjoyed in 2005
should hopefully see me getting into Mantegna's marvellous
(I'm told!) Camera degli Sposi this time. Trips to Cardiff,
with Gloucester Cathedral, and Venice are
disappointment-soothing prospects for July and September too.
6.5.2019
It's been weeks
since I returned from the Siena trip below, and only now can I
report the healing of the pulled muscle I came home with. I
can finally go places without limping back! And walk for
pleasure, rather than just supermarket supplies. (Thank you
Boots support bandage.) Which is just as well as I have a new
medieval course at the V&A starting tomorrow, and a guided
trip booked to Umbrian hill towns next week. Those damn hills!
But I sure got plenty of church-website work done, and lots of
reading. As a fiction fan I've always had a novel on the go,
since my teens, but recently the habit of a non-fiction book
too has become established. Currently, though, I'm reading
about the Habsburgs, the history of the Bible and the Palazzo
Rucellai - all three non-fiction! It's not natural. On
the baked-goods front I ate the last slice of simnel cake
yesterday and today the last of the Colomba di Pasqua, so I
feel that this Bank Holiday weekend marks the divide between
Siena/Easter and my striding, without pain, with hope in
my heart, into summer. Shame the central heating's still on
though.
11.4.2019
Siena
15.3.2019
If
my many mentions of House of Secrets - The Many
Lives of a Florentine Palazzo by Allison Levy whetted your
appetite and you're wondering why no word...I'm glad to report
that a copy is finally on its way, after much correspondence.
Even better is the news that following one brief email a copy
of The Venetian Masquerade by Philip Gwynne Jones fell
onto my doormat this morning (see flyleaf snapshot right). Expect
a review before
the end of next week, as I have just started reading, and been
immediately smitten by Once Upon a River by Diane
Setterfield, which I heartily recommend already.
24.2.2019
In other review (copy) news...House of Secrets
(see
4.2.2019
below) is proving hard to get, but the author
herself is now onto it. I've requested the new one by Philip Kazan, called
The Phoenix of Florence, from his publisher and I'm
quietly
confident that The Venetian Masquerade by Philip Gwynne
Jones will be through the old letterbox comfortably before
it's 4th of April publication date. The spring rush - maybe I
should save some up for the summer lull!
22.2.2019
Wonders never cease, as I'm sure you'll agree. Old fans will
remember how regularly I whinge about the publisher
Heinemann's resistance to sending me review copies of the
Brunetti novels of Donna Leon. The number I've managed to
wangle out of them these past 20-odd years is less than the
fingers of one hand, of a Simpsons character! But fatalism is
not in my nature and so I asked again this week, and this
morning a fresh hardback of Unto Us a Son is Given
dropped through my letterbox. Amazeballs!
Expect a review next week.
8.2.2019 After a fair
amount of faff a trip has been booked to fill a tempting gap
in my schedule as course terms finish a fair few weeks before
Easter this year. First it was going to be Milan, to start a
new page on Churches of Venice maybe. This plan was
discouraged by discovering that in the week I wanted my hotel
of choice was charging €900
a night, with the weeks either side averaging around €200,
including the Easter weekend. I still haven't figured out why.
So to prevent further mind bogglement I've decided on a week
in Siena, to quietly add data and depth to the relatively new
Siena pages
on
The
Churches of Florence. But
before then, I'm off in early March for my first-ever time in
Sicily. Sicily then Siena - them old librarianly
alphabetical-ordering instincts are still strong. Maybe I'll
pop down to Sidcup in between.
4.2.2019 On the
Florence front there's some subtle media fuss about House
of Secrets - The Many Lives of a Florentine Palazzo by
Allison Levy. It's about Alberti's admirable and handsome
Palazzo Rucellai, its history and later role as lodgings for
the author.
A review copy has been requested.
Reviews
January 2019
The Aspern Papers
Venice films
Andrea Perego
The Laws of Time
Venice
12.1.2019
This morning's surprise was a new film of
The Aspern
Papers, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and
Jonathan Rhys Meyers (see right). IRL VR is JR's mum, of course, and here
VR plays JR's aunt. Also JRM was married to JR, when he was
Henry VIII and she was Catherine Parr. Oh FGS!
