They are twice as long as Piazza San Marco and one and a half times as high as the Palazzo Ducale: the new "visitors" of Venice are the huge cruise ships that pass along the Giudecca Canal and the Bacino di San Marco and burst in, even just while passing, on the familiar townscape. Berengo Gardin followed the course of these cumbersome ships, documenting their appearing and disappearing on the horizon of the lagoon. The book is a contribution to reflecting on these "imposing presences" that upset not only the urban and architectural scale but perhaps also the balance of a city so beautiful and so fragile. "Who has not found fascinating, precisely because terrifying, the spectacle of the entry and slow transit through the basin of San Marco of these floating condominiums, their menacing, almost extraterrestrial presence? Then at once comes the terror that the smallest accident could turn into a disaster, an irreparable loss of an irreplaceable collective heritage" (Vittorio Gregotti).