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The city of Venice
Why is born Venice
The gardens of Venice
Traditions and curiosities
The ombra Venetian
Why is born Venice
text Laura Hierche
An expanse of water constantly at the mercy of the tides that often hide insidious shoals, a group of so small islands that it is necessary to drain them, no connection with the mainland part the aquatic way (the long bridges that join Venice, Chioggia and Jesolo with the mainland were recently built).
Yet the hostility of these places has become the cradle of one of the most famous and powerful cities in Europe. Why such a choice?
The answer is very behind in the time, at the end of the Roman empire, when Italy was invaded by the Barbarian people. To that epoch, on the lagoon lived a population of few fishermen and pickers of salt.
James Holland (1800-1870, England)
Sight of the lagoon
Well soon, from the fifth century in then, the inhabitants of the near cities of the mainland realized that the only sure shelter from the continuous invasions that they suffered continuously were really these islets, because the Barbarian people of the North didn't know the lagoon and didn't know whether to effect a naval fight on a very different aquatic expanse that the one of the sea. If they possessed boats able to plough the waves of the oceans, they didn't know instead whether to use on so insidious backdrops, sometimes little depths and mutable times for times because of the tides. In fact still today the navigation in lagoon is a navigation so special that only its inhabitants know its secrets.
When these invasions were not more made only to sack, but in the precise aim to get settled on the conquered territories, the real creation of Venice began. For the fugitives the problem was no more to take refuge temporarily and to wait for the end of the "storm" for return then at home, but well to take the univocal decision to move themselves definitely , family, animals, weapons and luggage, even statues and monuments, for perpetuate the history of their own city in a new place and to restart afresh everything.
A hospitable as so hostile place. Hostile because it was not easy to recreate the conditions of work of the mainland in smaller spaces and often marshy. Hospitable because its offered, over the fishing, a natural wealth that cannot be found in mainland, so great to have called white gold: the salt. Hostile because it was not easy to sail us and to live with the whims of the tides, but hospitable because when the mechanism was understood, it was really this hostility that made the security for the one who lived here. It was an immense port with an almost unassailable natural fortification: its waters, the boundaries invisible of Venice. In fact it was never surrounded by boundaries comparable the others of medieval cities.
Soon these merits became the reason to develop an intense maritime commerce headquartered in lagoon. The maritime power in Venice had been born...
Subsequently the developments of the history changed often the administrative and political course in Venice. But the first step forward to create one of the most powerful republics of the Mediterranean world had been made....