Venice is a city of dreams

“Nothing is as great as you’ve imagined. Venice is … Venice is better,” Fran Lebowitz is reputed to have said. “Spend a few days in La Serenissima, as Italians call it, and it’s not hard to see why,” says Architectural Digest. “As the sun glints off the water in the canals, the city seems to sparkle with a most improbable beauty. After dark, with no cars and hardly any noise, the narrow streets and stone piazzas seem more like a film set than a real place. Arched bridges, Gothic mansions, Renaissance palaces, and Baroque basilicas serve as reminders that Venice has had many rulers and architectural influences since its days as the center of a powerful maritime republic.”    

The story of Venice is an endless mine for the imagination, observed the late Jan Morris in Vanity Fair. “It was all a performance, I thought, but then, who was I to talk? I had spent my own Venetian years in voluntary self-delusion. It was my own personal Venice that I had fostered, my own dream of it."

It’s like nowhere else on earth. If you look at NASA’s map of the lagoon, you see a city of marble palaces sitting on a marshy lagoon. “The original genius of Venice lay in its physical construction,” says Roger Crowley in The Smithsonian. “Painstakingly reclaiming marshland, stabilising islands by sinking oak piles in the mud, draining basins and repairing canals, maintaining barriers against the threatening sea: All required ingenuity and high levels of group cooperation.” The ever-shifting lagoon “not only shaped the city but also gave rise to a unique society and way of life.” That’s because Venice could produce nothing other than fish and salt from the lagoon -- “without land, there could be no feudal system, no knights and serfs, so there was a measure of equality … without agriculture, seafaring and trade were its only options, so the Venetians had to be merchants and sailors.”