In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venicenot the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle ?poque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the Disneylandification” of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themesthe increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture.