Venice truly was an amazing city.
It was clear upon arrival that I had come to a type of marvel for human achievement.
Not only is this city of feat of incredible engineering, but it also managed to produce and preserve the
architecture and aesthetic of an era long gone.
Here, in the historic part of Venice, we have
55,000 people all living on a collection of
118 islands, completely encompassed by the waters of the Venetian Lagoon, found at the head of the Adriatic Sea.
Unfortunately, aside from rising sea levels due to climate change, the city has always had a bigger problem:
it's sinking.
A study conducted between the year 2000 to
2010 found the city to be sinking on average between one and two millimeters each year.
Which over hundreds of years can really build up.
There are two main causes for the city's slow fall into the ocean and the first one has to do with plate tectonics.
You see, Venice rests atop a small tectonic plate called the Adriatic Plate. And believe it or not,
this plate actually broke off from the African Plate, and has been slowly
smashing into the larger Eurasian Plate for the past few million years. And
as the Adriatic Plate crashes into Europe it subducts or goes beneath the Eurasian Plate.
It's this process that contributes to the volcanism noted across Italy including Mount Vesuvius. But more importantly, for Venice
it also causes the plate, and everything sitting on top of it, to slowly lose altitude.
The second cause of Venice's sinking
however, has to do with the way Venice was built. You see, like I said, before the city of Venice was
constructed, settlers would have arrived to find a collection of
118 or so muddy islands that stuck within a swampy lagoon. Which isn't the best thing to put heavy stone buildings on top of.
So in order to create sturdy foundations on which a city could be built, the islands beneath Venice were drilled full of tree trunks.
Over 10 million wooden pilings were driven into the ground here,
sometimes so close that they were touching. And despite that sounding like a horrible idea,
it actually wasn't. The dirt
these poles were placed in was almost completely waterlogged, meaning there was little to no
oxygen here to allow for decomposition to occur. As a result, these wooden beams could be covered and built on top of without the
threat of them rotting. This method was so effective that to this day many of the
original wooden beams that Venice was constructed on remained beneath the city, supporting all of the buildings and people that came much later.
But as even more buildings were constructed, as even more people came to live here,
and as even more time passed, the weight put on these wooden beams sitting in no more than mud only increased.
And -well- this seems pretty obvious, but if you push something down in the mud, it will sink.
So while the wooden beams supporting the city are still holding up,
the muddy base of Venice is slowly giving away under the weight of millions of bricks, thousands of people and hundreds of years.
So the longer Venice stands, the more it will sink. Now
this doesn't really happen with most cities,
obviously, for the most part when choosing a place to make a city, people
typically choose places with solid soil and bedrock beneath them and in locations that's
easy to reach on foot. And -well- Venice is kind of the opposite of that, built on nothing but mud in the middle of a
lagoon, that for most of its history required a boat to reach. Now, sometimes people are restricted by what's available to them,
but in the case of Venice, less than four kilometers away is mainland Europe with all of its
accommodations, such as a solid ground.
So then this raises the question
Why did the early people who settled here choose to build on the swampy islands in the middle of the lagoon
instead of -you know- on the nearby coast that's
perfectly suited to host a city? And well the answer to this has to do with how the city got its start.
Now the city itself was officially founded in 421 CE but, people lived in this area much earlier.
The name Venice originally comes from the Veneti tribe, who inhabited the land around modern-day Venice, in a region that is
unsurprisingly known as Veneto. Before the founding of Venice,
however,
the region of Veneto was still a pretty
populated place, with people residing in cities like the nearby Padua, as well as throughout the countryside, as farmers.
The Veneto region is part of what's known as the Po Valley of Northern Italy. Which is some of the best farmland in the entire
country. And while most of the valley is guarded from outsiders by the Alps, the Veneto region lies right at the only opening to greater
Europe.
So if you were some sort of
invading army that wanted to take control of the prosperous farmlands of Veneto, the Pope Valley, or further, your two choices were to either cross
the Alps or go through the pleasant Veneto region.
