06 September 2026

Greetings!

I am writing this to you on Saturday from Koper, Slovenia, which was one of the first ports on this two-month adventure aboard Seabourn Quest.

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We finished up strong this week with an extended stay in Dubrovnik, which gave us just enough time after my final lecture to jump in a taxi and make it to PROTO for a bang up dinner to celebrate our 32nd anniversary. I feel very blessed that Dmitry enjoys sharing this crazy lifestyle with me. It was an expansive meal with a delectable lobster pasta with Croatian capers that has lodged itself in my mind rather doggedly. I can’t work out what they did to the capers, but they were utterly addictive.

Yesterday we had a lovely day ashore in Hvar, Croatia, joining the locals on the rocks for a swim in the crystal clear waters of the Adriatic, followed by a marvelous lunch alfresco. Hvar is a place I’d love to return to for a more extended stay: it combines beautiful architecture with superb natural wonders. It’s also the epicenter of Croatia’s lavender cultivation.

By the time you read this I will have said my goodbyes to all onboard, and made my way into the heart of Venice.

We will remain for three days. I am here to work, building a new 8 Hour guide to the city, which means walking the routes myself, timing the vaporetto connections, finding out which churches actually open when they say they will, and eating a great deal in the interest of research. It is my favorite kind of work, and I will report back.

We could not have timed the arrival better, because tomorrow is the first Sunday in September, and the first Sunday in September in Venice belongs to the Regata Storica. The Republic began staging regattas in the thirteenth century for entirely unsentimental reasons — a maritime power that rowed rather than sailed needed its oarsmen fit, drilled, and competitive — and what started as state-sponsored training has become the most theatrical afternoon on the Venetian calendar.

It opens at half past three with the corteo storico, a parade of sixteenth-century boats crewed in costume, re-enacting the welcome Venice staged in 1489 for Caterina Cornaro when she handed the Republic the crown of Cyprus. Then the racing, in ascending order of seriousness: the children, the young men and women in pupparini, the six-oared caorline, the women's mascarete, and at last the gondolini, two rowers apiece, standing and pushing on the oar rather than pulling, down a Grand Canal lined four deep and roaring. They finish at the machina, a gilded floating pavilion moored opposite Ca' Foscari, where the judges hand the first four crews their flags — red, white, green, and blue, in that order of glory. Venetians have been arguing about who deserved the red one for roughly seven centuries. I intend to find a place on the Volta del Canal and lose the entire afternoon, and will report on this next week.

There is a symmetry to this visit that I have been turning over for the past few days. I first came to Venice in the 1980s on a shoestring: the kind of trip where you calculate whether the Accademia is worth the price of dinner, and dinner usually loses, though somehow I think we scraped together enough for a bellini each at Harry’s Bar. I like to think so, anyway. It was an incredibly romantic trip, but the city itself defused into a haze of things I could not afford to enter, admired mostly from the outside, and I remember being perfectly, ferociously happy about it. This time I have three unhurried days, a centrally-located hotel, a sturdy leather notebook, and a research budget. I intend to walk into every single one of those buildings I once stood outside.

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Rather than three books this week, I am giving you twenty-one.

I have been assembling a Venice reading list for years: college and post-college art history deep dives, pulling books down from Northampton’s wonderful library for talks, arguing with them, putting them back, listening to Jan Morris’s evocative explorations of the squares and canals — and I finally sat down and organized the whole thing into something you can actually use. It is now live: Venice Reading List: 21 Books.

The organizing idea came from Cardinal Bessarion, who in 1468 handed Venice his collection of 750 Greek and Latin manuscripts. He had his pick of European cities. He chose Venice because he considered it quasi alterum Byzantium — another Byzantium — and because he trusted the Venetians to actually read the things. That instinct, that Venice is a working city rather than a stage set, is the thread running through every book on this list.

It seems to me that Venice attracts more sentimental prose per square meter than any city on earth. If doesn’t, it should. Sunsets, gondolas, decay, Charles and Sebastian exploring with Cara, melancholy, the inevitable Death-in-Venice fog. Some of it is glorious. Most of it tells you nothing about how a lagoon full of mud and refugees came to run a maritime empire for a thousand years and keep the books of Europe along the way.

