It will be a few years before I make it to Italy, particularly Venice. Which is actually a mercy, as I neither read nor speak Italian, and that will take some time to pick up. Additionally, for all I've studied the history of the city--I come back to Norwich's classic ever several years for a refresher--my sense of what's where is muddled at best.
To correct the latter problem, I picked up James McGregor's Venice from the Ground Up plus a city map, preparing to stick the push-pins of History onto the canvas of the modern city. What a disappointment! I would have done better to reach for a Rick Steve's guidebook and work from there. McGregor positively obsesses over the minutiae of architecture. And--far worse--he uses that as the thread that binds the locales he describes jumping from palazzo to palazzo with no more pretext than their facades. The result is an absolute mess for anyone who needs to figure out the major landmarks, and who would--with a few glaring exceptions--rather prefer to dodge the dumbed-down touristy parts without the risk taking a wrong turn and stepping into a canal by mistake.
I finished that yesterday, which was a quiet Fourth due to my husband feeling under the weather for most of the day. Last night I started on the presentation I'm giving Thursday on Mantis (an open-source bug-tracking web application.) When I picked up the presentation today, I was quite chagrined to realize how bogged down in minutiae I had already become, and how far I'd strayed from the basic question(s) of what problem was being solved, what were the constraints, and why was this an optimal solution.
Sigh.
