97 Venices

Venice, what’s a beautiful city! Venice is one and only. But is it just like that? According to the new book “Welcome to Venice” there are 97 in the world! Edited and distributed by the syndicate Venezia Nuova, a ministerial institution which attends to the safeguard of the city, the volume tells all the Venices of the world, i.e. how the city has been copied, imitated, dreamed. The most famous is the Californian Little Venice, founded at the dawning of twentieth-century by Abbott Kinney, a dreamer self-made man who recruited also 36 gondoliers “made in Italy” who shot through the canals till the Great Depression. Then it had a gloomy period until the Sixties, when the hippies made it very cool. In the USA there are other 31 Serenessime: from the little village in the New York State where the old farms are built in Palladian stile to the mammoth, hyper-realistic, very kitsch Hotel The Venetian of Las Vegas. But also the Latin America isn’t badly off for these copies. There are more than 40 mocks Venices, creations of Italian immigrants’ imagination, one, Nova Venetia, built even in the Brazilian virgin forest, ringed by banana trees and orchids. The others are peppered in the rest of the planet. Perhaps the case more astonishing is the last: in August, in the Chinese city of Macao was inaugurated a gigantic hotel that is the copy of the Venetian. The facsimile of the facsimile. The globalisation to the nth power. At least, if Marco Polo lived these days he would feel at home in China, in the true sense of the word.

Photo credit: .arzan