In these brilliantly realized, linked tales, the real Venice is revealed – not the iconic tourist destination the city has become, but the mysterious society that resides behind its elegant doors and shuttered windows. With a sly and affectionate delicacy, Jane Turner Rylands, an American expatriate who has lived in Venice for thirty years, portrays a dozen Venetians– a construction foreman, a countess, a gondolier, a postman, an architect, a Baronessa, an English lord – as they pursue their respective interests. And in turn, through the perspective of those who live and work in this most alluring of cities, Venetian Stories illuminates canals and palazzos, churches and gondolas, large concerns and small rituals, with an uncommon intimacy.

The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic’s eventual surrender to Napoleon. The Venetians illuminates the character of the Republic during these illustrious years by shining a light on some of the most celebrated personalities of European history—Petrarch, Marco Polo, Galileo, Titian, Vivaldi, Casanova... Frequently, though, these emblems of the city found themselves at odds with the Venetian authorities, who prized stability above all else and were notoriously suspicious of any "cult of personality." Was this very tension perhaps the engine for the Republic’s unprecedented rise? Rich with biographies of some of the most exalted characters who have ever lived, The Venetians is a refreshing and authoritative new look at the history of the most evocative of city-states.

An inspector rages against the announcement that police HQ is to relocate – the way so many of the city’s residents already have – to the mainland... An aspiring author struggles with the inexorable creep of rentalisation that has forced him to share his apartment, and life, with ‘global pilgrims’... An ageing painter rails against the liberties taken by tourists, but finds his anger undermined by his own childhood memories of the place... The Venice presented in these stories is a far cry from the ‘impossibly beautiful’, frozen-in-time city so familiar to the thousands who flock there every year – a city about which, Henry James once wrote, ‘there is nothing new to be said.’ Instead, they represent the other Venice, the one tourists rarely see: the real, everyday city that Venetians have to live and work in. Rather than a city in stasis, we see it at a crossroads, fighting to regain its radical, working-class soul, regretting the policies that have seen it turn slowly into a theme park, and taking the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink what kind of city it wants to be.

An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeur Thomas Madden’s majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and its people, tracing an arc from the city’s humble origins as a lagoon refuge to its apex as a vast maritime empire and Renaissance epicenter to its rebirth as a modern tourist hub. Madden explores all aspects of Venice’s breathtaking achievements: the construction of its unparalleled navy, its role as an economic powerhouse and birthplace of capitalism, its popularization of opera, the stunning architecture of its watery environs, and more. He sets these in the context of the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire, the endless waves of Crusades to the Holy Land, and the awesome power of Turkish sultans. And perhaps most critically, Madden corrects the stereotype of Shakespeare’s money-lending Shylock that has distorted the Venetian character, uncovering instead a much more complex and fascinating story, peopled by men and women whose ingenuity and deep faith profoundly altered the course of civilization.

Hard not to be florid about this book Devoured in snippets or read straight through. It presents amazing experiences and skills. Because Marc-Charles Nicolas has a brilliantly delicate appreciation for the idea of a sentence in a poem, the juxtapositions of segments in these pages appear essentially to construct entire topics for mediation. Examined along and the dawnings increase and multipy--- inspirations, love, feelings, locations, events hitherto isolated are now all hooks-and-eyes into each other. And because Marc-Charles gets his inspiration from the muse, you feel the exquisiteness and beauty buried in shattered phrases about the "universality of poetry." As a poet he belongs to a life larger than his own. The life of genuine things. And (One more performance worth a word): the poems in his book "Perfumed Paradise" are filled with aboutness'. Put together as they are, they're seen to abound with roots: their laughter or melancholy or ire has discernible reasons. The humanness of poem-writing as a hobby, the splendid unavoidability of it ---that is what this compilation brings together. But floridity was to be kept away. One cloudless day---pace the anti-sentimentalists: life is short I sat in the sun and by a Brook with a friend and passed pages of this manuscript from side to side, reading fragments aloud, laughing quietly or looking grave, occasionally thrilled and bemused. A while back, this was, yet I remember no happier afternoon. The poems were written originally in French 13 years ago in the year 1993, delicious remembrance - fantastic book! Virgo A. Bernice

Inscriptions, medals, and travelers' accounts, on more learned humanist and antiquarian writings, and, most importantly, on the art of the period, Brown explores Venice's evolving sense of the past. She begins with the late middle ages, when Venice sought to invent a dignified civic past by means of object, image, and text. Moving on to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, she discusses the collecting and recording of antiquities and the incorporation of Roman forms.

From the author of the acclaimed Venetian Stories, a captivating new collection about Venice from the perspective of its residents. A professor writes lectures on Venetian literature for American millionaires. A baroness falls in love with the architect restoring the ancient palazzo of her husband’s family. An ambitious gallery owner sells a young artist’s work faster than he can paint it. A salesman finds a way to trip up a narcissistic race car driver who seems to be able to get away with anything. As her characters negotiate the conflict between tradition and a rapidly changing city, Jane Turner Rylands draws us deep into a society all but unknown to outsiders.