Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FROM
THE
GROUND
UP
J A M E S H. S. M C G R E G O R
Cambridge, Massachusetts
p. cm.
2. Venice (Italy)—History.
3. City planning—Italy—Venice—History.
I. Title.
DG674.2.M44 2006
945'.31—dc22 2005035501
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The Lagoon 7
3 Company Town 79
Information 335
Acknowledgments 341
Index 344
Maps 362
INTRODUCTION
Divided from the sea and its Byzantine masters by a long barrier island, and
found security in its tidal estuary. Safely out of reach of potential overlords
on both sides, the Venetians crafted a way of life perfectly suited to their
strange environment. Fishers, salt gatherers, and traders, they lived in widely
Two events in the ninth century galvanized Venetians along the main
Lagoon channel and pushed them to form a cohesive city. The regional gov-
ernor appointed by the Byzantine emperor relocated to the site of the city in
810 AD. And then in 829 the body of St. Mark was stolen from its sepul-
cher in Alexandria and brought to Venice. From this time onward, political
well placed to capitalize on the trade that passed inland from the city
2 VENICE FROM THE GROUND UP
toward the Italian mainland in shallow-draft boats and outward into the
Adriatic in heavier and larger craft. Venice stood at a point of exchange
between two different markets and the specific vessels they depended
on. Along the deep channel that ran past San Marco on its way from the
mainland to the sea, Venetian merchants constructed distinctive houses
Land was precious, and families built cheek-by-jowl all along this serpen-
tine commercial waterway. At a pinch point in the Grand Canal they cre-
ated a marketplace, which they soon expanded into the legendary Rialto.
Goods from North Africa, Russia, and India were exchanged there for the
the thirteenth century, expansion at what was then the city’s perimeter
churches, and in the process they opened new areas of the city to
When the Turks took Byzantium in 1453, they destroyed the last bar-
and trade routes of the Venetians. Soon after, the Portuguese circumnavi-
gated Africa and challenged the city’s centuries-old trade monopoly with
the East. In that same era, as Venice began to take over territories on the
Italian mainland, its colonies dragged the city headlong into the unceas-
ing and fruitless warfare that convulsed Renaissance Italy. A new style of
building gained predominance in the city, one that cancelled every link
with the architecture of the basilica of St. Mark and the palace of the
Introduction 3
Doge—the two iconic buildings that had anchored the city’s identity
ing. For the next two hundred years it remained more or less in balance,
poised for collapse but in many ways still vital and appealing. Throughout
this long twilight, the city was a wonderful and secure place to live, and
thousand years, came to a sudden and absolute end. The French bled the
proper structure of cities had no place for island clumps linked by water-
ways. They worked to transform the amphibious city into something more
have now linked almost the entire city into one homogeneous pedestrian
network. The train line from the mainland, and the much later motorway
built alongside it, were the most decisive steps in this transformation.
Their placement on the opposite side of the city from San Marco turned
Venice on its head. Food for residents and tourists began to arrive by
train and then by truck, rather than by boat. Electricity, gas, and water
were piped in from the mainland. Trash was hauled away in the opposite
direction.
the Lagoon and made it inhospitable to marine life. Deprived of its popu-
lation, divorced from its environment, the Venice we know today threat-
ens to become a historical theme park run by government entities for the
benefit of a world community of the interested and curious. But the city
itself seems to shrug off its fate and carry on with beauty, energy, and
This book explores the culture of Venice that is imprinted most dis-
that readers can trace the city’s evolution through the narrative and, with
just a little backtracking here and there, explore it area by area on foot
and by boat if they are fortunate enough to make a visit. Venice is rela-
What a visitor sees is for the most part where it has always been. As a
result, few monuments are pure examples of their type or perfect repre-
sentatives of the period that gave them birth. The buildings of Venice
have always been immersed in its daily life, and they have grown and
explored in Venice from the Ground Up. As it follows the long arc of the
scale, from the grand layout of the city as captured in Jacopo de Bar-
Introduction 5
tion and its sense of itself were expressed not just in the architecture of
San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale but in the majestic mosaic program of
the basilica’s interior and the sometimes outrageous official art commis-
churches and in the city’s unique confraternities chronicled the aims and
ings in homes along the Grand Canal encouraged piety and reaffirmed the
restricted roles women were allowed to play in this most patriarchal society.
Venice’s far-reaching influence was grounded in entrepreneurial drive
expression not just in great buildings and great art but also in public
city’s way of life. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, granaries
along the Grand Canal stored food for public use during famine. Confra-
ternities looked after not just the spiritual health of their members but
employees of the Arsenal remain, today, among the most beautiful and
livable buildings in Venice.
