The citations in my title derive from a book of the 1890s by Francis Hopkinson Smith, American writer, engineer and painter who portrayed the Zattere in a fine gouache now in the Musée du Louvre. My essay uses both Smith’s words and small work of art to draw attention to the new interest in painted urban views of the site in the nineteenth century. In the previous one hundred years, both Antonio Canaletto and Francesco Guardi had depicted the broad Giudecca canal but never focused on the promenade itself. Pictorial awareness of the walkway a century later was occasioned in part by the civic and ecclesiastical buildings raised along its two-kilometer length, but it resulted even more overtly from the cast iron bridge newly erected over the Grand Canal in the 1850s. Walking from the old city – the centers around the Rialto and Piazza San Marco – both Venetians and travelers now visited the Zattere as had never before been possible. Guidebooks pointed out the attractions to be found there, for instance, Tiepolo’s frescoes in the church of Santa Maria del Rosario (the Gesuati), and small hotels – La Calcina to cite the most well-known – opened to the public. British, French and Italian painters portrayed the promenade from different angles, looking west towards Marghera or east to the Lido, as did painters of the new world: among them, John Singer Sargent most famously, but also John Henry Twachtman from Cincinnati, Ohio, Ferdinando del Campo from Lima, Peru, and Smith in his atmospheric gouache done soon after he designed the imposing pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.