Few of its many observers, analysts, and visitors have remained indifferent to the Serenissima. To John Ruskin it was “the paradise of cities”; to D.H. Lawrence, “an abhorrent, green, slippery city”; and for the Italian Futurist poet Marinetti, “a magnificent sore from the past” whose canals he would have had filled with the rubble of the demolished palazzi and museums. Venice lost its raison d’être as entrepôt between East and West when the Portuguese discovered the seaborne spice route to the Indies in the fifteenth century: since then it has been a living – and dying – museum city, a place of fashion, intrigue, fantasy, enchantment, dalliance, art – and above all of tourism.Australian historian Richard Bosworth sta