6.1.2019 Buona Epifania! The weekend papers’ book pages have had
their previews of 2019, telling us what books we might look
forward to. The only Venice-mentioning novel amongst the
literary stuff is Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh. Due out
in June, it’s the story of Deen, a book dealer whose
‘extraordinary journey...takes him from India to Los Angeles
and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and
experiences of those he meets along the way.’ Hmm. Due later
that month is The Orphan's Song by Lauren Kate, another
novel about 18th century musical orphans, but from the
Incurabili this time, as the orphan here sings rather than
plays the violin. The author’s books usually have titles like
Fallen and Torment and have windswept women in
long frocks and lots of wild hair on the covers.
In April we can expect The Venetian Masquerade by site-fave
Philip Gwynne Jones, a far brighter prospect. He also reissues
To Venice with Love, his moving-to-Venice memoir, on
the 7th of March, the day after my birthday. More of a shocker
is the new Brunetti from Donna Leon, Unto Us a Son is Given,
coming out not in April, as they always do, but on the 5th of
March, the day before my birthday! But out first is The
Laws of Time by Andrea Perego, which combines an 18th
century setting with a murder, unfolds in a single day (not my
birthday) and features Rosalba Carriera. Could be juicy, it's
out tomorrow.
The pickings for Florence-fiction fans are even slimmer, so
far. Aside from the new one by Philip Kazan, called
The Phoenix of Florence,
in February, late May sees
Lent
by fantasy author Jo Walton, which seems to be a fantastic
take on the life of Savonarola.
Spot the location!
FESTIVE GREETINGS
Some years seem full of fresh developments and some seem to be
more characterised by consolidation. (This wise observation is
in no way to be related to the ongoing global tragedies of
Brexit and Trump, of course, which just fester and get more
farcical with each passing year.) Website-wise Siena and
Bologna, my two newest pages, got solidly improved after
visits in 2018. No new pages were begun, but
fruitful visits to Milan and Arezzo made both of these cities
possibilities. Other trips this year took in Lincoln, Leeds,
York,
Florence and Nancy.
No visit to Venice for me this year despite the lure of the
Tintoretto exhibitions, but a trip is planned for 2019, to
take in the Biennale and a tie-in exhibition devoted to the
demolished church of San Geminiano, involving its links with
Dutch painters and a Tintoretto once owned by David Bowie.
There was increased contact with academic admirers this year,
which is always heartening, and I discovered that
The Churches of Venice had been cited and linked
to in a reference on the Tate Gallery's website, and on
another page there my site is even cited to contradict the
previous misidentification of a doorway! Much useful Venetian
information and updates (and photos) came from a fair few of
you this year. (You know who you are!) Which was all good.
As you may know us retired people need
structure, but 2018 developed oddly. April was dominated by a
great rush of Venice novels, but my usual clustering of Spring
trips didn’t happen, although I did go away more in the
Summer. Courses and summer schools, taking in close encounters
with illuminated manuscripts, Byzantium’s influence on Italian
art, and the Dutch Golden Age kept me well stimulated. And
then in the Autumn there was a sudden blizzard of new novels
by favourite authors, none of whom are exactly prolific and
none of which was less than wonderful. They were The
Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafon,
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, Melmoth
by Sarah Perry and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by
Andrew Miller. The last one was verily the best book I’d read
in many a year.
In prospect for 2019 are courses on Paradise,
Purgatory and Hell, The Courts of Renaissance Italy, and
divers Medieval matters. Anticipation of a mosaics course
propelled me, at last, to book Sicily in March. Also planned
are guided trips to the hilltowns of Umbria (Assisi at last!)
and Medieval Shropshire.
I hope that you have plenty to look forward to
too.
Jeff
30.10.2018
Milan
Spookily featuring a
coincidental continuation of the October focus on works by Mantegna and Bellini.
Also sadness, guidebooks, a fruity old novel, and a rather
fine film.
18.10.2018
I had my first
visit to the
Mantegna and Bellini exhibition
at the National Gallery this morning, and it's a firm
recommendation: intelligent arrangement, impressive and
well-chosen loans, good audioguide and not too crowded.
Highlights include the Crucifixion panel from the San Zeno
altarpiece in Verona, which has still not been returned after
Napoleon swiped it, which means it's much easier to see up
close and appreciate than the altarpiece is itself. And
Mantegna sure has a way with classical architecture, and
rabbits. I came away more of a Mantegna fan than before, but
Bellini is still my man. How they interacted is the
fascination of the show, which moves to Berlin next spring, if
that helps.
