The American art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim saw Venice for the first time in 1924. She had traveled there for her honeymoon with her first husband Laurence Veil, an American-French Dada sculptor and writer. At the time, Peggy was only twenty-six—she was born in 1898—and immediately fell in love with the floating city. “I have never been in a city that gave me the same sense of freedom as Venice,” Peggy wrote, “Venice is not only the city of freedom and fantasy but it is the city of pleasure and happiness.”