Venetian

Venetian culture belongs to the Veneto people of north-eastern Italy, centred on lagoon Venice. Their Venetian language grew from local Vulgar Latin, first attested in the thirteenth century; linguists debate whether it is Gallo-Italic or its own Dalmatian Romance group.

In 1337 Venice was the dominant Adriatic maritime republic, ruled by its doge and Great Council, its merchants linking Europe with the Byzantine and Islamic east. After the War of Chioggia with Genoa, it conquered a mainland empire, taking Treviso, Padua and Verona by the early fifteenth century. Venetian was a Mediterranean trade lingua franca with its own theatre, from Ruzante's peasant comedies to the eighteenth-century Goldoni, while Tuscan became the language of formal writing.

The League of Cambrai defeated Venice at Agnadello in 1509, and Ottoman wars cost it Cyprus, Crete and Aegean possessions. In 1797 Napoleon abolished the republic, ceding the Veneto to Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio; after a decade in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, it returned to Habsburg rule in 1815 as part of Lombardy-Venetia.