Venice is a city that resists the usual consolations. It will not be improved by your recommendations, your hacks, or your smug insistence that you have done it properly. Venice does not wish to be done. It wishes to be contemplated, misread, over-loved, mourned even.
“Venice itself was a theatre, a theatre as grand as the world could be - a theatre in which all the scenes were simultaneously performed.” - Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Thomas Mann caught something essential when he wrote that Venice was a theatre “in which all the scenes were simultaneously performed”. This remains true, though the cast has changed and the ticket prices have risen. Venice is still theatre, but it is also reliquary: a civilisation sealed under glass and visited by crowds who think as if the point of beauty were to be photographed. Beauty was once understood as something that acted upon the soul. From Plato onwards, it was bound up with truth, order and transcendence. To encounter beauty was to be altered by it, unsettled, reminded of something beyond appetite or utility. Medieval Europe built for God not merely out of piety but because beauty was assumed to have consequences.
The modern age has steadily dismissed this idea. Beauty has been repackaged as content. Its highest function is no longer to endure, instruct or elevate, but to reproduce well on a screen. What cannot be photographed cleanly, branded efficiently, or marketed instantly is dismissed as problematic, elitist, or irrelevant.
This inversion has produced a curious result. In art, fashion and architecture, sheer ugliness is now frequently presented as an achievement. Buildings are celebrated for their hostility, clothes for their wilful offensiveness, artworks for their refusal to please. The old aesthetic criteria of harmony, proportion and permanence are treated with suspicion, as if beauty itself were complicit in historical wrongdoing.
Venice exposes the fraud. Its beauty is not ironic, disruptive, or apologetic. It does not explain itself. It simply exists, indifferent to marketing strategies and theoretical justifications. This is why it attracts cameras in such numbers.
The first mistake people make about Venice is to treat it as a destination, an item on a list, a sort of cultural vitamin to be ingested before returning to normal life. The second mistake is to treat it as a theme park for romance. The third is to insist it is overrated because it is crowded, which is like calling a cathedral overrated because people have arrived to pray.
Venice is not merely beautiful. It is a lesson in what Europe once built when it built for God and glory, and what it now builds when it builds for quarterly returns, minimal maintenance, and a planning committee’s fear of offence.
Approaching Venice can feel like an aesthetic insult at first. The mainland, with its generic sprawl and dutiful ugliness, functions as a kind of ante-chamber in which modern Europe exhibits the architectural imagination of a warehouse. One passes through it as through a low-grade modern purgatory. The contrast is almost too on-the-nose: the tawdry present before the heavenly past.
Then the old city appears, improbably afloat, and you feel the psychic click of a civilisation shifting gear.
The vaporetto down the Grand Canal is initiation. Palaces, churches, façades arranged like stage scenery, and that strange Venetian habit of splendour turning its face to the water, as if the city knew the land was an afterthought. The first time you arrive this way, you do not so much enter Venice as get absorbed by it.
A Byzantine city in Italian clothing
Venice’s great trick, historically and aesthetically, was to be both of Europe and not quite of it.
It began as a lagoon refuge and a Byzantine border-world, connected to the Eastern Empire’s administrative and cultural orbit. The lagoon communities were part of that Veneto-Byzantine strip overseen through the Exarchate of Ravenna, the final stubborn remnant of Roman Constantinopolitan authority in northern Italy.
That Eastern inheritance never left. It simply became synonymous with Venice.
If you have recently been thinking about Istanbul, you will recognise the family resemblance at once. St Mark’s Basilica is the most famous example. The church that looks westward, though its real soul is eastern, Byzantine mosaic-saturated, and deliberately imperial. San Marco’s architecture draws openly on Byzantine traditions and, through plunder and commerce, incorporates elements that advertise Venice’s intimate, cannibalistic relationship with Constantinople.
John Julius Norwich, in his magisterial account, reminds us how the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople furnished Venice materially and symbolically, a brutal transfer of sacred glamour from one world-capital to another.
When buildings were made to outlast their builders
Walk across the Rialto Bridge and you are confronted by the scandal of permanence. Four centuries on, it still performs its function with a certain serene contempt for our era’s temporary thinking. The bridge is a testament that public works can be made to last, that the future can be considered, that utility need not exclude grace.
Modern urbanism, by contrast, often looks like a conspiracy against posterity. We build as though we will not be judged, which is an interesting admission. Venice was built under the assumption that judgement by God, by history, by rivals, and by time itself was inevitable.
This is one reason Venice unsettles modern visitors. It exposes how low we have set our ambitions. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced many impressive things, but very few that feel as if they were built to be admired in centuries to come.
Venice was.
Against the Car, For the City
We praise Venice for being without cars as if this were a lifestyle choice, a sort of early adoption of urban virtue. In truth, it was a historical accident that became an aesthetic and social triumph. Forced by geography, Venice never surrendered itself to the motor car, and in doing so escaped one of modernity’s most destructive forces.
Lewis Mumford understood this early. He saw the car not merely as a machine but as a technology that atomises populations, stretches cities into incoherence, and dissolves public life into a sequence of private capsules. Where the car dominates, streets cease to be social spaces and become conduits. Distance expands, encounters diminish, and the city loses its ability to hold itself together as a shared form. What begins as convenience ends as sprawl.
