Hints and tips:
...Napoleon was an early adopter, instructing his army to have transfer paper and portable presses brought to the battlefields so that artist-reporters could dispatch news of his successes....
...In “Hall Mirror with Table”, placed in one of the most evocative settings in Venice, the Palazzo Pisani on Campo San Stefano, Armajani invites us to watch our own reflections in the context of Venetian grandeur...
...Archivio di Stato, Campo dei Frari 3002 (+39041-522 2281; www.archiviodistatovenezia.it). Biblioteca Marciana, Piazzetta San Marco 7 (+39041-240 7211; www.marciana.venezia.sbn.it)....
...By the 1700s, Venice was the party capital of Europe and the continent’s most fashionable city but Napoleon’s invasion in 1797 put an end to its dominance....
...They themselves were the progeny of a merchant family so wealthy that during Napoleon’s occupation of Venice they paid 10 times as much tax as any other noble in the city....
...His fervour was followed by Napoleon’s invasion and its ruinous wars. Noble gardening was hit yet again. It was not extinguished, however....
...In the Campo San Barnaba, the aluminium café chairs were tilted against an impending shower, the vegetable man swaddled to the chin beneath his awning in the boat....
...Soon the conversation lapsed and my eye was drawn to the late evening sun catching on the windows of a tractor, to the wind soughing the leaves of Napoleon’s poplars, swifts flying parallel to the train...
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