History of the Republic of Venice were little compensation. This was the last war of the Republic with Turkey. The decline of Venice in the 18th century was also due not only to Genoa, Venice's old rival, but also to Livorno, a new port on the Tyrrhenian Sea created by the grand dukes of Tuscany and chosen as staging-post for British trade in the Mediterranean. Still more injurious were the Papal town of Ancona and Habsburg Trieste, a free port since 1719, in the Adriatic Sea, which no longer constituted a "Venetian Gulf". An eminent Venetian politician of the time declared, "Apart from the residue which
Gulf of Carpentaria or four days closer to Asia via shipping routes. The Gulf is one of the distinct physiographic sections of the larger (and surrounding) Carpentaria Basin province, which in turn is part of the larger East Australian Basins physiographic division. Gulf of Carpentaria The Gulf of Carpentaria () is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea (the body of water that lies between Australia and New Guinea). The northern boundary is generally defined as a line from Slade Point, Queensland (the northwestern corner of Cape York Peninsula) in