For six centuries, the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign p
ower extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean - an empire of coast
s, 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 hist
oric Venetian trade routes from Venice itself to Greece, Crete and Cyprus. It is
a traveller's book, geographically arranged but wandering at will from the past
to the present, evoking not only contemporary landscapes and sensations but als
o the characters, the emotions and the tumultuous events of the past.
