An anthology mines Venice's ghosts to escape its tourist crowds

Venice today is inseparable from the image of its own excess: cruise ships towering over fragile pontoons, crowds pressing through the calli. Even attempts to conjure a more mysterious, vaporous Venice, Le Temps notes, tend to circle back to the tourist as a figure. Jacques Finné, described by the paper as a longtime guide to literary darkness, has assembled an anthology of short stories devoted to a fantastical version of the Serenissima, one built from bizarreries, orgies and psychological thrillers rather than gondola postcards.

Among the texts cited is Dino Buzzati's brief 1958 story L'autre Venise, which opens with an instruction to the reader: to observe the behavior of the tourist. Buzzati follows a visitor wandering through the calli, the rii terra (filled-in canals) and the campi, growing dizzy and lost, met with what the narrator calls compassion and perhaps a touch of irony when he asks for directions. Beyond this official Venice, Buzzati suggests, lies another city, secret and probably forbidden, folded into the first.

Le Temps frames Finné's anthology as a way of reading Venice through the fantastic genre precisely because the city's real-world image has become so saturated with overtourism that stranger, older layers of the place are harder to see. The piece does not detail the anthology's publisher, full contents or other authors included beyond Buzzati.