Paul Kaplan
Shaul Bassi
Igiaba Scego
Maaza Mengiste
African Venice is the first guidebook to the extensive historical and contemporary African presence in the City of the Lagoons. A set of ten walking tours highlight images of Black people in Venetian art from the Middle Ages to the present, the afterlife of Shakespeare’s Othello, the painful local legacies of slavery and Italian colonialism, as well as the remarkable visibility of African and Afro-descendant artists artists at the Venice Biennale. These tours are enriched by more than twenty essays, poems and reflections, which celebrate, question and reimagine Venice’s Black past and present. From medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture to contemporary artworks, from early modern documents to postcolonial voices, African Venice will show you the city as you have never seen it.
