BONUS: IAN FLEMING IN VENICE
“Then came the unfailing shock of the beauty that never betrays,”
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-Ian Fleming
Where does James Bond’s love for Venice come from? Ian Fleming himself, the writer and mastermind behind the 007 saga, was a big fan of the Italian city. By the end of the 1950s, Ian Fleming was a successful writer and an “adventure” reporter for The Sunday Times. In 1958, he went to the Seychelles in the search of 120 million pounds of treasure, supposedly hidden there by the French pirate Levasseur. Instead of riches, Fleming left with coral poisoning and met his wife Anne for a family holiday to Venice. To recover from the injury, Fleming booked their room at the Gritti Palace Hotel, a spot with one of the finest views of the Laguna in all of Venice. There, the couple would spend each morning looking for a church or a museum where Anne could enjoy the art, while Fleming would settle with a newspaper and a coffee in the nearest bar or cafeteria. It was during these mornings that Fleming wrote “Risico”, one of the five short stories Fleming published in the book For Your Eyes Only (1960), in which Bond is asked to investigate a drug-smuggling operation based in London via Venice. Fleming was a great admirer of Thomas Mann’s novel Death In Venice, which was mostly based on the Lido; Fleming and his wife visited the island to study the locations used for “Risico”. Apropos of Mann’s novel, Anne Fleming said, “Once I had read it, I understood for the first time the sad nostalgic beauty of Venice and realised that this was how Ian [Fleming] saw the city and why he loved it.”
Fleming, like Bond does in “Risico”, must have had several tipples at the most prestigious cocktail bars in the city:
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“That evening, scattering thousand-lira notes like leaves in Vallombrosa, James Bond sought, at Harry’s Bar, at Florian’s, and finally upstairs in the admirable Quadri, to establish to anyone who might be interested that he was what he had wished to appear to the girl-a prosperous writer who lived high and well. Then, in the temporary state of euphoria that a first night in Venice engenders, however high and serious the purpose of the visitor, James Bond walked back to the Gritti and had eight hours of dreamless sleep.”
Fleming clearly appreciated the joys of travelling off-season, writing in the short story that “May and October are the best months in Venice” because “the sun is soft and the nights are cool… The glittering scene is kinder to the eyes and there’s a freshness in the air that helps one to hammer out those long milestones and terrazza and marble that are intolerable to the feet in summer.”
Thanks to this trip to Venice (and a second one in 1962), Fleming certainly held onto the floating city, a place where James Bond comes back several times, mostly for love-Venice is, after all, the perfect place for it.
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