Tropic of Venice · Default Product

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Named one of the "Big Ten Outstanding Books from University Presses for 2006" by ForeWord magazine For Margaret Doody, Venice, poised between East and West, earth and sea, sacred and profane, occupies a place only its own. Appearances confound. Renaissance ladies achieved their blond beauty by crimping and dyeing their hair in urine. The richly ornamented facades of its buildings mask lighter structures based on wood pilings ultimately floating on clay and water. Marble is intimate with mud. In Doody's Venice, the holy is never far from the sensual, the earthy and carnal. Though the city's patron is one of the four Evangelists, enshrined in the glorious basilica that bears his name, she reminds us that according to legend the body of Saint Mark was transported to Venice hidden in a mound of pork. With a novelist's eye for quirky anecdote and rich detail, with a connoisseur's eye for the secrets hidden in the cut of a sleeve or the corner of a painting, Doody summons the Venice of Carpaccio, Titian, and Canaletto, of Goldoni and Casanova. She draws on comments from the myriad travelers, contented or grumbling, from the Middle Ages to the present, men and women who have by turns been

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