Venice Chronicle

Long before a city stood in the water, the Veneti – the ancient people who gave the whole region its name – settled along the edge of the lagoon. Under Roman rule the mainland flourished: Altinum (near today's Altino), Aquileia, Padua and Oderzo were prosperous towns on the Via Annia. The lagoon itself was fishing ground, salt garden and waterway – inhabited only by fishermen on stilt dwellings, as the Roman official Cassiodorus famously described around 537: a people living "like waterfowl" between land and sea, whose entire wealth was salt.

These modest beginnings already carried the seed of later Venice: whoever masters the channels, the tides and the salt, masters the lagoon.

Source: Wikipedia – History of Venice

The Migration Period shook Italy. When Attila's Huns destroyed Altinum and Aquileia in 452, followed a century later by the Lombards, the mainlanders fled to where no cavalry could follow: the islands of the lagoon. According to legend, Venice was founded on 25 March 421 – but what history can actually grasp first is something else: Torcello, not Rialto, became the first centre. In 639 the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta was built there; its founding inscription survives to this day – the oldest dated document of the lagoon.

Torcello grew into a veritable town with a bishop's seat, palaces and – so tradition has it – at times up to 20,000 inhabitants. That this very "mother of Venice" now counts barely a dozen residents is one of the great ironies of lagoon history.

Source: Wikipedia – Torcello

In 697, tradition says, the lagoon islands elected their first doge – formally still subjects of Byzantium, in practice increasingly independent. After repelling a Frankish attack, the seat of government moved in 810 to the sheltered island group of Rialto ("rivus altus", deep channel) – the birth of the city of Venice in the narrower sense.

In 828 came the greatest PR coup of the Middle Ages: Venetian merchants smuggled the relics of St Mark the Evangelist out of Alexandria – hidden under pork, which the Muslim customs officers would not touch. The winged Lion of St Mark became the state emblem, St Mark's Basilica the heart of the city, and Venice henceforth had a patron saint of the first rank. Around the year 1000 Doge Pietro II Orseolo secured the Adriatic – ever since, the doge symbolically "married" the sea each year (Sposalizio del Mare).

Source: Wikipedia – Republic of Venice

With the Crusades, Venice became indispensable: whoever wanted to reach the Holy Land needed ships – and nobody built them faster than the Arsenal, the state shipyard founded in 1104, arguably Europe's first "factory". Venice charged for transport and supplies with trading privileges across the whole Levant.

The peak of ruthlessness and business acumen combined: the aged, nearly blind Doge Enrico Dandolo simply redirected the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to the Christian city of Constantinople. The richest city in the world was plundered; Venice secured "a quarter and half a quarter" of the Byzantine Empire – Crete, Euboea, strongholds along every important route. The four bronze horses above the portal of St Mark's are loot from Constantinople to this day.

Source: Wikipedia – Fourth Crusade

In the late Middle Ages Venice, with at times 100,000 to 150,000 inhabitants, was one of Europe's largest cities – and by far the richest hub between Orient and Occident. The system was brilliantly simple: everything ran through the Rialto.

What came into the lagoon: spices (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger) from India and Southeast Asia via Alexandria and the Levantine ports; silk, cotton, carpets, dyes and gemstones via Constantinople and the Black Sea colonies; grain from Apulia and the Crimea; slaves, wax and furs from the East. Marco Polo, who set off from here for the Silk Road in 1271, was merely the most famous of thousands of Venetian long-distance traders.

What left the lagoon: salt from Venice's own salt pans (the "white gold", a state monopoly), glass from Murano – the furnaces were forcibly moved to the island in 1291, for fire safety and to guard the trade secrets –, fine woollens, silk fabrics, weapons, paper and books. And the spices themselves: Venice bought in the Orient and sold on to all of Europe at a handsome markup.

Where the goods were delivered: across the Alpine passes (Brenner, Septimer) to Augsburg, Nuremberg, Vienna and Prague – German merchants, later including the Fuggers, were required to live and trade in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, their counting house and warehouse right beside the Rialto Bridge. State galley convoys (mude) sailed on fixed schedules to Bruges, Antwerp, London and Southampton (the "Flanders galleys"), to Aigues-Mortes, Tunis, Beirut and Alexandria. Venice was Europe's logistics network – centuries before containers and hubs.

