A unique book about an incredible city. The Venetian past has not disappeared, the eternal beauty is as fresh as “high water”, from the Rialto Bridge you can hear the voices of courtesans and the screams of Nicolotti fighting with Castellani. Here there are more masks than faces, and there are more skeletons than wardrobes, here the blind Doge Dandolo changes the map of the world and indestructible Byzantine reigns, which Venice was forever infected with while robbing Constantinople. Here are crowds of tourists and dead solitude, tall Slavic slaves and crusading bandits, Vivaldi and Titian, Gozzi and Tintoretto, Diaghilev and Brodsky, the Venetian avant-garde of the 15th century, ancient skyscrapers of the Venetian ghetto, shimmering gold smalt, the colorful sound of Murano glass, the green smell of the sea in Cannaregio and Rio. And an inescapable, unquenchable desire to return to a city that has no equal in the world.