VENICE

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She adopted Wales — her father’s native country — as her beloved home, living on the Llŷn Peninsula. But, really, Morris belonged to nowhere in particular. She tendedto travel somewhere — Oxford, Venice or Trieste, for example — and stay put for a while, allowing her to develop a deeperunderstanding of a place, rather than bounce from one destination to another. Trefan Morys is a low, 18th-century barn – stone-built, slate-roofed, topped with a weather vane and surrounded by a dense tangle of garden beneath a towering elm tree. Jan Morris has lived here, halfway up a hill in the top-left corner of Wales, with Elizabeth, once her wife, now her civil partner, for the past 30 years. Before that, they had raised their four children in the big manor house a little further down the lane toward Criccieth and the coast. Like everything about Jan Morris’s long and unique life, there is a kind of storytellers’ magic to Trefan Morys. Last week, I drove up through Snowdonia and down toward the Irish Sea, to listen to some of Morris’s myths and legends, while the last of storm Dennis rattled outside. Jan Morris first arrived here in 1945, as an 18-year-old intelligence officer with the British Army. Then she was James Morris: a man to the world, a woman to herself. ( Editor’s note: Morris wouldn’t transition for another three decades, but we are using her preferred pronouns throughout.) Venice was in those days like “a surrendered knight at arms”—a wistful, melancholic place where the glories of the old republic, the so-called Serenissima, had been ceded to a decidedly humbler present. Never, no. The sea is just over there. I wouldn’t want to be entirely in the mountains. I go down to the sea most days. I suppose the day will come when I cannot drive the Honda. Then I suppose I will have to walk it.” Yes, I would like to have been asked if there was any moral purpose emerging from my 40-odd books, and I would answer yes, my gradually growing conviction that simple kindness should be the governing factor of human conduct.

Derek Johns: Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, London: Faber & Faber, 2016, ISBN 978-0-571-33163-5 I can only speak from my own experience. I believe in serendipity, and sure enough, my subjects have always found me.the Renaissance church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, hidden away behind the Rialto like a precious stone in ruffled satin… No – see above! I was enthralled in the first place by its sense of timeless melancholy – just my style, but no longer available.

Catharine) Jan Morris [3] [4] CBE FRSL (born James Humphry Morris; 2 October 1926–20 November 2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.Even the kindest public response at the time was bafflement. Germaine Greer was not alone in denying the validity of Morris’s female persona. Interviewers were prurient or bemused, or both; literati were spiteful –“He was a better writer than she”, spat the novelist Rebecca West, although in perspective any softening in Morris’s prose is more attributable to the era’s change of tone from public assertion to private confession, from reportage to memoir. And on the subject of Venetian food and drink, do you have any theories about why so much of it is so bad? The earliest of all state banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century." (The City: 19) Last Letters from Hav". The Booker Prizes. The Booker Prize Foundation. January 1985. Archived from the original on 20 October 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. World tourism since the 70s has increased from 200 million people to 1,500 million people and I think cities like Venice or Paris have probably individually seen a similar quantitative increase. Do you think there is a “new” Venice, made up of tourists and tourist services, superimposed on what Venice was, say 50 years ago - that it is a kind of double place where it used to be a single entity? For example I have seen places that double/triple their population due to some event like a festival for a few days, what a change for the town! But in the case of Venice the change might be permanent …