This imminently orderly city was also home to Carnevale. The public
campi throughout the city, groups of players staged the conventional dra-
mas of the commedia dell’arte. Gambling was a riskier outgrowth of the
6 VENICE FROM THE GROUND UP
carnival spirit, and widespread prostitution, with its threat of death from
syphilis, was its most sordid by-product. And despite the license
foundations of its broader culture. The basilica of San Marco is the most
Venetian of shrines, but its mosaics record the history of the apostolic
movement throughout the world. Again and again the city took upon itself
the Shepherds in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, was a meditation not
ating them in unique and memorable ways was the work of a city that
But in its aim to sponsor and house the greatest expressions of Christian
dogma, the city vied with these capitals of Christianity throughout the
cent churches, and its handful of superb museums, the city’s history of
THE LAGOON
who clamps down on the lower jaw of her antagonist. (1) The narrow belt of
water that separates the two fish, outlining their heads and open mouths, is
the Grand Canal. This configuration, so familiar to us today, was not filled in
completely until the late nineteenth century, and the notion that Venice is
more land than water would have seemed absurd not only to the city’s
Though the name of Venice now belongs exclusively to this island cluster,
with its distinctive history and deeply threatened way of life, in the ancient
world the city’s ancestral name referred to a place that was nearby but very
different. The Veneti were one of the many indigenous peoples whom the
Romans conquered and assimilated as they tightened their grip on the Ital-
ian peninsula. These men and women, described by both the Greek geogra-
pher Strabo and the Roman historian Livy, lived along the rivers or in river
towns like Padua or Ravenna and supported themselves by fishing and trade.
They were not children of the Lagoon. In fact, some historians believe that
8 VENICE FROM THE GROUND UP
Lagoon has been where it is, and what it is, for some five thousand years.
washed with tides that are tamed by their passage through three inlets in
the Lido, its barrier island. With its mix of freshwater and saltwater habi-
tats, the Lagoon once teemed with marine life. Fish, aquatic birds, shell-
fish, and salt were the region’s first and most sustained harvests.
The rivers that bring fresh water also bring sand and silt, which fall
out of suspension and pile up in the slack water at the edge of each cur-
rent. The Lagoon acts as a delta to brake and bend the seaward thrust of
the rivers, causing them to plow sinuous channels in the Lagoon bed.
Along the edges of these currents, silt builds mud banks and flats and
ultimately islands. Each channel crafts its own banks and then breaks
through them in tiny rivulets. These fragmented mudflats and the clear
channels that spawn them became the raw material of Lagoon settle-
ment. The soft curves of Venice’s outline and the reflected S of the Grand
Canal are the accommodations centuries of builders made to the insis-
both channel and canal; long before settlers arrived, the currents of the
finer the farther they carry it, and by the time rivers reach the sea, what
powder, however, rock remains heavy, and the steady deposit of mud
banks weighs down the Lagoon floor, countering the buildup of silt above.
For millennia, the surfaces of the islands on which Venice was built
have stood above the waterline, permanently isolated from the currents
that renew soils. Pressed down by the weight of the city’s architecture
trative units whose names reflect Venetian control of the area imposed
five centuries ago, in the Italian Renaissance. The Veneto and Venezia
Giulia fill the fan-shaped northeast margin of Italy that touches Austria
and Slovenia. Long before the people of the Lagoon achieved political
and military dominance over this area, their way of life was tied to it.
During the Bronze Age (roughly 1500 BC), Celtic settlers opened the
Brenner Pass through the Alps, clearing the last obstacle to a trans-Euro-
pean trade route that linked the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Mediter-
10 VENICE FROM THE GROUND UP
ranean. Northwest of the Alps, the great river valleys of Europe were the
conduits of trade. In the short space separating the Alps from the Adri-
atic, the River Adige and its tributaries carried trade in both directions.
The indigenous people of the Lagoon traded salt and salt-dried fish,
which was lighter and more portable, to the north. Amber gathered from
the shores of the Baltic, along with tin and lead from Britain and flints
from Denmark, passed southward through the Elbe, Weser, and Moldau
river valleys, then through the northern Adriatic and on to Greece. The
Lagoon played its part in this trade, but it was not the hub—it would
take up that role many, many centuries after the Celts had been con-
The Romans preferred roads to rivers. They built highways through the
but the great trunk routes over which most of the commerce of the
Roman Empire passed lay south of the Alps. In northeast Italy, the most
important of these roads were the Via Postumia, which linked Milan to
the Adriatic, the Via Popilia, which ran from Ravenna northward along
the coast, and the Via Annia, which continued these Italian routes into
Eastern Empire, spread its influence over the Italian peninsula as the
Western Empire faltered in the fourth century. Milan became the admin-
devastate, and finally to dominate Rome and its empire. Most of these
invaders entered Italy through the Brenner Pass. They followed the Adige
river valley south to Verona, and from there their passage along the great
Roman roads was smooth and unstoppable. They raided and pillaged and
foraged along the way, but the Lagoon lay just far enough off the major
Venetian historians of the early Middle Ages believed that their city
was populated by mainland Veneti driven eastward by these barbarian
invaders to the shelter of the inland sea. Leaving the marshes, rivers, and
black, arable lands of northeastern Italy, they brought the name of Venice
with them to the very different environment of the Lagoon. “So, in fact,
there are two Venices,” Johannes Diaconus wrote in the tenth century.
