Jan Morris (1980). The Venetian & Empire: A Sea Voyage. London: Penguine, p. 9.
The spirit is infections indeed, and millions have journeyed to experience the sense of place of the remarkable island. Venice is not the only tourist-world-city, but it is among the purest -- and perhaps earliest -- incarnations of a distinctive postindustrial urban type: the city as an entertainment machine. When Harvey Molotch developed the "growth machine" metaphor to understand the competitive economic development strategies of industrial cities in North America, Venice had already undergone a dramatic transformation from the production of material things to the production of experiences for visitors: thirty years after Molotch's famous growth-machine thesis, it has become clear that tourism, entertainment, and spectacle have become central fixtures in the economic development consciousness of urban elites everywhere. Venice, of course, has centuries of experience in hosting visitors in expanding imperial circuits that anticipate nicely what Sheller and Urry describe as the "new mobilities paradigm." Today it's leisure travelers from Europe and well beyond. In the Winter of 1201, it was Crusaders preparing fleets for the venture to Egypt, with a side trip to take on the defenses of a competitor to the Venetian empire -- the "capital of half the world" (Morris, p. 27), Constantinople." />
Venice
The meanings are vivid and so is the place; Jan Morris sets the scene:
"The most glittering of all the world's belvederes, the most suggestive of great occasion and lofty circumstance, is surely the Piazzetta di San Marco, the Little Piazza of St. Mark, upon the waterfront at Venice. Two marble columns stand in it, one crowned with a peculiar winged lion of St. Mark, the city's patron saint, the other with a figure of St. Theodore, his predecessor in that office, in the company of a crocodile: and if you stand between the two of them, where they used to hang malefactors long ago, you may feel yourself almost to be part of Venice, so infectious is the spirit of the place, and so vivid are all its meanings."
Jan Morris (1980). The Venetian & Empire: A Sea Voyage. London: Penguine, p. 9.
The spirit is infections indeed, and millions have journeyed to experience the sense of place of the remarkable island. Venice is not the only tourist-world-city, but it is among the purest -- and perhaps earliest -- incarnations of a distinctive postindustrial urban type: the city as an entertainment machine. When Harvey Molotch developed the "growth machine" metaphor to understand the competitive economic development strategies of industrial cities in North America, Venice had already undergone a dramatic transformation from the production of material things to the production of experiences for visitors: thirty years after Molotch's famous growth-machine thesis, it has become clear that tourism, entertainment, and spectacle have become central fixtures in the economic development consciousness of urban elites everywhere. Venice, of course, has centuries of experience in hosting visitors in expanding imperial circuits that anticipate nicely what Sheller and Urry describe as the "new mobilities paradigm." Today it's leisure travelers from Europe and well beyond. In the Winter of 1201, it was Crusaders preparing fleets for the venture to Egypt, with a side trip to take on the defenses of a competitor to the Venetian empire -- the "capital of half the world" (Morris, p. 27), Constantinople.