This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 Excerpt: ...about Venice has also been widely read in French and German translations. In some sense, indeed, Ruskin may be said to have discovered Venice to the modern world. Venice had been, it is true, a favourite haunt with travellers of many nations for many centuries before Ruskin, but she was visited for reasons and with ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 Excerpt: ...about Venice has also been widely read in French and German translations. In some sense, indeed, Ruskin may be said to have discovered Venice to the modern world. Venice had been, it is true, a favourite haunt with travellers of many nations for many centuries before Ruskin, but she was visited for reasons and with eyes very different from those of the modern tourist or student. Referring to the alleged " commercial appetite " which is supposed to have governed the zeal of Venice for the crusades, Ruskin says that "Venice was sincerely pious and intensely covetous. But not covetous merely of money. She was covetous, first, of fame; secondly, of kingdom; thirdly, of pillars of marble and granite; lastly, and quite principally, of the relics of good people." It was this last form of acquisition to which Venice owed her early influx of foreign visitors. In the Middle Ages men became tourists in order to visit holy places and holy relics, and Venice rivalled even Rome in the number of its relics.1 Then, at a later age, Venice was visited as the city of 1 See the " History of Travel in Italy" in Mr. James Sully's Italian Travel Sketches. a Great Power, the centre of a world-state; the papers collected by the Record Office from the Venetian archives sufficiently attest this phase in her history. In the days of her political decline Venice suffered no diminution in her popularity with foreign visitors. She became one of the pleasure cities of Europe, and travellers went to her for her gay social life and her stately pageants. Venice, as Thackeray says in The Four Georges, "was the most jovial of all places at the end of the seventeenth century; and military men after a campaign rushed thither, as the warriors of the Allies r...
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