“The first is the one that the historians of antiquity described as lying
between the borders of Slovenia and the River Adda with its capital in
Grace, preached the Lord Jesus Christ. The second is the one we know
that is situated among the island groups in the Lagoon of the Adriatic
population lives and thrives. Certainly that population, from all that can
sea. The people sometimes known as the Winili but more commonly
called Lombards left their homeland on the shores of the North Sea and
after long migration and struggle reached the Balkans. They did not dare
remained there for forty-two years. In the year 540 AD, these Lombards
erupted into the province of Venetia, the northeasternmost province of
Italy. They eradicated Vicenza and Verona and many other towns, but not
and in this way the name of Venice, from which they had fled, was
assigned to these same islands, and those who inhabited them came to
Lagoon, they built cities and well-stocked fortifications. They created for
rum 1.1–5).
new way of life is less convincing. Some may have been absorbed into
the security of solid ground. Still, in defiance of all that the Romans had
flourished in their watery environment. Just how alien the Lagoon must
traveled northward from Ravenna along the coastal road, but at some
point he left the Via Popilia and continued his journey by boat through
the Lagoon. What he saw there astonished him. He described it as a
world not only out of the ordinary but one in which the norms of Roman
toward Ravenna and Padua; to the East it enjoys the benefit of its own
Ionian shores. Here each successive tide first covers then lays bare the
face of the country. The houses are like seabirds’ nests. Where first you
saw land, you soon see islands, even more numerous than the Cyclades,
soon you see the unchanging aspect of these places. The reflections of
their widespread houses stretch far on the flat sea. Nature provides a
place which the care of man enriches. With slender branches tied in bun-
dles, they consolidate the land and have no fear of facing the sea waves
with such delicate defenses, that is to say, when massive waves surge
over the shallow sea and overwhelm without effort every place that is not
sufficiently high.
“To the inhabitants who eat nothing but fish, a little is a great deal.
The poor and the rich live together in equality; all share a single food; all
and even the rich in such an environment find no scope for vice . . . All
their exertion is in the saltworks; in place of the plow and the scythe they
rake the salt which yields them its fruit, when in these things even that
which you do not make you possess. Food here is coined as money. By
their arts the very waves yield cash. You may scorn gold, but understand-
ably there is no one who does not desire to find salt, which makes every
food more delicious. They tie their boats to the walls of their houses like
has no value compared to salt, a “food” that turns into money; the waves
14 VENICE FROM THE GROUND UP
landscape inspires; the rigors of the environment and the efforts made to
accommodate human life to it; the saltworks; the pilings made of slender
branches that reinforce the soil; the boats anchored at the doors—details
have taken these details literally, but they seem utopian if not wholly fan-
this setting. They had adapted to the realities of their environment and
crafted a way of life that suited its rigors and its opportunities. They were
not the Lagoon’s masters or its antagonists; they had not subdued it; and
they did not live as exiles within its boundaries. They lived in harmony
with their habitat, and the way of life they created flourished in the econ-
The Lagoon comes into view more clearly at the moment when the
the seventh century, a few island groups stood out, marked by churches
The Lagoon 15
quite small by comparison with the city of Venice, but they represent the
same process of shoring up and linking nearby islets that gave birth to
the metropolis. (Map 1) The few canals that still transect these tiny islands
are the remains of channels that separated the original shoals from which
they were made. Burano and Torcello, in the northern part of the Lagoon,
stopped growing almost a thousand years ago, and Murano would have
followed the same path if glass production had not been relocated there
from nearby Venice in the fourteenth century. But as these other islands
grown from a single nucleus. Rome arose from a ford in the Tiber River at
and planned towns always had a clearly articulated center where build-
these concentration points of wealth and power. During her long matura-
tion, Venice took on a shape that reflected these European norms, but
this was the result of prolonged and deliberate effort. Like its neighbors
in the Lagoon, the city was slowly cobbled together by joining nearby
islands along a central canal; and its social structure, at first fragmented,
that remote time when culture throughout the Lagoon was still widely dis-