Art versus Lit-Life – Michelle Lovric

A few years ago I wrote a children’s book called Talina in the Tower. The eponymous heroine is an impudent book-worm who lives in a tower on the edge of Venice. The villains are some creatures I invented: the Ravageurs. The breed is cross between a wolf and hyena, with all the worst qualities of both. The Ravageurs gourmands, bullies, thieves and cowards, with pretensions to Frenchness. In ancient times, Venice belonged to them. I took my inspiration from the fact that the Santa Croce sestiere of Venice used to be called ‘Luprio’ because wolves once roamed across the sand banks of the lagoon to browse for prey.

My story eventually recounts how, centuries past, a wily Venetian bought La Serenissima from a greedy Ravageur ancestor. The islands and its architecture were traded for a luxe picnic. When Talina in the Tower commences, the Ravageurs are back, and they want revenge, land and obscene quantities of over-dressed food. And to stop them, I offer up only Talina, a couple of children, a professor, an historian and a few cats …

I had great fun devising the Ravageur names and their dialect using a French dictionary of slang. Here are their names:

(Literal translations in brackets):

Frimousse - vicious face

Rouquin - reddish fur

Fildefer - thin
Croquemort - an undertaker's man
Échalas - (a lath) lanky

Lèche-bottes - a boot-licker

The Lady Ravageurs are cruelly given unpleasant mocking names, such as:

Ripopette - worthless

Caboche - (a hobnail) a blockhead

Bourrique - (a she-ass) a stupid girl

Bassinoire - (a warming pan) a boring female
Bique - (a goat) a silly girl

However, in the end, the females will prove that they are in fact clever, funny and brave.

Grignan is the largest, fiercest and hungriest of the Ravageurs. He's hungry for flesh, for Golosi's Mostarda and most of all, for power. The terrifying thing is that he appears to be entitled to it. Although he claims the title of Lord of the Ravageurs, and is feared by even these fearsome creatures, the story will show that he is not always the leader they believe him to be. Petit Grignon was the name of a devil said to consort with a Frenchwoman called Suzanne Gaudry, who was tried for witchcraft in 1652. A wife of a man called Nochin Quinchou was named in the same trial, so I borrowed that one as well.

I lived with those Ravageurs in my head for a couple of years. They are still there to consult, if I want to.

And I was driven back into Ravageur Venice with a shock and a gulp recently.

One of the main joys of the Biennale in Venice is the fact that one is allowed access to certain wonderful palazzi and cloisters that are not normally open to the public. Often, the art is almost beside the point, because the architecture is so dazzling.

But this year I stumbled into an exhibit that put the architecture in the shade, while still profiting from the space.

 

In the cloisters of the old monastery of San Salvador, I found that a hundred of my Ravageurs clustered around a pale replica of Michaelangelo’s Pietà.

The beasts’ body language denoted the ferocity of fear, yet they were also full of blood-lust. They were cowed by the Madonna while irresistibly true to their savage natures.

The creatures were created by the Chinese artist Liu Ruo Wang, working in conjunction with the Republic of San Marino. One of the smallest and one of the largest republics of the world came together to promote contemporary art with dozens of installations and hundreds of events. The "Friendship Project - China" was curated by Vincenzo Sanfo.

Although the installation is ‘site-specific’, her oeuvre did not refer to any specifically Venetian context. ('Tis almost ever thus, at the Biennale).

The website appears to have a bad case of ‘Google Translate’ or ‘Babelfish’, explaining:

This is meant to represent the one hand a complaint against those attacks and destroys the art, the other a conviction against religious persecution a complaint extremely important especially because made by a Chinese artist who makes her cry of pain of His Holiness Pope Francis the guilty silence of the world.

I prefer not to tinker with this translation as I think we can extract the general idea, and (I often find that these translation sites throw up joys. I recently used the site to translate a poem of mine, ‘Vamping the Rat Man,’ into Italian and back to English again. An entirely different poem emerged, full of new ideas.)

And anyway, for me the main joy was to discover that someone had made one hundred of my Ravageurs and smeared them with blood.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Thoughts on drowning - Michelle Lovric

A German tourist died on the Grand Canal in Venice a few weeks ago. In a 'perfect storm' of traffic, the unfortunate man was crushed in a collision between a vaporetto and a gondola. His body was repatriated to Germany for the funeral - which was attended by a cohort of Venetian gondoliers, showing solemn respect.