19.9.2018
A bit of a
Bellini book bonanza at the moment. Lives of Giovanni Bellini
is a palm-size but comprehensive and plushly-illustrated
compilation of roughly contemporary writing about Bellini by
Vasari, Ridolfi and Boschini, with the letters between him and
Isabella d'Este as a bonus. It's edited and introduced by the
Getty's Davide Gasparotto and looks like an ideal
stocking-filler for the Bellini fans in you life. Giovanni
Bellini: The Art of Contemplation by Johannes Grave is a much
more major career survey. I'll be reviewing both soon. And
then there's the Mantegna and Bellini exhibition in London in
prospect, in connection with which I'm going to a one-day talk
and a two-afternoon course. I strongly doubt that you can have
too much Giov Bellini, but I think that I'm going to find out,
one way or the other.
16.9.2018 Florence and Arezzo 11.8.2018 Searching
for something fresh in the fiction line to read on my upcoming
trip to Florence (and Arezzo) I'm not getting any anticipatory
frissons, I have to admit. There's a new
Philip Kazan, called
The Phoenix of Florence - we like him but it's not
published until next February. Fiction set in Florence
featuring Leonardo is far from rare, as are novels where
conspiracies are uncovered, crimes committed and members of
the Medici family murdered. Also Florence and feminism and
female artists is a definite thing. So a series that mixes up
all of this stuff, called the Da Vinci's Disciples series,
should be no surprise. It features a team of female painters
secretly trained by Leonardo and the books look to be dark and
tasty, but it takes a lot to make me forgive the making of the
heinous Dan Brown mistake of using Da Vinci as a surname, as
regular readers will know. There is a new
Marco Vichi out while I'm in
Florence, but I haven't read his previous one yet. So maybe I
will.
1.7.2018
On a quiet
Sunday afternoon, with the temperature nudging 30 in London,
nothing warms the cockles of a webmaster like the discovery
that his Venetian churches site has been cited and linked to
on the Tate Gallery's website
and on
another page
on the same site
The Churches of Veniceis
even cited to
contradict the previous misidentification of a doorway! 25.6.2018
Nancy 9.6.2018
In Venice fiction news: an email arrives from Christopher
Jones, the author ofWhite Phantom City which I read and liked a while back.
He's been re-writing it and tightening it up, it seems, and it
has just been republished as The Breath of the Zephyr.
If you missed it first time round...
6.6.2018
Bologna
5.6.2018 I'm
just back from a week in Bologna, and my trip report will
follow. But while I was away news broke that John Julius
Norwich had died - a sad day for fans of Venice and for the
readers and lovers of his many special books on his favourite
city. He revealed his innermost passions to this very website
on
this page.
8.4.2018 As the temperature
creeps up and the rain falls it seems that Spring is upon us,
with all the yellow flowers and forward-looking that the
season demands. Me, I've got a week-long Summer School next
week (I
know!) at the Courtauld on the Byzantine influence
on Italian art, followed by a Spring-term course at the V&A on
illuminated manuscripts. Trips booked for the next six months
are to Bologna, Nancy, Leeds & York and Arezzo. I hope that
you've got good stuff to look forward to too.
1.4.2018 During a
conversation on my recent trip to Siena the tour manager
revealed that she had been a pupil of Donna Leon during the
latter's early career as a teacher, and that Donna L. now
lives in Switzerland. This last fact is no secret, but it does
explain the news that from the next instalment the action of
the Brunetti novels is moving to Geneva. Following the
unpleasantness at the end of
The Temptation of Forgiveness Brunetti and the family are
moved for their own safety, it seems. Your guess is as good as
mine as to the crimes he might investigate. Antique cuckoo
clock forgeries? Chocolate counterfeiting? The Swiss banks
hanging onto Nazi gold? We'll see, next April.
12.3.2018
Siena
25.2.2018 Whilst waiting for the
April rush of new novels set in Venice - Donna Leon's
The Temptation of Forgiveness and Philip Gwynne Jones's
Vengeance in Venice - and
following upon the joys of Gregory Dowling's The Four
Horsemen, the last-mentioned author tells me good things
about The Eye Stone by Roberto Tiraboschi. So
that one is next up on the Kindle, not least because it's set
in the 12th century - a pretty darn rare period for Venice-set
fiction.
