VENICE

resort city, Sarasota county, southwestern Florida, U.S. It lies along the Gulf of Mexico, 18 miles (29 km) south of Sarasota. Originally a fishing village founded in the 1880s, it was later planned (192425) as a retirement city for members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers; the project was abandoned after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but Venice survived as a small resort noted for tarpon fishing. It revived after 1960, when it replaced Sarasota as the winter headquarters for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Light manufacturing augments tourism as the city's economic mainstay. Nearby is Oscar Scherer State Park, and there is a spa at Warm Mineral Springs. Inc. 1925. Pop. (1990) 17,052; (1994 est.) 16,722. Italian Venezia, city, major seaport, and capital of both the provincia of Venezia and the regione of Veneto, northern Italy. Once the centre of a maritime republic whose influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world, Venice is now known principally for its canals, art, architecture, and unique romantic atmosphere. The historic city of Venice lies almost in the centre of a crescent-shaped lagoon that stretches for about 32 miles (51 km) from northeast to southwest. It is built on an archipelago of islets, mud flats, and sandbanks about 2 miles (3 km) long and 1 mile (1.5 km) wide. The limits of the modern city, embracing the whole 90-mile (145-kilometre) perimeter of the lagoon, include 10 principal islands (apart from those of the mother city) and 2 industrial mainland boroughs, Mestre and Marghera. Tourism and industries related to tourism, such as the production of glass, lace, and textiles, employ a large share of the Venetian work force, although some of the work is seasonal. Port activities occupy additional workers, but the port of Marghera now handles a greater amount of shipping than does the old city. Most recent industrial development has been on the mainland. Venice's many canals follow the original watercourse among the 118 original islands. The main stream through these isles, the Grand Canal, flows around two wide curves through the city. Ranging in width from about 100 to 225 feet (30 to 70 m) and having a mean depth of 9 feet (2.7 m), the Grand Canal is bordered by many palaces, churches, and a maritime gas station. Until the 19th century, the Grand Canal was crossed only by the Rialto Bridge, which was designed by Antonio da Ponte; two additional bridges now span the Grand Canal. The most famous of Venice's approximately 400 bridges is the Bridge of Sighs, a short, covered passageway between the Doges' Palace (Palazzo Ducale) and the former Venetian Republic's prison. The architecture of Venice is varied, with Italian, Arabic, Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque styles all represented. For centuries the social and political centre of Venice was the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square), one of the most famous squares in the world. Arcades line three of its sides; at the eastern end, spiked with the 324-foot (99-metre) Campanile, rises the golden facade of San Marco Basilica. The southern wing of the piazza, called the Piazzetta, is flanked by the Doges' Palace and the Old Library. At its edge lies the entrance to the square, at the point where the Grand Canal meets the broad San Marco Basin. The ornate chambers of the Doges' Palace were decorated by a number of Venice's great artists, and St. Mark's is filled with objects collected over the years by the Venetians in their various conquests. There are approximately 450 palaces and old houses of historic and artistic significance in Venice. Typically they are built on pilings or on stone fill. Few of these houses remain in the hands of the original families. Most of the residences have been cut up into office buildings and antique shops, and some of the palaces have been converted into hotels that have, in their turn, gained renown. Assumption, oil painting by Titian, 151618; in Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice. Venice's principal art museum, the Accademia on the Grand Canal, occupies the former convent, church, and trade-guild building of Santa Maria della Carit; the works of many famed Venetian artists are displayed there. Some of the Accademia's collection came from the scule, confraternity (or trade) guilds, two of which still exist as charitable organizations in their original buildings, which have been completely restored with their original decorations and paintings. The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (called San Zanipolo by Venetians), consecrated by the Dominicans in 1430, features a Giovanni Bellini polyptych and a Paolo Veronese ceiling. The Franciscan Santa Maria dei Frari, built in the 13th century, contains the mausoleum for the artist Titian together with his Assumption (see photograph), Psaro Madonna, and other works. Other notable churches include the Il Redentore, San Giorgio Maggiore, and Le Zitelle. Venice is also noted for its music, which became increasingly important as the city's commercial power declined. Claudio Monteverdi, a chief pioneer of the opera form, wrote the first opera ever performed in Venice, Proserpina rapita. Many operas by such celebrated artists as Giuseppe Verdi, Gioacchino Rossini, and, more recently, Igor Stravinsky were first performed in Venice at La Fenice Theatre, which was seriously damaged by fire in January 1996. Beginning in the 1950s the deterioration of ancient buildings and other art treasures, which had been a long, slow process related to floods, subsidence, and various other natural phenomena, was accelerated by air pollution resulting from motor vehicle and boat engine exhausts and domestic and industrial smoke. In the mid-1960s the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) began a worldwide campaign to harness scientific and technical procedures aimed at saving historic Venice. In 1988 testing was begun on a prototype for a series of barriers designed to prevent flooding in the city. Transportation within Venice is chiefly by water, and virtually every type of small water transport can be seen plying the Venetian canals, including water taxis and buses, red fire boats, police speedboats, and the famous, hand-propelled gondolas. Automobiles are not allowed within the central city; vehicular traffic can reach the old city by causeway but must be left in parking lots provided on the outskirts. A railroad bridge runs alongside the causeway. Air service is centred at Marco Polo International Airport, and motorboat service is provided to transport passengers to the city. Pop. (1991) 317,837; (1994 est.) 306,439. