How does a city become an icon? During the 200 years since its political extinction, the shabby relic of a despised tyranny has been transformed into a great modern cultural symbol by the work of such eminent Venetophiles as Ruskin, Proust, Mann, and Henry James.

John Pemble shows how American and European outsiders developed an obsession with the idea of a dying city which must be preserved at all costs; how they reconstructed the imagery as well as the architecture of Venice, and how the Victorian need to restore was supplanted by a wish to conserve without altering the remains of this fragile inheritance.

This engaging and novel interpretation links the transfiguration of Venice to social and intellectual changes in Europe and North America. Analysing the appeal of the city to novelists, historians, and apostles of 'culture', the author demonstrates how changing perceptions of the city reveal much about the development of modern Western sensibility.