The Clients With Big Money

Okay so I'd better warn you about things to come...

Perhaps not.

...Ahem. Moving along now though, my friend the 'lady-of-leisure' Demi 'X' is still in Venice eating chocolate cake in the veranda area outside my grandfather's Florian cafe (which is called 'Caffe Florian' there). It was his for a short time before WWII although it technically is owned by the cousins whose surname means something like 'three flower petals.' Not allowed to say their names...

Venice people messing around outside the Florian -
no, inside the Florian.

'Technically' because it's not actually theirs as such in the first place - belongs to a secretive Venetian family whose name is even more problematic to mention.

You remember how I told y'all about how the Venetian Republic signed itself out of existence? Well see, students of history will know that at that time (1796) Napoleon was in full swing smashing his way all over Europe until he pursued the Austro-Russian alliance one step too far...

The UK people pretend they 'defeated' Napoleon at Waterloo. He lost in Russia.

Beforehand however, the Republic of Venice was taken into the Austrian Empire upon the abdication of the last Doge of Venice, Manin - and this was supposedly part of a secret pact between France and Austria; Venice already being seen by all sides as something of a non-existent naval power at that stage with only a handful of militarily armed ship compared to its past pre-eminence as a naval power.

I mean I'm not really even personally sure to what purpose I would put an armed ship, or sophisticated armed aircraft or whatever today - even were such things to readily fall into one's hands!! Would you? Do we need such things anymore? 

Can you play 'two armies in the mist' in Venice?
I dunno. Can you?

This week I had a few friends in the lawyering world come to me and ask if I knew any businesses into which three foreigners might invest in order to attain their high level business migration visa? Those expensive types of visas.

Well I guess I'll have to go take a look in 'the Golden Book' to see if we have anything lying around at the moment.

One million dollars each. That's three million all up.

So. Napoleon, eh. Clever guy. Dead, though.