"Built on wooden pilings sunk into the ooze of a backwater lagoon, Venice rose over a millennium to become a city-state of dazzling power...When Napoleon seized Venice in 1797, the Queen of the Adriatic has already become a faded dowager haunted by gilded memories."

(Text from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "More Than a Dream: Venice," February 1995, National Geographic magazine)