While I am strongly against the inclusion of Venice as a Civ, I too think the it's inclusion is very likely by now, just not exactly for the reasons people are talking about. I posted earlier noticing the spacing between the main purple city and the other two, how (the other two) seem to have been aquired not settled, how it is on the coast with massive borders and how there's an Incan city right beneath it at around the Industrial era. I also agree that the colors of the purple and the cream in the minimap are remarkably similar to those of the purple and cream found on the wikipedia flag. It's also well established how lazy Firaxis can be when looking for source material for their icons and stuff, so is not beyond them to have indeed used the wiki flag as sample color for the game.
But this whole "Venice is confirmed" craze REALLY started when someone "showed proof" of how the color on the minimap and the flag are exactly the same, down to the HTML code, and how this is (and I agree it would be) impossible to be a coincidence, especially when it's happening with two separate colors at the same time (purple/cream).
The thing is, they are not the same colors, and this is the single point of my post. First of all, areas don't have colors, pixels have colors. I don't know wich method was used to aquire the samples but I took the time to take multiple samples from multiple pixels, both of the purple areas and the cream areas of both the minimap and the flag images. I'll be posting the results and you be the judge. (I hope I can manage the image attachements or all of these becames mute. But believe me, I have the results, and theres A LOT of different HTML codes there.) I used a simple app that captures the color of screen pixels and while that's amateur, the whole basis of the curret hypotesis (it's not a theory if it's not proven) is that Firaxis would have done the same, that is capturing the colors of the Wikipedia flag with some king of colorpicker themselves, so it's valid. On the first image I highlited the areas of the app UI that shows the color code (right on top), a square sample showing the color itself (right beneath) and a little red square that shows precisely wich pixel is being sampled (on the bottom)