From the Archives: Book Review: A Thousand Days in Venice

Depending on the source, Venice, Italy gets between 15 million and 20 million visitors a year—people allured by the city’s promise of mystery, beauty, and history all combined into one (basically) disappearing location.

In A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance, the city itself is a character in Marlene De Blasi’s developing romance between herself and a blue-eyed Venetian.  The allure and impact of Venice enters her life before she even realizes what’s ahead of her:

“I just wasn’t ready.  I wasn’t ready for how Venice made me feel, from the first moment when I walked out through the doors of the train station.  It was as though Venice was more than a place.  It was as though Venice was a person, someone familiar but not familiar at all, someone who caught me off guard.  I was pretty jaded back then.  I’d already been many places, seen so much, I just wasn’t prepared for the frenzy of emotions in that moment.”

The author offers honest insight into her life as she falls in love with a Venetian man, makes the seemingly brash decision to move to Venice, and attempts to develop a life and relationship in a country where she barely speaks the language—she shares the trials of forming a marriage with someone she barely knows, the challenges of setting up a wedding in a foreign country, and the difficulties of searching for the ideal location in the delicate maze that is Italian property ownership.

While the book’s focus is on the relationship of De Blasi to her new husband, Venice itself plays a starring role.  She captures the city’s allure, magic, and hidden treasures—from watching a gondola being built to the bustling markets where locals shop, from describing sensuous dishes to highlighting the difficulties of living on water (something visitors don’t often think about)—while also capturing a budding romance.

Whether one has actually visited Venice or not, everyone has an image of what the city will be like as a tourist relays to De Blasi on her wedding day: “Thank you for giving me the Venice I had hoped to find.”  De Blasi gives readers the Venice of our dreams (delicious food, romantic men and women, seemingly hidden passageways) and the Venice of reality…it’s an interesting look at one of the world’s most-documented cities.

Where De Blasi fell short, in my mind, was her relationship with her husband, “the stranger” as she calls him—I didn’t really understand and feel their love—but I think that might have been the point.

Is it really possible to describe love…and is it really possible to describe Venice?