
Venice
The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City
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Narrated by:
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David Colacci
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By:
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Dennis Romano
About this listen
No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, “another world.” During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations.
This comprehensive account reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice’s origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city’s commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism.
Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city’s cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera. Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities.
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How the World Made the West
- A 4,000 Year History
- By: Josephine Quinn
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.
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Middling
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-24
By: Josephine Quinn
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Spice
- The 16th-Century Contest That Shaped the Modern World
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control.
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Spice or Megellan?
- By BarbieAlaska on 06-21-24
By: Roger Crowley
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The House of Medici
- Its Rise and Fall
- By: Christopher Hibbert
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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This enthralling book charts the family's huge influence on the political, economic, and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici, it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence's slide into decay and bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.
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Laundry list of names
- By Elizabeth W on 01-02-17
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Princes of the Renaissance
- By: Mary Hollingsworth
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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A history of the Renaissance told through the lives of its most influential patrons. From the late Middle Ages, the independent Italian city states were taken over by powerful families who installed themselves as dynastic rulers. Inspired by the humanists, the princes of 15th- and 16th-century Italy immersed themselves in the culture of antiquity, commissioning palaces, villas and churches inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome, and offering patronage to artists and writers.
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ideal
- By BaliDoug on 07-04-22
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World on the Brink
- How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century
- By: Dmitri Alperovitch, Garrett M. Graff - contributor
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A leading national security expert, who publicly predicted Vladimir Putin's intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine months before it took place, lays out the case for why China's Xi Jinping is preparing to conquer Taiwan in the coming years and the dire stakes for America and the whole world if he is not deterred.
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a must read book!
- By Val Lendaro on 06-02-24
By: Dmitri Alperovitch, and others
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Raiders, Rulers, and Traders
- The Horse and the Rise of Empires
- By: David Chaffetz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.
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The authors love of his material
- By Jim7 on 05-02-25
By: David Chaffetz
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Genius of Place
- The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 18 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here.
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Ponderous yet incomplete
- By John F. Caffrey on 01-23-19
By: Justin Martin
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Spycraft
- Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration
- By: Pete Langman, Nadine Akkerman
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In this engaging, accessible account, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including disguises, invisible inks, and even poisons. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources, they show how understanding the tricks and tools of espionage allows us to reimagine well-known stories such as the Babington and Gunpowder plots.
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Needs accompanying PDF
- By Amazon Customer on 09-26-24
By: Pete Langman, and others
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The Horse
- A Galloping History of Humanity
- By: Timothy C. Winegard
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back.
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Virtue signaling on 4 legs
- By K N on 08-25-24
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How Economics Explains the World
- A Short History of Humanity
- By: Andrew Leigh
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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This small book indeed tells a big story. It is the story of capitalism–of how our market system developed. It is the story of the discipline of economics, and some of the key figures who formed it. And it is the story of how economic forces have shaped world history. Why didn’t Africa colonize Europe instead of the other way around? What happened when countries erected trade and immigration barriers in the 1930s? Why did the Allies win World War II? You’ll find answers to these questions and more in How Economics Explains the World.
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Rehashed ideas better explained in other books
- By Louislocke on 10-27-24
By: Andrew Leigh
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The Eastern Front
- A History of the Great War 1914-1918
- By: Nick Lloyd
- Narrated by: Elliot Fitzpatrick
- Length: 22 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria.
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This is an eloquent account of a conflagration whose consequences we are still grappling with
- By Richard M. Bendix, Jr. on 04-01-25
By: Nick Lloyd
What listeners say about Venice
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- marco
- 01-13-25
As a resident great general summary of the history of the city
As a resident of Venice this book gave me a better perspective on the history of my city. I feel like I’ve achieved a better understanding of the calli I walk on, the palazzi I see everyday and the decisions I’ll have to take when the need of political participation will arise! I particularly enjoyed the last chapter: very honest and not at all biased.
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