“There is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice,” Mary McCarthy wrote in “Venice Observed,” published in 1956. According to a handy little chart in Salvatore Settis’s “If Venice Dies,” the city had 174,808 inhabitants in 1951. The beginning of Mr. Settis’s book is its own plague of terrifying facts and figures. As Mr. Settis notes (citing Italo Calvino), Venice is currently “the polar opposite” of a megalopolis. Mr. Settis continually invokes Calvino’s notion of a city’s spirit, that ineffable thing that sets it apart from other places.

Source: New York Times November 23, 2016 22:22 UTC