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WORK TITLE: If Venice Dies
WORK NOTES: trans by Andre Naffis-Sahely
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/11/1941
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Italian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 11, 1941.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Archeologist and historian. Getty Research Institute, former director; Scuola Normale Superiore, former director. Chairman, Louvre Museum’s Scientific Council.
WRITINGS
Also author of books in Italian. Contributor to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Salvatore Settis is a trained archaeologist and art historian who has who has written several books in Italian. He is chairman of the Louvre Museum’s Scientific Council, and he has also worked as director of the Getty Research Institute and director of the Scuola Normale Superiore. While much of Settis’s professional background is attached to museums, his writing career is widely associated with cultural critique. In Italy, Settis is widely known for lamenting the dissolution of Italy’s cultural heritage as it gives way to late-stage capitalism. Settis’s first book in English translation, If Venice Dies, follows this approach, and it explores the commodification of one of Italy’s most famous cities.
As Settis explains in If Venice Dies, the tourist population in Venice is greater than that of local inhabitants. Young Venetians are leaving the city in droves, and most of the city’s municipal services have moved to the mainland. Venice supports a growing number of new luxury hotels. Many of these hotels are built with cheap materials, creating an architectural landscape that undermines Venice’s rich cultural heritage. While Venice continues to sink and water continues to rise, few efforts to preserve the city have succeeded. In fact, there are plans to build a them park on a nearby island. Yet, Venice itself has become a kind of theme park, and Setis asserts that the city is merely the canary in the coal mine. According to the author, the commodification of Venice as a tourist destination, is symptomatic of the increasing commodification of life itself. Humans spend more and more time in skyscrapers and cubicles. Cities are increasingly built without consideration for human experience (i.e. human scale), thus failing to promote interpersonal interaction outside of commodification and/or failing to provide an opportunity for communities to form organically.
As Maclean’s correspondent Brian Bethune explained, “the enemy in his eloquent polemic against the iconic city’s decline is the way the Western world, dedicated to commodifying everything, is busy turning its cultural patrimony in general and Venice in particular into theme park attractions.” Discussing the book in the Washington Post Online, John Domini remarked: “Although brief overall, in other words, this polemic feels chock-full of insight. It shines a harsh light on the risks in the way we live, much as Jane Jacobs did in The Death and Life of Great American Cities more than 50 years ago. As for a way out of those risks, a glint of light down the urban canyons, If Venice Dies makes savvy use of the great fabulist Italo Calvino.”
However, Jennifer Senior in the New York Times Online stated: “It is Mr. Settis’s prerogative to write a book that privileges philosophy over policy. But If Venice Dies is practically devoid of history, a criminal oversight for a polemic that makes such an impassioned case for history’s value. Mr. Settis continually invokes Calvino’s notion of a city’s spirit, that ineffable thing that sets it apart from other places. Yet he never comes out and says what Venice’s spirit is, and how it might guide future plans to invigorate the city, to rescue it from its ‘mummified museum-city’ self.” Open Letters Monthly Online writer Steve Donoghue was more equivocal, advising: “In pursuit of the elusive balance between aesthetics and history, Settis half-jokingly proposes that architects swear the Virtruvian Oath, their own equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath . . . Such an oath wouldn’t address the aforementioned hordes of trampling tourists, and neither it nor anything else can do much about the rising seas. But it’s a start, and If Venice Dies is its most passionate discussion yet.” Praising If Venice Dies in Kirkus Reviews Online, a critic announced that it presents “an impassioned plea that every lover of Venice, urban planner, architect, and cultural historian should read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Maclean’s, September 19, 2016, Brian Bethune, “Venice without Venetians,” p. 68.
Publishers Weekly July 11, 2016, review of If Venice Dies, p. 56.
ONLINE
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (June 21, 2016), review of If Venice Dies.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (November 23, 2016), Jennifer Senior, review of If Venice Dies.
Open Letters Monthly Online, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (September 12, 2016), Steve Donoghue, review of If Venice Dies.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (October 10, 2016), John Domini, review of If Venice Dies.*
LC control no.: n 79139518
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Settis, Salvatore
Variant(s): Settis, S. (Salvatore), 1941-
See also: Employer: Scuola normale superiore (Italy)
Birth date: 1941-06-11
Field of activity: Archaeology History
Affiliation: Scuola normale superiore (Italy)
Profession or occupation:
College teachers College administrators
Found in: Author's Chelōnē. Saggio sull'Afrodite Urania di Fidia,
1966.
