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The urban space in the Republic of Venice (circa 800–1797) seems to have had a more malleable and variable quality than other towns situated on dry land: its physical space was not merely an ‘infrastructure’, the precondition for the existence of social space, but rather something that was actively produced and reconstructed by society itself. This is one reason why the authors decided to use the Republic of Venice to study the relationship between the social and physical space and chart the ways in which social inequalities at the dawn of the modern era were reflected in the organisation of the urban space. They present Venice as ‘two cities in one’: Venice the city built and portrayed from the perspective of the privileged classes, i.e. the viewpoint of those who had themselves transported through the city on gondolas; and Venice the city of the pedestrian traffic of the lower classes, excluded from political life. The authors set out to attain a better understanding of the deep social and political inequalities that existed in Venice on the one hand and of how it endured a thousand years of internal political stability without experiencing a single attempt at revolt, revolution or social uprising on the other. They therefore focus not just on forms of stratification, segregation and exclusion, but also on how Venetian society integrated its marginalised members and how it accorded them social and cultural relevance and recognition.