Word: serenissima
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Four centuries ago, no body imagined that La Serenissima, the most serene republic, would come to this. In 1550, when much of Rome was a rubbish heap and wild pigs rooted in the Forum, Venice had never been invaded; its form of government - by council and committee, hardly a democracy in the modern sense but a vast improvement, in point of rights and liberty, on the feudal or city-boss regimes that prevailed elsewhere in Europe - had scarcely changed since the 14th century, and would continue until 1797, when Napoleon abolished...
From a distance, seemingly beyond the stage, the workshop of an eccentric inventor swims into view, its cheery interior alive with whirring mechanical toys that no child has ever imagined. Gondolas glide serenely through the perfumed, decadent atmosphere of La Serenissima-Venice, dark and dangerous. A placid bourgeois home suddenly explodes with the nightmarish visitation of a sinister, cadaverous physician who walks through walls and bursts from fireplaces in a ball of flame...
...better with one another than they have at past meetings. Carter is still regarded with suspicion and indeed disdain by some European leaders, who think that he is too much of an amateur in statecraft. But for the most part, allied tensions ebbed in the tranquil setting of la Serenissima...