La Colonna Traiana, c1988: t.p. (S. Settis) jkt. (Salvatore
Settis)
Info. converted from 678, 2012-10-02 (b. 1941)
Bibliothèque nationale de France, via VIAF, 23 April 2013
(Settis, Salvatore; born 11 June 1941; Italian author;
writes in Italian, French, English, German; director and
professor of history of archaeology at EÌcole normale
supeÌrieure de Pise)
Associated language:
ita eng ger fre
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Salvatore Settis is an archaeologist and art historian who has been the director of the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He is chairman of the Louvre Museum’s Scientific Council. Settis, considered the conscience of Italy for his role in spotlighting neglect of its national cultural heritage, has been mentioned frequently for the post of minister of culture and Italian president. He is the author of several books on art history as well as a regular contributor to major Italian newspapers and magazines.
Salvatore Settis is an archaeologist and art historian who has directed the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He is chairman of the Louvre Museum's Scientific Council. Considered the conscience of Italy for his role in spotlighting its neglect of the national cultural heritage, Settis’s name has been mentioned frequently for the post of minister of culture and Italian president. He is the author of several books on art history as well as a regular contributor to major Italian newspapers and magazines.
Venice without Venetians
Brian Bethune
129.37 (Sept. 19, 2016): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
IF VENICE DIES
Salvatore Settis
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Over the centuries, and increasingly so as sea levels have begun to rise, a lot of people have worried over the possible death of Venice. But Settis, an art historian who currently leads the Louvre Museum's scientific council, is not primarily concerned with the Queen of the Adriatic slipping beneath the waves. No, the enemy in his eloquent polemic against the iconic city's decline is the way the Western world, dedicated to commodifying everything, is busy turning its cultural patrimony in general and Venice in particular into theme park attractions.
Venetians, "the lifeblood that flows through the veins of [the city's] streets and squares," are an endangered species. For half a century they have been fleeing the islands of the urban core for the mainland. The number of permanent inhabitants in the historic city has fallen to about 56,000, the same number who lived there after the Black Death halved the population in 1348. Yet the place isn't exactly empty, as Settis acidly notes: eight million tourist visits annually mean that, on any given day, Venetians--who are overwhelmingly employed in servicing the visitors--are outnumbered 140 to 1.
The demands of "the tourist monoculture" have led to astronomical prices for the global super-rich's trophy second (or third or fourth) homes--housing costs that would make Venetians laugh at Vancouverites' concerns over the effect of foreign demand on their city's real estate--and to an insatiable demand for hotel space for the merely affluent. Since 2000, Settis writes, numerous government and private quarters along the Grand Canal--Venice's main drag--have been displaced to make way for 16 new hotels. It's as though the world at large were responding to Venice's oncoming fossilization in the same fashion 19th-century natural history organizations responded to news of an approaching species extinction--by dispatching hunting parties to kill the remnants, for the sake of the bragging rights bestowed by ownership of the last stuffed carcasses.
If the prognosis is crystal clear, the prescription is depressing in its own way. What, in a world given over to market forces, will otherwise affect who lives, works and rules in Venice? Settis can demand the state take steps to subsidize non-tourist businesses and the living costs for young people while curtailing foreign ownership, but it's unlikely the cash-strapped Italian government is listening. The writer himself sounds more angry than hopeful. His title, in fact, says it all: if-when--La Serenissima is fully Disneyfied, let its fate be a cautionary tale for the inhabitants of every still-breathing, still-not-like-every-other-megalopolis, city.
