Venice

Venice is one of the most famous cities in the world. Almost nobody knows how it got that way.

Venice: Seven Things You Should Know is a short, accurate, accessible history of one of the most extraordinary places in the history of human civilization - told not through dates and dynasty charts, but through the things that are genuinely surprising. The things that, once known, change how you see the city.

The seven things:

• Venice was not founded. It was invented - by refugees with nowhere else to go, who built a city in a lagoon because it was the only place their enemies couldn't follow.
• The city is built on wood. Millions of wooden piles, driven into the lagoon floor over centuries, are still holding everything up - and the wood is not rotting.
• Venice became one of the richest cities in the medieval world not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of spices between Asia and Europe - and by helping divert a Crusade along the way.
• It ran the most sophisticated intelligence and surveillance apparatus of the pre-modern world. The Council of Ten, the spy networks, the stone lion's-mouth boxes where citizens could deposit denunciations. Seven centuries before the modern surveillance state.
• It invented industrial production. The Arsenal - the world's first factory - could build and equip a warship while a visiting king finished his dinner. Dante visited and used it as his model for Hell.
• It gave the world quarantine - and the word for it. The word comes directly from the Italian for forty days - the time ships were required to wait offshore during the Black Death before anyone could come ashore.
• It lasted more than a thousand years without ever being successfully invaded. And then it ended - not with a battle, but with a vote.

Part of the I'm No Expert, But series - short, accurate, accessible books on subjects that are more surprising than most people expect.

Readable in under an hour. Worth knowing for a lifetime.