#3. Venice
”..When first upon the traveller’s sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces, - each with its black boat moored at the portal, - each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation … Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or merciless, - Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests, - had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.”
Marcel Proust - In search of lost time
