NEW YORK—One word comes up often when people discuss Venice, both past and present: peculiar. This city made up of 100-plus islands, embedded in the water on the coast of northeastern Italy, was a cultural nexus that fueled tremendous creative output of artists still celebrated today.
Venice, where every year the duke would throw a ring into the waters to marry the city to the sea, was the birthplace of opera and the workplace of composers like Monteverdi and Vivaldi and painters Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Paolo Veronese, and Francesco Guardi. It was a center for growth of the printing press in Europe and a champion for freedom of thought and expression; it was for the West a gateway to the East, and a giant in mercantile trade.