So the choice was easy. At least for most invaders anyway.
Because of this, the Veneto region witnessed many invaders marching through it over the centuries. As early as the 2nd century CE,
Germanic tribes, such as the Quadi and Marcomanni, invaded and destroyed many of the cities within this region.
Then, around the fifth century, another Germanic tribe, at this time the Visigoths, invaded through Veneto. And another 50 years after that,
it was the Huns, led by Attila, who marched across Veneto on their way to the rest of the Western Roman Empire. Then, finally, by
568 CE the Lombards, another Germanic group who originated further East, migrated nearly their entire
population into the Po Valley and basically replaced a lot of people already living here.
The effects of this can be seen today in the name of the region Lombardy,
which is where the city of Milan is to be found. As a result of all of these invasions and
migrations, many Roman cities in the region were destroyed and many Roman people were forced out of their lands,
creating a refugee crisis within the Veneto region. When some of these refugees fled to the coast of the
Adriatic Sea, they ended up here, at the Venetian Lagoon, and it was this, the lagoon,
not really the islands themselves, that attracted these refugees to build here.
You see, in this location, these people who had all been recently inflicted by war, found something that none of their other cities had:
natural defenses. The islands in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon were -well- just that:
islands in the middle of a lagoon. A place
invaders could not reach, unless they had boats.
Which -well- they usually didn't. The same way that castles of medieval times had moats to protect them from invading
armies, these islands had an entire lagoon protecting them. They didn't need to construct walls or towers to defend it,
they just needed to make these islands habitable and the fact that they were Islands would do the rest.
So that's what they did.
Driving wooden pilings into the muddy islands creating the foundations for a city. So that explains why people built Venice,
but it also explains how Venice became what it is today.
You see, while the city was built by necessity,
the protection provided by the lagoon also allowed trade to flow through it without the worry of attack and plundering.
After the Roman Empire had fully
collapsed to do to invaders and
internal pressures, Venice remained a prosperous center of trade. Even as all of Europe fell into the medieval period, Venice
commanded trade throughout the Mediterranean. Soon,
the Republic of Venice was established and this small city came to control not only the trade, but also
territories throughout the Mediterranean. At its territorial maximum the Venetian trade empire owned or controlled
a large part of the Po Valley in Italy and of territories throughout the Adriatic, all the way to Greece. Here,
they controlled the entire lower half called the Peloponnesus,
as well as Attica, where Athens is. They also controlled the Greek islands like Crete and Cyprus, as well as most of the smaller
ones as well. The Venetian holdings even went as far as Turkey and Crimea.
Venetians started off in the salt trade, as the surrounding lagoon was shallow and flat, creating the optimal conditions for salt works.
Quickly, the city was extracting salt from the ocean and exporting it to the region, into the Po Valley
and beyond. By the 13th century, Venice had reached its
economic peak and had expanded to command the spice trade from India through Arabia to Europe, becoming the major port of entry for
spices into the continent.
Venice had become so powerful, that it made and held exclusive trade agreements along all of its trade routes, making it nearly impossible
for anyone else to bring spices into Europe. In order to open up a spice trade of their own, nations like Spain and Portugal
needed to seek out much longer ways of getting to India that weren't controlled by Venice.
Usually they looked for this route on boats. An endeavor which eventually resulted in the European discovery of the Americas.
Essentially, the Republic of Venice had become as economically powerful as an entire European nation
and the city of Venice was at the center of it. The enormous amount of wealth that entered the city through
this trade is what allowed it to grow and beautify, giving us the spectacular city we know today.
Ironically, nowadays because of its architecture and beauty, the city that was built to keep outsiders -well- out, does the exact
opposite and attracts millions of outsiders each year. Now in the form of tourists.
So many tourists! Even still, Venice was an amazing city to visit and a real lesson on how given
refugees a safe place to live can benefit everyone and create an economic boom for an area.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
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