I’m watching the merchant of venice and I started wondering about that.
By putting one brick on top of another?
Venice is only a short boat ride from the mainland. Today, anything, from beds to food to bricks & mortar, has to be transported by boat. Only with 20th-century transport everywhere else does Venice look particularly unusual - in earlier times, it would not have seemed so different. After all, before the building of railways, the most important and efficient methods of inland transport in most places were by water.
…or of course, since the 1930s or so you can take the train or drive on the causeway. Getting people and things to Venice is not a problem these days, but distribution within the city is still done the old fashioned way.
Building in Venice presents special problems. What land there is is very soft. Buildings in Venice are built upon huge wooden piles driven into the mud. Hundreds of piles may be required even for a small building. Being permanently water logged and away from oxygen, the piles seem to last for a very long time.
This was certainly true up until the 19th Century, at which point a rail causeway was built from the mainland (with a station, Santa Lucia, on one of the Venetian islands), which was expanded to allow for cars and trucks in the 1930s. The causeway can be seen in the lower left of this aerial photo, together with the warehouses where materials are unloaded. AFAIK most goods nowadays arrive in Venice via truck over the causeway.
Yes, I know there’s a causeway. But that doesn’t provide the last leg of the journey, which was my (unclear) point.
Ah, OK. I will add that I’ve seen people in Venice wheeling some pretty large objects (multiple crates of food, etc) on hand trucks. Choice of boat vs wheels for the last leg probably depends on how far one’s destination is from Santa Lucia station and the truck-unloading docks (which are right next to each other).
It’ll also depend how many steps are in the way! (Near the railway area there aren’t many)
I’d say unless you live very close to the station, wheels won’t do you much good. Although some of the canals have been filled in and can take wheeled carts, there are still countless bridges, almost all with steps, to cross over the canals. I’d say most goods would be taken by boat to the nearest pier (which is never far away from any given house) and then manhandled from there. Plus, of course, there are lots of other islands entirely separate from the main part of Venice, with no bridge link.
As for how the houses were built, it’s not as simple as “putting one brick on top of another” as essentially Venice has (or had when building started) virtually no “dry land” - the islands were only really exposed at low tide. Wooden pilings had to be driven deep into the swampy lagoon, and stones placed onto this to provide a foundation. SImilar construction was used in Amsterdam.
Am I the only person who has wondered which came first – Venice or the high water level? I’ve always assumed that Venice was built on land that gradually started to sink, and Venetians adapted to it.
I wondered this after visiting for the first time, but apparently it was built like that. (OK, it has sunk a little over the years, mostly due to the abstraction of subterranean water from artesian wells - a process that was banned in the 1960s).
There never was much in the way of land there - there were a hundred or so very low-lying sandy islets in the marshy lagoon. The early settlers built on these, in the process raising the level of the land above the high tides, but the houses have always had their feet in the water.
Venetian buildings were initially built on very large piles driven into the marsh floors. The buildings would slowly sink into the mud (and still do). Every hundred years or so a building would be razed to its foundation and a new foundation and building would be built on top of it. Venice’s current problem with high water is caused in part [1] to the preservation efforts of the last couple of centuries. While preserving architecture is a noble and worthy cause, in Venice the city will disappear into the marsh unless there is constant rebuilding.
There was a facinating episode of Nova about this very topic. You could probably find information on pbs.org/
AuntiePam, the high water came first. Venice was built because a bunch of northern Italians got sick and tired of being invaded by the Huns and Goths, and moved to the marshes for defense.
[1] Please note I said “in part” a not insubstantial contributor to Venice’s high water problem is the rising sea level.
Before it was settled, Venice was a saltwater swamp with a few sandbars. Obviously it wouldn’t normally have been viewed as an ideal spot for development. But in the sixth century, when barbarian hordes were running around the neighbourhood, the defensive values of being surrounded by a natural moat trumped the potential disadvantages of flooded basements and excessive mildew.