The list divides into four parts:

The Republic and Its Sea: the histories, from Roger Crowley's City of Fortune through Dennis Romano's magisterial 2024 Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, plus Mary Laven's Virgins of Venice, which recovers the lives of the women the Republic locked into convents as a matter of state policy. I found the latter endlessly fascinating.

Stone, Pigment, and Water: art and architecture, including Deborah Howard on how you build a marble city on wooden pilings driven into mud, and Peter Humfrey on why Venetian painters turned to oil on canvas when the damp destroyed their frescoes. Ruskin is here too, thesis and all.

The City in Prose: Jan Morris, Peter Ackroyd, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and yes, Mann. If you are going to encounter the clichés, encounter them at the source.

La Cucina Veneziana : four cookbooks, none of them interchangeable, including Enrica Rocca writing about her own city with an entirely bracing lack of reverence.

If you are sailing into Venice this season and want one of each, here is my starting quartet: Crowley for the history, Howard for the architecture, Morris for the feeling of the place, and *Russell Norman's Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking for the food — which also boasts the best cicchetti* crawl in print, and I intend to test this claim thoroughly.

→ Explore the full Venice Reading List​

The Merchants of Venice: How a City Built on Mud Invented the Modern World

Each book on The Venice Reading List circles the same impossible fact, which is the subject of my new long-form piece: The Merchants of Venice: How a City Built on Mud Invented the Modern World. This is an article version of a new talk I gave on Quest twice, which was well received.

The thesis: Venice should not exist. Not metaphorically — physically. The Lombards came over the Alps in 568, the mainlanders fled into a lagoon no cavalry could cross, and what began as a refugee camp on sandbanks ended as the commercial capital of the medieval world. The wooden pilings are still down there, holding up the marble.

What I find most interesting is what Venice built once it stopped merely surviving, things that it often took from others and improved and expanded. Florentine double-entry bookkeeping. Genoese letters of credit and maritime insurance. The first general patent statute, in 1474. The relazione: the written intelligence report every returning ambassador had to file, so good that other governments bought copies. Quarantine, which Dubrovnik decreed first, in 1377; Venice stretched it to forty days, which is where the word comes from, and in 1423 built the first permanent lazaretto. The Arsenal ran an assembly line three centuries before anyone thought to call it that, and could arm and launch a galley in hours. Dante reached for its boiling pitch when he needed an image for Hell.

The article does not flinch from the rest of it. Enrico Dandolo, blind and past eighty, turned the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople in 1204 and called the plunder a business decision. In 1516 the Republic invented the ghetto — the word is Venetian — and gave Europe a model of segregation it used for four hundred years. The same institutional genius produced both. That is the argument.

Then Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape in 1497, the monopoly evaporated, and in 1797 Napoleon dissolved a thousand-year republic. The city stopped being the engine of the world and became its playground. Understanding the first part changes how you walk through the second.

→ Read the full article​

Venice Highlights

I’m excited to announce that I’m rolling out a new product: bespoke maps. It began with frustration during a search for a workable map of Ibiza to use in my new talk about the city for Explora I. It has taken off from there! I created this map to accompany my new History of Venice talk, and made it available it to Seabourn passengers to help them explore. I will be building out a “Map Room” on my website in the coming months. This is really satisfying work!

The front shows the location of 50 of Venice’s key highlights, and the reverse gives you more information about them. Click the map to download.

If you’d like to share the map with your friends and family, just send them this link: https://jennifereremeeva.com/venice-highlights/.

I rarely recommend an entire show rather than a single episode, but the History of Venice Podcast has earned it. Jess and Simon are working through Venetian history in order, from the very beginning, meeting the doges, the schemers, and the occasional outright lunatic as they come. They are somewhere in the thirteenth century now, ninety-odd episodes in, which tells you something about their pace and rather more about their stamina. Episodes run thirty to fifty minutes, arrive every other week, and carry no advertising whatsoever — a small mercy I appreciate more each year. The banter is funny and never comes at the expense of the history. Start at episode one and let it run in the background of your ordinary life; by the time you reach the lagoon, the Republic will make sense to you as a system rather than a stage set.

