Verona is a lovely city. It is just the right size for exploration on foot, and there lots to see. Many of its restaurants are justly famous. It is amply stocked with comfortable places to stay. Its Roman theatre, whose tiers of seats rise high above the river Adige, must have commanded one of the finest views of any ancient theatre in Italy. Its churches are magnificent. And then there is the Museo del Castelvecchio.

This fortress of art displays an astonishingly rich collection of sculpture and painting in the rooms of the old brick-built, Ghibelline-battlemented stronghold of the Scaligeri, or della Scala, who were overlords of Verona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until overthrown by the Visconti of Milan. At dead of night, the last of the Scaligeri fled this castle, across the bridge over the boiling river, and melted away, fading out of history.

Castelvecchio has one of the finest collections of paintings in Italy. Architecturally the building is interesting too, because its museum space was remodelled by Carlo Scarpa in 1959–73. Concrete now vies with brick. Once so cutting-edge, Scarpa’s arrangements now seem a bit quaint. The equestrian statue of Cangrande I (ruled from 1311) stands on an elevated concrete platform which has all the stateliness of a lift-shaft in a multi-storey carpark. But this means the paintings really have to speak for themselves–and many of them eloquently do. The Pisanello and Stefano da Zevio are of course outstanding. There are some interesting paintings by Francesco Morone. Giovanni Francesco Caroto, the teacher of Veronese, is well represented. His Boy with a Drawing (c. 1515) is wonderfully modern: a grinning, red-headed lad holding up a scribble of a stick man. Any parent who has been called upon to admire a proud child’s not terribly brilliant masterpiece will warm to it.

And what about where to eat? Well, it was pouring with rain when I was last in Verona, so I didn’t spend a long time searching. Sometimes the tried and tested are just what one needs. An Aperol in one of the Listòn cafés overlooking the Arena and then lunch in Antica Bottega del Vino. The lamb with rosemary was excellent. The Amarone even better.

Find Verona in Blue Guide Venice & The Veneto and Blue Guide Concise Italy.

by Alta Macadam

As I begin a revision of the Blue Guide Venice for a ninth edition to be published next year, my thoughts have turned to Ruskin and all he taught subsequent generations about the way to look at the city. I have always been fascinated by his detailed descriptions in The Stones of Venice and the picture of him at the very top of a ladder propped against one of the columns of the Palazzo Ducale to peer at close range at the carvings on the capitals in order to scrutinize their every detail and be able to describe the expressions of the figures, the texture of the stone, the very spirit of the work of art. But it was his autobiography, Praeterita (1899), that I have recently reread with particular pleasure.

Here his very earliest memories as a four-year old during his idyllic childhood in his simple home with its orchard at Herne Hill are memorable. His father was a wine- merchant and in the summer months John and his mother would accompany him by carriage throughout Britain on visits to his clients. He recognizes that his parents over-indulged him and he made sure their ambitions for him to become no less than a bishop were foiled. His fond descriptions of the people whom he most admired, including his Croydon aunt, children of his own age, as well as his nurse Anne (“she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid”), reveal his generous spirit and insight into character.

Later in the book he describes at some length how he delighted in making detailed  sketches of the places and things he saw throughout his life. According to Kenneth Clarke (in 1948) these include “some of the most beautiful architectural drawings ever executed”.  Ruskin also gives us a delightful account of his writing method: “My own literary work…was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I knew exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast next morning, as a girl shows her sampler”. A simplistic description of how some of the great prose in the English language was constructed. It is difficult to detect that the period in which he was writing these memoirs was clouded with terrible bouts of depression, which his contemporaries were quick to put down to fits of madness.

When at last, about half way through Volume I,  the family decide they must go and see for themselves the wonders of the Continent, Ruskin notes just how much things had changed since then:  “The poor modern slaves and simpletons who let themselves be dragged like cattle, or felled timber, through the countries they imagine themselves visiting, can have no conception whatever of the complex joys, and ingenious hopes, connected with the choice and arrangement of the travelling carriage in old times”. And of course we realize how far removed we are now from his time and are fascinated by the details of the carriage which was to be virtually their home for the next six months or so, led by four “properly stout trotting cart-horses” who, with a change at each post-house, were able to take them some 90 miles a day. We are given a description of the postillion as well as the courier: “A private Murray who knew, if he had any wit, not the things to be seen only, but those you would yourself best like to see”. Ruskin remembers the “luxury and felicity” of never being in a hurry, in contrast to the “modern” tourists who were travelling by train at the time he was writing his memoirs.

Much of the description of his travels with his doting parents is concentrated on France and the sublime Alpine scenery of Switzerland—“the revelation of the beauty of the earth”—although he is perceptive enough to understand that “the temperament belonged to the age” and a child born a hundred years earlier, or (we may add), a hundred years later, would not have been carried away as he was by his first distant view of the mountains from Lake Geneva.  But we are also given some wonderful passages about Venice. He remembers that he knew the city before ever setting foot there through the art of Turner (he and his father delighted in purchasing many of his works), and the writings of his master Byron: “here at last I had found a man who spoke only of what he had seen, and known:  and spoke without exaggeration, without mystery”…“he bade me seek first in Venice—the ruined homes of Foscari and Falier”…“Byron told me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet had worn the marble I trod on”.

