
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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Story
Emerging as a market town from a cluster of hill villages in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Rome grew to become the ancient world's preeminent power. Everitt fashions the story of Rome's rise to glory into an erudite book filled with lasting lessons for our time. He chronicles the clash between patricians and plebeians that defined the politics of the Republic. He shows how Rome's shrewd strategy of offering citizenship to her defeated subjects was instrumental in expanding the reach of her burgeoning empire.
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Rome from the fall of Troy through Julius Caesar
- By Mike From Mesa on 12-11-12
By: Anthony Everitt
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Paris in Ruins
- Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans-then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris.
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Stunningly great narrator!
- By Julie Seavello on 12-26-24
By: Sebastian Smee
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Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
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The Ottomans
- Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs
- By: Marc David Baer
- Narrated by: Jamie Parker
- Length: 17 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic Asian antithesis of the Christian European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage.
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Great except for pronunt of Turkish names
- By Anonymous User on 11-04-22
By: Marc David Baer
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The Wages of Destruction
- The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
- By: Adam Tooze
- Narrated by: Adam Tooze, Simon Vance
- Length: 30 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period.
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Book is good but contains bias
- By Heinz-Jürgen MacSwain on 01-29-24
By: Adam Tooze
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The Fountainhead
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 32 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the 20th century's most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three characters: Howard Roarke, a genius; Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul and self-made millionaire; and Dominique Francon, a devastating beauty.
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The Fountainhead
- By Zachary on 06-04-10
By: Ayn Rand
As a resident great general summary of the history of the city
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