venice

Venice Travel Guide - Yahoo Canals, gondolas, and the Rialto Bridge. You think you know what to expect from Venice, but it turns out that no photo, however digitally enhanced, can hold a candle to the real city. To get to know it, though, requires more than an afternoon. While the day-trippers...

Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is situated on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The name is derived from the ancient Veneti people who inhabited the region by the 10th century BC.

Venice's small islands were enhanced during the Middle Ages by the dredging of soil to raise the marshy ground above the tides. The resulting canals encouraged the flourishing of a nautical culture which proved central to the economy. Today those canals still the provide means for transportation.

San Giorgio Maggiore is a 16th-century Benedictine church on the island of the same name in Venice, northern Italy, designed by Andrea Palladio, and built between 1566 and 1610. The church is a basilica in the classical renaissance style and its brilliant white marble gleams above the blue water.

Piazza San Marco, often known in English as St Mark's Square, is the principal public square of Venice, Italy, where it is generally known just as la Piazza. All other urban spaces in the city are called campi. The Piazzetta is an extension of the Piazza towards the lagoon in its south east corner.