FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“The Other Venice is a short book but one of the great books written both about the city and about the inspiration it has evoked down the centuries.”
Libération, Paris

THE OTHER VENICE

Predrag Matvejević
Translated by Russell Valentino
Distributed for Reaktion Books by the University of Chicago Press

Where do you find the essence of a city? In search of this answer, Predrag Matvejević probes behind Venice’s touristy façade and draws a striking portrait of a city forged of memory and stone.

Matvejević plumbs the depths of Venice’s canals and peers into its narrow alleys, reimagining this ancient city through the people, places, and ideas that flourished within its confines. By turns a historian, anthropologist, and cartographer, the author relates the stories behind big and small details of the Venetian cityscape, recounting gems of fact and myth. Whether the trattoria and taverns that line the canals, the culinary history of regional bread and breadmaking, or the excavation of islands and ships from swampy lagoons, The Other Venice infuses the city with the mystery and intrigue of ancient traditions and treasured secrets.

Arresting black-and-white photographs by Sarah Quill accompany the text as a silent complement to Matvejević’s pilgrimage. An intimate and compelling travel memoir, The Other Venice sweeps us into an unfamiliar cityscape where the mysteries of the Old World mingle with modern life.

Predrag Matvejević teaches at the New Sorbonne of Paris and the Sapienza in Rome, and has published many books. Russell Valentino is associate professor of Russian and of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He has translated books from Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Croatian, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Autumn Hill Books.

 

For more information please contact Harriet Greene at (773) 702-4217 or hgreen@press.uchicago.edu