Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates
The ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico attracted little attention during his lifetime, except in Venice, where his works found an enthusiastic audience. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's early ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Sandi (1725–26) offers a unique example of how contemporary Venetian intellectuals read Vico's work. It appears that Tiepolo's patrons based the iconography of their salone on Vico's Universal Law (1720–22) and first New Science (1725) to illustrate the main tenets of the myth of Venice, a political fiction that legitimized the class structure of the republic and the absolute legislative and judicial authority of its aristocracy.
Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as a Double Heritage in Venetian Cultural Politics
Modern scholars have stressed Venice's artistic and cultural ties to Byzantium, as represented by the imitation and appropriation of Byzantine works - a process that appears to have been at its height in the thirteenth century. Or, alternatively, scholars have emphasized Venice's connection to the West, to ideas of ancient lineage and classical antique style as inspired by Rome - a process generally seen as coming to the fore in the fifteenth century. This article sets out to trace the coexistence of both traditions. 
 
Though awareness of this dual heritage developed already in the early thirteenth century, it was in the following century, with the expanasion onto the mainland, that it was consciously cultivated in order to give Venice a distinct identity setting it apart from other Italian city-states. The key figure was the scholar-doge Andrea Dandolo (1343-54), who used San Marco to express artistic statements that would project the East-West message. By the time of the sixteenth-century theorists, such as Gasparo Contarini, the concept was firmly rooted in the Venetian vision.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.