Previously sighted at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, jamme d between marble columns, it's like the Bucentaur crossed with Brighton Pavilion, fantastically woven from cardboard packaging.

Rather, they have fashioned it into a statement of their mercantile supremacy at sea and they act out a ritualized wedding between their city referred to here as la Signoria, and the Mediterranean Sea: "then the Signory went forth with great pomp to wed the sea in the Bucentaur, with so many handsomely dressed gentlemen on board, so much music and singing, that it seemed a paradise.