In the development of the "landscape idea", no city played such an important role as did Venice. From about one hundred city gardens, squares, and courtyards, public parks and temporary gardens, the book develops a typology of gardens in a densely built environment that is permeated with history.

Professional tour guide Mariagrazia Dammicco unlocks Venice's garden gates, allowing us access to hidden oases usually closed to the general public. This book invites the reader to explore 20 of Venice's secret gardens, ranging from private family havens to convents and sanctuaries.

Britain's pre-eminent gardener and most revered photographer take readers on a journey across Venice to show how the city's complex history and fragile ecosystem create the perfect conditions for splendid gardens. For all its history and romanticism, Venice is not well known as a destination for horticultural tourists--but Monty Don is here to change that. As lush and colorful as a summer garden, this book takes readers on a spectacular tour around Venice - across its bridges and down its canals to explore both well-known and unexpected pockets of garden delights. Starting in the heart of the city and working their way out to the Veneto, Monty and acclaimed photographer Derry Moore celebrate the beauty of these places and tell their unique stories: from a nunnery garden with a history of exotic animals to the serene terraces of the Cini Foundation; charming window boxes to surprising rooftop sanctuaries. Each site is featured in Derry's luscious photographs and Monty's erudite and often deeply personal commentary. The perfect gift for garden enthusiasts or anyone with a passion for Venice, this magnificent book is a must-have for fans across the world.

In these brilliantly realized, linked tales, the real Venice is revealed – not the iconic tourist destination the city has become, but the mysterious society that resides behind its elegant doors and shuttered windows. With a sly and affectionate delicacy, Jane Turner Rylands, an American expatriate who has lived in Venice for thirty years, portrays a dozen Venetians– a construction foreman, a countess, a gondolier, a postman, an architect, a Baronessa, an English lord – as they pursue their respective interests. And in turn, through the perspective of those who live and work in this most alluring of cities, Venetian Stories illuminates canals and palazzos, churches and gondolas, large concerns and small rituals, with an uncommon intimacy.

The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto takes in a varied selection of gardens old and new, large and small, public and private. It ranges from tiny monastery gardens tucked away within the walls of Venice to grand palatial landscapes in the former marshes of the hinterland. The book is divided into five sections as well as a lively introduction which captures the rich history of this region. The first section will show the extraordinary gardens still to be found locked behind high walls in the city itself. Then Jenny Condie and Alex Ramsay wander through the more modest parts of the city where ordinary Venetians manage to grow flowers, fruit and vegetables in the most unlikely spots. Then it is out into the lagoon and wild gardens on marshy islands before turning inland to the grand Palladian villas and the Baroque splendours of villas like the Villa Barbarigo and the Villa Allegri Arvedi among many fine country residences of ancient families. All the gardens in the book can be reached within a day's expedition from Venice and practical information about access and advice on the best time of year to visit is included for all those open to the public.

The master ship builders of seventeenth-century Venice formed part of what was arguably the greatest manufacturing complex in early modern Europe. As many as three thousand masters, apprentices, and laborers regularly worked in the city's enormous shipyards. This is the social history of the men and women who helped maintain not only the city's dominion over the sea but also its stability and peace. Drawing on a variety of documents that include nearly a thousand petitions from the shipbuilders to the Venetian governments as well as on parish records, inventories, and wills, Robert C. Davis offers a vivid and compelling account of these early modern workers. He explores their mentality and describes their private and public worlds (which in some ways, he argues, prefigured the factories and company towns of a later era). He uncovers the far-reaching social and cultural role played by women in this industrial community. He shows how the Venetian government formed its shipbuilders into a militia to maintain public order. And he describes the often colorful ways in which Venetians dealt with the tensions that role provoked—including officially sanctioned community fistfights on the city's bridges. The recent decision by the Italian government to return the Venetian Arsenal to civilian control has sparked renewed interest in the subject among historians. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal offers new evidence on the ways in which large, state-run manufacturing operations furthered the industrialization process, as well as on the extent of workers' influence on the social dynamics of the early modern European city.