Venice, Italy

  I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;

  A palace and a prison on each hand:

  I saw from out the wave her structures rise

  As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand;

  A thousand years their cloudy wings expand        

  Around me, and a dying glory smiles

  O’er the far times when many a subject land

  Looked to the wingéd’s Lion’s marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

Venice, Lord Byron