ancient cities

legality), throng many main thoroughfares adding
to the congestion. The imbalances mean there are
questions as to whether the city is now more of a
theme park than a living entity, where locals perform
the role of Venetians. The replacement of services
catering to locals with those targeted at tourists
has been driven by an inexorable financial logic and
connects with the decline of the resident population.
The campi are now often devoted to open-air cafés
and tourist establishments rather than being the
focus of community life.
Mike A. Crang
See also Ghetto; Heritage City; Historic Cities; Medieval
Town Design; Mediterranean Cities; Racialization;
Renaissance City; Tourism
Further Readings
Braudel, F. 1992. Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th
Century. Vol. 3, The Perspective of the World.
Berkeley: University of California Press (especially
Chapter 2 The Belated Rise of Venice, pp. 116–35).
Burke, P. 2000. “Early Modern Venice as a Center of
Information and Communication.” In Venice
Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian
City-State, 1297–1797, edited by J. Martin and D.
Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cosgrove, D. 1982. “The Myth and the Stones of Venice:
An Historical Geography of a Symbolic Landscape.”
Journal of Historical Geography 8(2):145–69.
Davis, R. C. and G. Marvin. 2004. Venice, the Tourist
Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most
Touristed City. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davis, Robert C. and Benjamin Ravid, eds. 2001. The
Jews of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Horodowich, E. 2005. “The Gossiping Tongue: Oral
Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early
Modern Venice.” Renaissance Studies 19(1):22–45.
Laven, M. 2004. Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and
Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent. London:
Penguin.
Quinn, B. 2007. “Performing Tourism: Venetian
Residents in Focus.” Annals of Tourism Research
34(2):458–76.
Redford, Bruce. 1996. Venice and the Grand Tour. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Romano, D. 1989. “Gender and the Urban Geography of
Renaissance Venice.” Journal of Social History
23(2):339–53.
Ve r a n d a
Veranda
955
The veranda can be found across a range of geographies
and time periods. It is an exterior, semiopen
building element constructed as an extension
to or as a separate object attached to a more substantial
structure. Found in domestic and public
buildings, it can encircle a building or occupy part
of its facade. Several other terms have been used
to describe the same or similar building elements,
including porch, portico, piazza, and gallery. This
range of terminology corresponds to a range of
hypotheses about the origins of the veranda.
Veranda first occurs in a record of Vasco da
Gama’s 1498 trip to India. From this and other
sources, it is clear that the word was used in fifteenth-century
architecture in Portugal. Portuguese
speakers in India may have applied veranda to an
Indian building element that seemed familiar.
Indians used similar words that originated in
Sanskrit and Persian. British administrators appropriated
the form as they developed the bungalow
into a specialized residence for Europeans in the
tropics. Verandas offered an ideal site for the
enactment of power and for activities that enabled
social exclusion on racial and cultural grounds.
The term, first documented in England in 1800
and Australia in 1805, was diffused as Europeans
moved around the world to further their interests.
Drawing on histories of migration, Jay Edwards
has summarized the main theories of origin for the
veranda. Before the fifteenth century, buildings
raised on plinths, with open sides supported on
posts, were common in West Africa. Similar forms
were found in areas of central and southern
Africa. In eastern Africa, the Swahili baraza served
comparable functions.
Locals used these veranda-like spaces for socializing,
sleeping, and working. Slaves took this form
to the New World, where it was firmly established
by the seventeenth century.
Sixteenth-century Italian villas included open
loggias and pedimented porticos, borrowed from
classical antiquity. In contrast to West African
verandas, loggias and porticos served primarily representational
purposes. They became popular
throughout Europe and may have influenced the
emergence of verandas in the colonies. Similarly,
projecting roofs and galleries occurred in Portugal