Anyone lucky enough to travel to Italy has probably visited one of the “Big Three” cities: Rome, Florence, and perhaps the most intriguing city of all: La Serenessima, aka, “The Serene One”, aka, Venice (Venezia in Italian). Every city in every nation on the planet is unique in one way or another, but Venice is truly sui generis: It is, literally, a city of water – built on sand, surrounded by canals, and devoid of cars, transportable only by vaparetti (water taxis) or by foot (via a series of connecting lace-work bridges, some of them famous on their own, i.e., the Rialto and the Bridge of Sighs). 

The city which nurtured explorer Marco Polo, which invented the mask-wearing Carnevale, a place which even the nihilistic philosopher Frederic Nietzsche referred to as “music,” Venice was a major sea-faring power until Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, cutting off its ties to the world. Though Napoleon briefly made it a part of Austria in 1797, the city became a part of the newly reestablished Italian nation in 1863, where it has retained its allure as a fairy-tale city to tourists. 

While watching Ken Burns’s recent PBS series on American writer Ernest Hemingway, I had forgotten that this most macho of American literary giants fell in love with what some might call this most feminine of Italian cities. Hemingway had been to Italy before, of course; he served as a Red Cross ambulance worker during WWI, where he sustained major injuries after a shell exploded close to his vehicle. His recovery in Milan and in nearby Stresa formed the basis for his later book, A Farewell To Arms.  He had wanted to visit Italy again, but the Spanish Civil War (where he served as a war correspondent) and then World War II (where Benito Mussolini banned his books) got in the way. 

In 1948, however, he and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, traveled to Venice and stayed a while. They hung out at Harry’s Bar in Piazza San Marco, hobnobbed with fellow American ex-pats like heiress Peggy Guggenheim, and, later, lived on the nearby island of Torcello. It was there that Hemingway wrote his book, Across the River and Into the Trees, inspired by his love of the city and by his flirtatious relationship with an 18-year old Italian aristocrat, Adriana Ivancich. Years later, after surviving a near-fatal plane crash in Kenya, the Hemingways returned to Venice to quietly recover.  

The same week the Ken Burns PBS series aired, Venice made the news again: Finally, after years of debate, the Italian government took action and officially banned huge cruise-line ships from plowing near the city’s delicate canals. Mass tourism has always been an issue in Venice: A century ago, the American writer Henry James wrote that “there are some disagreeable things in Venice, but the most disagreeable are the tourists.” It got worse over the past few decades when the city allowed gigantic ships teeming with hordes of pleasure-seekers to dock just outside of the city. 

Aside from the human glut, there was the issue of disrupting the environment, specifically, damaging the city’s already crumbling infrastructure. Then there was the issue of stirring up the very waters themselves, making the city’s annual mini-floods even worse. Then there was the sheer aesthetic assault on the senses, which I once witnessed myself: The quiet chatter of locals, and of the softly lapping canals, was suddenly interrupted by a jarringly loud boat whistle, followed by a behemoth of a ship looming over the city like Godzilla over Japan. Or, to use a sea metaphor: The boat was Moby Dick and the Venetian gondolas became plankton, ready to be gobbled up. One hopes that this long overdue ban on bigness restores some normalcy to this jewel-box of a city. 

These thoughts on Venice made me wonder about the city’s appearance in various Hollywood movies. I came across a website called theculturetrip, which has a list of the Top Ten Films set in Venice  https://theculturetrip.com/europe/italy/articles/la-serenissima-ten-of-the-best-films-set-in-venice/.

I checked a few other sites as well, and they all seem to agree: David Lean’s 1955 film with Katherine Hepburn, Summertime, consistently ranks #1.  It’s about a career woman who, like many an American, male or female, travels to this dream city in search of either love or enlightenment. Unlike Roman Holiday, the 1953 film which made Audrey Hepburn (no relation) a star, Summertime is in Technicolor, which gives you a better appreciation of Venice’s visual charms. Lean himself was so impressed by the city that he, like Hemingway, returned to live there. 

Lean also considered Summertime one of his own favorite films – a bit ironic, as this “small” film stands in marked contrast with his later epic movies (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter). Any city that can charm a buttoned-up Brit – as well as a rip-roaring American author – is surely one-of-a-kind.  -BDC