This beautiful travel video of Venice from Expedia lives up to the high standards of its tribe. The online travel booking service has dozens of fine videos of cities around the world that are so nice that they might make you feel that you need not go to the expense of traveling there. Only kidding. This one is merely nine minutes long. Would it were longer!

I choose Venice because I recently wrote of the Assassin’s Creed video games, the earliest of which sets its game play in La Serenissima, the Queen of the Adriatic, City of Water, City of Masks, City of Bridges, the Floating City, and City of Canals, to list only those nicknames listed in Wikipedia’s entry for the capital of the Veneto, which I visited in 2005.

Cities and towns could be as beautiful as Venice if we could turn away from modern architecture and take up the great traditions of building and urban planning. Beauty is not some thing of the past that that is lost and gone. We have every reason to make use of it today. All it requires is the will to do so – a fact that makes our ugly built environment a problem more easily soluble than almost every problem facing mankind. So much more easy to solve than such longstanding global vexations as poverty, injustice, ignorance, disease, war, etc. It is as easy as snapping our fingers – if only we could dethrone the cult of modernism that forces the world to accept its unhappy lot. If only …

But don’t get me going.

Also, I want to report that with the assistance of Kellie at WordPress support, I learned today that the difficulty of my inability to place the usual images on my last post was easily solved. All I had to do was to prune my WordPress media library, which was absolutely full. I have done so and here is the link to that post, “Vid cities in ‘Fortnite’ game,” with its intended illustration of the Happy Hamlet. And below are a couple more images of La Dominante.