[txt] Venice: A Second-Hand City? - Recycled Goods - www.open2.net
Renaissance Venice was astonishingly good at PR - the city sold itself as a place of unique harmony, freedom and prosperity, specially favoured by God. Should we take the Venetian publicists at their own estimation? How did the ordinary man or woman in the street manage on a day-to-day basis? Given the gulf that existed between the poor who pledged their children against loans and the rich who carried a fortune in clothes on their backs, how did society hold together? What was the social cement? We present here evidence and invite you use them as a starting point in thinking about possible answers to these problems. There is difficulty in knowing anything about the poor and illiterate, those who lived on the margins of society, for they were powerless to tell their own story; it was the literate elite who recorded what was inevitably a partial and prejudiced account of the lives of the poor.
video Pink Floyd - Money (Venice 1989) Guigui31b on youtube [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCpkHkq4apE]