Venice

• 1. Introduction

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  Venice sits on 126 islands in a shallow lagoon wedged between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers in northeastern Italy. Those islands are laced together by 472 bridges, and the city has no roads in its historic heart - only water and foot paths. At the peak of its medieval power, Venice had 36,000 sailors operating 3,300 ships, dominating commerce across the Mediterranean. It was, by the assessment of several historians, the first real international financial centre in the world, a distinction it earned as early as the 9th century. How did a cluster of marshy, mosquito-ridden islands become the most prosperous city in Europe? How did refugees from crumbling Roman towns build an empire that lasted almost a thousand years? And why, today, does that same lagoon city face the very real possibility of being swallowed by the sea it once commanded?

• 2. Born from Refuge

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  The traditional founding of Venice is fixed to a precise moment: the dedication of the church of San Giacomo on the islet of Rialto, said to have taken place at the stroke of noon on the 25th of March 421, the Feast of the Annunciation. No surviving records document the founding directly, but historians have reconstructed the story from later sources. The original settlers were refugees from nearby Roman cities - Patavium, which is modern Padua; Aquileia; Tarvisium, which is Treviso; Altinum; and Concordia, now called Portogruaro. They were fleeing successive waves of Germanic and Hun invasions that had torn through northern Italy beginning as early as 166-168 AD, when the Quadi and Marcomanni destroyed the main Roman town in the region, present-day Oderzo.

  The Visigoths swept through again in the early 5th century, followed roughly fifty years later by the Huns under Attila. The most consequential migration came in 568, when the Lombards arrived and left the Eastern Roman Empire only a thin strip of coastline, including the lagoon settlements that would become Venice. Cut off from the mainland by the Lombard occupation, the lagoon communities were connected to the Byzantine world only by sea routes. That isolation turned out to be a gift: it forced a growing autonomy. The earliest governing body, the tribuni maiores, dates from around 568. By 697, the oldest chronicle - written by John, deacon of Venice around 1008 - records that the first doge, Paolo Lucio Anafesto, was elected. Venice would go on to produce 117 doges before the Republic fell.

• 3. The Republic's Architecture of Power

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  The city was governed by the Great Council, composed of members of Venice's noble families, who appointed all public officials and elected a Senate numbering between 200 and 300 individuals. Because that Senate was too large to govern efficiently, a Council of Ten - also called the Ducal Council, or the Signoria - handled most of the city's daily administration. One member of the Great Council held the title of doge, or duke, and served as chief executive typically until death, though some were pressured by their oligarchical peers into monastic retirement when they were felt to have failed. The structure echoed ancient Rome: an elected executive, a senate-like body of nobles, and a general citizenry with limited political power who once held the right to approve or withhold approval of each newly elected doge.

  Politics and the military were kept rigorously separate, except on occasion when the doge personally commanded forces in the field. Venice employed large numbers of mercenaries to fight its wars, which the ruling class viewed as a straightforward extension of commerce. The state was also notably free from religious fanaticism. Although Venetians remained largely orthodox Roman Catholics, Venice executed nobody for religious heresy during the Counter-Reformation. This stance brought the city into repeated conflict with the papacy. The most noted confrontation came in 1606, when Pope Paul V imposed an interdict on Venice. The Cavalieri di San Marco was the only order of chivalry ever instituted in the city, and no citizen could join a foreign order without government consent - a rule that kept loyalty firmly local.

• 4. Maritime Empire and the Crusader Detour

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  From the 9th to the 12th centuries, Venice built what Italian historians call a thalassocracy - a sea-based empire. Its strategic position at the head of the Adriatic made its naval and commercial power almost invulnerable. The Republic adopted sound monetary policy, anchored by a reliable gold ducat that underpinned confidence in Venetian trade across the known world. With pirates cleared from the Dalmatian coast, Venice became the primary trade corridor between Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire, and between Europe and Asia.

  Twice the Republic provided military aid to the Eastern Roman Empire, receiving in return special trading privileges known as chrysobulls. In the first chrysobull, Venice formally acknowledged homage to Byzantium; in the second, that acknowledgment was absent - a small diplomatic shift that reflected the growing reality of Venetian power and Byzantine decline. The relationship with Constantinople reached its most dramatic turn during the Fourth Crusade. The crusading army, which had contracted with Venice to transport it to the Holy Land, veered badly off course and in 1204 captured and sacked Constantinople. Venice came away with considerable Byzantine plunder, including the gilt bronze horses from the Hippodrome of Constantinople, which were placed above the entrance to St. Mark's Basilica. Venice subsequently carved out a sphere of influence across the Mediterranean called the Duchy of the Archipelago and captured the island of Crete. By the late 13th century, Venice was the most prosperous city in all of Europe.

• 5. The Weight of Decline

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  Venice's long slide began in the 15th century, when a combination of geopolitical shifts undercut the foundations of its wealth one by one. The Ottoman Empire began absorbing Venice's eastern Mediterranean possessions through a series of Ottoman-Venetian wars declared after the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II. Then came a blow from an entirely different direction: Vasco da Gama's voyage of 1497-1499, which opened a sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Venice's oared vessels were poorly suited to ocean crossings, and the city was left behind in the race for colonies. Portugal became Europe's principal intermediary in the trade with the East, striking at the very foundation of Venice's great wealth.

