Venice, Italy is a beautiful city in which all travel is done by boat or by foot, no cars. Venice is special in the fact that it doesn't have walls. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the people walled up towns and cities to defend themselves from the barbarians (which was just what the people of the Roman Empire called the invading outsiders) coming into Italy. There aren't any walls because of the fact that the Venetians built on the marshland in the middle of the lagoon. The shallow bits would reck a ship and strand the people on it. This didn't happen to the Venetians because they actually knew where they should take their boats. Today there are paths in the water to follow, but back then there weren't.