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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