“Will you look at that? St. Mark’s Square is flooded!” An Australian day tripper is astonished. “This place is actually sinking,” her friend casually exclaims. They, like so many I’ve overheard on the vaporetti, are convinced that the Venetian islands exist on a precipice between the fragility of their current condition and nothing short of imminent submersion. With catastrophe always around the corner a short break in Venice is more of an extreme adventure trip than a European city-break. If it were true, that is.
Venice is not sinking – it's flooding. Since time immemorial the city has periodically flooded as a result of tidal patterns and residents are well-accustomed to its wintertime rhythm (and, less frequently, during the summer season). While acqua alta (high water) is a fascination for intermittent visitors it is an accepted inconvenience for those who live with it: ground floor doors have to be sealed with barriers, boots and dungarees have to be fished out of the cupboard and, if the water is particularly high, boats might be unable to pass beneath the smaller of the city’s hundreds of bridges until the water eventually subsides. Walkways are erected throughout the city’s lowest areas (Piazza San Marco is, incidentally, particularly low terrain) and people continue to see to their daily business – only in a more elevated fashion. I once joined friends for dinner during a freak summer sirocco wind-induced acqua alta on the Fondamenta Ormesini – we sat outside, legs submerged, thinking little of the otherwise extreme conditions that the evening had proffered.
Venice has always had an unusually intimate connection to the water which surrounds it. Its first settlers were refugees, fleeing to the marshlands where the city now stands in order to escape the genocidal tendencies of Germanic tribes and the Huns. The first structures they erected on the rivoalto (a small constellation of high islands where the Rialto and its Palladian bridge is now positioned) were built atop wooden piles – a unique process of petrifying sunken columns in the silt of the swamp that is still in use today, both as a method of preservation and when building anew. Even as the city expanded into La Serenissima—the serene Venetian Republic, one of the most powerful thalassocracies that the world has ever seen—it was consistently reminded of its delicate, defensive and highly lucrative relationship with the lagoon and the oceans beyond. The ancient and mystical annual Marriage of the Sea, established in AD 1000, saw the Doge (the elected ruler of the Republic) hurl a consecrated ring into the murky waters and declare the city and sea to be indissolubly one. This liturgy, one can surmise, was a way of throwing caution to the wind and praying that prosperity would continue amid comparatively ungovernable natural conditions.