Sources: Wikipedia – Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Economic history of Venice

Around 1500 Venice seemed to stand at its peak: mainland possessions stretching almost to Milan, colonies as far as Cyprus, Titian and Bellini painting, Aldus Manutius printing – at times a third of all Europe's books came from Venetian presses. Yet in that same decade the die was cast against Venice without a single shot fired at the city: in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by sea around Africa. The spice trade began to bypass the lagoon via Lisbon and later Amsterdam – the Rialto monopoly started to crumble.

In 1571 Venice, with the Holy League, won a glorious victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto – yet lost Cyprus in the very same war. The victory was celebrated; the strategic position nonetheless worsened step by step: the Mediterranean was no longer the centre of the world.

Source: Wikipedia – Battle of Lepanto

Twice the plague tore enormous gaps: in 1575–77 around 50,000 people died – a quarter to a third of the city – and in gratitude for its end the church of Il Redentore rose on the Giudecca. In 1630/31 a second wave carried off nearly 50,000 more; this time the city vowed Santa Maria della Salute at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Both feasts – Redentore in July, Salute on 21 November – are celebrated to this day with pontoon bridges across the canals, and they remain among the few festivals that belong to the Venetians themselves.

In fighting the epidemics, Venice incidentally invented a piece of world history: quarantine (from "quaranta giorni", forty days) on the lazaretto islands of the lagoon – see the Lost Places below.

Source: Wikipedia – Santa Maria della Salute

In political and economic decline, Venice became Europe's pleasure capital in the 18th century – in a sense the first tourist destination of the modern age. Carnival lasted for months, ridotti (gaming houses) and opera houses flourished, Canaletto painted vedute as souvenirs for English Grand Tour travellers, Casanova and Goldoni shaped the myth. Even then the city lived more from visitors than from trade – a foretaste of things to come.

On 12 May 1797 the 1,100-year-old Republic ended without a battle: under pressure from Napoleon, the last doge Ludovico Manin abdicated and the Great Council dissolved itself. Napoleon plundered the city (the bronze horses, too, travelled to Paris), closed monasteries and scuole – and in the very same year traded Venice away to Austria in the Treaty of Campo Formio.

Source: Wikipedia – Ludovico Manin

Under Austria, Venice at first grew poor but gained two things that would shape its future: in 1846 the railway bridge linked the island city to the mainland for the first time – the end of complete insularity, the beginning of modern travel. And with the railway came the travellers: Byron, Ruskin, later Wagner (who died in the Palazzo Vendramin in 1883) made Venice the yearning destination of Romanticism.

In 1848/49 the city rose up under Daniele Manin and, as the "Repubblica di San Marco", withstood a months-long siege – in vain. Only in 1866, after the Austro-Prussian War, did Venice join the young Kingdom of Italy by plebiscite.

Source: Wikipedia – Republic of San Marco

Three decisions that explain today's Venice: first, from the 1870s the Lido became Europe's most fashionable seaside resort – the Grand Hotel des Bains (1900), the Excelsior (1908) and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" (1912) built its legend. Second, in 1895 the city founded the Biennale, the world's oldest art biennial (see the golden section below). Third, from 1917 Porto Marghera grew on the mainland: industrial port, refineries, chemicals – jobs, but also the start of the great resettlement of Venetians to the mainland towns of Mestre and Marghera.

The old city survived both world wars almost untouched; in 1933 the road bridge (Ponte della Libertà) joined the railway bridge.

Source: Wikipedia – Marghera

On 4 November 1966 the water stood 194 cm above normal – the worst flood in the city's history, on the same day as the Arno flood in Florence. The world discovered how vulnerable Venice is; UNESCO and private committees ("Save Venice") began decades of rescue work. The MOSE barrier project was planned from the 1980s onward.

In parallel ran the quieter catastrophe: the population of the historic centre plunged from around 175,000 (1951) to about 66,000 (2001). Flats were damp, expensive and without car access; jobs were in Mestre; and tourism increasingly crowded out ordinary rents. Shops for locals gave way to mask boutiques, schools closed – the city began to empty from within even as it filled up from without.

Source: Wikipedia – Acqua alta

Around 30 million visitors a year meet a historic centre with fewer than 49,000 residents – at times more guest beds than resident beds were registered, a symbolic tipping point reached in 2023. The extreme flood of November 2019 (187 cm) accelerated the completion of MOSE: since October 2020 the mobile flood gates have genuinely kept the severe acqua alta events out – a success, though bought with high running costs and open questions about the rising sea level.

In 2021 Italy banned large cruise ships from St Mark's Basin and the Giudecca Canal; in 2024 the entry fee for day visitors launched as a world first – both covered in detail in the outlook below. UNESCO has repeatedly debated placing Venice on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

Source: Wikipedia – MOSE