Venice: Impossible City

Abstract

Venice has long been seen as an impossible city, like one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities miraculously made visible if not entirely real. The rhetorical trope of Venice’s impossibility goes back at least to the sixteenth century, when the historian Giovanni Nicolò Doglioni writes, ‘And so Venice being an impossibility she is also placed in the impossible, since she is founded on the sea, and in this she is out of the ordinary amongst all other cities’ (Doglioni 1594: 5, my translation). Because of its singularity, its improbability as an urban entity, Venice makes us ask: what is a city? This is a question that can only have multiple answers, and in the pages that follow I approach it in three ways. First, the topographical and architectural formations of Venice show how a city can be made in the most unlikely of circumstances. Second, the testimony of artists and writers demonstrates the degree to which the city exists not just in three-dimensional form, but also in the creative expression it occasions in a variety of media. Venice in its uniqueness is a compelling subject for artists who aspire to originality in their own work.