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Writers

Un shop avec tous les livres sur Venise

Compared to other Italian cities, literacy rates in Venice were high, although on the whole readers and the state were more interested in practical books than poetry. Petrarch left much of his library to the Serenissima, which promptly misplaced it. Although the 14th-century Travels of Marco Polo brim with marvels, the book is also very down to earth. Venetians could (and did) read Marco for tips on what to buy and sell in faraway lands.

Gutenberg had his first movable-type printing press running by 1450, but Venice, sniffing a money making opportunity, became the first place to print and sell books like any other commodity (it was also the first place to commercially manufacture spectacles, so people could read them). The Senate issued its first licence to print in 1469, announcing: 'This peculiar invention of our time...is in every way to be fostered and advanced.'

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Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi

Countess, hostess and writer

Pietro Aretino

Scourge of Princes

Pietro Bembo

Venice's Renaissance man

Byron goes swimming

Venice makes him a new man

Giacomo Casanova

Polymath, lover and the greatest diarist of the 18th century

Veronica Franco

Poet and courtesan

Carlo Goldoni

The Molière of Venice

Carlo Gozzi

The Fairy Tale Playwright

Lorenzo da Ponte

Priest, womanizer, professor—and Mozart's librettist

Prostitutes and Courtesans

Big business back in the day

John Ruskin

And the Stones of Venice

Paolo Sarpi

Venice's great rebel priest

Sebastiano Serlio

Author of the Seven Books of Architecture

Gaspara Stampa

The ‘new Sappho’

Giovanni Francesco Straparola

The Father of Fairy Tales

Elena Arcangela Tarabotti

Early feminist nun

Text © Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls

Images by Abxbay, PD Art