Montserrat & Venice [30min]

Sandi Toksvig welcomes social anthropologist Jonathan Skinner and Montserrat's Minister of Tourism, Ernestine Cassell, to assess ten years' impact of the explosion of the volcano on the Caribbean Island; then she discusses geography and culture of Venice with social anthropologist Garry Marvin and America author John Berendt. [1] Ten years ago Montserrat's volcano erupted without much warning. The entire capital, Plymouth, once one of the prettiest towns in the Caribbean was drowned by rivers of lava and ash, a natural disaster long-term impact on the tourism of Montserrat and the lives of its inhabitants. Cassell is Minister for Tourism in Montserrat and the Director of the Montserrat Tourist Board; Skinner is a writer and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropological Studies, Queen's University, Belfast, and author of Before The Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat (Arawak Publications). [2]"There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject," wrote Henry James about Venice, a city he loved with a passion and in which he completed his novel Portrait of a Lady. Berendt and Marvin join Sandi to prove why Henry James was wrong and to investigate this extraordinary Italian city, steeped in ritual and tradition but isolated geographically and culturally from the outside world. Berendt is author of The City of Falling Angels (Sceptre); Marvin is a Social Anthropologist at Roehampton University abd author of Venice: The Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City (University of California Press).