Easter break arrived and I was whisked away to the Italian peninsular
for a holiday. As a historian who studies the intricacies of the renaissance
and has a fascination with medieval writers to never have visited Rome was
something of a blot on my copy book I had to resolve. My only previous visit to
the city had been a virtual one, turned on to a video game called assassins
creed, it provided a rather good tour of the renaissance city, albeit while
leaping unfeasibly large distances across surprisingly sturdy rooftops.
The trip got me thinking about how we deal with history and
the way in which we teach the nature of the city. Reading up about Venice I came
across John Julius Norwich’s book on the city – which I heartily recommend. In
the introduction he talks about his first visit to Venice and how he can ‘Still
feel the impact made on his 16 year old brain’. For him ‘Venice more than anywhere
is more than the sum of its parts’ and has to be considered whole and complete
rather than a collection of facts and figures or a series of churched islands.
Perhaps we, in our age of dissection and dissemination, don’t
take time to connect with the grandeur of the grand institutions. Seen as a
series of events or shops or churches the city is pale and unformed. Seen as a
single, living breathing creature Venice becomes a struggling upstart built on
slowly rotting wooden piles hammered into the Northern Italian Marshlands millennia
ago that rocked and rolled, riding its luck until happily allowing itself to be
subsumed into the new Italian nation. It is a languorous beauty of a city, its
heart of St Marco, veins and arteries of criss-crossing canals and alleyways.
We have all taken students to a city, shown them a new
place, but how often can they get a view of the city as a single place instead
of the art gallery or theatre we’ve dragged them to. Can we help them see the wood for the trees? When
I take my next field trip I will be trying to let the students see the bigger
picture – I don’t know how just yet – maybe the peak of Arthur’s seat in Edinburgh
or London Bridge at 7am on a summer morning. In the meantime I recommend you
check out Norwich’s book and use the look inside feature on Amazon to read the introduction.
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