La Serenissima : The Story of Venice

Dream and romance have conditioned myriad encounters with Venice across the centuries, but the city's story embodies another kind of experience altogether - the hard reality of an independent state built on conquest, profit and entitlement and on the toughness and resilience of a free people. Masters of the sea, the Venetians raised an empire through an ethos of service and loyalty to a republic that lasted a thousand years. In this new study of key moments in Venice's history, from its half-legendary founding amid the collapse of the Roman empire to its modern survival as a fragile city of the arts menaced by saturation tourism and rising sea levels.