18 eric r. dursteler
to the post-World War II decades, while the remainder provide a thematic
treatment of venetian art in two volumes and a rather unusual, though
fascinating, volume dedicated to the relationship of venice to the sea.49
Modeled on Treccani’s Storia di Milano (1953–62), the project had its
genesis in a series of conversations involving the most influential Italian
scholars of venice of the day. While acknowledging the long chain of his-
tories of venice that preceded it, the organizers of the massive under-
taking acknowledged that no definitive history of venice could exist and
that “every age and cultural climate feels the need to grapple with the
lagoon’s history, to write, and rewrite it again.” Their objective, then, was
to “surpass” all previous histories of venice in scale and historiographical
currency and produce the definitive history of venice for this generation.
This was to be accomplished by an in-depth tracing of the trajectory of
venetian history, from its origins to the present day, focusing not just on
the city itself, but placed within the broader context of its relationship to
the landed and maritime components of its state. More than just a politi-
cal narrative, the Treccani series also provides up-to-date treatments of
society, gender, religion, economy, institutional history, law, trade, envi-
ronment, industry, popular culture, and demography. One of the series’
real strengths is its treatment of venice’s maritime empire within its Med-
iterranean context. While certainly not as rich in its treatment of culture
as the Storia della cultura veneta, the Storia di Venezia does devote two
full volumes to art.50
Parallel to these post-war developments in Italian historiography, begin-
ning in the 1960s venice was, in a sense, rediscovered by a new wave of
non-Italian scholars. This discovery was accompanied by “an astonishing
expansion” in studies of the city and its state, particularly during the early
modern period, and arose in response to both historiographical and insti-
tutional developments that attracted renewed attention to the lagoon.51
In Britain this growing interest saw the publication of several modest but
influential collections of essays, including Brian Pullan’s Crisis and Change
in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in 1968,
and J. R. Hale’s Renaissance Venice in 1973, which remains a standard point
49 On this unusual volume, see Achille Olivieri, “ ‘Il mare,’ primo volume tematico della
‘Storia di venezia’: letture, prospettive,” Studi veneziani 28 (1995), 179–90.
50 vittore Branca, et al., “Prefazione,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 1 (1992): Origini-Età
ducale, ed. Lellia Cracco Ruggini, Massimiliano Pavan, Giorgio Cracco, and Gherardo
Ortalli, pp. xiii–xvii.
51 N. S. Davidson, “ ‘In Dialogue with the Past’: venetian Research from the 1960s to the
1990s,” Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 15 (1997), 13–15.