 

The story attracted international press attention. Deaths on the water are rare in Venice these days. But once upon a time urban drownings were far more common, and it was often impossible to identify the corpses.

Venice has historically shown tenderness to those who have died in her waters, and even to those whose identities have never been known..

 

Chapter 5 of my children/'s book Talina in the Tower begins like this:

                                     The Company of Christ and the Good Death

                  the canals of Venice, the early hours of April 30th, 1867, Saint Pio’s Day

 

The saddest work of the members of the Company was to retrieve unknown drowned bodies from the water: that’s why its full name was ‘The Company of Christ and the Good Death’.

Venetians were prone to drowning: it was an ancient superstition among them that it was better not to learn to swim.

‘The sea must have what the sea wants,’ they were fond of quoting.

And, every so often, the sea took. When the stones sweated slippery danger, there were always drunken, clumsy – or just plain unlucky – Venetians who slipped and fell into the canals. Some time later, the kind, quiet men of the Company of Christ and the Good Death would pull their corpses out of the water and take them to the cemetery island of San Michele for a decent burial ...

 

I create a lot of counterfactual history in my books, but la Scuola del Cristo e della Buona Morte really did exist, as did the old Venetian superstition about not learning how to swim.

The Company of Christ and the Good Death was indeed devoted to taking dead bodies out of the water. Sometimes also known as la Confraternita del Santissimo Crocefisso, the association’s foundation in 1635 was marked by the construction of a little chapel with an altar under a portico (now demolished) of the church of San Marcuola, near Venice’s ghetto.

In 1643 began the building of the current edifice in the street now known as the Rio tera del Cristo. It was pronounced, on its completion the following year, to be  "in bellissima forma".

On the façade, in white Istrian stone, an inscription records that from 1640 the Scuola was allied to a similar confraternity in Rome which also "esercitava quella di portarsi a raccogliere i corpi degli annegati non conosciuti per dar loro onorevole sepoltura".

At the entrance, on the Rio Tera drio la Chiesa, to the right is still visible the 'abate’ or large stone that served as an anchor for the standard of the Scuola.

In the Scuola's early days, there was no cemetery at San Michele. This joining of the islands of San Michele and San Cristoro was a Napoleonic invention. Until the early nineteenth century, the Venetian dead were usually buried in campi di morti  near the parish churches. Opposite la Scuola at San Marcuola is a raised piece of land, usually a sign of one those burial grounds. It easy to imagine that quiet corner as a resting place for the drowned bodies of the unknown.

 

And it would have been so much easier to drown in Venice at that time. Very few of the bridges had the handrails we see now, or the parapets. On rainy, slippery nights, a misstep might lead straight into the water. There were no street lights, of course, unless you count the candles that were lit at the capitelli, little altars that you find all over the street, usually with an image of the Virgin Mary. If you absolutely insisted on nocturnal perambulations, you’d have been well advised to hire a member of the Scuola of the Codega, the lamp men, who would talk in front of you with a lantern and guide you over the rimless bridges.

My collections of Venetian proverbs show a respect for the water and its perils.

If you want to learn how to pray, go to sea

Better to drown in the sea than in a canal

If God had wanted Venetians to be fish, He would have given then an acquarium, not a city.

Where there is no faith, the water pushes in.

But back to the Company of Christ and its home. There is so much to peer at in Venice that I for years I have walked unseeing past the beautiful little building. The façade is enriched by windows with intricate iron grates. Tall Corinthian pilasters rise high. The third floor is crowned with a triangular timpano.

Inside, there were once fine paintings, including three by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini 1675-1741). There was also a Jesus among the Doctors by Giambattista Lambranzi, and a Portrait of the Confraternity Members in front of an Allegory of the Church and Boranga’s The Transport of a Drowned Man with the Participation of the Confraternity Members, dating from 1700.

The congregation of the Scuola, which survived the Napoleon suppression of the monasteries, was still functioning in 1858. Today it is integrated with that of San Marcuola.

And in 1984 it seems that canvases remaining in the disused Scuola were despatched to the Museo Diocesano d’ Arte Sacra in San Marco.

I have never seen the doors to the building open but recently it has been given a healing hand. The roof has been consolidated, the beams reinforced and the large marble crucifix on the façade has been made more secure. The parish priest at San Marcuola, the newspapers tell me, has shown great tenacity and a great attachment to the Scuola, of which he is the guardian, from the moment when he took his role 23 years ago. Federico Niero has been a champion of the fabric of the place all this time. With this link, you can see the architects’ beautiful drawings for the project.

