Venice: A New History

It does the job. There are lots of great anecdotes, the major periods are covered, and it is an easy, fun read that is written well. There is a habit, throughout, however, of treating Venice as an organic, living body, with a relatively undifferentiated populace (despite the recurring theme of shifts in power relations between doge, elites, etc.). Adjectives are attributed to the whole, and its history told in the style of a national history of the rise and fall of some great monumental creature. While Madden occasionally points out where one should be skeptical of popular tales, in other places, he doesn't see any trouble in describing events, speeches, and individual acts with a confident voice that we cannot possibly know with any certainty.

The aspect I found most frustrating however, is the book's habit of constantly acting as an apologist for Venice. We are constantly told how everyone has misunderstood poor Venice. Its surveillance institutions like the bucche were not oppressive, its justice system fair, its political institutions were really republican, its benevolent elites acted on behalf of the people, its plucky capitalists so progressive in comparison to those tired old landed elites in the rest of Italy, and so on. Madden writes with little reference or comparison with other republican experiments in the world (indeed sometimes you are left with the impression there were none). It is a story which would make the historical elites of Venice proud.

The period following the coming of Napoleon, naturally, is really a sad afternote. Now that the great lion has fallen, the rest of the book seems to merely go through the motions.