For centuries, Venice has attracted literary representations, from J.W. Goethe’s Italian Journey  to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, passing through the work of John Ruskin, Thomas Mann, and Joseph Brodsky, to mention only a few, a thick urban palimpsest of narrative stratifications. This long and stratified literary history has made Venice one of those ineffable, “unspeakable cities, about which too much has already been said, those cities in front of which it seems we have nothing more to say” (Rossetto, “Le città” 17). However, there is a network of cities close to Venice that still calls for “cognitive mapping” and rethinking.