This is the walking guide to Venice taking in the cultural highlights and illustrated with paintings, photographs and engravings to reveal how the city became how it is today. None of Venice's innumerable chroniclers have portrayed the Serenissima's character with quite such a combination of the scholarly, the informal and the intimate. Over the years thousands of readers, starting this book, have been relieved to encounter its famously undemanding approach to the city - 'Generally the first thing to do in Venice is to sit down and have a coffee': but by the time they get to the end of it, all the same, they will have learnt virtually everything that an educated stranger needs to know about the place, its art and history, besides being subtly entertained throughout. (from Jan Morris' introduction to this new 8th revised edition published on the occasion of the title's 40th Anniversary).