Venice Rediscovered

For two centuries after it ceased to be an independent city-state, Venice lay moldering, no longer a great center of power and wealth. Cut off from easy access to mainland transportation, it was considered stinking and vile by the few Europeans who visited. But in the 19th century, it was rediscovered as a cheap place to live and attracted writers and artists from England and the continent, whose paeans to its timeless beauty stimulated a renewal of interest in the city. After a bridge to the mainland was built, large colonies of the wealthy and titled-largely English and German-began to flock to it, buying up old palaces and making it a fashionable social and artistic center. Memorialized by Byron, Proust and a multitude of other writers and painters, it once again moved to center stage, if no longer as a center of commerce and power then as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Pemble, a reader in history at the University of Bristol, evokes the city's impact on the literary and artistic world of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Though dense and scholarly, his work is nevertheless accessible and exciting, with rich rewards for sophisticated readers. (Mar.)