14.2.2018
Short trips: Lincoln
My Books of 2018
Roberto Tiraboschi
The Eye Stone Imogen Hermes GowarThe Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Haruki Murakami
Killing Commendatore Sarah Perry
Melmoth Andrew Miller
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
Paraic O’Donnell The House on Vesper
Sands
Christelle Dabos A Winter's Promise
Ben Schott Jeeves and the King of
Clubs After spending 2017 reading all of the Jeeves & Wooster stories how
topping
it was that Ben Schott was surprisingly able to channel the master
so well.
My CDs of 2018
Nils Frahm All Melody
Neko Case Hell-On
Great Lake Swimmers The Waves, The Wake
Death Cab for Cutie Thank You for Today
Frontperson Frontrunner
Aurora Infections Of A Different Kind –
Step 1
Eddi Reader Cavalier
Tina Dico Fastland
Dan Mangan More of Less
Evangelina Mascardi Laurent de Saint-Luc:
Pièces pour luth
Jadran Duncumb Weiss & Hasse: Lute Sonatas My lute thing continued
(two above) and a modern choral thing took hold (two below) Latvian Radio Choir Silvestrov: To
Thee We Sing
Chamber Choir of Europe Lauridsen: Les
Chansons des Roses
Utopia Chamber Choir Piae Cantiones A nice combination of
troubadour pluck and percussion with choral loveliness.
1.1.2018 My minor new-year chore was
re-organising these News pages, in the light of a whole new one
just beginning. Amongst things noticed were that Francesco da
Mosta's much-hyped novel,
The Black
King, which was due out in 2011,
never did appear, and neither did the film of Miss Garnet's
Angel, or the remake of Don't Look Now. But one of
my favourite books of 2014 Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist
was a (reportedly spiffy) big thing on TV over xmas, and
another of my 2014 picks Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern
Reach Trilogy has the film of its first part out in
February, directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie
Portman and Oscar Isaac, stars of the Star Wars
prequels and sequels respectively. And if you haven't seen the very
stirring Star Wars: The Last Jedi
yet...why not?!
My Books of 2017
Philip Gwynne Jones
The Venetian Game
Sylvain Neuvel
Waking Gods
David Adams Cleveland
Time's Betrayal I read all of the Jeeves and
Wooster stories and novels in 2017,
but if you read only one make it... P.G. Wodehouse
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
Jennifer Egan
Manhattan Beach
Glenn Haybittle
The Way Back to Florence
Philip Pullman
La Belle Sauvage
Blake Crouch
Dark Matter
Ali Smith
Winter
My CDs of 2017 Elbow Little Fictions
Dirty Projectors
The New Pornographers Whiteout Conditions
Leslie Mendelson Love & Murder
Grizzly Bear Painted Ruins
UNKLE The Road, Pt. 1
The National Sleep Well Beast
Oh Wonder Ultralife
Jim White Waffles, Triangles & Jesus
My late-life Early Music obsession mostly
bedded in this year - no startling discoveries,
just a continuation of the lute-love, especially from Germany in the 18th century,
and the keenness for Biber's violin sonatas.
Ensemble Violini Capricciosi Biber - Violin Sonatas
John Schneiderman Eighteenth-Century Lute Music
Lutz Kirchhof The Lute in Dance and Dream
Was 2017 a worse year, globally speaking, than 2016, or just
more of the same? The Trump situation only got worse,
certainly, not least for me because every time I read of his
latest moronic outburst or action I'd spend the next hour or
so humming flipping Nellie the Elephant to myself.
You know... Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump.
My big deal of 2017 was my 60th birthday, in March, when I
started getting my work pension, free travel in London and
cheaper rail journeys outside London. This last benefit didn't
quite get me to as many English cathedral cities as I'd hoped,
but they'll get visited in time, have no fear.
Unlike Mr Trump I learned a lot in 2017. My Byzantine and Medieval thing
continued, with the Black Death featuring heavily. (Modern
scholarship is easing off on the rats and putting the blame more on gerbils, don't you know.) Trips to Venice, Milan,
Bologna and Urbino got the year off to a safely Italian start.
