Witty and meditative by turns the overall effect is like being shown around by a wonderfully
self-effacing but impressively erudite guide The Sunday Times BOOKS OF THE YEARNooteboom has
achieved the impossible: to say something new about the ageless city about which everything has
been said ALBERTO MANGUELThe whole book is the illuminating testimony of a man who cannot look
away and so sees things that others even those with more specialist knowledge have missed
GREGORY DOWLING Wall Street JournalVENICE: A dream of palaces and churches of power and money
dominion and decline a paradise of beauty. By the author of Roads to Santiago and Roads to
BerlinWith this treasury of his time spent in Venice over a period of fifty-five years
Nooteboom makes himself the indispensable companion for all lovers of the sailing amphibious
city and for every new visitor.Because he is a master storyteller with an inexhaustible
curiosity and always with a suitcase of books (to which new discoveries are added) he brings
vividly and poetically to life not only the tumultuous history of the Republic but along the
way its doges its villains its heroes its magnificent painters its architects its scholars
its skies its canals and piazzas and alleyways and on his expeditions its bronze voices of
time.Those who know and love this city and its literature will recognise Nooteboom - in Laura
Watkinson's fine translation - as the dazzling heir and companion to Montaigne Thomas Mann
Rilke Ruskin Proust Brodsky and Donna Leon. His homage to Venice is a generous introduction
learned and enchanting and worthy of its magnificent subject.His writing is lyrical and
densely textured. He is a poet of time and memory - COLIN THUBRONTranslated from the Dutch by
Laura Watkinson
