Seen from a distance across the mists of the lagoon, the visually astonishing and unreal structures of the city rise up in a unique architectural fantasy that invokes the inevitable question of how it all came to be. The answer is here in this book as John Higson sets forth in a new way a running commentary or overview that synthesizes chronologically Venice’s vital essentials against the background of the Mediterranean world.

This, in turn, forms a framework for comment on the city’s contributions to art and architecture, to music and pageantry, to finance and trade, and to morals and politics. At the same time, the tangible remains of Venice’s cultural heritage—the monuments, churches, palaces, bridges, sculptures and other extraordinary works of art—are described and interpreted in the context of their respective eras.

Here is the dramatic saga of this small coastal community struggling to survive during the Middle Ages and its early wide-ranging commercial enterprises that led eventually to its command of the Mediterranean trade routes; of the countless battles at sea by its intrepid war galleys over the centuries, ending in a final showdown with the Ottoman Turks at Lepanto; of the glories and triumphs of its Renaissance artists and architects at the zenith of Venice’s wealth and prestige; and finally of the long downhill slide into decadence and weakness and the city’s humiliating surrender to the army of Napoleon.

Different from other guide books that are often burdened with unrelated facts and utilitarian information, Higson has successfully integrated by selection and emphasis the essential elements of the city’s cultural, social, and political patrimony with historical narrative. Nothing less does justice to the only city of any consequence that has come down to us almost unchanged from prior centuries—a remarkable composite of East and West, of land and sea, the product of hard-headed seafaring adventurers and the inspired artists and architects they employed.

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