Venetian Empire a Sea Voyage

For six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean - an empire of coasts islands and isolated fortresses by which as Wordsworth wrote the mercantile Venetians held the gorgeous east in fee. Jan Morris reconstructs the whole of this glittering dominion in the form of a sea-voyage travelling along the historic Venetian trade routes from Venice itself to Greece Crete and Cyprus. It is a travellers book geographically arranged but wandering at will from the past to the present evoking not only contemporary landscapes and sensations but also the characters the emotions and the tumultuous events of the past. The first such work ever written about the Venetian Stato da Mar it is an invaluable historical companion for visitors to Venice itself and for travellers through the lands the Doges once ruled.