During the century between 1815 and 1915, Anglophone travellers to Venice were often reluc- tant to engage with the realities they encountered in the city. In this essay, with particular emphasis on the decades before 1848, I explore the impact of the poet Lord Byron and the historian and apologist for Napoleon Count Daru in perpetuating myths about the city’s past and present. I examine the reasons for the durability of this Venetian imaginary, and in particular the persistence of distortions of the Venetian past. I then argue that such views came to be challenged, both from the perspective of more sensitive, in- formed, and scholarly engagement with the city, and as a consequence of markedly changed notions about its population, born of the dramatic events of the Risorgimento.