Venice Book

This is not a travel guide in the usual sense. Instead, Barrie Kerper has collected a selection of articles about the city and the surrounding area and presented them according to topic. I read several of the articles while traveling to Venice and there were a few that did enhance our time there, especially those on the food and wine of the region. There was also a wonderful essay by Jan Morris about a day on Torchello that was worth the price of the book, although we didn't visit that island. There were fewer articles about Venice than I expected because the author wanted to include a large area around Venice, explaining that she wasn't going to do a full book about the region, but wanted to include the articles she'd collected. The first two hundred pages of the book are taken up with an abbreviated traditional travel guide to Venice, giving not enough information to serve instead of a travel guide, while taking up space that could have been used to include more interesting articles. There was some good information in this first section, but it could have been covered in an article written by the author, omitting all the repetitive items and things best covered elsewhere.

In short, this is a good book to use to prepare for a trip to Venice, but not one to carry along with you. It suffers from a lack of focus, but many of the articles in the book are worth reading.