The next step, of course, would be to get its paintings back, and to let the public, and curious writers of historical novels, back inside.

And who wouldn't like to know of the comforting existence of some modern Company of the Good Death to be vigilant, waiting for to recover the unknown dead from what ever accidents might have befallen them?

The idea of tending to the dead is one of the basic decencies of civilization. 

This week I've been working in a writers' boot camp in Venice with fellow History Girls Mary Hoffman and Louisa Young and this idea was discussed between us. An agreed conclusion between us was that writing a person's true history is a way of offering them a decent burial too. We did not agree as to whether there needed to be something essentially redeeming in the way of recording a life, or whether some lives were irredeemably sad and that this fact should be recorded too. 

Those of you working on the lives of the happy or the sad may have some thoughts about this?

 

 

Favourite historical figure: Giuseppe Tassini – Michelle Lovric

My FHF is Giuseppe Tassini, author of Curiosità Veneziane – Venetian Curiosities, originally published in 1863. I’ve blogged about him before. In fact, to be honest, I never stop mentioning him, but my reason for awarding him this slot on the History Girls – finally cementing my reputation as an incorrigible Tassini-bore – is that I see him as both an historical figure and a recorder of history.

Giuseppe Tassini was the Venetians’ Venetian, and a man living through a classic case of ‘interesting times’. He defied the outsiders’ concept of 19^th-century Venice as a dismal shadow of herself: ‘La Leggenda Nera’ so beloved of Byron and his morose, melodramatic ilk painted a town who had partied herself to death and now existed principally for the convenience of misery-tourists and the coiners of cheap metaphors. The ultimate insider, Tassini provided the antidote to this deadly slander. He showed a real and different Venice, choosing to give prominence in his writing to what was fascinating and great about his city, mingling the past and the present, and most importantly – in Curiosità Veneziane – presenting history in a way that makes it still possible to envision Venice 1882, and even Venice 1310, in  2012.

Here is one prism for viewing Tassini: his personal biography. Giuseppe Tassini was born in 1827, the son of a prosperous bourgeois family. His grandfather had been ambassador to Istanbul; his father was born there. His mother was the daughter of an upper-class Austrian colonel. The young Tassini, perhaps in the sway of the exotic near-past of his family, originally aspired to be a poet and lived very much for pleasure while technically studying for a law degree. His father’s death in 1858 appears to have brought on a new sobriety in the young man, who then graduated in jurisprudence. He inherited a comfortable fortune – liberating him from earning his living in law. Thereafter he devoted his life to the investigation of Venetian history, topography and legend, especially the whimsical, curious and neglected aspects that most appealed to him personally. He never married but he loved women and conviviality. He was a well-known figure in the restaurants of Venice. He was a notable drinker. A sketch of him shows an ironic-looking face with a little goatee and thick glasses. He died on December 22^nd, 1899 of an apoplectic fit caused by his culinary and bibulous excesses. His body was found at his home by the waiter from the Caffè dei Segretari who brought him his breakfast every morning. It appears that the man who brought Venice to life was buried in a common grave, the site of which is no longer known.

And here’s another prism for viewing the same man. Tassini was born in the second decade of the long Austrian Occupation of his city. He would have been 19 when Venice’s 1500-year-old island state was abruptly ended by the construction of the railway bridge that finally connected her to the mainland, an event of great psychological importance to the Venetians. It was also at this time that photography (initially in the form of daguerreotypes) arrived in Venice to anchor her to reality in a new and possibly even more invasive way. Perhaps Tassini sat at Florian opposite John Ruskin, a frequent visitor in the late 1840s and early 50s as he recorded the city for his Stones of Venice. Tassini would have lamented, along with Ruskin, the dreadfully botched restorations at the Basilica and Ca d’Oro.

He would have been 21, at the height of his hot-blooded youth, when Daniele Manin led Venice into revolt against her Hapsburg masters. The city endured a cruel siege for 16 months, finally capitulating when the Austrians cut off her fresh water and cholera raged. Tassini spent the next 17 years in a city under suspicion and an increasingly heavy Austrian grip. Tassini was 33 when northern Italy threw off the Austrian yoke, 39 when Venice herself was liberated in 1866. He must have taken part in that autumn’s plebiscite by which Venice joined Italy – by a vote of 642,000 to 69. A year later, he would have been wading though the 153 centimetres of one of Venice’s worst acqua altas.