Caption: 'If Venice Dies': The biggest threat to the city is not climate change, it's the influx of tourists and the ultra-rich that turned it into a theme park
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bethune, Brian. "Venice without Venetians." Maclean's, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466297301&it=r&asid=5ca9b7473ccc78f6cdea4f661ad6ef27. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466297301
If Venice Dies
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
If Venice Dies
Salvatore Settis, trans. from the Italian by Andre Naffis-Sahely. New Vessel, $16.95 trade paper (180p) ISBN 978-1-939931-37-5
Few urban landscapes are as recognizable as Venice's, but as Settis, an art historian and former director of the Getty Research Institute, writes, tourists now outnumber inhabitants and dozens of municipal institutions have decamped to the mainland, replaced by luxury hotels and "a tourist monoculture." Meanwhile, around the world, prefabricated doge's palaces flanked by a few desultory canals have been "constructed with cheap building materials, but [are] nonetheless presented as the epitome of luxury." These cut-rate imitations are often more tourist-friendly than the real thing. Plans are even afoot to build a theme park of Venice on one of its own outlying islands. "The virus of the simulation has wormed its way into Venice and has ensnared it," Settis writes, "like a mirror that swallows up the face of whoever looks into it." He observes that as cities worldwide are swept up in the "rhetoric of heights"--the race to build ever taller skyscrapers--people are herded into anonymous cubicles, sapping the vitality of the streets below. Settis laments the commodifying, transactional effect of capitalism on communities' ideas about their identities, purposes, and aesthetics, and this brief book is at once a moving eulogy for Venice and a resounding manifesto, enriched by a dense web of historic, literary and cultural allusions. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"If Venice Dies." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915366&it=r&asid=54f0fa4d8e8c77f26bfb9509ef1d145d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915366
Review: ‘If Venice Dies’ Examines a City Sinking, and Not Only Into Water
Books of The Times
By JENNIFER SENIOR NOV. 23, 2016
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For centuries, Venice has a been a gorgeous shell — the colorful, fragile remains of its former imperial past. It is a stop on an itinerary, not a final destination. “There is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice,” Mary McCarthy wrote in “Venice Observed,” published in 1956.
What’s so demoralizing about this observation is that McCarthy made it when the city’s native population was likely at its peak. According to a handy little chart in Salvatore Settis’s “If Venice Dies,” the city had 174,808 inhabitants in 1951. By 2015, the number had dropped to 56,072. That’s about 2,000 fewer residents than Venice had in the aftermath of the plague of 1348. Maybe the ancient records can’t be trusted. But you get the idea.
The beginning of Mr. Settis’s book is its own plague of terrifying facts and figures. Today, visitors outnumber Venetians by 140 to 1. If tourism development continues apace, the city center may soon have no residential lodging at all. Among the institutions that have closed since 2000 along the Grand Canal: the National Research Council, the Mediocredito bank, the transport authority, the local education agency, the German Consulate. Souvenir shops have replaced grocery stores. Luxury hotels have replaced medical offices.
“A tourist monoculture now dominates a city,” Mr. Settis writes, “which banishes its native citizens and shackles the survival of those who remain to their willingness to serve.”
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There’s a depressing falsity to it all. The city has become a replica of itself. Epcot by way of Palladio.
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Credit via New Vessel Press
Mr. Settis, an art historian and chairman of the Louvre Museum’s Scientific Council, is clearly committed to saving Venice from the various forces that threaten to destroy it. Yet the city itself is curiously absent from this slim, speculative volume. “If Venice Dies” is more of a meditation on the madness of the free market, consumer culture and mindless urban expansion than it is about a city in a peril. At its best, the book is a bracing tonic, I suppose. But at its worst, it’s a slimy bouillabaisse of French poststructuralist-theory slop.
And there’s a lot of this slop. His comparison of César Pelli’s towers in Seville and Santiago to phallic symbols may alone make some readers green around the gills.
“This widespread metaphor reveals how architecture is conceived as a form of control, oppression and display of power, typical of an androcentric society in which rape can be considered a virtue,” he explains. “The skyscraper is the dominant male that forces the city, or the woman, into submissiveness; or the skyscraper, which represents modernity, fertilizes the historic city center.”
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Skyscrapers loom large in Mr. Settis’s imagination. His ruminations about them, turgid phallic references aside, are enlightening, if rather bleak. He views them as the hallmark of the Earth’s many rapidly expanding cities, or megalopolises, and for the most part, he doesn’t see these buildings as doing much good for anyone other than their developers and starchitects; seldom are they expressions of a city’s soul.
