Venetian Dreaming

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, Sep 17, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 368 pages
Who hasn't longed to escape to the enchanting canals and mysterious alleyways of Venice? Globetrotting writer Paula Weideger not only dreamed the dream, she took the leap. In Venetian Dreaming, she charts the course of her love affair with one of the world's most treasured cities.
Weideger's search for a place to live eventually takes her to the Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, one of the rare Venetian palaces continuously inhabited by the family that built it. She weaves the past lives of the family Donà with her own adventures as she threads her way through the labyrinthine city. Art and architecture are a constant presence. Yet even more strongly felt is the passage of time, the panorama of the seasons as reflected in special events -- Carnival, the Film Festival, September's historic regatta, midnight mass at San Marco. We follow Weideger as she explores the Ghetto, the expatriate community, and the lives of locals from noblemen to boatmen. Along the way she encounters everyone from the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim to the Merchant Ivory crowd, and experiences some high drama with the Contessa, her landlady. The resulting memoir is a wry and illuminating, intelligent and tender account of the once grand heritage and now imperiled future of Venice.
 

Selected pages

Contents

3
22
The Bronxness of Venice
36
Lost and Found
52
Arriva
67
Drifting and Dreaming
79
Getting Connected
95
Our Doge
110
The House of Good Neighbors
122
Battle Stations
199
Love or Money
214
Venice Belongs to the World
227
Meeting Pinocchio
229
A Case of Mistaken Identity
239
Sliding Doors
250
Dead in Venice
260
Repeat Offenders
274

Social Dancing
132
Beginnings and Endings
144
A Very Venetian Story
157
Peggy Guggenheim and I
159
A Merchant Ivory Production
169
Revisions
178
Hares and Tortoises
188
Higher Water
284
Fans in February
293
Happy Christmas
295
Carmen Miranda and Friends
305
Making Waves
316
Fireworks
328
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2003)

Paula Weideger was born and raised in the Bronx and then Long Island. She started out as a painter, went to graduate school in Physiological Psychology, and taught at universities in New York before becoming a writer. Her journalism has been published in many newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain, including the Sunday New York Times, Travel and Leisure, Town & Country, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. A New Yorker always, she has lived in Paris and Amsterdam for twenty years and spent a great deal of time in London before managing to move to Venice.

Bibliographic information