An Attila unto the State of Venice
On April 25, 1797, Francesco Donà and Lunardo Giustinian arrived in Graz (modern Austria), two exhausted diplomats representing an equally weary and addled state. They came to see the Emperor Napoleon, Consul of the French Republic, and to beg him for mercy and for restraint. Donà and Giustinian spoke for arguably the only state in the world that actually remembered other consuls of a previous epoch, those appointed by the emperors in Constantinople and Ravenna. Donà and Giustinian came from Venetian Republic, La Serenissima. In the early days of consuls and western emperors, Venice as we know it didn't exist, either culturally or politically or even geographically. The islands which we today recognize for their palazzos and church towers and throngs of sunburnt tourists are the product of landfill and dredging and tens of thousands of wooden posts thrust into the lagoon bottom which hold up Venice and which now are slowly sinking back into the sands that support...