Venice
Martin Gayford visits the greatest one-artist show on Earth
For a good deal of this autumn, I was living in Venice. This wasn’t exactly a holiday, I’d like to…
Venice needs Venexit
Some of Venice’s problems are well known: the challenge of conserving her famous buildings, the dangers of poorly managed mass…
Will it be kid pie this Christmas?
A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a…
Tintoretto unmasked
Tintoretto was il Furioso. He was a lightning flash or a thunderbolt, a storm in La Serenissima of Renaissance Italy,…
Notes on… Lord Byron in Venice
‘I want to see Venice, and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses.’ So wrote Lord Byron in 1814, some two years…
Venice all tarted up
Veneta is a Venetian restaurant inside the St James’s Market development south of Piccadilly Circus. I do not like this…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
High life
I’m in Venice for the film festival that just ended and, as an American humorist once wired his paper: ‘Streets…
Repeat prescription
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Whodunnit?
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
The Venice Accademia
The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most…
A tale of cloaks and daggers
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
Venice Notebook
Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace…
Low life
I sprinted through Milan station, speed-read the departures monitor without stopping, and arrived gasping on platform 8 with two minutes…
Trattoria tour
The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is…
Striking Middle Sea
The Mediterranean has always been central to European civilisation — and a source of drama and conflict, says Anthony Sattin
Curators
As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…
Venice
I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled…
No mappa mundi
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…
Remember the Negroni Index? At last I’ve found a market that never stops rising
This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that…
Three sisterhoods
The Honourable Society of Odd Bottles has been mentioned in this column before. I can report that the membership is…
That sinking feeling
When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…
Old Harry’s game
Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held…
Senses working overtime
In 1914 Fernand Léger gave a lecture about modern art. By then recognised as a leading Cubist artist, he had…
Welcome to Big Venice
London is at risk of becoming a tourist trap full of second homes