He no doubt stood weeping in the square of San Marco on March 22^nd, 1868 when the remains of Daniele Manin, who died in exile in 1857, were brought back to Venice for the saddest and most ornate funeral of the century. He would have seen the church and tower of San Paternian before their degradation and destruction, the ghastly work of the 1868 fire in the Cappella del Rosario at San Giovanni e Paolo. He would have watched women shimmering through Venice’s streets in the sinuous pleated silk dresses of Mariano Fortuny; maybe even the beautiful young actress who rejoiced in the name of Emma Grammatica. He was there when Wagner died in 1883, and when Robert Browning expired at the Ca’ Rezzonico a few years later. Tassini himself died just three years before the Campanile collapsed, but he lived to see the ancient city start to reinvent herself in the avant-garde of Art with the first Biennale in 1895.

I’ve recently been looking at photographs of this period, as I’ve written two novels set during Tassini’s lifetime, and in one of them he is a character. When I consult those atmospherically charged albumen prints of 19^th-century Venice, I find myself looking for Tassini’s face in the crowd. Would he have carried a notebook? Or would he have preferred to live the moment without translating it into words, putting it behind that pane of glass? Would he have rushed home to his desk and churned out fresh prose? Did he use one of the newfangled typewriters, or did he prefer to write by hand? I have stood outside his modest house in the Calle dei Specchieri, San Marco 635/634. (Since 1988, the first floor has carried a plaque commemorating Curiosità Veneziane and its author, ‘the passionate researcher of our traditions’.)

I imagine his desk against the window, the smells of local restaurants rising up to tempt him away from his work. I see him chasing his notes as a gust of the sirocco bears them away. I see him throwing up his hands at a bad paragraph and stomping down to the Caffè dei Segretari for a grappa-dirtied coffee. Yes, of course, Tassini is also my FHF because I find myself presuming to identify with him. I also know what it is to feel inspired by Venice, and yet maddeningly distracted by her. I also know that sometimes the only way you can express your love for the city is to write about her. And I understand the task he faced, of condensing the fugitive city, crammed with incident and ornament, into something in words that people will want to keep reading: two kinds of work that are almost irreconcilable.

And here is a third prism for viewing Giuseppe Tassini. His most famous book also represents an interesting phenomenon of historiography. Venice of all cities fuses ocular and historical fascination. I think Tassini responded to this stimulus. Instead of charting her history by chronology or theme, Tassini went for the gazetteer approach, and in this way effectively created a key to the mysterious city, accessible to anyone who speaks Italian (incredibly, it’s never been translated into English). In alphabetical order, Curiosità Veneziane recounts the stories of the streets and squares, bridges and palaces of the city. One can stand in the Campo of Sant’Agostin with Tassini in hand and learn where the church once stood, where the palazzo of Baiamonte Tiepolo was razed, where the column of infamy that vilified that would-be Dogicide once loomed. One has only to swing on one’s heel to discover the tiny alley where Daniele Manin was born. The connections are almost dizzying in their resonances. By allying place to past, Tassini chose to present history in such a way that it can be instantly accessed when and where it is wanted: by a person who stumbles into ‘The Little Alley of the Dirty Habits’ or ‘The Courtyard of the Dwarfs’ and wants to know who, where, what, why and when.

And here’s my last prism for viewing Tassini: as a writer of spellbinding charm and energy. He is as interested in hauntings and scandals as in political milestones. I think his criterion was: whatever brings the city alive. So he would write about facial moles as well as deadly conspiracies, and even on the same page. This sense of a duty to detain the attention and keep it alive is reflected in Tassini’s other books, about beards, glasses, vice, festivals, Veronica Franco. One of my favourites is Buildings of Venice destroyed or turned to uses other than those for which they were originally destined. One of his frequent title words is ‘alcune’ – some. So there are books about Some Palaces and Old Buildings of Venice and Some of the most Sensational Death Sentences carried out under the Republic. In other words, Tassini does not seek to be exhaustive and so exhaust the attention of the reader. He seeks to be selective, and present what people most want to know in doses that are not only digestible but also highly palatable.