In Volume II when finally he arrived in Venice he experienced “the pure childish pleasure in seeing boats float in clear water. The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually inside the door at Danieli’s, when the tide was up, and the water two feet deep at the foot of the stairs; and then, all along the canal sides, actual marble walls rising out of the salt sea, with hosts of little brown crabs on them, and Titians inside”…“Thank God I am here; it is the Paradise of Cities”.

Ruskin remembers fondly the days he spent in his gondola: early in the morning moored among the boats at the busy Rialto markets and then in the afternoon fastening a rope to a fishing boat to be pulled out to the Lido as he sat sketching the wind in the sails, or the view back of Venice shining beyond its islands. He tells of hours spent in the Scuola di San Rocco among the Tintorettos—the painter he most admired there and whom he considered had been totally neglected by the English public up until then. He speaks with great affection of two Englishmen he met on his travels, Rawdon Brown in Venice, and Joseph Severn in Rome, pointing out their generous spirits with unaffected admiration.

In Volume III he treats us to the most delightful description of his dog Wisie (“exactly like Carpaccio’s dog in the picture of St. Jerome” in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni) who when he took him out to the Lido for a “little sea bath” charged straight into the waves and was lost for three days. At last “he took the deep water in broad daylight, and swam straight for Venice. A fisherman saw him from a distance, rowed after him, took him, tired among the weeds, and brought him to me…I was then living on the north side of St. Mark’s Place, and he used to sit outside the window on the ledge at the base of its pillars greater part of the day, observant of the manners and customs of Venice.” Ruskin then took him home with him across the Alps (which, to Ruskin’s chagrin, made no impression on the dog) and when they stopped in Paris Wisie was equally unimpressed—but hearing a bark in the street which sounded Venetian jumped out of the window and fell over thirteen feet to the pavement below where he immediately picked himself up and trotted back up the hotel stairs and eventually returned to England where he lived for many happy years.

As Kenneth Clarke wrote in an introduction to Praeterita in 1948, Ruskin’s “chief merit was his power of analysis—the power of scrutinishing an object so patiently and so perceptively that he could reveal something of its true character”. The traveller today has much to learn from such an approach—often all too intent on hurrying on to visit the next place and rarely content with halting for long enough to fix his attention before a building or a painting or sculpture to take in its instrinsic value and try to understand how it was constructed and where its beauty lies.

Anonymous tweets: essential for protest against oppressive regimes or the safe refuge of trolls and people who make trouble for fun? The Republic of Venice confronted this problem too, and they came up with the Bocca di Leone, or ‘lion’s mouth’, a hole-in-the-wall box where citizens could post denunciations of their foes and neighbours. The illustration at the top on the left shows the Bocca di Leone on the Zattere, placed there for ‘denunciations against public health abuses in the sestiere of Dorsoduro’. There are few surviving bocche in Venice today. The most famous is in the Doge’s Palace. Most of them were destroyed by Napoleon, in his mania for altering the world order, to underline the fact that Venice’s autonomy was no more and that she was subject to the laws of Napoleonic France.

Commentators have often used the Bocca di Leone as an illustrator of how sinister the workings of Venetian justice and government were. But in fact the inquisitors of the republic were circumspect in their treatment of anonymous defamations. A good blog about this can be found at bit.ly/Mw0E48.

The other two illustrations show a surviving bocca in Verona, which elected to join the Venetian republic in 1405. It invites ‘secret denunciations against usurers and usurious contracts of any sort’. It is placed beside the door of the old Palazzo della Ragione. Above it once proudly stood the Venetian lion—until Napoleon’s men hacked it to death.

In the art of the Venetian artist Canaletto (Antonio del Canale, 1697–1768), Venice returned to one of her oldest habits: the depiction and celebration of her own beauty. Unlike the works produced in Venice’s heyday, however, Canaletto’s art and that of his contemporary Francesco Guardi (1712–93), both of whom were at work in the last decades before the end of the Serene Republic, was a depiction without the glorification of earlier times. And the works attained international fame in the artists’ own lifetimes.

Canaletto’s views of Venice and its canals were exported widely, especially to England through the British Consul, Joseph Smith. Their popularity was due in part to the outstandingly rendered light and shadow which suffused the ordered spaces. His works give remarkable delight to the eye both from a distance and from close to. Canaletto came to London between 1746 and 1754 and painted it: in his views of the northern city, he performed the remarkable feat of making the banks of the Thames look as serenely lovely as the Bacino di San Marco. Stillness is all in Canaletto.

The works of Guardi are far less serene.

Here, the coruscations of light and vibrancy of atmosphere reveal a diametrically different response to the city’s beauty, a response which was only appreciated many generations later, once European sensibilities had been educated to see things differently by the Impressionists. For Canaletto, the light is the vehicle of his passion for the architecture: for Guardi the architecture is a necessary receptacle for his passion for the light.

The works of both these masters remind us that so much of Venetian art, indeed so much of the fascination of the city, has always depended upon its unique light—immediately, tangibly different from anywhere else in Italy because of the surrounding water which constantly modifies it. It is this that explains the primacy of the the visual sensibility in Venice: it has produced no internationally great writers, poets, thinkers or scientists. Venice has no Dante or Leonardo, no Galileo or Machiavelli; but it produced painters whose universal influence has been incomparable, because of one fundamental lesson they imbibed from the endless modulations of their native light. They instinctively understood how light in painting is the vehicle of human empathy.

An extract from the introduction to Blue Guide Venice. © Blue Guides. All rights reserved