What I could not tell, however, was how big a threat skyscraperism (new word!) poses to the city of Venice. As Mr. Settis notes (citing Italo Calvino), Venice is currently “the polar opposite” of a megalopolis. Over the course of his book, he names just two examples of proposed skyscraper projects intended to help repopulate the city and, in one case, to help stem its rising waters. But one looks as if has been canceled, and the other, the Aqualta 2060 project, is “purely theoretical.”
Mr. Settis spends an awful lot of time dwelling on the theoretical. He devotes three chapters to lamenting the various simulacra of Venice around the world, including the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, which he fears are “corrupting the real Venice’s image of itself” by further reducing the city to caricature. The ultimate insult: a possible amusement park, Veniceland, on one of the islands in the Venetian Lagoon now dedicated to storing garbage. But will it happen? And if it did, would the resulting tragedy really be what he describes? “A fake Venice next to the real one, whereby the truth of the simulacrum shatters and engulfs the truth of history”?
Venice faces many concrete, on-the-ground problems. But Mr. Settis doesn’t begin to address them in earnest until the last 40 pages of the book: It is hemorrhaging young people. Its government is incompetent and corrupt. Its real estate has become unaffordable, thanks to fabulously wealthy second-home owners who’ve hoovered up every building or apartment with a winged lion on its door. Its water levels are rising even as the city sinks; its solutions to both problems have resulted in some serious boondoggles.
And the city is hostage to the tourism industry. Cruise ships blight the scenery, ravage the canals and disgorge their day trippers. Yet the governing class passively accepts it, “all in the name of a single reward: money.” What Venice desperately needs — which Mr. Settis doesn’t say until the penultimate page of his book — is a rehabilitation of its own industries, like fishing, and better infrastructure for a new creative class: investments in universities and research, incentives for manufacturing and private enterprise.
It is Mr. Settis’s prerogative to write a book that privileges philosophy over policy. But “If Venice Dies” is practically devoid of history, a criminal oversight for a polemic that makes such an impassioned case for history’s value. Mr. Settis continually invokes Calvino’s notion of a city’s spirit, that ineffable thing that sets it apart from other places. Yet he never comes out and says what Venice’s spirit is, and how it might guide future plans to invigorate the city, to rescue it from its “mummified museum-city” self.
“Venice must know how to creatively construct its own destiny, tailoring each change it makes according to the best possible future for its citizens,” Mr. Settis writes, “and not what the tourists or real estate agencies want.” Agreed. But again: Tell us — please, please tell us — what would that mean?
Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @jenseniorny.
If Venice Dies
By Salvatore Settis
Translated by André Naffis-Sabely
179 pages. New Vessel Press. $16.95.
Book Review: If Venice Dies
By Steve Donoghue (September 12, 2016) No Comment
If Venice Dies if-venice-dies
by Salvatore Settis
translated from the Italian by André Naffis-Sahely
New Vessel Press, 2016
It’s like that one elfin great-aunt who’s been showing up at family gatherings for as long as anybody can remember and only ever discussing one subject: her imminent demise from “the thrombosis.” On the one hand, it would be churlish – and asking for trouble – to outright disbelieve her, but on the other hand, anybody who’s been on death’s doorstep long enough to see her own great-grandchildren perhaps has some explaining to do. And, as the inimitable Yogi Berra used to say, on the third hand, might there be a pitiless but natural calculus at work, suggesting that this great-aunt might in fact profit from a fundamental change? That if not she then certainly the world might benefit from the full-stop of her perpetual invalid status?
So it is with the grand city of Venice: it’s been teetering on the brink of its own annihilation for the past five hundred years, with the world’s pundits lamenting the marauding Turk, the barbarous Bonaparte, the rot of urban decay, the rising of the waters, and the onslaught of tourists – each in their turn declared the final nail in the city’s coffin, sure sign that the end has come. On the one hand, it would be churlish to deny some of the grosser facts involved; many districts of Venice are now experiencing worse and more frequent flooding than every before, and the city is trampled by millions of tourists every single year (and thousands more who don’t even bother to trample, being content to take cellphone photos from the promenade deck of their massive cruise ship, which is parked 100 feet from the front door of St. Mark’s). But on the other hand, the city endures – and has been enduring these and other daily indignities for a long time. And on the third hand, in a world that has always held sack and fire in minimal abeyance, can a dreaming city over a thousand years old really rightfully complain if fundamental changes are finally in the offing? Hasn’t Venice had a good run?
