Word: venetian
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Think of your typical Italian opera. Now substitute a trance beat for the aria, a blank screen for the Venetian cityscape, a hand-crafted marionette for the buxom donna and art for her paramour...
...lost track of how complicated the political divisions of the medieval Mediterranean really were. Constantinople fell in 1453 not because it failed to collaborate with western Europe but because of centuries of economic decline and lack of military innovation. Hastening this collapse was the brutal ambush of Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204; ignorant Christian warriors melted ancient Greek statues to sell their bronze by weight, they picked the gems out of precious Orthodox relics. Why would residents of Constantinople ever want to ally with the pillagers of their heritage...
...city chock full of big-time gamblers, Sheldon Adelson, 70, stands out for his bold bets. "Either I'm the stupidest guy around or the biggest crapshooter in town," he said before opening his $1.5 billion Venetian mega-resort in 1999, complete with canals, gondola rides and its own convention center next door. Five years later, the Venetian is one of Sin City's most profitable hotels, and Adelson has led Vegas' transformation into a business destination...
...worth an estimated $1.8 billion, Adelson isn't resting on his laurels. With the help of his chief lieutenant, William Weidner, he just opened Asia's first Las Vegas--style casino (see following story), he's about to break ground on a $1.6 billion resort near the Venetian, and he may soon take public his privately held company, Las Vegas Sands, Inc., which could be valued at more than $4 billion...
...than 30,000 visitors a day at the $240 million Sands Macao, which uses the Portuguese spelling. But the Sands, with its golden facade and shimmering neon-purple fountain, will have some serious sibling rivalry in 2006 when its parent company finishes building an $800 million replica of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, complete with imitation canals and singing gondoliers. Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson is so gung ho about Macau that he is enlisting partners in a $10 billion project to duplicate the Vegas Strip on a sliver of reclaimed land between two of the territory's islands...