island-refuge

Updated: May 19, 2025

But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents never grew into a people.

John Richard Greene - Stray Studies from England and Italy