The whole complicated subject of the city’s life and death and afterlife is the main obession of a new book from New Vessel Press, If Venice Dies, an English-Language translation (by the very capable André Naffis-Sahely, himself Venetian-born) of Salvatore Settis’s 2014 Se Venezia muore. Settis is an archeologist and an art historian, and here he writes with flash and passion about the present and future of Venice. It’s a grim but downright thrilling short book that dashes around a dozen fascinating aspects of the struggle that Venice has been having with modernity for the last thirty years or so.
He venomously dislikes the boutiquing of the city, its gradual transformation from a living, breathing place of markets, churches, and schools into an “embalmed city” acting mainly as a picturesque backdrop for tourist fantasies, and many stretches of If Venice Dies are animated by the tension between those two alternatives. He fulminates against the kind of blind modernization that would blight the city with towers of steel and glass:
Can Venice’s uniqueness (being one of the only cities on earth where the sound of one’s footsteps isn’t drowned out by the rumble of traffic, where one can still hear the sound of the water washing against the quays and the “stones of Venice,” which Ruskin so dutifully explored) still be considered an antidote to the monoculture of skyscrapers?
But he can also be impatient with the timidity of the alternative, arguing instead for a more nuanced approach to the history of what he calls the “poetics of reutilization”:
The architect doesn’t professionally study history, but his or her profession is both empty and miserable without it, all because history, meaning the awareness of our collective cultural memory, is the foundation of the notion of responsibility. Conversely, anyone who places aesthetics above history is advocating a kind of architecture that is both socially irresponsible because it harms society and essentially servile because it is beholden to its customers.
In pursuit of the elusive balance between aesthetics and history, Settis half-jokingly proposes that architects swear the Virtruvian Oath, their own equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath that, with a little luck, guides the medical profession in the struggle between tradition and modernity, between its own progressive and conservative tendencies. Professionals taking the Virtruvian Oath would then be duty-bound to consider their cities as living, breathing things rather than blank canvases – with the results being, ideally, a more holistic approach to extremely historical places like Venice.
Such an oath wouldn’t address the aforementioned hordes of trampling tourists, and neither it nor anything else can do much about the rising seas. But it’s a start, and If Venice Dies is its most passionate discussion yet.
IF VENICE DIES
by Salvatore Settis, translated by André Naffis-Sahely
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Archaeologist and art historian Settis (The Future of the Classical, 2006, etc.) explores how troubled Venice is capable of being the true vision of a city.
As Lucca has a wall and fields beyond, Venice has the lagoon protecting it, acting as its countryside by providing for it. The city is the ideal and quintessential form of human community, an open space where diversity and social life can unfold. However, as the author shows, Venice is under threat: from “tourist monoculture,” citizens leaving their hometown, and other factors. Settis decries the densification and verticalization of cities, and he condemns skyscrapers as symbols of a civilization completely subservient to the bottom line. The value of the relationship between the population and its cultural heritage can’t be monetized. Even as architects—or “starchitects,” as Settis calls them—anthropomorphize their buildings, making them into organic shapes or creating villages with urban forests, they cannot redeem them aesthetically. Cities must grow, but creative destruction has to produce civil capital, and passive preservation merely presages and hastens a city’s death. Settis cites Plutarch in writing that the city is like a living organism that grows as it mutates and yet still remains itself. Happily, Venice has been behind in the race to gigantism—the author cites the horrors of 32 million people living in and around Chongqing, China, among others. But in the past decades, Venice has suffered significant population flight as those who remain only serve tourism and Venice’s own skyscrapers, the cruise ships; often, the tourists outnumber the residents. Settis also chronicles some proposals to help Venice; some are mere examples of Disneyfication, while others are potentially “devastating”—e.g., Aqualta 2060, the plan to build a ring of skyscrapers around the lagoon. The author calls for a code of ethics for architects, who need to build a city and landscape not to look at but to live in.
An impassioned plea that every lover of Venice, urban planner, architect, and cultural historian should read.
