La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia 568 - 1797
With the bank holidays now over, the sun has returned to the UK again. Everywhere, people are sitting outside the coffee shops, grazing on sharing-plates of cured meats and preserved fish and sipping on Aperol Spritz. I wonder if they realise how much of our modern lifestyle has its origins in the history of a tiny city at the head of the Adriatic. I love Venice. I love its art, its culture, its music. I love the cool of its churches, the shimmer of the light on the canals, the sounds of its busy squares and the silence of its streets at night. I even love the smell of the mud! Nobody really knows where the Venetians came from. A quick look at any native will tell you they were most certainly not Italian: shorter, fairer and often with blue eyes. Whatever their origins, it is generally agreed that these first inhabitants settled in the dank, misty islands of the north Adriatic Lagoon around the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire. They are accepted to have been refugees, flee...