Water-fronting streetscapes like these had a certain sober charm which – since they have not been replaced en masse in the name of ‘progress’ – presumably reflects something of the Netherland’s national character. Though both Amsterdam and Venice are water-oriented, this Dutch town looked immeasurably tidier and more efficient than its Italian analogue (which I also visited for the first time on that 2016 European excursion). Unlike Venice’s seemingly random pattern of jagged canals and short, narrow streets unsuitable for motorized traffic, central Amsterdam has a carefully planned concentric layout.

And the desire for order of the city’s Golden Age proto-merchant culture is also suggested by the still-prevalent building stock visible here: Hundreds of narrow, 4 to 6 story-high residential structures, presumably built or owned largely out of profits from Dutch international trade or its domestic support enterprises. These structures appeared to be substantial but unpretentious, and evidently the fruit of careful investment. In contrast, older residential buildings in Venice did not give that impression.

That difference also represents a seismic shift in social priorities. Whereas most of Venice’s notable buildings seemed to be governmental, the palazzi of local nobility or religious properties, the multi-story blocks in which ordinary Venetians apparently lived along narrow pedestrian streets, in the era of the city’s zenith (several centuries before Amsterdam’s prominence) looked to be fairly non-descript, utilitarian – even a bit shabby, vertical hovels – shelter for the urban masses.

By contrast, the housing stock of Amsterdam presented solidity and order, not just crude abodes expeditiously thrown up. Looking at those rows of sturdy townhouses, one can perceive harbingers of a wealth-spreading, business-oriented society – not just a sprinkle of scattered elegance, based on restricted control of resources amid semi-squalor, typical of pre-Modern urbanism – that would continue to evolve, and help drive an interconnected world economy as it grew and prospered.

For example, the canal-side roadways visible here were likely originally built to facilitate moving commercial goods from water craft to markets in town, or beyond. Later they were adaptable to use for auto traffic and parking, whereas Venice’s haphazard layout precluded such re-purposing. Today, Amsterdam is still a locus of progress and evolution in civilization and economics, whereas Venice – a town tied to the Mediterranean as the world’s center of gravity, so then bypassed by oceanic exploration – has proven, physically and spiritually, far less ‘adaptable’ to change. Venice now mainly survives as a tourist destination, offering visitors evidence of its past glories. Reflect on that comparison, if/as you may.

The Dutch Republic was not democratic as Americans in the 21st Century might think of that word, but unlike almost all the rest of Europe, it was no longer wholly class-bound, either (as Venice, though also nominally a Republic, remained). Netherlanders then had less a “station” in life than a “standing,” which one could improve by personal determination and exertion; efforts that the ‘proto-merchant culture’ encouraged, and rewarded.