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.

Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common. Moving beyond the "clash of civilizations" model that surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical perch, Dursteler analyzes the lived reality by focusing on a localized microcosm: the Venetian merchant and diplomatic community in Muslim Constantinople. While factors such as religion, culture, and political status could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, Dursteler finds early modern identity to be more than the sum total of its constitutent parts and reveals how the fluidity and malleability of identity in this time and place made coexistence among disparate cultures possible.

Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common. Moving beyond the "clash of civilizations" model that surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical perch, Dursteler analyzes the lived reality by focusing on a localized microcosm: the Venetian merchant and diplomatic community in Muslim Constantinople. While factors such as religion, culture, and political status could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, Dursteler finds early modern identity to be more than the sum total of its constitutent parts and reveals how the fluidity and malleability of identity in this time and place made coexistence among disparate cultures possible.

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

This prosopographical study provides information about each Venetian living in the early Middle Ages, from the invasion of the Lombards in 569 - an action that forced part of the North-East Italy's population to seek refuge in the islands of the Venetian lagoon - to the rule of Duke Petrus Ursoylus II (991-1008). There is an entry for each individual listing all available information and quoting the full text of primary sources within the footnotes. The data are organized in categories such as families, first names, rulers, women, office holders, ecclesiastics, occupations, and places of residence (Venice was a duchy with different urban centers). Venice is an extremely important place for this kind of analysis. It is the area in which family name use began for the first time in medieval Europe. Venice was never conquered by a 'Germanic' people, and therefore it is possible to study the evolution of a post-Roman/Byzantine society by analyzing the names of the Venetians. Moreover, scholars interested in later periods will be able to find the origins of all the most important Venetian families.

This book presents the most flamboyant and whimsical of all Chihuly's series. The voluptuous glass pieces, shown in full-colour, were inspired by Art Deco Venetian glass during Chihuly's Fullbright scholarship in Venice. With collaboration between Chihuly and glass master Lino Tagliapietra, the series evolved over a period of only seven blowing sessions. Though at their core, the Venetians are vessels of some sort, they explode outward when wrapped with spiralling coils, leaves, feathers, and claws in startling colour combinations. Chihuly chronicles the evolution of the series in his reflective essay included in this volume. His bold and colourful drawings illustrate how the artist guided his team to make these pieces. This oversized book offers a breathtaking view of Chihuly's Venetians, which, more than any other of his series, embody personality and individual character. This book begins with an essay by Ron Glowen.

Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city's mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo's China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of 'firstness', similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.