First, I’d like to apologise for the irregular schedule of the Venetian Stories newsletter during the spring. I will try to do better going forwards.
Of course, everything has a reason, and, as is usually the case, it is always somebody else’s fault 🙂
Tourist guide bureaucracy
To make a very long story unreasonably short, the Ministry of Tourism opened up for exams to become an authorised tourist guide. In the Veneto region, that hasn’t been possible for fifteen years. The last exams were in 2010.
Naturally, I signed up immediately.
As the decree was published, time was short. The schedule gave at most three months to read up on a wide-ranging curriculum covering legal matters, and the history, art history, geography and archaeology of all of Italy, not just one’s home region as it used to be.
I signed up for almost daily online courses, and spend all available time studying all the parts of Italy I haven’t been to.
Then somebody sued the ministry over some details of the decree.
Now the whole process is stalled, and the exams probably won’t be before December, as they have to be announced forty days in advance, and the court hearing is in mid-October. That notwithstanding, the ministry has said they’re going to continue the procedure, court case or not, just to ensure that general uncertainty remains at unsustainable high levels.
Consequently, I have to prepare for several exams, which could start in July, or maybe in December, or who knows.
All so very Italian.
Venetian Stories Podcast
Before all this happened, I had spent much of the winter preparing the launch of a Venetian Stories podcast, which, I thought, could be an interesting addition to my History Walks in Venice and this newsletter.
The general idea is to tell stories like in the Venetian Stories newsletter, which is why I used the same name, but in a longer form, and of course, spoken.
I had drawn up a fairly articulated plan for my work, when the Ministry of Tourism decided otherwise.
The podcast will not be a chronological narrative of the history of Venice, but to give the listener an overview, I have recorded a series of initial episodes, which tell the history of Venice as succinctly as possible. It is not meant to be a complete history of Venice, but rather an introduction to the two millennia of this city and culture.
Podcast episodes and newsletters will not be the same, but they might draw on the same material. My plan is for the two to be siblings, but not twins.
The last podcast episode published, and also the next, is about Bianca Cappello, who eloped from Venice with her lover at seventeen, and ended up Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Besides a remarkable human history, there’s some interesting Venetian diplomacy in there too.
You can subscribe to the podcast directly on the website, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on the Fediverse where episodes are shared automatically. The Fediverse handle is ‘@venetianstories’.
Free book download
The preparations for the podcast had me work my way through the history of Venice chronologically, for the initial batch of episodes.
The resulting scripts are each about 20 minutes reading time. The whole thing can be read in about two hours, for example on the flight to Venice or while waiting in the airport.
I have therefore taken all those texts, with some home-made maps and a few illustrations, and made an Unreasonably short history of Venice, downloadable as PDF or EPUB (a common e-book format which should work on most readers), or readable directly on the website HistoryOfVenice.com.
It is published under a Creative Commons licence, so it can be used and distributed freely.
Moving forward
So, the current provisional plan for the Venetian Stories is to make a podcast episode and a newsletter every second week, alternating between the two.
They will not be identical, but they will probably quite often be about some of the same subjects.
This email comes from a new domain, which is shared between the podcast and the newsletter: VenetianStories.com.
I will try to keep this going, along with my history walks and boat tours in Venice, until the Ministry of Tourism tosses another spanner in the works.
Leave a Reply