Cities and Melancholy

Stone Angel, Venice, October 2003

I have been thinking for some time of collecting my thoughts on cities, especially in contrast to the rural environment we now live in.  I have been thinking especially of Venice, a city I have visited only once, in the October of 2003 to celebrate my 40th birthday.  City-visiting to mark milestone birthdays is a good tradition; I was in Vancouver to celebrate my 30th and we were in Prague for my partner's 30th in 2001.  

Some cities have a greater pull on the soul than others; writing recently about sea-cities I wondered if this was due to an air of melancholy and lost greatness, what Orhan Pamuk calls 'a palpable air of ancient purpose'. His book on Istanbul has an undercurrent of melancholy and seems to suggest that gloom seeps through all aspects of the city, from architecture to the character of the inhabitants.  Istanbul, Venice, are they melancholy cities?  Can a place have an innate mood?  Is it about decay or dereliction, so are ruins innately melancholy?

What gives a city its mood?  Most modern cities are lively and bustling, most British cities certainly are either busy or hoping to be regenerated, even under the present economic downturn; there is a fashionability about urban life that transcends economics.   I suppose places are haunted by our knowledge; we bring our ghosts, born of our awareness of history, to a landscape.  Does Prague's Ghetto feel any different from any other group of narrow, just-off-the-city-centre streets?  No, not unless we bring to it a knowledge of history, an awareness that this was to be Hitler's dark memorial to European Jewry, the only place they were to be remembered.