Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Venezia |
VeneziaNoun1. The provincial capital of Veneto; built on 118 islands within a lagoon in the Gulf of Venice which is an arm of the Adriatic; has canals instead of streets; one of Italy's major ports and a famous tourist attraction. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
- For alternate meanings see: Venice (disambiguation).
Venice (Italian Venezia), the city of canals, stretches across numerous small islands in a marshy lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in the northeast of Italy. The saltwater lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers.
Venice is the capital of the region of Veneto.
History
The city was founded as a result of the influx of refugees into the marshes of the Po estuary following the invasion of Northern Italy by the Lombards in 568. At first an outpost of Byzantine civilization, as the community developed an anti-Eastern character emerged, leading to the growth of autonomy and eventual independence. Venice was a city state (an Italian thalassocracy or Repubblica Marinara - the other three were Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi). The chief executives were called Doge (duke), and, theoretically, held their elective office for life. In practice a number of Doges were forced to resign the office and retire into monastic seclusion by pressure from their oligarchical peers when they were felt to have been discredited by perceived political failure. At the height of its power, Venice controlled much of the coastal territory along the Adriatic, most of the islands in the Aegean, including Crete, and was a major power-broker in the Near East. On April 27, 1509 Pope Julius II placed Venice under interdict.
Venetian ambassadors sent secret reports about the politics and rumours of European courts, these supply fascinating information to modern historians.
Venice in true colours
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Venice and surroundings in false colour, from TERRA satellite. The picture is oriented correctly (north at the top).
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After 1070 years its independence was lost when Napoleon Bonaparte on May 12, 1797 conquered Venice during the First Coalition. The French conqueror brought to an end the most fascinating century of its history: it was during the "Settecento" that Venice became perhaps the most elegant and refined town in Europe, influencing art, architecture, and literature. Napoleon was seen as something of a liberator by the city's Jewish population. He removed the gates of the Ghetto and ended the restrictions on when and where Jews could live and travel in the city.
At the conclusion of the Napoleonic era, Venice became part of the Austrian-held Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia when on October 12 1797 Napoleon signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. The Austrians took control of the city on January 18, 1798.
Transportation
Venice is famous for its canals. It is built on an archipelago of more than 100 islands in a shallow lagoon. In the old center, the canals serve the function of roads, and every form of transport is on water or on foot. In the 19th century a causeway to the mainland brought a railroad station to Venice, and a automobile causeway and parking lot was added in the 20th century. Beyond these land entrances at the northern edge of the city, transportation within the city remains, as it was in centuries past, entirely on water or on foot. Venice is unique in remaining a sizable functioning city in the 21st century entirely without motorcars or trucks.
The classical Venetian boat is the gondola, although it is now mostly used for tourists, or for weddings, funerals, or other ceremonies, due to its cost. Most Venetians now travel by motorised waterbuses ("vaporetti") which ply regular routes along the major canals and between the city's islands. The city also has many private boats. The only unmotorized gondolas still in common use by Venetians are the traghettos, foot passenger ferrys crossing the Grand Canal at certain points without bridges.
Venice is served by the newly rebuilt Marco Polo International Airport, or Aeroporto di Venezia Marco Polo, named in honor of its famous citizen. The airport is on the mainland and was rebuilt away from the coast so that visitors now need to get a bus to the pier, from which watertaxi or Aliliguna waterbus can be used.
Places of note
- Piazza San Marco
- Basilica di San Marco
- Doge's Palace
- The Bridge of Sighs
- La Fenice opera house
- Palazzo Grassi
- Peggy Guggenheim Collection museum
- Giudecca
- The Venetian Lagoon
- Islands of Murano, Burano, Torcello, Isola Di San Michele, Lido
The Grand Canal, Venice
painted 1835 by J.M.W. Turner
Larger version
Sinking of Venice
The buildings of Venice are constructed on closely spaced poles, or pilings, which penetrate alternating layers of clay and sand. Most of these pilings are intact after centuries of submersion. The foundations rest on the pilings, and buildings of brick or stone sit above these footings. The buildings are often threatened by flood tides pushing in from the Adriatic between autumn and early spring.
During the 20th century, when many artesian wells were sunk into the periphery of the lagoon to draw water for local industry, Venice began to sink. It was realised that extraction of the aquifer was the cause. This sinking process has slowed markedly since artesian wells were banned in the 1960s. However, the city is still threatened by more frequent low-level floods (so-called Acqua alta, "high water") that creep to a height of several centimetres over its quays, regularly following certain tides. In many old houses the ground floor is unoccupied due to the periodic floods, but people continue to live and work in the upper stories.
Some recent studies have suggested that the city is no longer sinking, but this is not yet certain; therefore, a state of alert has not been revoked. In May 2003 the Italian Prime Minister inaugurated the "Moses" project, which will lay a series of 79 inflatable pontoons across the sea bed at the three entrances to the lagoon. When tides are predicted to rise above 110 centimetres, the pontoons will be filled with air and block the incoming water from the Adriatic sea. This challenging engineering work is due to be completed by 2011.
