Welcome to Venice, a city that lures not only tourists and new residents but urban planners. Today, Venice is known for its friendly, small-town feel, its quaint shopping center of low-rise buildings that are primarily in a Mediterranean style, and its lovely boulevard shaded by giant live oaks that extends from downtown to the beckoning beach. The beach, starting at the northern edge of the city where the Venice jetties open a passage from the Intracoastal Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, extends for miles.  

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.