And this is why, in my opinion, Tassini may take his place on a blog for writers of historical fiction too.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Giuseppe Tassini is a character in Talina in the Tower, which was published on February 2^nd, 2012, by Orion Children’s Books

Naming names – Michelle Lovric

In interviews, people often ask me where I find my sometimes frankly bizarre character names – or if I make them up. The fact is that they are almost all appropriated, and I think that the act of appropriation is vital to their … vitality.

This is going to be a short post, breaking the recent admirable History Girl tradition of encyclopaedic blogs. And it’s going to be a list: my dirty dozen ways or places for finding characters names.

1. Census forms for the appropriate year (in which the novel is set)

2. Maps showing the colourful names of small villages. Current favourite: Ploopluck in County Kildare, Ireland.

3. Giuseppe Tassini’s Curiosità Veneziane – a gazetteer of Venetian places and names.

4. Doorbells. Venetians go in for engraved brass plates by their doors.

5. List of the war dead on the walls of churches. Also, (slightly shamefaced) the death notices people put outside shops and bars in Venice.

6. Puns. I love ones that work in Italian and English. So the rat in my latest children's novel, Talina in the Tower,  is called Altopone. 'Topo' is the Italian word for mouse or rat. Adding '-one' means 'big one'. And then Altopone rhymes with Al Capone. And my rat is a bit of a wide-boy.

7.  Tombstones in graveyards (except in Venice, where Napoleon had all the campi dei morti sealed up and transferred the burial business to two islands in the lagoon.

8. Il Gazzettino and La Nuova di Venezia, our local rags. Perps are fair game, especially.

9. Backs of old postcards that I buy in Venetian flea markets.

10. Waiting in queues at airports:  luggage label voyeurism. You'd be amazed.

11. Dictionaries of slang. For Talina in the Tower, I named my sleazy hybrid wolves after their personal characteristics. I found the vocabulary in Charles M. Marchard’s  1917 tome, A Careful Selection of Parisian Slang . (I am wondering what he had to be careful about?). The Ravageurs are not French, but they pretend to be. So this is what they are called and what their names mean: Frimousse – vicious face; Rouquin – reddish fur; Fildefer – thin; Croquemort – an undertaker’s man; Échalas – (a lath) lanky; Lèche-bottes – a boot-licker.  The Lady Ravageurs are cruelly given unpleasant mocking names, such as: Ripopette – worthless; Caboche – (a hobnail) a blockhead; Bique – (a goat) a silly girl and, um, Bidet.  I hasten to add that the females will prove that they are in fact clever, funny and brave.

12. Dinner table conversation cannibalism. The vulture in Talina is called ‘Restaurant’, a name I heard given to a greedy horse encountered on my stepson's Mongolian holiday.

Where have you found names? Or what names have you read that you’ve particularly relished?

Michelle Lovric’s website

Talina in the Tower was published by Orion Children's Books on February 2nd 2012

Bring out your dead! Or, a new kind of ghost-writer – Michelle Lovric

My subject in this Dickensian week is the ghosts of books past. But first we must take a detour into the construction industry.

Eighty per cent of the energy that a building will use over its lifetime has already been spent in its construction. Therefore architects and green-minded planners are now looking at refurbishing old urban buildings rather than demolishing them. City centres, it turns out, can be a better shade of green than the new so-called ‘green towns’. Moreover, in a city, the energy expended on lighting and infrastructure reaches a higher density of people. If you righteously inhabit a ‘green town’, you still have to get in your car and drive into a real dirty old town to work, shop or be entertained. (Even your cardboard coffin will have to be carried in a large petrol-guzzling vehicle to your green burial site.) If you live in a city centre, you can walk everywhere or use greenish public transport.

So how does this relate to books and publishing? And ghosts, for that matter? Well, in the rush for absolute novelty, I worry about the way many publishers forget their existing buried treasure. Why are so many fantastic books out of print? Why are so few relaunched? Or reprinted? How many authors are dropped at the first sign of sales becalming, with no questions asked about an ill-advised cover or a marketing non-event? Instead, some publishers are addicted to the Next Big Thing. Books are being put in their graves prematurely, in my opinion, and coffin lids are being nailed down on characters who are still breathing. The squirrel who forgets where his nuts are buried is likely to go hungry – some publishers could perhaps nourish their bottom lines if they remembered and dug up some of the valuable material they have ‘laid down’. I hasten to add that many publishers do keep their backlists alive, and all power to their elbows in this.

