Venezia

Venezia is an Outer Colony and one of the most notable melting pots of the human and ex-Covenant civilizations.

Venezia is a warm terrestrial world with a roughly 1.1G gravity. The equatorial belt is uncomfortably hot, and mostly desertified. Landmasses cover about 2/3 of the planet, while the world's single shallow ocean is mostly covered in a native type of algae growth. The planet has no native complex life, with most of the fauna - a chaotic excuse for an ecosystem - having been brought by the human settlers from various other worlds, mainly the nearby Gao. Various fauna and flora of Covenant origin have been introduced to the planet since contact. Most habitation - in the form of around a pair of major spaceport-cities and innumerable lesser towns and settlements - is centered around the lakes and wetlands along the temperate zones toward the poles.

History
Venezia's original settlers were likely an offshoot of the group that colonized the nearby Gao. While originally smaller than Gao, largely serving as a waystation and mining outpost, Venezia's population grew dramatically as a result of the migrations caused by the Covenant War. In the war's later years, a group of Covenant traders using the now largely defunct Tempest Crossing ingress route found their way to Venezia, followed soon after by other peripheral elements of the hegemony, including defectors, merchants, smugglers and pirates. For much of this time, Venezia remained cut off from the UNSC at large, only resuming contact in the post-war era.

Following the war, Venezia's disparate local governments stabilized into an alliance of what are mostly merchant republics centered around major urban centers and a handful of orbital ports. The spaceport-city of New Tyne, including the core city and a surrounding sprawl of slums and raft-cities filled with refugees, is considered by some to be Venezia's capital, though many of the other independent city-states are quick to dispute this claim.