Venetian find
Hugo Vickers
Love from Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal
By Gill Johnson
Hodder & Stoughton, £25
Every now and again, a dream-like book slips on to the shelves, having battled its way past a politburo of marketing executives with their spreadsheets. Such a book is Love from Venice. I loved it. It concerns a young woman, in love with her fiancé, with a city and with a family. To say that it is in the genre of Bonjour Tristesse is not quite fair, but just as Françoise Sagan evoked a French summer, so too Gill Johnson has recreated the world of Venice in the summer of 1957. The author, then 25, left her staid job at the National Gallery. Her husband-to-be was working in Paris, and, on a tenuous recommendation from the stage-designer Oliver Messel, who vetted her, she was sent to the Brandolini family in Venice to speak English to their two young boys. The story is crafted from the letters she wrote to her...
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