  Disease compounded the political and commercial losses. The Black Death devastated the city in 1348 and returned between 1575 and 1577, killing some 50,000 people in three years. Then, in 1630, the Italian plague of 1629-31 killed a third of Venice's 150,000 citizens. France and Spain fought for control of the Italian peninsula in the Italian Wars, further marginalising Venice's political influence. The Republic's formal end came on the 12th of May 1797, when Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Venice during the War of the First Coalition. Napoleon removed the gates of the Ghetto and lifted the restrictions on where Jews could live and travel - he was seen by the Jewish community as a liberator. He then signed the Treaty of Campo Formio on the 12th of October 1797, transferring Venice to Austria. The Austrians took control on the 18th of January 1798.

• 6. Water, Stone, and Sinking Ground

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  The physical city rests on foundations that its original builders devised under desperate conditions. Those refugees who settled the sandy islands of Torcello, Iesolo, and Malamocco learned to drive closely spaced piles of alder wood - a timber prized for its water resistance - deep into the mud and sand until they reached a compressed layer of clay below. Building foundations then rested on plates of Istrian limestone laid atop those piles. This engineering was ingenious, but it could not prevent the city from slowly sinking over the centuries.

  During the 20th century, artesian wells sunk into the periphery of the lagoon to supply local industry accelerated the subsidence dramatically. Once the cause was identified, the wells were banned in the 1960s and the sinking slowed markedly. Studies still show the city continuing to drop at roughly 1-2 mm per year. Meanwhile, the lowest point of Venice - St. Mark's Basilica, which sits only 64 cm above sea level - becomes the first place to flood when Acqua alta, or high water, pushes in from the Adriatic between autumn and early spring. On the 13th of November 2019, waters peaked at 1.87 m, the highest tide since 1966 when the level reached 1.94 m. More than 80% of the city was covered, damaging more than 50 churches. The planned flood barrier, the MOSE Project, was inaugurated as a concept in May 2003 by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, though a Reuters report attributed its long delays to corruption scandals. A National Trust of Italy spokesman put the projected total cost at least 7 billion euros, far exceeding the original 800 million euro estimate. On the 3rd of October 2020, MOSE was activated for the first time, protecting the Piazza San Marco from a predicted high-tide event.

• 7. Print, Art, and the Words We Inherited

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  By 1482, Venice was the printing capital of the world. The city was among the first in Italy to adopt the German printing press after it spread across Europe in the 15th century, and by 1500 it had 417 printers. The most important of these was the Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius, established in 1494, which in 1497 issued the first printed work of Aristotle and in 1499 produced the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, considered the most beautiful book of the Renaissance. Manutius established modern punctuation, page format, and italic type, and invented paperback books small enough to carry in a saddlebag. Around fifteen percent of all printing in the fifteenth century came from Venice.

  Venetian painting became its own tradition during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, characterised by a warm colour scale and a picturesque use of colour. Early masters included the Bellini and Vivarini families, followed by Giorgione and Titian, then Tintoretto and Veronese. In the 18th century, Tiepolo's decorative painting and the panoramic views of Canaletto and Guardi gave the tradition a second flourishing. The city's cultural reach extended into language itself. A number of common English words trace their origins to Venetian: arsenal, ciao, ghetto, gondola, imbroglio, lagoon, lazaret, lido, and regatta. The word ghetto comes directly from the Venetian gheto, the area in the city where Jews were compelled to live under the Republic. The first complete and uncensored printed edition of the Talmud was printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberg in 1523. Marco Polo, born in 1254, left Venice to travel to the Orient and co-wrote Il Milione with Rustichello da Pisa, providing Europe with its most detailed account of the lands from the Middle East to China, Japan, and Russia.

• 8. Overtourism and an Uncertain Future

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  Venice today hosts up to 60,000 tourists per day, with annual estimates ranging from 22 million to 30 million visitors. By 2017, UNESCO was considering placing Venice on its List of World Heritage in Danger sites, a list that typically includes historical ruins in war-torn countries. The population in the historic old city has declined from about 120,000 in 1980 to roughly 50,000 in 2021. A 2016 National Geographic article captured the anxiety in its subtitle: "Residents are abandoning the city, which is in danger of becoming an overpriced theme park."

  The city has tried a range of interventions. In mid-2017, it banned the creation of any new hotels - there were already over 24,000 hotel rooms. A ban on additional fast food take-away outlets had already been in place to protect the historic character of the city. On the cruise ship question, a 2013 attempt to restrict vessels over 40,000 gross tons from entering the Giudecca Canal was overturned by a regional court in January 2015. In June 2017, an unofficial referendum drew more than 18,000 votes, with 17,874 in favor of banning large ships from the lagoon, in a city with a population of about 50,000 at the time. In August 2021, the Italian government finally began diverting large cruise ships away from the Giudecca Canal. On the 28th of February 2019, the city council voted to introduce a day-tripper access fee. After pandemic delays, the fee of 5 euros came into force on the 25th of April 2024, applicable only on peak visitor days. For the 2025 season it was extended to 54 days, and for 2026 expanded further to 60 days, with a mandatory digital reservation system for all non-resident day-trippers. Bewildered tourists, astonished locals have reported, have been known to ask: "Where is the exit?" and "What time does it close?"