The gloomy landscape of the Venetian lagoon has often surprised those who associate it with Venice and nothing else. “This damp expanse, speckled with islets, clogged with mud-banks and half-drowned fields…a place of beautiful desolation,” wrote Jan Morris.

Perhaps that was an incentive of sorts to make the houses so colorful, the palaces so grand and the art so epiphanous. From the dreamy dollhouses of Burano to the grandiose palaces of Venice, the residents of the lagoon have succeeded in turning this swampy marshland into a place of joy, spectacle and beauty.