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, consecrated in 1687, where the Grand Canal opens into the San Italian Venezia city, major seaport, and capital of both the provincia of Venezia and the regione of Veneto, northern Italy. An island city, it was once the centre of a maritime republic. It was the greatest seaport in late medieval Europe and the continent's commercial and cultural link with Asia. Venice is unique environmentally, architecturally, and historically, and in its days as a republic the city was styled la serenissima (the most serene or sublime). It remains a major Italian port in the northern Adriatic. Venice is one of the world's oldest tourist and cultural centres. Today the city is recognized as part of the artistic and architectural patrimony of all humanity, a fitting role for a city whose thousand-year economic and political independence was sustained by its role in global trading. The situation of the city on islands has limited modern suburban spread beyond the historic centre; its framework of canals and narrow streets has prevented the intrusion of automobiles; and its unmatched wealth of fine buildings and monuments dating from the period of commercial dominance has ensured a keen and almost universal desire for sensitive conservation. In 1987 Venice and its lagoon were collectively designated a World Heritage site. Since the fall of the Venetian republic in 1797, the city has held an unrivaled place in the Western imagination and has been endlessly described in prose and verse. The luminous spectacle of ornate marbled and frescoed palaces, towers, and domes reflected in the sparkling waters of the lagoon under a blue Adriatic sky has been painted, photographed, and filmed to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish the real city from its romantic representations. The visitor arriving in Venice is still transported into another world, one whose atmosphere and beauty remain incomparable. Pop. (1991) 309,422; (2000 est.) 277,305. Additional reading General Views and descriptions of the modern city are found in many well-illustrated guides: Hugh Honour, The Companion Guide to Venice (1983); Guido Alberto Rossi and Franco Masiero, Venice from the Air (1988); Fulvio Roiter and Olivier Bernier, Venice II (1985); and Alta Macadam, Venice, 3rd ed. (1986), in the Blue Guide Series. Life in Venice is surveyed in Shirley Guiton, A World by Itself: Tradition and Change in the Venetian Lagoon (1977); James Morris, Venice, 2nd rev. ed. (1983); Alessandro Savella and Nantas Salvalaggio, The Carnival of Venice, trans. from Italian (1984); George Bull, Venice: The Most Triumphant City (1980); and Christopher Hibbert, Venice: the Biography of a City (1988). Observations and reflections on Venice can also be found in a number of works by individuals who lived or traveled in Venice; these include chapters of Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, 12 vol. in 6 (196671; originally published in French, 182638); Horatio F. Brown, Life on the Lagoons (1884), and Venetian Studies (1887); W.D. Howells, Venetian Life, rev. ed. (1907), written after his posting as U.S. consul to Venice in 186065; Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846), available in many later editions; Henry James, Italian Hours (1909, reprinted 1987); and Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (1956). History John Julius Norwich, Venice, 2 vol. (197781; also published as A History of Venice, 1982), treats the history of the city from its beginnings to 1797. Another comprehensive survey of the same period is W. Carew Hazlitt, The Venetian Republic: Its Rise, Its Growth, and Its Fall, A.D. 4091797, 2 vol., 4th ed. (1915, reprinted 1966). See also Roberto Cessi, Storia della repubblica di Venezia, 2 vol. (194446, reissued in 1 vol., 1981), a history by Venice's foremost historian; and William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 10811797 (1974, reprinted 1986). Freddy Thiriet, La Romanie vnitienne au Moyen Age (1959; reprinted with additions, 1975), describes the Venetian commercial empire of the 12th15th century that was founded by the Fourth Crusade. Other historical studies include Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (1980); Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 15801615 (1967; originally published in Italian); Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality Versus Myth (1986); Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (1987); Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986); D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 13801580 (1970); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981), on the role of public display in the life of the republic; M.E. Mallett and J.R. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice, c. 1400 to 1617 (1984), on the armed forces and power politics; Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (1980), on the complex political structure that was in place at the height of the Republic; and William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (1968, reprinted 1984), on the evolution and political uses of the myth of Venice.Histories of the economic and social conditions and commerce include Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973); Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice: Coins and Moneys of Account (1985); Peter Lauritzen, Venice: A Thousand Years of Culture and Civilization (1978); and a collection of earlier works by Frederic C. Lane, Studies in Venetian Social and Economic History, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and Reinhold C. Mueller (1987). See also James C. Davis, A Venetian Family and Its Fortune, 15001900 (1975); Susan Connell, The Employment of Sculptors and Stonemasons in Venice in the Fifteenth Century (1988); Richard J. Goy, Chioggia and the Villages of the Venetian Lagoon (1985); and Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice (1987; originally published in Italian, 1985). Arts and architecture John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vol. (185153; reprinted 1979), is a major historical study. Deborah Howard, The Architectural History of Venice (1980), provides a detailed treatment of Venetian buildings and their social context. See also Michelangelo Muraro, Venetian Villas: The History and Culture, trans. from Italian (1986); Peter Lauritzen and Alexander Zielcke, Palaces of Venice (1978, reissued 1985); Douglas Lewis, The Late Baroque Churches of Venice (1979); and Richard J. Goy, Venetian Vernacular Architecture: Traditional Housing in the Venetian Lagoon (1988). Developments of the Renaissance period are studied in John McAndrew, Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance (1980); Ralph Lieberman, Renaissance Architecture in Venice, 14501540 (1982); and Bernhard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd ed. (1897). Essays on many aspects of Venetian art and politics of the Renaissance are collected in an illustrated catalog of a major exhibition, Jane Martineau and Charles Hope (eds.), The Genius of Venice, 15001600 (1983). Other special studies include Simon Towneley Worsthorne, Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (1954, reprinted 1984); Michael Levey, Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice, 2nd rev. ed. (1980); and Peter Lauritzen, Venice Preserved (1986), a concise survey of restoration work. Denis E. Cosgrove