“Among Venice’s spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast. People of this kind–dry, prose people of superior intelligence–object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else. The extreme of this position is to feel nothing. Such a case was Stendhal’s: Venice left him cold. He was there only a short time and departed with barely a comment to pursue an intrigue in Padua. Another lover of Italy, D. H. Lawrence (on one side of his nature, a debunker, a plain home-truth teller like Ruskin before him), put down his first reaction in a poem: ‘Abhorrent green, slippery city, Whose Doges were old and had ancient eyes….’ And Gibbon ‘was afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust by the spectacle of Venice.'”
Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed