Archives

Venetian gardens are unexpectedly quite a few. At least five hundred. In Venice, gardens are not so easy to spot, though. Most visitors, after spending a few days in Venice, get the feeling they [...]

Iron is the name of a major side-walk in Venice, by the Rialto bridge: “riva del ferro”. This area is close to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the ancient warehouse of the Northern European merchants, [...]

Libraries in Venice are silent places reflecting hundreds and hundreds of years of the history of this city and its over one million human voices. Visiting libraries while visiting Venice is [...]

Gondola builders and the true icon of Venice Gondola builders: they are the ones that turned the gondola into the most iconic image of Venice. Is there still anybody that doesn’t connect it to [...]

A boat as an icon of Venice A boat is for sure the most iconic thing you can imagine describing the city of Venice. I am sure you are thinking of a black lacquered, slow and silent gondola, [...]

One needs to plunder art to found an empire! When conquering a country, you cannot be happy just to get their land, their wealth or the lives of its inhabitants. It must affect history, which [...]

Venice is a city where appearance has always mattered and this shows in the façades of the buildings. A triumph of make-up: whether it expressed the immense wealth of a family or the sublimation [...]

“There is no reason to feel like Cinderella: all over Italy there is nothing like it, such a long life, such burning vitality”. So wrote the director Angela Vettese in 1990 about the BLM [...]

“about the fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them, walking on the sea” (Gospel of Mark c.66-70) Water surely can be viewed as a treacherous element you would be safer to keep [...]

What is a stool in Venice? … please be patient and read it till the end 🙂 I am reading an interesting booklet written by Salvatore Settis (I am afraid available only in Italian) and [...]