
SUSAN SONTAG’S UNGUIDED TOUR
VENICE WITHDREW FROM THE GRISLY business of making history after losing Crete in 1669; the city has been a museum ever since, sinking languorously under the combined weight of its past and armies of despoiling tourists. It is the ideal resort town of the homeless modern mind, a nobler Disneyland for the meditative. To love Venice properly is to find one’s own mutability mirrored in its scaling frescoes and chipped mosaics: Palladian churches, love affairs, Tiepolos, opinions, palazzi, arcades, botanical gardens, tastes. The inventory is inexhaustible, the effort of holding it all in one’s head