As an anthologist, I was always dismayed when publishers still claimed permission fees for extracts from books that had been out of print for more than fifty years. I could never be sure if these fees were precisely legal, or if the authors/estates would ever get a taste of them. But I did know that I’d be in time-wasting trouble if I didn’t pay them, so I did. And every time a publisher took my money for one of these forgotten books, I had a faint hope that some fresh, young, bibliocurious editor might descend to the cobwebbed vaults and view the mildewed file copy that (I hoped) they’d kept down there.

But what I really hoped was that the cub editor would think, ‘This is damned fine stuff. And still of interest. We should reprint this little masterpiece! It’s still just as good as it always was. One short life was not enough for it.’

And then we would see a return on a book’s energy – the writing, editing and designing: the eighty per cent of energy required in its original construction. Even if one or all three were tweaked a little to accommodate modern taste, and yes, that pernicious desire for something new, such books would still be greener than anything manufactured from scratch.

I’m not saying that new books should be banned. Quite the opposite. I want all deserving writers to be able to eat and buy a new pencil from time to time. No, what I am proposing is a new kind of ghost-writing: new books could be TWINNED with revivals of old, wonderful books on similar themes. The living authors could talk about the dead ones. The dead ones would talk, subliminally, to readers’ memories. Living and dead authors could go on virtual tours together.

Wouldn’t I love to be lit-twinned with Rhoda Broughton, or Augustus Sala? My latest, Talina in the Tower, is about a Venetian girl who turns into a cat in Victorian times. Therefore I’d love to twin it with the immortal (yet out of print) CATS: Their Points and Classification with Chapters on Feline Ailments and Their Remedies. How to Train for Performing Tricks, etc, by W. Gordon Stables, M.D., C.M., R.N.

The title belies the book’s lovely, arch tone, the irrepressible tendency towards anecdote and editorializing. He bemoans the shameful cat show classification ‘cats of no sex’, who are judged on weight alone. He has ideas for training cats to open and close doors, ring the doorbell and do somersaults on request. He tells horror stories of people who leave cats shut up in houses to starve to death while they go on holiday. Dr Stables has a great cat lexicon too. I have never seen it written before that cats say ‘Wurram’ – but they absolutely do. As for discipline, he admits that ‘there are times when even the most highly-trained cat will deviate from the paths of decency’. In this case, he unfashionably recommends a little bit of whalebone to switch the offender several times across the fore-paws or the tops only of the ears before turning her out of doors. Obviously I vehemently disagree with any corporal punishment for cats. All the better! Dr Stables and I can debate the matter with passion.

Then there’s the genial William Dean Howells, who lived in my own house in Venice at exactly the time that Talina in the Tower is set. His book, Venetian Life, is one of the most charming volumes written by a foreigner about the city. Venetian cats receive some honourable mentions. We’d have plenty to talk about, he and I.

So I’d be happy to go on tour with Dr Stables and Mr Dean Howells, answering questions about all things cat and all things Victorian Venice. I don’t believe the revived sales of their books would damage mine.

Does this sound like ‘Bring out your dead!’?

Is it a crazy idea?

And so was separating rubbish.

And so were energy-saving light bulbs.

And so were hyper-sexed thousand-year-old vampires.

So, no publisher-bashing comments please, as that’s not what this blog is about. Without publishers, there’d be no books at all. Much more interesting is this question: If you’re a writer, who would your writerly ghost-twin be? Who do you imagine opposite you in the Edinburgh yurt, swigging that last medicinal glass before your minder takes you up on stage? Or on that train to the school visit? Or sitting beside you signing at a bookshop?



Michelle Lovric’s website
Talina in the Tower is published by Orion Children’s Books

self-assembly polystyrene coffin prop from Yourspares

Once upon a time in a tower, Part One – Michelle Lovric

Once upon a time, my architect husband wanted to take over a deconsecrated bell tower in Venice and turn the top floor into a studio. Venice’s skyline is punctuated by dozens of empty bell-towers, now slowly crumbling into the lagoon. Inhabiting a building is the best way to keep it alive, and we were prepared to invest in the restoration of a tower even though we knew that we would never actually own one. But Byzantine negotiations with the church finally deprived our idea of the will to live. So Project Venice Bell-Tower was consigned to the imagination. I expiated my frustration in the usual writerly way – I wrote a novel about it. Talina in the Tower is the story of a girl, a cat, three dogs and an elderly writer who inhabit an imaginary bell-tower on the northernmost edge of Venice. I enjoyed myself immensely, fantasizing about the layout of each single room on each successive floor, furnishing it with every comfort and accoutrement I’d once desired for my own tower.

