A Jamesian tale in the chiaroscuro light of Venice
There’s plenty of damp, mist and dingy palazzos, while the Grand Canal becomes a ‘sluggish waterway coiling itself like a fat, grey-green worm through the very bowels of the city’.
Maurizio Fecchio / flickr | Creative Commons
“Venice […] is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea,” wrote John Ruskin in the mid-nineteenth century. Ever since, writers of Gothic, ghostly and macabre tales have been drawn towards La Serenissima. Ian McEwan, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier and Thomas Mann – none of them could resist the symbolism of the sinking city and its centuries of decline. Nor could Henry James, who used Venice as a setting for two stories – The Wings of the Dove and The Aspern Papers – as well as a backdrop for several more.
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