Venice

Welcome to Venice, a city that lures not only tourists and new residents but urban planners, who come to see the results of the much revered original 1920s plan by John Nolen, one of the nation’s first urban planners. Nolen, an urban planner before there was such a specialty, learned from his association with Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, about features that make cities “livable.” 

In addition to the lovely beach, a central park along Venice's main street, Venice Avenue, is the site of concerts, arts and craft shows, and various special events. Throughout the city are neighborhood green spaces and parks, many design features of which inspired architects and city planners working on what is called the "New Villages” concept of city planning. 

The most common response of people who move here or who return each year to visit, is, “When we drove down Venice Avenue past the shops and parks and saw the beach, we knew this was where we wanted to be.” 

Venice, Florida has been listed in many publications as being the "Shark's Tooth Capital of The World". It hosts an annual festival, the Shark's Tooth Festival, every year to celebrate the abundance of fossilized shark's teeth that can be found on its shores. In addition to finding shark's teeth on beach shores, many large sized teeth can be found freediving off of the coast or by excavating in the many shell deposits that are left over from the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway. Beach renourishment efforts also brought new sand from a few thousand yards off the coast, yielding new, but fewer, fossilized shark's teeth. The teeth in the area can vary in size from an eighth of an inch to 3 inches and, on occasion, even bigger. A good place to look is on the very south end of the island part of Venice, known as Caspersen's Beach.