Where is this Place?

Italy is a particular target of this ‘legitimation’. German scholars have identified more than a dozen ‘Tuscanies’ in Germany, perhaps the best known being around Freiburg; the division of Germany into autonomous states, and now into Länder, enables them to have one each. Around the coast of England are many Bays of Naples, which was the epitome of excellence of the Mediterranean coast long before the French Riviera (though notice we have a Cornish Riviera as well). Mounts Bay, Torbay (now the English Riviera), Minehead Bay and Filey Bay have all been likened to the Bay of Naples, but an examination of nineteenth-century guidebooks of any coastal area will reveal more. In some cases the Italianate connection also becomes hallowed in stone. John Betjeman, in his poem ‘The Town Clerk’s Views’, referred to Torquay as mid-Victoria’s Italy. Its origins as a town lay in the Napoleonic Wars (a period when problems of travel on the continent led to a great deal of legitimation of British places by continental comparisons). The security of the bay as an anchorage led to its use by British fleets and the officers’ wives were often housed on land. Some of those officers were only too familiar with Mediterranean shores, and the superficial comparison was born. But as the resort expanded later in the century the Italianate style was one of the most obvious of those used in the large villas and hotels. To add to the architectural comparison, the promenade and public gardens were planted with palms, or at least with cordylines – now known as the Torbay palm and accepted as the symbol of the town. The other common Italian legitimation is that of Venice, which for many years from 1860 onwards outstripped any other location in its artistic attraction. So almost anywhere with water that wanted tourists became another Venice. The name Venice of the North appears to have been applied to several cities, including Amsterdam and Stockholm as well as St Petersburg. In north London close to the Regents Canal is Little Venice, which also was the centre of an Italian community, though whether that community was specifically Venetian is not so certain. Stanhope Forbes entitles a very ordinary picture of a yacht in a lock-gate Venice inNewlyn. Even in Hong Kong there is a ‘Venice’ at Tai O, the only place where tiny stilt houses still exist as inhabited homes packed together over the water (Figure 13.2). The Athens of the North however is Edinburgh, a name referring to the Scottish enlightenment of the eighteenth century with Hume and Smith.