Italian scholarship has long benefited from the country's large number of often well-resourced and well-connected learned societies, and the readiness of public bodies to invest in academic publications, especially in areas connected to the fine and applied arts, history, architecture and archaeology, and often requiring a large number of good-quality illustrations. Venice is no exception to this, and one of the city's oldest and most distinguished learned societies is the interdisciplinary Istituto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti. Among that institute's initiatives has been the publication of a collana – a series – dedicated to the monuments and buildings of the Veneto, the Monumenta Veneta. The work under review also benefited from the patronage of the Regione Veneta, and this has resulted in the publication of a two-volume study, elegantly printed on high-quality paper and generously illustrated with photographs and plans – and accompanied by a supplementary appendix. Many publications of this kind can be hard to track down, or even hear about in the first place; often privately produced, they may not even reach the most obvious distributors and libraries. However, by sending this work out for review, the Regione and the Istituto are signalling their intention that their publications should be widely known, and rightly so.

Wladimiro Dorigo is an expert on the urban evolution of Venice, and the focus of this work is the development of his native city before the impact of the Gothic in the later fourteenth century; his concern is with ‘Romanesque’ Venice and his work's main concentration – in part determined by the surviving documentary and architectural evidence – lies between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. However, Dorigo seems to be aiming for more than an architectural or urban history. In his first volume, chapters deal with the early history of the ‘Civitas Rivoalti’ – the city of the ‘high bank’ – as early Venice was known, the higher ground in the area now known as the Rialto being where one of the early settlements in the lagoons was established. Dorigo discusses the expansion of the city in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the nature of its society and the building techniques employed. Given the fact that all building materials had to be imported, the attention Dorigo pays throughout to the fabric of the city is clearly relevant. The fourth chapter deals with a major shift in the city's centre, from the Rialto to what later became known as the Piazza San Marco. Its focus is the city's principal church, not its cathedral, but the Basilica of San Marco where the relics of the city's patron saint and the treasury collected in his interest and honour were preserved, under the protection of the doge. Some of the issues raised here are further developed in chapter 5, and later in chapter 8, where Dorigo discusses cultural influences on Venice and stylistic developments in architecture, as revealed, for example, in the design of capitals and arches. Chapter 6 considers how Venice's role as an imperial power was expressed in architectural terms, in particular following the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Considerable attention is paid here to the palaces, the ‘domus magnae’, of the city, many of which are now hard to locate and identify, but where Dorigo's use of excellent general and detailed photography proves particularly effective. Table (prospetto) 22 lists the families concerned, and the parishes, dates and contemporary descriptions where these can be documented. This chapter closes with what are called ‘exercises in reconstruction’, esercizi restitutivi, where Dorigo draws on photographic evidence, older plans, views and modern plans to recreate the appearance of, for example, the Ca’ Businello (pp. 384–5) as it is thought to have existed in the thirteenth century.

The focus of the volume then shifts from the city's religious and administrative centre, and its grander residences, to areas closely associated with trade and industry: the Rialto, the Arsenal, the warehouses built to store grain and salt, centres of artisan activity. Here tables give some indication of where the various trades and professions and various kinds of furnace for metals and glass were located, though one might have expected a fuller discussion of the glass industry. Chapter 8 deals with the cultural and artistic influences that impacted on Venice from the Byzantine east to the Italian mainland, as revealed in surviving sculpture, architectural decoration and painting – the climate of the city not being kind to the artistic legacy of its painters from this earlier period. The last chapter in the first volume relates to the further expansion of the city into the fourteenth century, its standing as an international power, and the arrival of the Gothic in its secular and religious architecture.

The second volume is more focused on the urban history of the city and discusses the growth of Venice by way of detailed maps, showing it as it is thought to have existed before and after 1300. These are preceded by modern maps indicating the area under discussion, as well as the significant buildings, ‘spaces’, quays, bridges and waterways for which some documentary evidence exists. A summary history is presented for each parish and the documentary evidence is given in abbreviated form. There then follows a very full historical and technical glossary (pp. 1005–10); for example, the etymology of ‘arsenal’ is discussed, and although the problem of its origin is not resolved, its earliest recorded use in Venice is dated to 1223, and the point is made that it was used to describe private boat yards as well as what became the principal naval base of the Venetian Republic.

Then the archival sources consulted, most, but not exclusively Venetian, are listed. An extensive bibliography is followed by specialized indices of names, places, subject matter (cose notevoli), illustrations – as well as by acknowledgments and a general index. A supplementary appendix contains plans of the extent of Venice as Dorigo thinks it may have existed in the late twelfth century and in 1360, and a chart, a Tavola sinottica, indicating the properties associated with the principal families of the city, mostly from the nobility, where ownership or use can be documented in the period from 1000 to 1360.

There is a reluctance to criticize a publication that comes with such support, and which includes within it so much conscientious research. However, whether as a work of wider reference or as a study in its own right, Venezia Romanica is hard to use. Its two volumes are of considerable weight and folio in size; taken together with its supplementary material, it would be virtually impossible to ‘read’ this work anywhere other than in a dedicated venue. Also the would-be reader will find it hard to navigate his/herself round the work's structural complexities, though a life-line of sorts is provided under the headings of Avvertenze tecniche and Legenda in the second volume (pp. 650–2), the second providing a key to the colours, lettering and symbols used in the following plans. However, this reviewer remains in need of a code-breaker to reveal the full point of the two Indici dei nomi – indices of names. In some respects the bibliography is inflated, and the message of some of the works cited is ignored or under-explored. Thus while Dorigo is similar to Ruskin in his combination of the sweeping and the particular – and his informed enthusiasm for Venice – more could have been made of The Stones of Venice and its legacy, though among the tables compiled to illustrate ecclesiastical buildings of the city, Dorigo does draw on Ruskin's definitive studies of types of arch and Gothic capitals. Similarly, the recent studies of Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan on the ‘other’ Venice – that of the smaller communities in the area of the lagoons – are noted, but their relevance for the history of the ‘Civitas Rivoalti’, the city of the Rialto, is not explored here. Indeed, relatively little is said about such settlements as Torcello beyond some attention being paid to their principal churches; such communities were of importance to the earlier history of the lagoons, even if they were ultimately eclipsed by Venice itself. Other problems presented are of a more analytical nature. The use of statistical information, from whatever source, is difficult for such an early period, but if the material is there why not use it? Thus in plotting the property interests of Venetian families in the period from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, why ignore their potentially significant holdings in peripheral areas? The fifteenth-century map of Venice used on the cover of the second volume and the famous De Barbari view of 1500, drawn upon throughout, show a much more extensive and built-up Venice than is suggested by the 1360 plan included among the Supplementi. The fact that the period following on from the Black Death saw only a very gradual recovery of the city's population levels suggests that Dorigo's reading for 1360 overestimates the city's extent and density. More generally, one would have thought more attention could have been given to the impact that the repeated and often debilitating wars with Genoa, and the Black Death, with its repeated visitations, had on the city.

However, criticisms of such a presentational and interpretative kind should not distract attention from the sheer amount of genuine research and planning that has gone into the preparation and publication of the well-produced volumes under review. If unlikely to be accessible to the more general reader, and lacking angles of approach for an urban historian in search of comparative material, these volumes are likely to remain as a useful work of reference for the more specialized Venetian historian. Given the pace of urban history, and the discovery of new evidence in Venice itself – from the archives to the archaeological site – it is to be hoped that Dorigo's substantial work will contribute greatly to a data base able to accumulate and disseminate future research on the history of the city, in terms of extent, fabric and activity.