Venice’s special relationship with the East, dating back to Marco Polo’s trip to China, is well known. The paper traces the history of the ties between Venice and Turkish world in sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, showing among intellectuals of the old Republic a substantial ambivalence in judgements on Turkish culture, between fascination and parody (the so called ‘turcherie’). In the decades immediately preceding the French revolution, writers and artists were no more looking for a remote world, being interested in the life of the eastern provinces of Venice’s Republic and discovering the reality of the «bon sauvage» in the primitive – yet neighbouring – Morlacchia.
