Venice

This is a succinct little book. Physically, it's a bit thick, but it's not tall at all. What it does is take (what I assume is) a large majority of Venice's most important buildings and give a 2- or 3-paragraph write-up on them. It's loaded with pictures, but you can also go to the internet to research more regarding their history or their interior and exterior architecture.

It also does something similar with Venice's art, but that's of lesser interest to me. I actually started to skip the write-ups on the art at about the halfway point.

I can't recommend this book highly enough as a companion to any beginner's reading about Venice. It's an absolutely great jumping-off point for Venetian architecture for amateurs.