At the end of Talina in the Tower, I wrote an historical note about towers and their uses in Venice, enviously noting that some people had succeeded where we had failed: These days, parts of some bell towers are being used as dwellings. San Marcuola’s tower is partly residential now, as is the tower of Santa Margherita (which lost its spire in 1810) and those of San Boldu and San Stae. San Vidal’s lower floors are used as offices. The top floors of the abandoned towers would, of course, make wonderful studios for architects . . . or writers.

Truth is relentlessly stranger than fiction, of course. Before Talina in the Tower is even published, I’ve discovered that another mind at work on the same idea of making a creative studio in at the top of a disused bell-tower. But Alex Scott-Whitby had done more than imagine it. He is actually doing it.

I first met Alex Scott-Whitby in Venice eighteen months ago, when he was part of a team of young architects invigilating at the British Pavilion at the architecture Biennale. (Rather flatteringly, it happened that Alex and his colleagues whiled away some of their long hours at the reception desk reading my novel The Book of Human Skin.)

Over a dinner on the Zattere, we talked about Alex’s project called (IN)Spires – an idea to create a series of creative studios for a new generation of St Jeromes nesting within the belfries of the City of London's churches. By that time, Alex had already taken possession of a tower himself – that of St Mary Woolnoth in Lombard St – and was using it as a studio, from which he was already dreaming of even greater things.

To demonstrate the spirituality as well as the materiality of his aspiration, Alex recreated Dürer’s depiction of Saint Jerome in his study. (I am not sure how he persuaded the lion to walk up the hundred steps to the tower. Perhaps there was a steak at the top, or a gazelle.)


Alex’s plan is facilitate a layer of creativity floating like cream above London’s economic engine room – a new intellectual community in these airy eyries with their strange and wonderful perspective on the city. The 51 churches in the City of London serve just 11,000 residents. Alex believes that 38 of them have St Jerome potential. There is an urgent need, too, to protect the towers from globalization and commercialization: Alex explains that ‘mobile phone company circle like vultures around a carcass,’ waiting to fill them with broadcasting antennae.


Over the next 30 years, Alex envisages, suitable applicants will be appointed both curates and curators of these towers. His own experiment has shown the worth of this human investment: ‘By acting as a curator of this place and becoming a keyholder to the church, I am also protecting it through occupation and as a tenant I provide a small income and so help to preserve and enliven this historic monument.’

And Alex looks beyond London too – foreseeing a global network of artists, designers and writers nesting in abandoned monuments.

In late October, I was delighted (though not surprised) to see that Alex’s (IN)Spires had won first prize in the RIBA Forgotten Spaces competition, which asked architects, artists, local groups and designers to nominate an abandoned place in Greater London and conceive an imaginative and inspiring proposal for its regeneration.

You can now see Alex’s and other architects’ ideas in an exhibition staged in some of Somerset House's own forgotten spaces – the lightwells and coalholes that lurk beneath the Edmond J Safra Fountain Court and in the evocative space known as the Deadhouse. The visitor makes his way in and out of these dim, mysterious niches and passageways, finding installations, images and multimedia that illustrate proposals for, amongst many other things, an urban climbing tunnel under Clapham High Street, a physic garden in Nag’s Head Yard, a Fish Ladder and salmon hatchery in the River Wandle, a Bee Farm and agro-forest in Neasden and a project to re-invent Crystal Palace as a Northern version of the scintillating market square of Djema el Fna in Marrakesh.

The Forgotten Spaces exhibition is open daily January 29th, 2012, 10am – 6pm. Admission is free. I suggest it would be an excellent place for novelists to go to refresh their sense of place, and for fantasy novelists to refresh their sense of the imaginable.

Part two of this blog is to follow – because I am lucky enough to have received an invitation to dinner in Alex’s bell-tower and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to tell you about that.


You can see more images of Alex’s airy desk here
Alex’s website
RIBA website
Somerset House website
Michelle Lovric’s website

Talina in the Tower is published February 2nd, 2012, by Orion Children’s Books

In which I commit identity theft, throw a child from a bell-tower and acquire a patina – Michelle Lovric

I’ve just had a classic History Girls weekend.

