For Fernand Braudel, the early modern adriatic appeared, as it did on Venetian maps, as the Golfo di Venezia. Venice, ruling also over the Dalmatian coast and the Ionian Islands, controlled shipping on the Adriatic and made the Adriatic into the Venetian basis for commercial activity all over the eastern Mediterranean. Braudel also credited to Venice the establishment of an Italian cultural sphere of influence around the Adriatic: “The gulf was Venetian, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was more than this; it was the sphere of a triumphant Italian culture. The civilization of the peninsula wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea.” Braudel, carrying out his research in the 1930s and publishing in 1949, might have been well aware that the Italian trans-Adriatic presence, even when triumphant—as in the case of Mussolini's occupation of Dalmatia—might not be something to celebrate as brilliant. Furthermore, reconsidering the early modern Adriatic, one might today wonder whether the term “Italian”—with its modern national meaning—should be used with caution in describing early modern cultural influence. Indeed, one might simply suggest that Venetian power on the Adriatic was the vehicle of Venetian culture—not Italian culture—on the Adriatic, an early modern imperial rather than a modern national idiom, and present even at Ragusa, which was independent of Venice.