Venice, Despite Everything: Books to Understand How the Most Enigmatic City in the World Survives

El Pais

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Venice has something impossible and it is not easy to write about it, it goes beyond words, but some books have achieved it. “I believe that Venice’s spells are difficult to define, or grasp: they suffer, succumb to them without even being conscious. It is a feeling of unreality, close to the world of ghosts or dreams, which creates the enchantments, the myths, the thousand seductions of Venice,” wrote the great historian of the Mediterranean, F…

ts.fi

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“The soul of Venice is its architecture, which tells not only what she was, but also what she believed.” So wrote John Ruskin in his work Stones of Venice (1851-1853), in which he argues that architecture reflects the moral and spiritual state of society. So what is the state of our society at the moment, and how will the Venice Biennale approach the question in 2025?