What Venice Still Has to Teach Us
I was standing inside St Mark’s Basilica on a recent trip to Venice, looking up at the mosaics while a wonderfully engaging guide walked us through the story of the Republic of Venice. She spoke not just about the art and architecture, but about something far more striking—how this small, lagoon-bound city managed to build a system that endured for around a thousand years. It’s one thing to read that fact in a book. It’s another to stand there, in a place shaped by that continuity, and feel the weight of it. Venice wasn’t just beautiful—it was stable, deliberate, and, for much of its life, remarkably effective.
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