VENICE

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She is further, and above all, a wonderful writer. A pre-eminent and inimitable prose stylist, unforgettable in her evocations of nostalgia, sadness, and wasted glory. She has written more than 40 books, taking in fiction, autobiography history, and travel. Many of them are masterpieces, like her Pax Britannica trilogy, and her accounts of the cities of Oxford, Trieste, Hong Kong, New York City – and, of course, Venice. One of the book’s more moving moments takes place at the Accademia bridge, along the Grand Canal, when Morris is still living as James. Passing by one day, Morris puts some money in the hands of an old blind woman who sits there. Instead of continuing on, however, as she usually does, Morris squeezes the woman’s hand. “A miracle then happened. She squeezed mine in return, and in the pressure of her old fingers I knew for certain that she understood me in her blindness and was responding woman to woman.” You first travelled with the British army in the second world war. Did that change the way you see the world? I was embedded (as the Americans would say) in the 1953 Everest Expedition as correspondent of the Times, because that newspaper had traditionally supported attempts upon the mountain, and because I was young and fit. My task was to get news from the expedition exclusively home to London despite worldwide and sometimes dirty competition. It was nearly 200 miles from the mountain to the nearest cable station in Kathmandu, and we weren’t allowed long-distance radios, so I sent most of my dispatches by Nepali runners, whom I paid on a sliding scale according to the time they took to get there. However, I discovered that the Indian Army maintained a small radio unit some 40 miles from the mountain, keeping an eye on the nearby Tibetan frontier, and when the expedition succeeded they agreed to send a single message to Kathmandu for me. I could not tell them what it said, because, helpful though they were, it would in no time reach every newsroom in the world, so I devised a message which would seem to be clear but was really in code – to wit: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD ADVANCED BASE ABANDONED YESTERDAY AWAITING IMPROVEMENT – which in fact told the Times, and none of our competitors, that the summit of Everest had been reached on 29 May by the New Zealander Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing. It was published in London on the very morning of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – to my mind a last hurrah of the British empire. The best meals I’ve enjoyed in Venice have almost always been at Harry’s Bar, which some people suppose nowadays to have become a mere tourists’ joint, but which is still a chosen haunt of urbane Venetians (I dedicated my last book to it!). My favourite meal there, which I enjoyed with my son only the other day, has always been Scampi Thermidor alla Cipriani, followed by warm zabaglione and washed down with a flask of the house white.

Obituary: Jan Morris, a poet of time, place and self". BBC News. 20 November 2020. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020.

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Morris's 1974 best-selling memoir Conundrum documented her transition and was compared to that of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen ( A Personal Autobiography). Later memoirs included Herstory and Pleasures of a Tangled Life. She also wrote many essays on travel and her life, and published a collection of her diary entries as In My Mind's Eye in 2019. [36] The earliest of all state banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century." (The City: 19)

NatGeoUK (19 July 2021). " 'Women felt at ease to write about the experience of being outside.' ". National Geographic . Retrieved 27 March 2023. I worked for the Manchester Guardian then, and its editor generously allowed me to divide my time between working as a roving correspondent for them, and writing books for myself. Some of Venice I wrote at the village of Samoëns in Haute-Savoie, until summoned by the paper to go and cover the miserable Suez intervention of 1956. Thereafter, as I remember, I just wrote it wherever I could until I had finished it. The fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby." (The Lagoon: 26) I am in Venice, in search of Jan Morris, the great British travel writer and historian who died last November at the age of 94. I am here with my younger sister, Virginia, who has gamely agreed to a Morris-inspired itinerary. Our guidebook is not Fodor’s or Lonely Planet but Morris’s own The World of Venice, published in 1960 and still in print today. It is a rhapsodic book, zesty and beguiling, about this “lonely hauteur,” this “jumbled, higgledy-piggledy mass,” this “God-built city”: Venezia. Here, “all feels light, spacious, carefree, crystalline,” Morris writes with characteristic aplomb, “as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender.”Jan and Elizabeth reaffirmed that love in a civil union ceremony in Pwllheli in 2008, witnessed by a local couple who invited them to tea at their house afterwards. “I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth said at the time. “After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.” A historian, a biographer and an author of fiction, ultimately Morris was a writer of great enthusiasm for whatever she focused on. Drawn by a deep curiosity for the world, she was a writer who happened to fall into travelling — by her own definition she was not a travel writer but someone who ‘wrote many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement’.