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The Founding of Venice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The early origins of Venice are murky \u2013 fitting, for a city that rose up from the muck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long before the city was built, this land past the northernmost reaches of the Adriatic Sea was inhabited by the Veneti people who gave the area its name. They spoke Venetic, an extinct language that shared features with both Latin and local Germanic <\/a>languages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They allied with Rome in 182 BC, and their culture gave way to gradual Romanization.\u00a0Venice began with a population of refugees. People fled the cities and countryside of Northern Italy as the Roman Empire began to crumble.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The region was frequently attacked by the Huns<\/a> and by various Germanic peoples<\/a>, who destroyed a number of Roman cities. Roman residents took refuge in the marshy lagoons near the coast that had been previously unoccupied, save for a smattering of fishermen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are no surviving documents from the time that the Republic of Venice was founded. Those damp buildings and watery streets aren\u2019t kind to anything so ephemeral as parchment. But the city is said to have been officially founded at noon on the 25 of March in the year 421 AD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the seventh century, the Imperial District of Venetia ruled a large swath of land encompassing the northernmost reaches of the Adriatic Sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This marshland had been inhabited for centuries by the time the twelve founding families elected their first doge, the official leader of Venice, in 697.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early settlers lived in rough structures made of wood, reeds, and clay. There was also some dry land in the marsh. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fishermen and refugees who lived there in Roman times built their simple dwellings along the sandy coastline and on the small islands that dotted the wetlands. As the population grew, they had to devise a way to build<\/a> where there was no dry land at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They began by driving long wooden posts directly into the muck that lay beneath the water. They used water-resistant varieties of wood, such as larch and oak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Countless wooden posts were used in the construction of Venice. The Santa Maria Della Salute church alone required the use of over one million stakes to construct its foundation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of this wood was sourced from the forests of Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Northern Italy. It was transported to Venice by water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under the soft mud is a layer of solid clay called Caranto. This dense material is found two meters beneath the surface in some areas but may be as deep as ten meters in others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early days, the posts were driven in by men with huge handheld pile drivers – a difficult and potentially dangerous job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wooden posts were laid out in a spiral that began at the center and moved out to the edges of the foundation. More posts were placed closer together beneath the outer walls, to support the immense weight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These posts were topped with two layers of horizontal planks and then with stone, nearly always an impermeable variety of limestone quarried in Istria, Croatia.\u00a0Finally, the building was constructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venetian buildings were generally constructed <\/a>with brick. Then, the dense variety of limestone called Istrian stone was used to protect the brick walls from the salty water of the lagoon. Sometimes marble was used to decorate the upper parts of the buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These techniques had been used elsewhere by the Romans, but the Venetians improved upon pre-existing architectural techniques. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As buildings became larger and heavier, the wooden poles were placed closer together to support more weight. They were generally five or six meters long and couldn\u2019t always reach the sturdy layer of clay beneath the softer mud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the Caranto was too deep to reach, the poles were placed so close together that there was virtually no space between them. If spaces were left, they were filled with stones and gravel. As weight was placed on top of these supports, the mud beneath became so compacted that it became as stable as the Caranto clay.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Construction of Venice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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