Venice is an astonishing survival, preserved from change above all, perhaps, by everyone's desire to save its fair face. Although Venice in Peril: The British Appeal for the Preservation of Venice works for the good of the city's fabric, the symposium it arranged there a couple of weeks ago under the title 'Residential Vernacular Architecture in Venice: The Other 90 Per Cent' was as much about people as buildings. I came to it ignorant - it was my first time in Venice - but paintings have made views from bridges and out across the lagoon familiar. Familiar and unchanging: St Mark's appears now much as it does in work by Bellini, Canaletto, Turner and Monet. Hundreds of years pass, new views are created when new buildings rise, but these changes seem small in comparison with what does not change: the broad turns of the Grand Canal, the floor plan which the palaces built along it nearly all follow, the layout of streets and waterways.

LRB 6 June 2002 | PDF Download