The Book Lover's Guide to Venice

I defy anyone to read Rachael Martin's latest and resist immediately booking a trip (and/or adding an embarrassing number of titles to your TBR)

Whenever I go to Venice I always bring two books. One is a guidebook—usually the Corto Sconto: Itinerari Fantastici e Nascosti di Corto Maltese a Venezia or the delightful Venice for Pleasure by J.G. Links—for use when I am in the city.

The other is Jan Morris’ Venice, to be read exclusively on the train ride home. I find leaving Venice very difficult and always experience soul-lag for several days, even if I’ve only been there 24 hours or less (day trips are the cruelest). The Jan Morris is my spiritual melatonin, dosing me with with Venetian energy while my body hurtles back home.

The Venice section of my own library is vast—filled mostly with histories, books on Venetian art, memoirs, and quirky city guides. Like the Jan Morris on the train, my books keep me in Venice even when I am not.

So given my relationship with both Venice and books, you can imagine how thrilled I was to be given an advance copy of The Book Lover’s Guide to Venice by Rachael Martin. As with all great travel books, this one is both a guide for use on the ground but also to open at random and dream, even when far from La Serenissima.

The beginning offers mostly practical information about when to go and a historical introduction, before launching into the literary history of each sestiere—neighborhood—of Venice.

Mostly via short biographies of writers who lived or stayed in the area, Martin deftly guides us through centuries of books and stories that feature the city. Her list is magnificently diverse, featuring a number of women and queer writers in particular.

One of my favorites was the story of Alathea Howard, Countess of Arundel—a young aristocratic woman whose godmother was none other than Queen Elizabeth I. She and her husband, the Earl of Arundel, had first visited Venice in 1613 (with famed architect Inigo Jones in their party, if you can imagine). Alathea then returned to Venice in 1620 when she became embroiled in an espionage scandal that ended in the mysterious death of a Venetian patrician that took place at her residence, the Palazzo Mocenigo. One might think this would get her banned from the Republic but no—not only did she become a very close friend of the Doge, when she did eventually leave Venice six months later she did so with a massive retinue of horses carrying gifts and goods to take back to England, duty free no less! It was only when I read that she had published a scientific work called Natura Extenterata (1655) that I realized I knew of her already. Alethea Talbot Howard was one of the women alchemists featured in the Anselm Kiefer exhibition I wrote about in my last newsletter. Synchronicities!

Martin is great at giving us vignettes like that of Patricia Highsmith, who first went to Venice in 1949 in the company of an Italian banker she had met only the day before in Milan (this sounds both thrilling and absolutely terrifying, which is exactly how one might characterize Highsmith’s fiction). That would be the first of many trips to the city, where she eventually became friends, and then frenemies, with the fabulous Peggy Guggenheim. Highsmith would eventually set one of her novels in Venice and readers of The Talented Mr. Ripley will remember Tom Ripley moving there hoping for anonymity after his succession of misdeeds.

Henry James (dying to read The Aspern Papers now) and Lord Byron make various appearances, as do Shakespeare, Edith Wharton, and John Ruskin. The story Martin tells of “Thomas Coryat, Who Walked from Somerset to Venice and Wrote About It” is absolutely fascinating—people were beside themselves that someone would do this and his haters back home mercilessly ridiculed him for it (personally strikes me as a bit harsh, but different times and all that).

Hometown literary heroes like Giacomo Casanova, Carlo Goldoni, and Marco Polo are all there, as are the 16th- and 17th-century powerhouses Sarra Copia Sullam, Moderata Fonte, Gasparra Stampa, Veronica Franco, and my favorite raging feminist nun, Arcangela Tarabotti.

Martin includes a number of contemporary authors, and her mentions range from Lauren Elkin’s non-fiction Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London and The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice by Judith Mackrell, to the historical fiction of Harriet Constable and Sarah Dunant. I was furiously looking up titles as I read (though they are helpfully listed in alphabetical order at the end, along with a bibliography) and was thrilled to find a used copy of Miss Garnet’s Angel by Sally Vickers (set in Dorsoduro) and a library copy of Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy Mitford, who stayed on the island of Torcello (at the Cipriani, natch) for two months in 1956.

In a most exquisite example of ekphrasis, Martin tells of A.S. Byatt wanting to learn more about designer Mariano Fortuny after reading Proust’s description of a Fortuny dress in À la recherché du temps perdu that was described as “having the features of Venice herself”. Byatt had stayed at Palazzo Fortuny in the 1990s and found herself linking one of the shades of green found on the walls to English designer William Morris, who had stayed in Venice in the early 1900s. The connections between the two designers would eventually turn into Byatt’s Peacock and Vine: Fortuny and Morris in Life and at Work. Such is the magic of Venice!

Wonderful Jan Morris is also here, Martin mentions her guides and histories, as well as an article called “Let her Sink” from the New York Times in 1975. As for Muriel Spark, Martin tells us that her question was not what you think of Venice, but how it makes you feel.

I feel Evelyn Waugh put it best when he had his Brideshead Revisited protagonist, Charles Ryder, muse on his time in Venice: “I was drowning in honey, stingless.” And as Martin rightly says, somehow we know exactly what he means.

The Book Lover’s Guide to Venice by Rachael Martin is published by White Owl and is out in June 2026.

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On another book note, please join me and Lauren Mouat of the Open Doors Review for our discussion of the Booker International longlisted novel Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (trans. Leah Janeczko) on Monday, June 8th at 6pm CEST. Register here, hope to see you there!