Then, following a marvellous Vermeer exhibition in Dublin in
the summer, the Dutch Golden Age got my juices flowing, with
an eye-opening Rembrandt etchings exhibition in Norwich,
during a
course dealing with Bosch and Bruegel, with a trip to Vienna
to see the very best works of the latter, and a superior
example of the former's work too.
As to what all this wider-horizons stuff means for my websites...well I certainly
seem to have been writing more trip reports than reviews of
novels set in Venice, but lives and enthusiasms and priorities
change, as I'm sure you'll agree. My sites will reflect
this, as more cities get their churches explored and less
Venetian novels seem certain to fascinate.
So
I'll sign off with a warm invitation to anyone wishing to
share my horizon-broadening in 2018. But if you're happy to
stay in Venice I'll see you sometime in 2018 too, no
doubt.
Chins up!
Jeff
18.12.2017 Looking forward into 2018,
April is looking like a good month for us fans of
fiction set in Venice. As ever there's the new Brunetti from
Donna Leon, called The Temptation of Forgiveness, but
also Philip Gwynne Jones' Vengeance in Venice, the
follow-up to
The Venetian Game
which was
one of 2017's best.
9.12.2017
Vienna
25.11.2017 The eagle-eyed
amongst you might have noticed that the trip to Florence and Siena
mentioned below didn't happen. This
was all down to BA cancelling my flight and my not being able
to face the queue and the faff of finding another flight, or
flights. Or maybe it was simply fate. For by not going to Siena I
attended an art lecture I would otherwise have missed. The
lecturer there raving about the Rembrandt etchings exhibition
at the Norwich Castle museum was timely encouragement for me
to spend a few days in Norwich, becoming equally smitten by
Rembrandt's etching and the city itself. So, I'm going with
fate, and making a brief trip report that I'm calling...
Short trips: Norwich Then on an evening when I wasn't in Siena I was also moved to
search for architecture-themed bed linen on Etsy, and
thereby found a spiffy panel of old stained glass (see photo
above right) which I bought and which now embellishes my
house and life. Further proof that I just wasn't meant to go
to Siena, I'm thinking.
26.10.2017
Next week I'm
off to Florence for a few days, and then to Siena for a few
more. Anyway, some Florence-related reading is planned - I
might even have a go at The Decameron, but don't take
that as a firm promise. I notice that this month has seen new
books about Leonardo da Vinci, the Medici and Vasari. Did we need these
subjects covered yet again? Well, I sure didn't.
22.9.2017
Padua & Verona
3.9.2017 Having just added a
film called Le Retour de Casanova to the Venice Films
page set me to wondering if it would be useful to make a
Casanova Films side page, as they don't all have titles
beginning with C. And maybe put the books about him on it too.
Which made me wonder what other subjects of novels might
deserve their own pages. Filippo Lippi has been the subject of
a few novels, I realised, so maybe I could combine them and
make a Men Famous for Relationships With Nuns page! Or maybe
not.
17.8.2017
You know how it
goes - an author emails you to offer you a review copy of his
new novel, and after months of shenanigans involving
publishers dithering over delivery, changing their minds, and
other hiccups and hesitations, you finally get a copy. And
it's 1165 pages long! And to be ahead of the game you need to
read and review it before October, when it's published. I'm
sure we've all been there. The book is Time's Betrayal
by David Adams Cleveland, and as I loved his two previous
novels I'm confident it'll be worth the time and muscle pain.
Expect a review, but not soon.
12.8.2017
Dublin
6.8.2017
Tomorrow we're off to Dublin. Why Dublin? Well, whilst it's not
unfair to accuse me of visiting major European art capitals mostly to feed
my obsession with Italian art - that being my main reason for visits to
Vienna, Liverpool, Birmingham and even Paris in recent years - in this
case the main draw is a big Vermeer exhibition - Vermeer and the
Masters of Genre Painting. This is my first visit, to Ireland and Dublin,
so ogling of Georgian architecture and literary pilgrimage spots will
probably be
indulged in too. And then there's The Book of Kells.
22.6.2017
A guidebook to
Verona has just been published in Germany with one of my
photos inside! I tell you this, with scans (see right) not just to blow
my own trumpet but to also blow a big raspberry at Brexit -
ffftttpppttt!
