The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo San Marcuola, Canaletto, about 1738.

Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is situated on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are located in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay that lies between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers.

Quotes

• Venice once was dear,
  The pleasant place of all festivity,
  The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), Canto IV, Stanza 3.

• Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population.
  • Alfred Legoyt (1861) cited in: Richard N. Juliani (June 2005). Building Little Italy. Penn State Press. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-0-271-02864-4. 

• Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
  And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
  Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
  Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
  • William Wordsworth On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, l. 1 (1807).

• General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.
  • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, (1907)

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