For something you can absorb between the airport and the water taxi, Katy Clarke gives nineteen brisk minutes to the five experiences she considers essential in Venice on Untold Italy. What I like about this episode is its practicality: she is very clear about what rewards independent wandering and what you must book well in advance, and she does not pretend the Piazza is a secret nobody has discovered. It is the episode I would hand to a first-time visitor who has one day ashore, a vaporetto pass, and no intention of reading twenty-one books beforehand. Consider it the shortcut for everyone in your party who did not do the homework.

Ruskin sits on the reading list, and I know perfectly well that some of you took one look at three volumes of Victorian prose about eighty churches and quietly moved along. Here is the side door: LibriVox has recorded Volume One in its entirety, thirty-six chapters, free, because the text has been in the public domain for a very long time. The narration is volunteer work and the quality varies — that is the LibriVox bargain, and you take the rough with the smooth. But Ruskin rewards listening far more than he rewards reading. His thesis is exasperating and his eye is unmatched: nobody before or since has looked at a capital, a doorway, or a band of brickwork with such ferocious concentration. Put a chapter on before you go, and you will never walk past a Venetian window unseeing again.

• ​Venice Reading List: 21 Books​
• ​The Merchants of Venice: How a City Built on Mud Invented the Modern World​
• ​The Sunniest Cure in Europe​
• ​Iberian Reading List: 21 Books to Read in Spain and Portugal​
• ​The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii | Review​
• ​Ice, Trolls & Deep Water: A Traveler’s Guide to the Norwegian Fjords​

Be sure to check in with the Destination Resources Reading Lists, which I update regularly with new books, podcasts, TV and film, and other resources designed to make your travel meaningful. I did a big update recently, changing the format to make it easier to navigate. Visit via this link!

So the summer aboard Quest ends here, in the one port where disembarkation feels less like leaving a ship than arriving somewhere. I will spend three days walking Venice with a notebook, and the 8 Hours in Venice guide will follow shortly — my aim is a day that gets you well past the Piazza and back to the ship on time, which is a harder piece of engineering than it sounds.

We will return to Riga for a few weeks of down time, just in time to enjoy all of the early autumn produce at Riga Central Market. Dmitry says all he wants is a fridge full of soup, but I will be experimenting with capers in my test kitchen and indulging in perfectly ripe tomatoes, plums, and, of course, mushrooms!

We are looking forward to a short visit to Berlin later this month: Dmitry is attending a conference and I will be back on the research beat: 2027 is a Baltic-intense year on my cruise schedule and I am developing several new talks, including one on German history and bridge commentary for the Kiel Canal.

We will then make our way to Barcelona for a weekend there before joining Explora I from Barcelona to Rome, with new talks on Carthage, Malta, Sorrento, and La Goulette that I have been living inside all summer. And maps!

I love hearing from you — and I always ask you to let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and always welcome suggestions from this remarkable community of readers. If Venice is on your itinerary this autumn, tell me what you want the guide to solve, and I will do my best to solve it while I am standing there.

Safe onward travels!

I hope you've enjoyed this edition of the Destination Curation | Books for Travelers Newsletter.

New Navigation for the Newsletter I’m delighted to announce that you can now browse past issues of the Destination Curation Newsletter by region! This is a great leap forward thanks to the good people at Kit.com, the platform I use to run this newsletter. I hope you’ll enjoy visiting past issues and perhaps researching future travel. Scroll past the featured post on this page: https://jennifer-eremeeva.kit.com/profile and find the regional menu: Note that when locked articles tell you that you can only access this content with “A Premium Subscription,” this does not mean you — or anyone else — has to pay to access. The Destination Curation newsletter is free and always will be. Simply enter the email you used to subscribe and you will have instant access. Now it is much easier to share the entire backlist of the Destination Curation newsletter with your friends and family. Simply share this URL: https://jennifer-eremeeva.kit.com/profile.

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I love hearing from you — and I always ask you to let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and always welcome suggestions from this remarkable community of readers. If Venice is on your itinerary this autumn, tell me what you want the guide to solve, and I will do my best to solve it while I am standing there.

Safe onward travels!

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