19.6.2017
When I read that
Richard Russo's new story collection
Trajectory
contained a novella-length story set in Venice I was immediately
interested, and looking forward to a new story from an author
whose previous Venice-set books have been gems. Imagine my
disappointment, then, in discovering that the story, called
Voice, is just Nate in Venice, read and reviewed
four years ago, with a new title. What can I say but 'grrrr'?
4-7.5.2017
Urbino
27.4.2017 ‘So, Jeff, what’s
happening?’ I hear you ask. Well, I’m off on an art historical
tour to Urbino towards the end of next week, and then it’s a
biggish gap, trip-wise, until a week in Dublin in August,
mostly to see the Vermeer exhibition (which is moving from
Paris in June), but the Book of Kells is also a draw, and the
city itself, of course. The trip-gap will be used to visit
more English cathedrals – my project of 2017. Books-wise
there's A Trial in
Venice
being read and the promise of a review copy of Sansovino's
Venice by Vaughan Hart, a rare new translation and
annotation of the famed guidebook of 1561.
7.4.2017 Psst, fancy a
good read? Well
in
Donna Leon'sEarthly Remainsand
Philip Gwynne Jones'
The Venetian Game
you'll find that April has
already provided a couple of essentials, and my copy of
A Trial in
Venice, mentioned below, has just arrived too. In
other news, provided by
The Venetian Game, it
turns out that the long and low arch of striped pipe amongst the
chimneys in the oil refinery in Marghera, visible from the Zattere, is called the Arch of Cracking. Who knew?
24-31.3.2017
Bologna
23.3.2017 A couple of new
Venice novels with reviews coming soon. Firstly A Trial in
Venice by Roberta Rich which sees Hannah, the heroine of
The Midwife of Venice and The Harem Midwife,
return to Venice, and the Ghetto, after some years living in
Constantinople. Then there's a novel by Philip Gwynne Jones
called The Venetian Game which has a plot involving a
prayer book illustrated by Giovanni Bellini. I've also found a
'new' film set in Venice - a musical called The Broadway
Gondolier from 1935, starring Dick Powell and Joan
Blondell. I doubt there's any location filming but a good deal
of the (reportedly preposterous) plot is set in Venice. But
firstly to Bologna, tomorrow, for a week.
8-12.3.2017
Milan
25.02.2017
A quiet February draws to a
close and a somewhat hectic March is in prospect. My birthday
on the 6th is my 60th and, apart from numerological
coincidences, it sees me reach the age when I can get free
travel in the whole of London with the 60+ Oyster, cheap fares
on train journeys in the whole country with the Senior
Railcard, and start receiving my work pension. Hallelujah! The
plastic cards for the first two have been acquired and are
waiting for action. The process for the last is well
progressed too. My birthday is also Michelangelo's and to
celebrate his birthday the Accademia Gallery in Florence are
introducing a friends' membership scheme, sweetly named The
Friends of David! Trips-wise I'm off on the 8th on a
guided tour around Medieval Milan, and later in March I'm
self-propelling to Bologna. My request for a review copy of
the new Donna Leon has as usual fallen on deaf inboxes at Heinemann, it
seems, but I'm confident of getting it onto my Kindle by some
means, foul or fair. But that's a matter for April, lets
celebrate March first. 18-22.1.2017
A fine cold time was had.
13.1.2017
Timothy Williams, the author
responsible for the Commissario Trotti series, had the fifth
novel in the series reviewed by me in the earliest days of
this site. He was not getting published at the time so I
championed him by putting up some chapters of the 6th Trotti
novel here.
He has been comprehensively reprinted since, and at long last
Trotti 6 is going to be published, on the 18th of May. I have
an advance copy here, so expect a review soon. In other
upcoming reviews news... A Florence Diary by Diana
Athill and Venice, An Interior by Javier Marías are a
pair of slim volumes in the 'personal reminiscence' vein
published before Christmas.
5.1.2017
Well that's 2016 and its
festive period over, and good riddance to both. My lack of
festive cheer is due to our cat Peter's illness worsening
after Christmas, and us having to make that sad last trip to
the vet on the 29th. He was a devoted and affectionate cat who will be sorely missed and warmly
remembered. Attempting to lift our gloom we've booked a sudden
few days in Venice for later in January, encouraged by those
of you who have written recommending the ease and crowdlessness of winter stays.
Chins up, then, with wishes for 2017 being a
relief after 2016.