Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice

Libreria Acqua Alta is a bookshop where Venetian art, local history, fiction, comics, and many other kinds of reading matter share the same crowded setting. Frizzo, a native of Trissino in the Veneto, assembled this unusual stock from new and used books. The shop’s most striking feature is in its rear courtyard: encyclopedias that could not be sold were arranged into a staircase beside windows sealed shut.

What began as a storage solution became one of the city’s most photographed scenes. The shop also has cats, and its popularity has grown so sharply through social media that thousands of people now visit each day. That attention brings a sobering chapter too: during the November 2019 flood, water climbed to almost two metres and many books were lost. The result is a place that feels part bookshop, part improvised market, and entirely unlike a conventional library.