What did Venice and its culture mean to the European area that extends beyond Vienna? This is the question we try to respond to this year, guided by our curiosity about whether Venice was of significance not only to the grand imperial capitals (Vienna and St Petersburg), as analysed in two of our previous explorations, but also to the many socio-cultural realities that for centuries coexisted in the boundless, indistinct lands that range from Gdansk to the Black Sea; areas, moreover, not highly populated by natural promoters and purchasers of high culture.

Was it worth going to see? The reader can judge for himself, but it is certain that the pages that follow are very engaging, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because figures of great vigour and intellectual curiosity are met there (not only emperors, kings, princes and electors). Secondly, because there are many different places where the creative and commercial flows of Venetian cultural production condensed (from Buda to Prague, Krakow and Warsaw). Thirdly, because the ’quantitative’ terms of such flows are very considerable – often not secondary to the ‘movement’ towards places much more closely linked to Venetian tradition (for example it is a surprise that three centuries ago Prague was a genuine gold mine of Venetian music, that a very large number of nobles collected in the mid-seventeenth century, and that the Kaunitz counts, whose Viennese palace is the viewing point for a celebrated panorama of the Austrian capital by Bernardo Bellotto, owned 2000 paintings). Finally, it is because the overall picture created is of a great polycentrism of small and medium towns, small and medium buyers and commissioners, small and medium Venetian artists involved in the dynamic of creation and cultural collecting. Rudolph II certainly occupied a preeminent place in all this, but his undoubted importance (to him we owe the transfer of the court from Vienna to Prague, and the creation of its charming old city centre) does not significantly overshadow such polycentrism.

This polycentrism also influenced the human, almost sociological dimension that is expressed in it. They were muddled and often frantic societies at times, and it can be understood that Venetian ambassadors and merchants were ‘disconcerted, dismayed and dumbfounded’ by the great number of magicians, charlatans, readily available women, imaginative storytellers, swindlers, spies and even slave merchants who frequented the city, and people who ambitiously assimilated grand Venetian culture. The lands ‘beyond Vienna’ were certainly not of an great elegance in terms of collective behaviours (as the adventurous Casanova also noted). And providing the means for understanding this mediocre physical nature of theirs (in eating and drinking, but also in more complex dealings) is no secondary merit of the contributions collected here.