It was a rare time alone in Venice. With no shopping, cooking or explaining to do (see Louise Berridge’s post on the bewilderments of those who live with writers), I confess that I went a little feral. The dishes piled up in the sink while I destroyed my wrists at the computer. I drank toxic levels of Illy coffee. I ate leftover pasta for breakfast. I rode outside in the vaporetto, in spite of the intense cold. I overdosed on architecture, art and historic crime, some committed by me.

It started at 8.15 on Saturday when I went knowingly and deliberately to the Lorenzo Lotto exhibition at the Accademia to steal some faces for my WIP, The Fate-in-the-Box. I had the gallery to myself at that hour and I was able to commit multiple acts of identity theft: I found the perfect sneering nose for an aristocratic boy; a mismatched couple whose marriage was going to founder dramatically, and even a rather sweet baby. No, I did not scruple even there. I had a vacancy for an infant’s face, so I took the infant Jesus too, dammit.

Thence to a photographic odyssey down the Grand Canal as I’m arranging for an urgent message to be transmitted from San Samuele to San Marcuola via Chinese whispers between the statues that adorn the facades of the palazzi in between. Mission accomplished, I looked for a relief of a bird at the end of that line who might break free of his stucco and fly to my protagonist’s humble dwelling to warn her of the danger. A shaggy-legged eagle on the side of Ca’ Gatti Casazza served nicely.

Off to photograph the building that belonged to The Company of Christ and the Good Death for the forthcoming website pages for my new children’s book Talina in the Tower. Then to the Rialto market to photograph some gut-wrenched displays of meat for another blog, and a trudge up through San Polo to try to find a garden wall with an apple tree than overhangs the street for the first encounter between my two child protagonists. The cold was intensifying and the shop windows were looking more and more luminous. Perhaps I tried on a nice woollen hat. Perhaps I didn’t. If it did, it was the kind that you would instantly recognize from a Carpaccio painting. (Possibly the massacre scene in the Saint Ursula cycle).


My to-do list was melting like fat on a barbecue – filling the air with rich scintillation. Home for translating some Venetian proverbs and an evening in the elegant and deliciously chilling company of fellow History Girl Imogen Robertson, whose Instruments of Darkness I recommend with all my heart. Then a little Berlusconi-vision to see what kind of fantasy-projected lingerie Italian women will be receiving in their Christmas stockings this year. (And I’m talking about the news channels here). I also learned that you say ‘Attila L’Unno’ in Italian.

Sunday it was a thousand words before breakfast and then up the bell-tower of the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari accompanied by the most sophisticated and urbane priest I’ve ever met and two lovely Italian architects. At seventy metres, the Frari’s is the second highest bell-tower in Venice. Ingress is forbidden to the public, and I’d had to negotiate this visit. The tower hides behind a goblin’s door in the left of the nave. Once it was unlocked, we found a huge surprise inside. I’m not going to tell you what it was, because the extraordinary construction of this tower is crucial to the plot I’m hatching. Suffice it to say some reference books have relied on flawed guesswork to describe it, and that the inside of the Great Pyramid of Cheops lacks lustre in comparison. Amneris d’Ago, my young Venetian seamstress, is going to have to make the same journey up the Frari campanile that I undertook in breathless wonder, but she’s coming down somewhat faster than I did.

Yet even we were too fast: after my architect friends and I came down, we still had to come down. We were high on bell-tower and we needed to sit in an historical café (I know it is, because there’s a plaque that says so on the stairwell at Toppo) and calm ourselves by talking about what we’d seen while nibbling the ring-shaped biscuits known as bussolai.

Then it was a slow, beautiful walk with my friends past San Rocco and Campo Santa Margherita, through San Barnaba and over the Academia Bridge as the dusk set in and the mist swallowed the horizon in soft white mouthfuls. It was the kind of evening when you think, ‘If I can grow old in a place like this, with friends like these two, then bring it on.’

Because of the campanile and because of these thoughts, it was a day in which my personal history acquired a new patina. Why do we call it ‘distressed’ when we refer to the appearance of something that has become more complicated and layered through age and use? The word for that effect should be far more positive. (See my blog in praise of dirty books.)

Of course, I was happy to return to London, to my lovely husband and my clever students at the Courtauld. But I’ve been changed over this intense weekend, living by the book, in the book and for the book.

I’m sure others of you have had that experience too?

Michelle Lovric’s website
Talina in the Tower is published by Orion Children’s Books on February 2nd 2012 – new Talina web pages coming in January