Note sull'episodio
Venice's stone palaces do not rest on bedrock. They stand on thousands of alder trunks driven through lagoon mud into hard clay, topped with Istrian limestone. In the oxygen-free mud, bacteria could not rot the wood, and mineral-rich salt water slowly petrified it. The city began in the fifth century as a refuge for people fleeing Attila the Hun and other invaders who sacked mainland cities like Padua and Aquileia, settling a malarial lagoon of 118 islands that cavalry could not cross. Drifting away from Byzantine rule, they elected their first Doge in 697. With no farmland, Venetians turned to the sea, and by the 13th century controlled trade in salt, spices, and silk, backed by the gold ducat.
The Arsenale, often called the first factory, moved hulls along canals past specialized guilds and could build and equip a galley in a day, supporting a fleet of over 3,000 ships. In 1204 Doge Enrico Dandolo steered the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople after the crusaders could not pay for their fleet. Vasco da Gama's 1497 route around Africa broke the Venetian monopoly, and after Ottoman expansion and plagues in 1348, 1575, and 1630, the Republic surrendered to Napoleon in 1797. Today the city subsides one to two millimeters a year, worsened by 20th century artesian wells banned in the 1960s. In November 2019 water peaked at 1.87 meters and flooded more than 80 percent of the city.
- The bronze horses on St. Mark's Basilica, looted from Constantinople in 1204
- Murano glassmakers isolated on their island to guard trade secrets
- Aldus Manutius and his portable octavo books, italic type, and standardized comma and semicolon
- The polychoral music of St. Mark's two facing choir lofts, a path toward Vivaldi, and the Venetian origin of the word ghetto
- The MOSE barrier's 78 air-filled steel pontoons, delayed by corruption at a cost near 7 billion euros