Dial Parrott

As author Dial Parrott explains in the Introduction to his book The Genius of Venice: Piazza San Marco and the Making of the Republic, 1982 was a memorable year for him. During those twelve months, he got married, was fired from his first job as lawyer, and saw Venice for the first time––interrelated events as it turned out. Barely out of law school, Parrott had been working feverishly to prove to his Boston law firm that he was a young attorney worth keeping. At the same time, he was determined that even if it cost him his position, he and his new wife were going to have a full two-week honeymoon, the first week in Paris and the second in Venice. He had never visited either place.

On the night train from Paris, Parrott was unable to fall sleep and arrived in the Venetian lagoon in a semi-delirious state. He says that that his experience during those first few hours was nothing short of a waking dream, one in which his mind kept repeating the same involuntary questions. "What could possible explain the fantastical scenes passing before my eyes? How could anything so beautiful and improbable ever have come to be?" Unable to provide coherent answers from college art courses he had taken, he contented himself with gathering gorgeous, inchoate sensations. He and his wife Sally danced across the moonlit Piazza San Marco to the music of three small orchestras and took a vaporetto to the deserted island of Torcello, where they explored the chaste, unguarded beauty of the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and its enchanting companion, the little octagonal church of Santa Fosca. They stayed in a small, ground-floor room of a magnificent medieval palazzo. In the morning, they walked up a massive stairway to breakfast in an enormous second-story chamber overlooking an elegant neighborhood campo. As they ate, small birds flew through the Gothic windows and circled the ornate ceiling.

Upon returning to Boston, Parrott made two quick discoveries. The first was that in his absence, one of the bond deals assigned to him had hit a snag and ended up on the desk of a very unforgiving senior partner. He was given a few months to find another job. The second was that his experience in Venice had been transformative. He needed to find answers to the dilemmas his mind had instinctively thrown up in those initial dazed hours. He began reading the literature of Venice, and fifteen years later, began to compose answers to his original questions.

The result is The Genius of Venice: Piazza San Marco and the Making of the Republic, published September 3, 2013 by Rizzoli ex libris. It has been hailed as "a brilliant book that blends the art, politics, and social history of Venice through a masterful and engaging account of the development of Saint Mark's Square, the city's oldest and most important architectural complex. It is like reading several books at once, all brought to life with the immediacy of a modern thriller."

In early 2019, Parrott will publish his latest work, entitled Pigeons in the Piazza: A Young American Family's Italian Adventures Seamlessly Merged with Growing Up in Police State Mississippi. Its narrative spine is a 1993 trip he and Sally took with their two boys, Sam (age six) and Max (age three) to an island near Venice as well as to Tuscany and Umbria.