Jane Austen and Venice

"The sense of an Italian love song must not be talked of"

Italy has had its own Jane Austen Society since 2013, and though Her Janeness never visited the country, Italy peeks into her novels both as an indication of cosmopolitan taste and as part of the penumbra of conflict which hovers behind the novels’ “light, bright and sparkling” surfaces. Jane was in her early twenties when the Republic of Venice fell to…