Ah, Venice
My wife and I recently took a trip to Venice (and I must say, if you ever get the chance to go there, go! It's truly an amazing city). We were enthralled and spent three days getting lost down tiny alleys, walking under and overhanging arches, eating Tofu sandwiches by canal sides, and drinking espresso every morning. The air was filled with the chugging sounds of boat engines as all-wood water taxi's, flat delivery barges, police boats, pleasure boats and public water busses ferried goods and people through the city. Tens of different dialects reached us as we wandered - from the smooth, sensuality of Italian, French and Spanish, to guttural German, twangy North American, and even the banging pots-and-pans sounds of Chinese and Korean. Intermingled with this noise came the occasional sound of a exorbitantly priced tenor, crooning opera to well-heeled tourists taking romantic gondola rides. Hearing wasn't the only sense wallowing in overload. Our noses were overwhelmed in turns with various aromatic bouquets depending on where you were in the city. By the canals, the air was thick with the smells of sea-water, seaweed, deisal engines and fish. The market areas waft with the fragrance of spices, fruits and vegetables. Simply moving around you wade through the rich smell of coffee drifting from a cafe patio, or cloying perfume from a passing lady, or pungent pipe and cigar smoke. And while you try to absorb all the information from sound and smell, the others crowd into your consciousness for attention too. Every building in Venice is huge, impressive and old. Here a cathedral clad in beautiful white marble, smooth and glossy in the sun. There an old brick wall, stucco cracked to expose the rusting metal underlay, surrounding wooden window shutters painted a deep sky blue. And over there chaotic colour from a street vendor selling grotesque and beautiful carnival masks. Under your feet you can feel cobble stones laid down a millenia ago, then modern herring-bone paving stones, then a street lined with building bricks. Truly a sensual overload.
Yet as we walked around, wallowing in our senses and overwhelmed with the magnificence and the history, something occurred to me and I stopped short (Which caused some consternation to the people walking along behind me). This is what it was:
This city is built on water.
Yeah, it seems a pretty simple concept. But what got me thinking was, what made the Venetians decide to start building the city of Venice where it was? There was perfectly good, dry land just 5 km across open water on the mainland. Why did they feel compelled to paddle out in their wobbly, single-oared open-topped gondolas and build their home on muddy, smelly islands a good 3-hour row from the mainland. In an area subject to high waves, stormy adriatic seas, shifting tides, seasonal floods, earthquakes, and the always present threat of having your kid drown? Surely it can't have been for overcrowding on the mainland. And I can't believe that the early Venetians were so far-sighted as to feel that in 1000 or so years Venice would be one of the top tourist cities in Italy, thus allowing them to reap the benefits of tourism revenue.
Granted, there are decided advantages to living over the ocean (early houses in Venice were built on thick stilts sunk into the mud). First, it's mighty difficult for violent invaders to raze your city to the ground. By the time they rowed out to it, there tinder would likely be damp from sea spray, and there arms tired from pulling on oars for 3 hours. Thus you would be well prepared to defend them with nothing more than a few well chosen names and a little girly pushing match. Second, getting food was likely very easy back in the day when the oceans still held fish. There are stories of mariners simply dunking a bucket over the side and pulling up a catch of fish. Or of having to push shoals of sea turtles out of the way with an oar so your boat could pass through them. And finally, living over the ocean likely solved the problem of what to do with food once your body was done with it, so to speak (which thankfully the Venetians seem to have ceased doing). So there are advantages.
But the disadvantages were just as clear (drowning, destruction by waves, having your house sink into the mud, losing your boat and having to swim to shore, being allergic to shellfish, invaded by pirates, not being a natural tenor). To my knowledge, Venice is the only major European city built entirely on mud flats (with the exception of almost all of Holland, who's people just decided to push that messy, annoying, old ocean out of the way).
And as I walked and thought, I saw a lot of evidence that Venice was still paying for it's choice of building locals. Church towers leaned at alarming angles, and I constantly felt the urge to swerve to avoid what I thought was 1000 tonnes of brick and mortar about to come crashing down with the slightest gust of wind, flattening all the houses around and two luckless Canadian tourists who happened to be in the right place at a very wrong time ("News Flash: Patron Saint of Venice Declares War on Canadian Tourists!"). There is not a straight line to be had anywhere in the city, and I pity the poor carpenters trying to hang a door so it swings smoothly. In fact, there probably is little profit in selling carpenter T-squares at all in this city. In some of the larger buildings in Venice, one side has sunk so far down into the mud that I imagine the children who grew up in those houses have one leg longer than the other.
