The first pages of the book contain a warning: “Nothing in Venice is invisible. Everything exists to be exposed.” From the outset, this maxim sets the tone for Michael H. Miranda’s journey, that of someone who explores ruins and splendors knowing that every sparkle has its own shadow sewn into it. If the city hides nothing here, it is because the light that envelops it is made of centuries and mirages: an oblique clarity that forces us to look and remember, because those who rely on their gaze always lose something.
Michael H. composes Venecia inactual (Casa Vacía, 2022) in the manner of a mosaic: with the patience of a restorer, with the audacity of a traveler who trusts that the tiles will fit together if left to vibrate on the page. “There is only one way to put the mosaic together: by throwing yourself into exploring every corner,” he notes. That dive includes Goethe and Brodsky, Pound and Sartre, the vaporetto and Pink Floyd’s floating concert in 1989. Each name is a fold in time. Just invoking it is enough for La Serenissima to unravel and reveal another layer, like a palimpsest that never stops being rewritten.
This stratified condition places Venice “outside of time,” forced to “deal with the anxiety of others.” Hence the adjective “inactual.” It does not mean outdated, but rather installed in a present that does not coincide with our clocks. The author knows this and therefore listens as much to what is brewing in the shipyards as to the signs at Marco Polo airport. In Michael H.’s prose, the futurists who dreamed of draining the canals converse with Simone Weil, and dialectics ceases to be scholastic and becomes the sound of water against bricks. Because it is the bricks—those “walls that form the labyrinth”—that give the lagoon its mineral steadfastness in the face of the waves. Michael H. touches them, smells them, connects them with Uruguayan spider holes and the distant sting of a childhood scorpion, tracing a poetics of the wall: everything that remains standing is about to dissolve, but while it lasts, it grants us a passageway for storytelling.
Human tension runs through the book like a tide that rises and falls. Shame and pleasure upon leaving the Salute with a Dante poster under his arm; the childish—and forbidden—desire to throw himself into the canal; the patrol’s scolding of a gondolier who crosses at the wrong time; the saving negative Covid test result in Florence that puts the world back on its axis; the regatta that fascinates and, at the same time, leaves out those who do not belong; Venezia FC’s relegation, turning a mythical city into a concrete defeat. The traveler is not unscathed, and the book does not seek absolution: it accepts that looking also compromises.
In this Venice of presences and misadventures, the narrator declares his strangeness in the face of his own foreignness: “To be in Venice is to admit an alteration, a restlessness.” The phrase encapsulates the emotional core of the journey. For the writer—a Cuban—the city brings back the experience of exile, that “bread with crust and all,” and transmutes it into aesthetic resonance. Mass tourism is out of focus: what matters is the individual breath, capable of detecting the smell of silt when the tide goes out or the note that a barista whistles on his way to the ghetto.
The color palette described by Michael H. is deliberately sober: “grays, ochres, whites, faint yellows, creams.” Underlying this desaturation is an ethical decision: to renounce the cliché of the pink sunset in order to capture the almost colorless tremor of the surfaces, as if the city had been filed down by the sigh of its bridges until it was reduced to luminous dust.
A book of still waters and sonorous textures, Venecia inactual follows in the tradition of stories where erudition serves to light bonfires in the night. It does not merely quote, it makes the quotes burn. Dante and Debord, Tintoretto and Breaking Bad coexist without hierarchy, summoned by the same underground current. “Permanence and fragility are both senses of eternity,” he recalls with Simone Weil. That thought could be the book’s motto: remain so that something may fragment, fragment so that something may remain.
If every great city invents its own myth, Michael H. records here its mutation in an era that pretends not to believe in anything. His Venice is a stage where the spectator enters only to verify that the backdrop continues to move a second after it has been described. Therein lies the irrelevance: in the certainty that loss itself is a form of survival, and not in nostalgia for what has been lost.
Is Venice—along with Paris—the city most visited by literature? This Serenissima Repubblica, so mysteriously decadent that any aesthete would want to close their eyes there, has become the epitome of the città impossibile: a liquid (or gaseous, as Casanova would have it) region that archives the last words of Wagner, Pound, or von Aschenbach. In these prose postcards—travel diary, reading notebook, love discourse—Michael H. Miranda takes up the gauntlet of the old chroniclers: he rereads streets and canals, watermarks and canalettos, churches, sunrises, miasmas, and Tizianos; tracks down obsolescence and Tintorettos; pursues a sonorous Venice, vibrant with mysteries and inhabited by Scripture. Perhaps—and only thus—can the Serenissima be saved from its eternal shipwreck.
Closing the book, I discover that the journey was not to the lagoon, but to the twilight zone where quotes, images, and memories renounce their origin and become floating matter. There, in that delta of words, Venice persists as it has always been: a solid mirage, a darkly legible labyrinth, a resurrected ruin that already heralds other anachronisms of the Republic of Water.
