“Strangers ... with vs in Venice”

Abstract

If Marco Polo, in his imagined conversations with Kublai Khan, really was speaking, as Italo Calvino insists, always and only of Venice, he cannot have been talking about his real home town, that city of Venice that stretches across numerous small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon, along the Adriatic Sea in Northeast Italy. He must have been speaking, as writers tend to do, of Venice the myth, Venice the fertile reservoir of mythologies. The word ‘Venice’ denotes a kind of virtual city, a city of fantasy and imagination. This Venice is composed from a vast multiplicity of texts and images: a cornucopia of images from paintings, maps, photographs, films; a ‘palimpsest’ of texts from histories, travel wiring, poetry, drama, novels. Venice, Manfred Pfister says, is always ‘inscribed with the traces of previous texts,’ ‘one of the most frequently and “thickly” represented places on earth.’