Pub Date: Sept. 13th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939931-37-5
Page count: 180pp
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: June 21st, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
Venice is just the beginning — the West is sinking into a sea of commerce
By John Domini October 10, 2016
My father was eager to leave Naples, the long-troubled Italian port in which he was born, but in his last years, he had a recurring complaint about life in the States. In this country, he would grumble, the simplest pleasures seemed to come with a price tag.
“Even a pretty sunset,” he’d say, no doubt recalling the spectacular sunsets of his native city. “If you want it, you have to pay for it.”
(New Vessel)
That complaint often came to mind as I sank into the erudite gloom of “If Venice Dies,” by Salvatore Settis, a distinguished professor of art and archaeology in Italy. Settis’s learning is so formidable that he can shuttle, in just three pages, from the anthropology of “cargo cults” to Walter Benjamin on capitalism and Nietzsche on the Italian spirit. But in this powerful work of cultural criticism, he seeks to reverse the same trend that upset my father: that of “a civilization completely subservient to market forces.”
[Review: ‘Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,’ by Robert Kanigel ]
Those forces are easy to see at work on the streets around St. Mark’s and the Rialto. Lovely as such places are, they all but suffocate under the hordes of sightseers, many of them day-trippers down off gargantuan cruise ships, who reduce much of Venetian life to what Settis calls a “tourist monoculture.” His book’s first column of statistics — the first of many — details the collapse of the actual urban population, the people who raise their children and make their living in town. Almost 175,000 in 1951, the head count now comes to roughly a third of that.
These dispiriting local figures are linked, throughout the opening chapters, to grim data from around the world. The global proliferation of the “megalopolis,” for instance, launches Settis into a sustained litany of its ills. In 1961, “megalopolis” served to describe “the Boston-Washington corridor.” These days, the term is more fitting for a largely unregulated boomtown like China’s Chongqing, its population exploding past 32 million, with “an urban jungle of hundreds of skyscrapers” looming over squalid shantytowns. Chongqing emerges as the book’s Inferno, a recurring shorthand for how civilization’s “highest cultural expression,” the city, has “given way to a machine which produces and consumes.”
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Production and consumption, to be sure, are the auricle and ventricle of capitalism, and certainly “If Venice Dies” misses few opportunities to lash out at “blind belief in the irrepressible power of the market as the sole source of all value.” But the effect can be wearying. What’s worse, Settis suffers such enthusiasm for his research that some passages call to mind an eager PhD candidate, working in every last item on the bibliography. (The pedantic effect, by the way, can’t be blamed on the translator, since André Naffis-Sahely proves adept even with colloquialisms like “chasing a quick buck.”) The most lugubrious writing comes when the author whales away at the 21st-century craze for skyscrapers in a jeremiad that reaches at least one highly dubious conclusion: Are the tall buildings of a contemporary downtown actually “gigantic phallic symbols,” representing a “society in which rape can be considered a virtue”?
Author Salvatore Settis (Alessandro Albert)
But then again, the book’s excavations turn up fascinating nuggets. I particularly enjoyed learning that a 45-story Caracas, Venezuela, project is now known as “the world’s tallest slum” because after the investors pulled out, squatters moved in. Better yet, philosophers, such as Benjamin and Nietzsche, assert guiding principles throughout, lending humanity to the string of worrisome numbers and compendiums of bad urban planning. And Settis himself can wax philosophical: “Photographs do not preserve a memory; instead they have replaced our remembrance and our ability to see.”
Although brief overall, in other words, this polemic feels chock-full of insight. It shines a harsh light on the risks in the way we live, much as Jane Jacobs did in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” more than 50 years ago. As for a way out of those risks, a glint of light down the urban canyons, “If Venice Dies” makes savvy use of the great fabulist Italo Calvino. Settis credits his countryman for the notion of “invisible cities.” He uses this as a defining term for the city as “a living tapestry of stories, memories, principles, languages, desires, institutions, and plans.” If homo urbanus can go on weaving that tapestry, allowing for “human scale” rather than insisting we pay for it, then even the likes of Chongqing may yet serve as “reservoirs of moral energy we’ll need to build our future.”
John Domini’s latest book is “Movieola!: Stories.”
If Venice Dies
By Salvatore Settis
Translated from Italian by André Naffis-Sahely
New Vessel. 180 pp. Paperback, $16.95