Italy Travel: Venice

WebVisionItaly.com travels Italy to Venice, just in time for Carnival - Venezia Carnevale. After the jump more Venice inside tips and Piazza San Marco.




Venice is a magical city built over 400 islands. This city has always been a mercantile city. Piazza San Marco is the center of Venice and one of Europe's largest squares. A visit to Venice, one of Italy's maritime powerhouses, is to learn about how the context and physical location of Venice had everything to do with its rise to wealth and mercantilism. By living literally in the sea Venetians spent time looking outward with an open mind toward what was to be discovered in the Mediterranean and in the case of Marco Polo as far away as China. While the church was running its crusades Marco Polo was trading with Arabs and Asians, bringing spices, silks, jewels, and of course pasta back to Venice in the 12th century. The merchants of Venice such as Murano Glass is another example of the Venetians taking best practices from around the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas and incorporating them into their glass making style and process to create something uniquely Venetian. At the same time continental Europeans were not equipped to invade a sea-land empire to steal the wealth giving Venice the time and space it need to grow into the world's richest city. Inevitably Venice's location and its efect on the Venetians led to the Venetian's success in commerce and trade with foreign cultures and people. Venice is another example from the Italic peninsula of how importing the best practises of the cultures they traded with and then putting a unique stamp leads to long term success and prosperity, much like the Romans, and the Etrucans before them who created the first

Italy Travel - Carnevale di Ivrea

Carnevale di Ivrea has been through several iterations in the 400 years since its founding. Ivrea, Piedmont today features an exciting orange throwing festival and battle rooted in the middle ages when feudal lords twice annually would give beans to the people who were of course all poor due to the Lord's largess. The people would then ceremoniously toss the beans out the windows and into the streets giving the lords the proverbial middle finger. Sounds fitting in today's environment of $1.2 trillion deficits. Maybe even a lesson in there for we post-modern sophisticates. If your Italy travel brings you to Torino consider a stop in Ivrea, where the people took control of their town in a renaissance of public and civic spirit and pride and re-engineered their carnevale to represent freedom from the shackles of the past and a celebration of the towns new urban identity.