Excerpt from Stories of Italy None of the gondoliers at the Rialto landing knew, nor did any of the old men at the water-steps - the men with the hooked staffs who steady your boat while you alight. Five years was so very long ago, they said, and then there had been the plague. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.