Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City

Paperback - 25 June, 2004 - University of California Press
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By: Robert Davis and Garry R Marvin
ISBN: 0520241207

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Reviews by readers

Venice, the Tourist Maze

A must for the regular visitor of Venice. Davis and Marvin show clearly how the historical center and the outskirts (!) are sacrifized to the needs of mass-tourism. They describe how the the city is transformed sytematically into a historical theme-park in which the remaining locals have only a stage-role. And 'resistance is useless': the inhabitants are able to slow, not to stop the process.
The book predicts an ominous future of this cultural heritage site. Food for thought.

Been There, Lived That, Right On!

As an inveterate traveler, I usually find that books about places I have visited leave me sorry I read them - travel guides are often so filled with tourist hype or stereotypical portrayals or out-dated analysis. But, this is not a travel guide: it is a thoughful and well-researched critique of Venice as both a tourist city and a (struggling to remain) actual city.

Over the years I have related to Venice in three ways: a member of the day-trip brigade (with two children in tow); a more serious tourist making a five day stay of it; a long-term (six month) resident in one of its working class neighborhoods. From all of those perspectives, this book speaks to my experiences.

But, more than a souvenir of my times there (see the excellent discussion of the role of souvenirs in a tourist city), this work has opened my mind to other ways to see my beloved city. I now see the city and its people with new eyes, for the authors' critical eyes and ideas challenged me to experience Venice once again anew.

If, as I would claim, I love Venezia, then I would also want to engage my heart and soul in the challenge they pose for the future of the city: not the worries about "sinking into the sea" but the worries about becoming "lost in the tourists."

And did you know that tourists have been coming here for over 500 years (yes, fellow Americans, that is before any tourists invaded North America), and that tacky souvenirs have been available for at least 300 years? Lots more to know as well as ponder in this work.

The Bermuda-Shorts Triangle

If the City of Venice (Italy) ever decides to build a model of Las Vegas, will the model include a little replica of Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel, itself a model of Venice? It's the kind of question I might address to the authors of Venice: The Tourist Maze, this entertaining and rewarding account of what may be the most touristed city in the history of the planet.

You might suppose there is nothing new in a critique of Venetian tourism. Venice first licensed tour guides in 1219 (and right there is a factoid I did not know until I read this book). Any number of others have left accounts of tourism in Venice, and quite a few have left accounts of accounts.

Davis and Marvin do a creditable job of trying not to replow old ground. There's almost no mention of Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris, Viscount Norwich, and other visitors who have done so much to inform and entertain. There's only a bit of Henry James; almost none of Proust and only a glancing reference to that most famous of all sex tourists, Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach. Instead, they give their primary attention to tourism as an activity, from the standpoint alike of the provider and the consumer. You might almost call it an account of "the enterprise of tourism," except this makes it sound, misleadingly, like yet one more business book.

There is a whiff of the lamp about the presentation, although it never gets overpowering: the chapter on the gondola is called "the floating signifier," which is, I guess, the kind of joke you are bound to get when academics try to have fun. They say they "take advantage" of a notion of one "Appadurai" (who?), although he never makes it to the bibliography. A more obvious progenitor is Dean MacCannell, whose "The Tourist" is one of those rare books to make fancy theory both interesting and plausible. A still better source, though surely unintended, would be the trdition o;f the mystery novel, where the hard-boiled detective sees the great city from the underside (indeed I am a little surprised that they don't say a word about Donna Leon, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Venetian murder mystery).

But forget about the theory: some of their best stuff is the nuts-and-boats practical. There is an admirable sketch-history of the gondola and its monster offspring, the vaporetto. And I particularly liked their discussion of the economics of the "artisan." They explain that Murano glass "works" because the craft is showy and dramatic, but that Burano lace-making does not "work," because the craft is not showy, and because real Burano lace is prohibitively expensive. Papier-mache masks work especially well, because the price is right, and the technology is accessible to any schoolchild. By the way it appears that those fancy designer masks (confession: I have one on the living room wall) are no part of the tradition of Venice: masks at the /carnevale/ were for the most part mass-produced.

The climax comes, inevitably in a discussion of the other Venice, the Venetian Hotel at Las Vegas (but why can't I find it in the index?). They provide an entertaining account, appropriately fascinated and appalled, of the Venetian as the private obsession of Steve Adleson who has lavished on it (so they say) the sum of $1.5 billion. They seem not to have noticed that from a business standpoint, the Venetian seems to have been a rousing success. If tourists still flock to the real Venice, they seem to descend at a comparable rate on our little Venice in the desert.

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