Venice : A New History

A book that couldn’t decide what it was, aside from a cheer squad for Venice - and especially it’s ruling class and its capitalism!
Madden’s mishmash of styles made this a dissatisfying read in the whole. it’s hard to do full justice to Venice’s 1500 year history in 400 pages so it’s surprising that he tried to do so much of it in the timeline style.
Choosing to rush through centuries in a couple of pages and dealing with the republics final collapse like it happened with a whimper probably the most frustrating of the structural decisions.
The chapters that focused, albeit fleetingly on certain aspects of Venice were the best. So perhaps he should have used that style throughout. Less Byron, more Byzantium perhaps?