Venice City Quotes & Sayings

The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence. ("Don't Look Now") — Daphne Du Maurier

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening. — Marina Fiorato

Aboard the gondola, Giacomo Foscarini sat facing Mathias. They were crossing the Canal Grande, then they would navigate around San Marco and return. Foscarini loved to travel around Venice this way. They stopped briefly at a mooring near the bridge to the Rialto, and Foscarini had a servant fetch green olives, fresh Piacenza cheese, a few sausages from Modena, and wine that had just been delivered from Crete. The nobleman often dined aboard his gondola, looking out over the city, watching his world. "Seen from this vantage point, Venice doesn't seem like it's in any of its terrible troubles at all magister," said Foscarini. — Riccardo Bruni

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. — Jan Morris

There is still one of which you never speak.'
Marco Polo bowed his head.
'Venice,' the Khan said.
Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'
The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'
And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. — Italo Calvino

Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms. — John Banville

The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn't a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. — Pamela Allegretto

He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere. — Patricia Highsmith

If there were not a bridge from Venice to Europe, Europe would be an island — John Berendt

[On Venice:] A wondrous city of fairest carving, reflected in gleaming waters swirled to new patterning by every passing gondola. — Sylvia Pankhurst

Venice would be a fine city if it were only drained. — Ulysses S. Grant

Like Venice, Italy, New Orleans is a cultural treasure. And everyone who lived in the city should be allowed to come back. But that doesn't mean that they all should live in exactly the same spot that they lived before. — Ed McMahon

Wasn't it Pieter Stuyvesant who said that first boatload of Jews could stay in New Amsterdam only as long as they took care of their own and asked for nothing? So take care of ourselves we did. They always told us how lucky we were to grow up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, schooling us in its illustrious history. Didn't we weather the blizzard of 1888, kept warm by our own stockpile of coal, fed from the ovens of our own bakery? And while children all over the city succumbed to cholera at the turn of the century, didn't we emerge unscathed, the city's water filtered before it reached our lips? After the Great War, people fell to influenza by the tens of thousands, but in the Home not a single child died. No matter how impressive, though, our Home was a kind of ghetto, the scrape of metal as the gates swung shut the same sound in Manhattan as in Venice. I — Kim Van Alkemade

Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone. — Erica Jong

It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring. — Erica Jong

The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public. — Peter Ackroyd

The laws of gravity vary from city to city. In Venice, the laws state that no matter where you want to go, you will always be drawn back to ST. Mark's Square. Even though you know it will be immensely crowded, and even though you have nothing in particular to do there, you will still feel yourself drawn. — David Levithan

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners. — Mary McCarthy

It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else. — Peggy Guggenheim

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction. — Donna Leon

I don't like the idea that one hotel could be better than another. In any city, I try to find a hotel that has the identity of that place - Claridge's in London, the Danieli or Cipriani in Venice. In New York, I stay at the Mercer Hotel; it is so much in the character of SoHo. — Jean Nouvel

Venice is the prettiest city I've ever seen. It looks like a Disneyland ride. — George Clooney

If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can't turn your head without seeing something amazing. — Nile Rodgers

Tossing a smile my way I nodded back to her. Veronica had come home. Somewhere in a thirty-six dollar a night shack a Nazi dwarf was making it with two call girls. Los Angeles was one hell of a city. — David Louden

By day, Venice is a city of museums and churches, packed with great art. Linger over lunch, trying to crack a crustacean with weird legs and antennae. At night, when the hordes of day-trippers have gone, another Venice appears. Dance across a floodlit square. Glide in a gondola through quiet canals while music echoes across the water. Pretend it's Carnevale time, don a mask - or just a fresh shirt - and become someone else for a night. — Rick Steves

The quality of Venice that accomplishes what religion so often cannot is that Venice has made peace with the waters. It is not merely pleasant that the sea flows through, grasping the city like tendrils of vine, and, depending upon the light, making alleys and avenues of emerald and sapphire, Citi s a brave acceptance of dissolution and an unflinching settlement with death. Though in Venice you may sit in courtyards of stone, and your heels may click up marble stairs, you cannot move without riding upon or crossing the waters that someday will carry you in dissolution to the sea. — Mark Helprin

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson. — Ben Van Berkel

It seemed no amount of praying could diminish the plague's wrath. By the time city officials realized it was the rats that were causing the disease, it was too late, but Venice still enforced a decree by which all incoming vessels had to anchor offshore for a full forty days before they would be permitted to unload. To this day, the number forty - quaranta in Italian - served as a grim reminder of the origins of the word quarantine. — Dan Brown

Yet the need for justifying the wealth and power of great corporations in the eyes of the people has never been greater. Why not hark back to Florence, Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam? The great corporations could devote wealth and energies to cleaning up, improving and adorning our cities. Each large corporation might adopt a city and vie with other corporations to see whose city shines brightest. In the center of each financial district there should be a large plaza in which periodically poets, singers, storytellers and artists of every sort would compete for rich prizes. The corporations should see it as their duty to spot and encourage talent, and celebrate greatness. There should be social intimacy between the powerful and the creative. — Eric Hoffer

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice! — Mary Augusta Ward

I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since, as we have said in the first chapter of this book, no other man, Christian or Saracen, Mongol or pagan, has explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice. — Marco Polo

I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes. — Mary McCarthy

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again. — Lev Grossman

Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town. — James Weldon Johnson

We danced our youth in a dreamed of city, Venice, paradise, proud and pretty, We lived for love and lust and beauty, Pleasure then our only duty. Floating them twixt heaven and Earth And drank on plenties blessed mirth We thought ourselves eternal then, Our glory sealed by God's own pen. But paradise, we found is always frail, Against man's fear will always fail. — Veronica Franco

General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. — Henry Adams

My favourite setting is Italy, specifically Venice, because it is there that I met my husband, who is Venetian. I used it as the setting for Virtue and Vice, Enchantment in Venice, and Seduced by Innocence. Apart from Venice, my favourite city is Rome. — Lucy Gordon

Venice took on the feeling of a city paved with black glass, the odd lantern, torch, or candle reflecting in the canals like distant windows into hell, the crescent moon throwing silver scythes across the water where it could find its way between buildings. — Christopher Moore

Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply
fascinating. — Lilian Whiting

It's so easy for me to get caught up in the feeling of a city like Venice, where everything is just beautiful color and gorgeous buildings that are so peaceful. You can roam around and get lost in the labyrinth. — Nanette Lepore

Elsewhere in Italy is the lovely city of Venice, which each year attracts millions of visitors despite the fact that it is basically an enormous open sewer.. — Dave Barry

Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room. — Erica Jong

Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees ... — Hilda Doolittle

Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the first place. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints ... — Erica Jong

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure. — Peggy Guggenheim

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. — Jerry Saltz

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius. — Alexander Herzen