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Author: Dennis Romano

Format: Audiobook (Narrator: David Colacci)

Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City is a survey history of the city of Venice from its founding (circa 500 CE) to the present day (post-COVID). As is probably to be expected, Romano focuses on Venice’s apex as a colonizing city-state in the late medieval to early modern eras. Overall, Venice provides a remarkably thorough and straightforward overview of the city’s history, which is impressive given the amount of content there is to cover. The length of the book (~30 hours / 800 pages) greatly helps in this endeavour for the obvious reasons and because there ends up being at least a little bit of room for Romano to insert short anecdotes of colour into the main narrative history that break up the monotony of many narrative histories of this length.

Beyond the anecdotes, Romano also includes longer (chapter-length) digressions into Venetian social life and culture, which were greatly appreciated - usually one such chapter was included in every larger part of the book. Romano also mentions cultural history (art, architecture, music, etc) a lot, which helps with adding colour to the narrative as well.

Somehow, it did feel like, despite its insane length, the book ended up going pretty quickly through Venetian history - I remember feeling like there was a lack of early (pre-medieval) Venetian history before realizing that the pace was just like that. In particular, this meant that the transition from Venice being a powerful political player to just a first-tier city within the country of Italy felt quite sudden, even though admittedly there was a full chapter or two on the era of ‘decline’. Additionally, it felt like there could have been more space devoted to talking about the unique qualities of Venice itself - if you’re going to write 800 pages of survey history surely there’s a reason why you choose Venice and no other city / topic (there is some mention of the uniqueness of the pseudo-republican government in pre-modernity, but that’s about it / could definitely be discussed more).