Neither land nor water, but shimmering somewhere ... La Serenissima ("the most serene one"), as Venice is known, is anything but. The world steps into the exquisitely carved font of the city ...

Despite Venice's impressive architectural history, the image at the source of this fact check was generated using artificial intelligence (AI) and doesn't accurately represent the "Most Serene" city's ...

This story appears in the March 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. When confronted with the limits of the known world, a 16th-century European cartographer inscribed the warning “Here ...