Jacques Ellul went further, arguing that modern societies increasingly organise themselves around the needs of their machines rather than the needs of their people. Town planning becomes an exercise in appeasement. Roads are widened, pavements narrowed, buildings flattened to accommodate flow, and the car reshapes the city in its own image.
Venice, spared this fate, remains scaled to people. There is no traffic noise, no tarmac, no architectural compromise made on behalf of mechanical speed. Movement is by foot or water, at walking pace or slower. One is forced into proximity, into patience, into awareness.
Other European cities now attempt, with great self-congratulation, to claw back fragments of what they willingly surrendered. Pedestrian zones the size of courtyards, traffic restrictions announced with moral fervour, signs imploring citizens to behave better. Venice requires no exhortation.
The conditions that created Venice cannot be replicated. But the lesson remains legible: love venice, hate cars.
If the gondola is performance, then the traghetto (a ferry operated by oarsmen) is infrastructure. For a small fee, one crosses the Grand Canal in a stripped-down gondola ferry, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, participating in a practice that predates tourism and ignores it entirely.
Traghetti have served as practical crossings since the medieval period. There is nothing romantic about the service. It exists to solve a problem, and in doing so preserves an ancient form of urban democracy.
There is something quietly civilised in this. The city offers you a brief return to its former normality, as if is not just an exhibit but a functioning republic with errands to run.
This brings us to the larger Venetian question. What does it mean to experience a city whose existence has become increasingly performative? The traghetto supplies an answer. For a few minutes, you are not a spectator, not a consumer of atmosphere, not the centre of the frame. You are simply another body crossing water, participating in a rhythm that predates your arrival and will continue after your departure.
Venice as a aesthetic commodity
When its naval power waned and its trading empire collapsed, Venice underwent a subtle conversion. What had once been a geopolitical actor became a spectacle, a post-empire aesthetic commodity, consumed not for what it did but for how it looked, and what it signified. Venice became Europe’s first great museum-city.
This was in many ways a necessary adaptation. Where other empires fell into irrelevance or ruin, Venice learned to monetise its looks. The historic coffee houses belong to the precise moment when Venice, having ceased to command fleets or dictate trade routes, discovered a second vocation as refined host. Caffè Florian, founded in 1720, Caffè Lavena shortly after, and Caffè Quadri later in the century, emerged as Venice slipped gently from superpower into a salon for rich young Englishmen looking to furnish their minds and their stately homes.
This transition is often described too crudely, as though tourism were merely the city’s consolation prize. In fact, the coffee houses represent an adjustment of scale. Coffee houses like Florian were filled with young Englishmen on the Grand Tour, notebooks open, opinions half-formed, absorbing the city as part of their moral and aesthetic education. Venice became a finishing school rather than a fortress.
What matters is that these places were built seriously. Their interiors were not provisional. The painted ceilings, mirrors, banquettes and waiters trained in a particular choreography were not designed for novelty. Recipes were handed down, manners preserved, gestures rehearsed until they became tradition. To drink coffee or tea there today is not an act of nostalgia but of continuity.
This is why the melancholy often attributed to these cafés is misplaced. They are not mausoleums. They are among the few remaining spaces in Europe where the eighteenth century is still around. One is not rushed, branded, or algorithmically managed. One sits, is served, and is expected to rise to the occasion.
If these coffee houses did not exist, the void would not be filled by something better or more authentic. It would be filled by the soft tyranny of global familiarity: glass-fronted chains and identical menus. St Mark’s Square would resemble an airport lounge with pigeons. That it does not is due, in no small part, to the stubborn survival of these institutions.
To sit in Florian is to participate in Venice’s post-imperial genius, graceful decline into ceremony. The city no longer commands the world, but in these rooms it still instructs it.
Cicchetti and the small plate revolution
The most Venetian way to eat is not in a restaurant at all, but standing at the counter of a bàcaro and ordering cicchetti (snacks). Bàcari (wine and snack bars) are not “small-plate concepts” avant la lettre but traditional, working institutions that serve traditional Venetian food.
A slice of bread topped with baccalà mantecato, whipped to a pale, improbable softness; sardines in saor, sweet-sour with onions; a skewer of prawns or a wedge of fried polenta are to be enjoyed with glass in hand, jostling for space with vociferous locals.
Cicchetti survive not because they are fashionable, but because they are useful. Instagram admires them for how they look. It is one of modernity’s ironies that cicchetti, like tapas, are born of age-old working class eating habits, but appear perfectly adapted to the age of visual excess. The contemporary enthusiasm for photographing small plates is driven less by appetite than by optics. A table crowded with dishes signals plenitude, choice, and a life being fully lived — or at least fully documented.
Social media has, in this sense, rediscovered an old form for the wrong reasons. Cicchetti were never intended to be photo-friendly. They were practical, repeatable, forgettable in the best sense. Yet small plates suit a world increasingly lived in motion, for people who prefer grazing rather than gathering. What Venice reminds us is that this mode of eating once belonged to a coherent social rhythm. Cicchetti were not about expressing oneself but about arriving at the right hour. They marked time, not taste.
