A city in the northeast of Italy, built on many small islands in a shallow bay. Instead of roads between the buildings, it has water: canals, which are man-made rivers. People move around by boat, or on foot over the hundreds of small bridges. The most famous boat is the gondola — long, thin, black, pushed along by one person standing at the back with a pole. Tourists ride them; local people mostly take the water buses. Venice is full of old churches, palaces and paintings, and it holds a famous film festival and a famous carnival where people wear masks. Hundreds of years ago Venice was not part of Italy at all — it was its own country, rich and strong, with a big navy and traders who sailed all over the Mediterranean and beyond. Because of all this, the name carries a feeling as well as a place: when people say a city is 'the Venice of the North' or 'the Venice of the East', they mean it has a lot of canals and boats, not that it is Italian. Note two spellings that look alike but are different places: Venice is the city, and Venezia is the same city in Italian. There is also a Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and small towns called Venice in the USA — so in an American conversation, check which one is meant. The adjective is Venetian: Venetian glass, a Venetian mask. A 'Venetian blind' is a window covering made of flat strips — that use has drifted far from the city and is just the name of an object now.