Venice

Venice (Italian: Venezia), the "city of canals", is the capital of the region of Veneto and of the province of Venice, {{coor dm|45|26|N|12|19|E|}}, population 271,663 (census estimate 2004-01-01). The city is included, with Padua (Padova), in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area, population 1,600,000. The city stretches across numerous small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy. The saltwater lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers.

Bibliography

Scholarship

• Chambers, D.S. (1970). The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580. London: Thames & Hudson. The best brief introduction in English, still completely reliable.
• Contarini, Gasparo (1599). The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice. Lewes Lewkenor, trsl. London: "Imprinted by I. Windet for E. Mattes." The most important contemporary account of Venice's governance during the time of its blossoming. Also available in various reprint editions.
• Drechsler, Wolfgang (2002). "Venice Misappropriated." Trames 6(2), pp. 192-201. A scathing review of Martin & Romano 2000; also a good summary on the most recent economic and political thought on Venice. For more balanced, less tendentious, and scholarly reviews of the Martin-Romano anthology, see "The Historical Journal" (2003) "Rivista Storica Italiana" (2003).
• Grubb, James S. (1986). "When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography." Journal of Modern History 58, pp. 43-94. The classic "muckraking" essay on the myths of Venice.
• Martin, John and Dennis Romano (eds). Venice Reconsidered. The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP. The most recent collection on essays, many by prominent scholars, on Venice.
• Muir, Edward (1981). Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. The classic of Venetian cultural studies, highly sophisticated.
• Rösch, Gerhard (2000). Venedig. Geschichte einer Seerepublik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. In German, but the most recent top-level brief history of Venice.