VENICE-O-METER 8
Psychological novella set in Venice
Henry James is an author I always wanted to love but really struggled with — until I read The Aspern Papers. It opened up James to me. It’s also one of those books that haunts you forever. Years after I read it I still find myself musing over the characters’ behavior, motivations and decisions.
According to various online sources, the place where Juliana Bordereau and her niece live was inspired by the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello. This residence features a garden — a oddity in Venice — which makes it consistent with the novella’s setting. Indeed, some of The Aspern Papers’s key scenes take place in the garden.
But you can’t just step into the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello, book in hand, and assess the similarities between the descriptions in the novella and the real-life locale, because the property now houses the offices of the Soprintendenza per i beni architettonici e per il paesaggio per le province di Venezia, Belluno, Padova e Treviso — an intricate, winding, almost opaque name that’s worthy of a sentence by Henry James.
Reading Venice 