Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Tourist in Italy
To the eye of the stranger the aspect of Venice first pre sents itself like some vision of the deep, while her history fills the mind with awe and wonder at the stem and fearful realities and heroic recollections with which it abounds. She stands alone and unparalleled in the annals of Italy's tempestuous rep'ublics, - those hypocrites of liberty, which recoiled from foreign despotism only the more effectually to exalt themselves, by harassing and oppressing each other. While torn by internal factions and successive revolutions, the rest of Italy wielded at will their fierce democracies Venice preserved unshaken her high and palmy state, based on the deep, invisible foundations of her more than Machiavellian system, - the combination of petty tyrants, which, unlike that of slaves, seldom fails to accomplish the Objects it has in view. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