Of course, Venice contains tourist menus and indifferent food abounds, because Venice contains tourists, and tourists must be fed. The city has always catered to strangers; it was, after all, a trading republic. What has changed is not the presence of outsiders but the thinning of everyday life. The bàcaro resists this thinning. It preserves a Venice that still eats for itself, even as it is watched.
Venice at night
Venice at night is the city’s best argument against its own cliché. The crowds disappear, the surfaces soften, and the place returns to its elemental vocabulary of water, stone, shadow, and silence. What was overstated by daylight becomes coherent again.
John Ruskin wrote of Venice’s nocturnal charm, of the lagoon reflecting the sky and the city floating like a dream. It sounds perilously like travel writing until you experience it and discover that it is simply accurate. Venice truly reveals itself at night.
The disappearance of the day-tripper produces a shift in ontology. The city ceases to perform and begins, instead, to inhabit itself. The canals and side streets lose their touristic urgency. What remains is not spectacle but presence.
Stendhal’s syndrome is not a daytime affliction. It requires stillness, duration, the absence of distraction. At night, with the sensory noise dialled down, beauty is no longer buffered by novelty or crowd psychology. It arrives unmediated. The canals reflect light deep into the soul. The stones seem to remember what they have seen.
Venice, so often accused of theatricality, becomes oddly severe. It no longer flatters. It watches back. One feels not entertained but addressed.
The modern habit is to treat beauty as stimulation. Night Venice refuses this economy. It accumulates. It presses. It lingers.
One walks differently then. The phone stays in the pocket. The pace slows. The mind, briefly unoccupied by instruction, becomes vulnerable. This is where Venice does its real work.
By day, the city is admired. By night, it is believed.
Venice in the arts
Venice attracts artists not because it is picturesque but because it exerts pressure on perception. It stimulates an artistic state of mind by force of form alone. Long before beauty became a matter of taste, branding, or theory, human beings evolved to respond to proportion, harmony, light, rhythm, and pattern. Venice happens to concentrate these stimuli with unusual density and coherence.
Despite the best efforts of modern Western culture to relativise beauty into opinion, or to recast ugliness as a form of moral seriousness, Venice remains almost neurologically unavoidable. Its architecture, scale and materials activate the brain’s reward and social circuits whether one approves of such reactions or not. Pleasure arrives before interpretation. Meaning follows sensation.
This is why Venice resists demystification. One may explain it historically, exhaust it symbolically, or parody it culturally, but the response precedes analysis. The city works on the imagination not because it performs originality, but because it aligns so closely with the way human beings are hard-wired to see, move, and feel.
Over time, Venice has also become a kind of shorthand for European elegance inseparable from decadence. To invoke Venice is to summon beauty shadowed by decline. Artists arrive primed, half-aware that the city has already written part of the work for them.
This is the risk. Venice is a rival not a subject. Many artists discover, often too late, that the city resists interpretation because it already feels complete. It does not need to be framed, justified, or improved. One can circle it, quote it, or fracture it — but rarely surpass it.
This is why Death in Venice remains the defining modern response. Mann understood that Venice was not a backdrop but a catalyst: beauty as a destabilising force. Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti and embodied with unnerving restraint by Dirk Bogarde, renders this collapse more languidly but no less cruel. Venice does not console the aesthete, but tests him.
Cinematically, Venice lends itself to intrigue and moral ambiguity with suspicious ease. In Don’t Look Now, its canals become corridors of dread. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, its surfaces reflect impersonation and cultivated deceit.
Music is different. It does not have to compete with the city’s appearance. Unburdened by surface, it can emerge from within Venice’s structure rather than ricochet off its image. The city’s most distinctive musical legacy grew not from salons or courts but from institutions, most notably the Ospedale della Pietà, where abandoned girls were trained with austere discipline to produce music of astonishing intensity. Vivaldi used the strict rules of the orphanage and the rigid structure of music to create a sense of forward energy. In Venice, beauty comes from following a perfect pattern. In the motoric rhythms and recurring cycles of The Four Seasons, that principle becomes audible. While painters struggle to capture Venice’s surface, Vivaldi succeeded because he captured the city’s underlying heartbeat.
“Do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.” Alfred (Death in Venice, 1971)
Venice without alibis
The contemporary tourist is encouraged to “make the most” of Venice, as if the city were a bargain, or a productivity exercise. But Venice is not improved by maximisation. It is improved by surrender.
The city offers nothing in itself. What it yields depends entirely on what one consents to notice. Those who arrive intent on efficiency encounter only congestion, queues and irritation. They will leave hating Venice. Those who insist on extracting value are repaid with exhaustion. Venice does not reveal itself to effort. It responds only to attention.
The deeper truth is harsher, and more interesting. Venice is Europe’s great warning: a city built for eternity, now rented by the hour. Its beauty has survived its power, but its survival now depends on the very forces that hollow it out.
And still, it remains a miracle, which is infuriating. You cannot dismiss it. You cannot outgrow it. You can only return, older, and discover that the city has not changed, but you have.
Venice does not offer advice. It offers judgement.
