Venice

Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is situated on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are located in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay that lies between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers.

The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo San Marcuola, Canaletto, about 1738.

Quotes

• With the main lines of business monopolized by the increasingly narrow elite, the decline was under way. Venice appeared to have been on the brink of becoming the world’s first inclusive society, but it fell to a coup. Political and economic institutions became more extractive, and Venice began to experience economic decline. By 1500 the population had shrunk to one hundred thousand. Between 1650 and 1800, when the population of Europe rapidly expanded, that of Venice contracted. Today the only economy Venice has, apart from a bit of fishing, is tourism. Instead of pioneering trade routes and economic institutions, Venetians make pizza and ice cream and blow colored glass for hordes of foreigners. The tourists come to see the pre-Serrata wonders of Venice, such as the Doge’s Palace and the lions of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which were looted from Byzantium when Venice ruled the Mediterranean. Venice went from economic powerhouse to museum.
  • Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012)
• General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.
  • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, (1907)

• Venice once was dear,
  The pleasant place of all festivity,
  The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), Canto IV, Stanza 3

• Venice by moonlight is an enchanted city; the floods of silver light upon the moresco architecture, the perfect absence of all harsh sounds of carts and carriages, the never-ceasing music on the waters, produced an effect on the mind which cannot be experienced, I am sure, in any other city in the world.
  • Benjamin Disraeli to Isaac Disraeli (c. 8 September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Vol. I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 108

• Venice's government, eager to maintain its Jewish tax base, officially discouraged the blood libel, but the population was more inspired by the renowned Venetian poet laureate Raffaele Zovenzoni-whose hymn describing the sainted child's murder, which begged authorities to protect the people from bloodthirsty Jews, went viral. Within a few generations, Venice's brilliant idea of imprisoning Jews in ghettos went viral too.
  • Dara Horn "Commuting with Shylock" in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (2021)

• Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population.
  • Alfred Legoyt (1861) cited in: Richard N. Juliani (June 2005). Building Little Italy. Penn State Press. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-0-271-02864-4. 

• Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
  And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
  Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
  Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
  • William Wordsworth On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, l. 1 (1807).