Venice
Venice needs Venexit
Some of Venice’s problems are well known: the challenge of conserving her famous buildings, the dangers of poorly managed mass…
Will it be kid pie this Christmas?
A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a…
Tintoretto unmasked
Tintoretto was il Furioso. He was a lightning flash or a thunderbolt, a storm in La Serenissima of Renaissance Italy,…
Notes on… Lord Byron in Venice
‘I want to see Venice, and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses.’ So wrote Lord Byron in 1814, some two years…
Venice all tarted up
Veneta is a Venetian restaurant inside the St James’s Market development south of Piccadilly Circus. I do not like this…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
High life
I’m in Venice for the film festival that just ended and, as an American humorist once wired his paper: ‘Streets…
RA’s Giorgione show is so rich it’s worth returning to several times
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Renaissance master? Rascal? Thief? In search of Giorgione
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was…
The Venice Accademia: is this the smallest great gallery in the world?
The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most…
Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
I found the future of privacy among the treasures of Venice
Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace…
Italy is so civilised! Even at a mad dash
I sprinted through Milan station, speed-read the departures monitor without stopping, and arrived gasping on platform 8 with two minutes…
Venetian restaurants know I’m English from the back
The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is…
From Barbary corsairs to people-traffickers: the violence of the Mediterranean
With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot…
The Heckler: Curators were once donnish scholars. Now they’re hip illiterates
As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…
How to walk along canals in Venice without feeling like a tourist
I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled…
The real mystery is how it got published
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…
The one economic indicator that never stops rising: meet the Negroni Index
This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that…
The Society of Odd Bottles and the Sisterhood of the Black Pudding
The Honourable Society of Odd Bottles has been mentioned in this column before. I can report that the membership is…
A Hello! magazine history of Venice
When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…
Harry’s Bar, where a slice of cake costs €32 – and is worth it
Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held…
The tubular joys of Fernand Léger
In 1914 Fernand Léger gave a lecture about modern art. By then recognised as a leading Cubist artist, he had…
Welcome to Big Venice: How London became a tourist-trap city
Queuing to gain admittance to the pavement of Westminster Bridge on a ferociously hot Sunday afternoon recently, I found myself…
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