In a quiet, almost empty part of Venice stands a Renaissance palazzo
with an unusually large garden. The garden is invisible from the
outside, blocked by a high brick wall that I recognized when I saw it.
In The Aspern Papers, a novella serialized in The Atlantic in 1888,
Henry James lets the narrator, a literary scholar whose name we never
learn, describe the wall. “It was figured over with the patches that
please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions
of brick that had turned pink with time,” he writes. “It suddenly
occurred to me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext.”
another
I arrived in Venice with a similar goal: to get access to that same
garden. I wasn’t sure it was possible, not least because I didn’t know
whether the garden really existed. But although I hoped not to use
hypocrisy and duplicity, I did know that if I found it, I would be
looking at Henry James’s Venice. Not Lord Byron’s decadent Venice,
that is; not Thomas Mann’s pestilential Venice; and certainly not
James Bond’s shootout-in-the-collapsing-palace Venice, but rather the
city of intense beauty and deep secrets that James transformed into
novels, letters, stories, and essays during the 10 visits he made to
the city between 1869 and 1907.
Beautiful piece on Venice-- snippets above. Worth the read and interesting context to any Venice bound traveler.
Happy travels!