Miscellaneous
- The city's patron saint is Mark the Evangelist.
- Venice is also famous world-wide for its unique Carnival
- Venice and its lagoon are listed as World Heritage Sites by the UNESCO.
Venice in arts and fiction
- William Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice
- Death in Venice, a 1912 novel by Thomas Mann
Famous Venetians
- Marco Polo (1254-1324), traveller
- Canaletto (1697-1768), painter.
- Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), legendary womanizer
- Hugo Pratt (1927-1995), cartoonist and creator of Corto Maltese
English words of Venetian origin
- ciao, ghetto, arsenal, Montenegro.
- "Venezuela" meant "small Venice".
See also
- Doges of Venice
- Venice Arsenal
- Venice Film Festival (This article incorporates some information taken from http://www.hostkingdom.net by permission.)
- Venice Biennale
- List of places known as 'the Venice of something'
- Venetia
- Fourth Crusade
External links
- The Carnival of Venice
- La Biennale
- What people say about Venice...
- Palazzo Grassi
- Teatro La Fenice
- Casino' Municipale di Venezia, with on-line Roulette (requires Shockwave Player)
- A real-time webcam (Canal Grande from Palazzo Balbi toward Rialto)
- Novels set in Venice listed and reviewed
- http://www.lapanse.com/venise/venise1.html (in French)
- some quick facts about Venice
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Venice."
Synonym: VeneziaSynonym: Venice (n). (additional references) |
Crosswords: Venezia |
| Non-English Usage: "Venezia" is also a word in the following language with English translations in parentheses. Italian (Venetia, Venice). |
| Domain | Usage | |
Movie/TV Titles | Morte a Venezia (1971) Addio Venezia (1969) Il Mostro di Venezia (1966) Sogno a Venezia (1958) Venezia città minore (1958) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
Books |
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Music |
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Consumer Goods | |||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit | Thumbnail | Description & Credit |
 | Venezia - Isola di Torcello. Chiesa di S. Fosca. Un capitello / Ed. Alinari. Credit: Library of Congress. |  | Potomac Electric Power Co. commercial kitchens, restaurants and lighting. Venezia Cafeteria I. Credit: Library of Congress. |
 | 9o Congresso regionale dei Repubblicani del Friuli Venezia Giulia : l'unita' regionale per la ricostruzione e per lo sviluppo del ruolo internazionale del Friuli Venezia Giulia : 29 gennaio 1978, Gorizia, auditorium Com. Credit: Library of Congress. | ||
Source: pictures compiled by the editor from various references; see picture credits. | |||
 |  |
| "Venezia" by Iliana . Commentary: "Venezia." | "Venezia" by Djalma Patricio Commentary: "Venezia, Italia." |
Source: photographs selected by the editor, with permission from the photographers. | |
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Minorities | Italy | The special rights of these areas--respectively the Valle d'Aosta, Trentino Alto Adige, and Friuli Venezia Giulia--include the use of non-Italian languages in government offices and, in Trentino Alto Adige and Valle d'Aosta, in public schools. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| "Venezia" is generally used as a noun (proper) -- approximately 97.50% of the time. "Venezia" is used about 80 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (proper) | 97.5% | 78 | 37,656 |
| Noun (singular) | 1.25% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Noun (common) | 1.25% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 80 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| The following table summarizes the usage of "Venezia" based on a population census conducted in the United States. Ranks and frequencies are based on all names reported and classified. |
| Name | Usage/Gender | Usage per 100 million Persons | Rank in USA |
| Venezia | Last name | 1,000 | 10,964 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits. | |||
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "Venezia": Venezia-Euganea. | |
Ending with "Venezia": Friuli-venezia. | |
Containing "Venezia": Friuli-Venezia Giulia. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-e-e-i-n-v-z" | |
-2 letters: azine, naevi, naive, nieve, veena, venae. | |
-3 letters: eave, even, nave, nazi, neve, nevi, vain, vane, vein, vena, vina, vine, zein. | |
-4 letters: ain, ane, ani, ave, eve, nae, nee, van, vee, via, vie, zee, zin. | |
-5 letters: ae, ai, an, en, in, na, ne. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-e-e-i-n-v-z" | |
+2 letters: vernalize. | |
+3 letters: evangelize, vernalized, vernalizes. | |
+4 letters: evangelized, evangelizes. | |
+5 letters: conservatize, evangelizing, overorganize, universalize, unverbalized. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)56 65 6E 65 7A 69 61 |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references)...- . -. . --.. .. .- |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01010110 01100101 01101110 01100101 01111010 01101001 01100001 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)V e n e z i a |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0056 0065 006E 0065 007A 0069 0061 |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)56718071927567 |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Photo Album 8. Images: Digital Art | 9. Quotations: Non-fiction 10. Usage Frequency 11. Names: Frequency 12. Expressions | 13. Expressions: Internet 14. Anagrams 15. Orthography 16. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
