A capital that dug three great canals in a half-moon and turned a swamp into the best-organized trading city on earth, a cathedral town where a tornado tore the nave from the tallest tower in the country and left a square between them, and a small canal city that gave the world Vermeer's light, the martyr who became a nation, and the blue-and-white porcelain a whole continent copied. A country that argued its land out of the sea, then decorated it.