Yet the Venetians seem to have adapted well enough to their extreme building local. They were the first in Europe to use the term "ghetto", (which is likely a twisting of the latin term "to throw" and referring to the proximity of cast iron works near the Jewish Ghetto) and to have the oldest jewish "ghetto". They became famous for turning sand into beautiful and very pricey glass objects. They successfully smuggled the body of their patron saint (Saint Mark) from his burial site in Egypt back to Venice through the simple expediency of stuffing his corpse into a pork barrel. And apparently they have solved the problem of stray dogs (because we were told condescendingly that there are "no stray dogs in Venice, silly American tourists"). So despite having not read the first chapter in "How to Build a City" (the one on picking a sound location), the Venetians have given the world a number of important things. And ended up with a city that is captivating (and speaking personally far more romantic than Paris).
Ah Venice. May your muddy foundations never give way.
Yet as we walked around, wallowing in our senses and overwhelmed with the magnificence and the history, something occurred to me and I stopped short (Which caused some consternation to the people walking along behind me). This is what it was:
This city is built on water.
Yeah, it seems a pretty simple concept. But what got me thinking was, what made the Venetians decide to start building the city of Venice where it was? There was perfectly good, dry land just 5 km across open water on the mainland. Why did they feel compelled to paddle out in their wobbly, single-oared open-topped gondolas and build their home on muddy, smelly islands a good 3-hour row from the mainland. In an area subject to high waves, stormy adriatic seas, shifting tides, seasonal floods, earthquakes, and the always present threat of having your kid drown? Surely it can't have been for overcrowding on the mainland. And I can't believe that the early Venetians were so far-sighted as to feel that in 1000 or so years Venice would be one of the top tourist cities in Italy, thus allowing them to reap the benefits of tourism revenue.
Granted, there are decided advantages to living over the ocean (early houses in Venice were built on thick stilts sunk into the mud). First, it's mighty difficult for violent invaders to raze your city to the ground. By the time they rowed out to it, there tinder would likely be damp from sea spray, and there arms tired from pulling on oars for 3 hours. Thus you would be well prepared to defend them with nothing more than a few well chosen names and a little girly pushing match. Second, getting food was likely very easy back in the day when the oceans still held fish. There are stories of mariners simply dunking a bucket over the side and pulling up a catch of fish. Or of having to push shoals of sea turtles out of the way with an oar so your boat could pass through them. And finally, living over the ocean likely solved the problem of what to do with food once your body was done with it, so to speak (which thankfully the Venetians seem to have ceased doing). So there are advantages.
But the disadvantages were just as clear (drowning, destruction by waves, having your house sink into the mud, losing your boat and having to swim to shore, being allergic to shellfish, invaded by pirates, not being a natural tenor). To my knowledge, Venice is the only major European city built entirely on mud flats (with the exception of almost all of Holland, who's people just decided to push that messy, annoying, old ocean out of the way).
And as I walked and thought, I saw a lot of evidence that Venice was still paying for it's choice of building locals. Church towers leaned at alarming angles, and I constantly felt the urge to swerve to avoid what I thought was 1000 tonnes of brick and mortar about to come crashing down with the slightest gust of wind, flattening all the houses around and two luckless Canadian tourists who happened to be in the right place at a very wrong time ("News Flash: Patron Saint of Venice Declares War on Canadian Tourists!"). There is not a straight line to be had anywhere in the city, and I pity the poor carpenters trying to hang a door so it swings smoothly. In fact, there probably is little profit in selling carpenter T-squares at all in this city. In some of the larger buildings in Venice, one side has sunk so far down into the mud that I imagine the children who grew up in those houses have one leg longer than the other.
Yet the Venetians seem to have adapted well enough to their extreme building local. They were the first in Europe to use the term "ghetto", (which is likely a twisting of the latin term "to throw" and referring to the proximity of cast iron works near the Jewish Ghetto) and to have the oldest jewish "ghetto". They became famous for turning sand into beautiful and very pricey glass objects. They successfully smuggled the body of their patron saint (Saint Mark) from his burial site in Egypt back to Venice through the simple expediency of stuffing his corpse into a pork barrel. And apparently they have solved the problem of stray dogs (because we were told condescendingly that there are "no stray dogs in Venice, silly American tourists"). So despite having not read the first chapter in "How to Build a City" (the one on picking a sound location), the Venetians have given the world a number of important things. And ended up with a city that is captivating (and speaking personally far more romantic than Paris).
Ah Venice. May your muddy foundations never give way.
posted by Mark at 7:30 a.m.
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