'An inspiring, life-affirming story' Reader's Digest Philip and Caroline Jones, a middle-aged couple living in Edinburgh, found themselves facing redundancy and an uncertain future. Until they received some advice from a complete stranger in a pub. Their response was to sell everything in order to move to Venice, in search of a better, simpler life. They were wrong about the 'simpler' bit... To Venice with Love recounts how they arrived in Venice with ten pieces of luggage, no job, no friends and no long-term place to stay. From struggling with the language to battling bureaucracy; the terror of teaching English to Italian teenagers, the company of a modestly friendly cat... and finally, from debugging financial systems on an Edinburgh industrial estate, to building an ordinary life in an extraordinary city, To Venice with Love is a love-letter to a city that changed their lives. It's a story told through the history, music, art, architecture (and, of course, the food) of La Serenissima.

In the summer of 1957, rebelling against her family and anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, Gill Johnson, aged twenty-five, gave up her comfortable job at the National Gallery in London and travelled to Venice to take up a job teaching English to an aristocratic Italian family. Love from Venice is her vivid evocation of that summer, the last hurrah of the European Grand Tour, when the international jet set lit upon the city for their fun. Drawing on letters that she wrote to David Ross, her admirer and correspondent, and to her parents in London, Johnson describes her life as she flits from palazzo to Lido to palazzo. Absorbed into the social whirl of the super-rich, how do her feelings for her love begin to change? This is a moving and witty memoir of a young woman coming to terms with her own feelings and destiny, and learning about different aspects of love from the people she meets, all set in high-season Venice in a halcyon age.

Venice, Anna Castelli receives a small package of letters consumed from the hands of two mysterious characters who entrust her story .. After a long working day, Jérôme de Seingalt smokes his last cigarette on his "altana" (Venetian terrace), enjoying the moonlight and the silence of the Lagoon Suddenly inside the mirror of his room, a funny woman appears, Lavinia de Merteuil. After fighting extremely hard to get her out of there, Jérôme listens in surprise to her story: Lavinia tells her that they already knew each other and that they loved each other three hundred years ago and asks for her help to break the enchantment that took her away from him, forcing her to travel as a mirror in mirror for centuries until the curse is broken. The only way to achieve this is to tell fables. Thus begins an exchange of letters with which the two will discover again in our days their former passion, between walks and appointments in the most beautiful places of Venice, which the reader can admire with them. Between one letter and the other they contrast the curse with their fables; love stories set around the world and in every age, that pursue with their walk the passion that Lavinia and Jérôme possess, until the incredible epilogue with which the reader will discover if the power of love is stronger than the witchcraft that falls upon they.

Originally published in 1991. Essays here are arranged chronologically within sections: ‘The Play as Text’, ‘Shylock’ and ‘The Play in the Theatre.’ Collecting previously published important commentaries and scholarly articles, this volume in the Shakespearean Criticism set looks at one of the Bard’s most disturbing plays. These historical critical pieces give witness to the changing attitudes to the play and the characters and provide readers with a wide range of material relating both to performances and to textual readings.