Venezia
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Africa Orientale Italiana
At Sant’Elena in Venice a flagpole base commemorates Venetians fallen in Africa Orientale Italiana – an Italian colony in Ethiopia and Somalia
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Liberation Day in Italy
Liberation Day – il Giorno della Liberazione – commemorates the end of German occupation in Italy on April 25th, 1945.
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Quarantine – forty days of isolation
Quarantine is derived from the Venetian (and Italian) word for forty, because the quarantine period on the Lazzaretto Nuovo ended up around forty days.
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Ciao – I’m your slave
Ciao – the Italian informal salute – is actually Venetian, and has its roots in the medieval slave trade.
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Ballot and ballottaggio
The Venetian lawmakers voted by casting a small ball in a vase. That ball, a balote, became a ballot in the United States.
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Cocciopesto
Cocciopesto is a dark red colour commonly used for short-lived writing on walls – but sometimes they survive.
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The United States of America and the Republic of Venice
The founding fathers of the United States of America sought inspiration, and looked to Venice, the oldest of only two republics in Europe in the 1700s.
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John Adams on the Venetian constitution
John Adams wrote about the Venetian constitution in 1787 in the “A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America”.
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Population 49,999
The population of the city of Venice has been in a steep decline for the last seventy years, and is now under 50,000 inhabitants.
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Postcards from the 1950s
Some old postcards from the 1950s give us a glimpse of how the city has changed dramatically within a single lifetime.