For most of the two and a quarter centuries since 1797, Venice has been a part of someone else's country. It was Habsburg Austrian (1797–1805), then Napoleonic French (1805–1814, as part of the Kingdom of Italy), then Habsburg again (1814–1866), then Italian. The longest single period of unbroken sovereignty in the city's recent history is therefore the Italian one — since the plebiscite of October 1866, when the population of the Veneto voted 647,464 to 69 to join the new Kingdom of Italy. The vote was not entirely fair (Austrian opponents had been suppressed, and the plebiscite was open) but the result was substantially representative of popular sentiment. Venice had been waiting nearly seventy years to belong to something more dignified than a Habsburg provincial governorate.
The 1848 republic
The most dramatic episode in the post-1797 history of the city is the seventeen-month independent republic of 1848–49, declared by Daniele Manin on the 22nd of March 1848 as the Austrian Empire collapsed under the European revolutions of that year. Manin — a Venetian lawyer of part-Jewish descent, no relation to the last doge — was no aristocrat: the constitution he drafted abolished the patrician class, established universal male suffrage, freed the press, and declared all religions equal before the law. His Venice was the only one of the 1848 republics that managed to organise a functioning national bank, a tax authority, and a navy of converted commercial vessels. It held out for sixteen months — through the Austrian counter-revolution that crushed Hungary, Lombardy and Rome — under siege, blockade, cholera and the first aerial bombardment in European history (Austrian artillery balloons dropped fused bombs over the lagoon in July 1849; most missed but some did not). The republic surrendered on the 22nd of August 1849. Manin went into exile in Paris. He is buried, by his own request, in the side of San Marco's basilica, the only commoner so honoured.
Italian Venice
The plebiscite of 1866 attached Venice to the Kingdom of Italy, where it has remained ever since (with the formal substitution of "Republic" for "Kingdom" in 1946). The city's nineteenth-century economic history is dominated by three concurrent trends. First, the lagoon's traditional industries — fishing, salt extraction, glass, lace — continued at a slow decline. Second, a new port — the Stazione Marittima, completed in 1880 — converted the western edge of the city into a working industrial dock, eventually backed up by an oil terminal and chemical works at Marghera on the mainland. Third, the city became, perhaps unwillingly at first, one of the great destinations of European Romantic and Edwardian travel. Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851–53) created a generation of British readers who arrived expecting a moral landscape; Henry James and Thomas Mann came; Robert Browning, William Dean Howells, Marcel Proust, Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky all wrote, painted, choreographed or composed parts of their best work in or about it.
The twentieth century
The twentieth-century history of Venice is a study in unintended consequences. The construction of the petrochemical works at Marghera between 1917 and 1960 brought economic prosperity to the Venetian mainland and substantial pollution to the lagoon. The dredging of deep-water shipping channels for tankers altered tidal currents and dramatically accelerated acqua alta, the seasonal flooding of the historic centre. The construction of the causeway road from Mestre, completed in 1933, brought private cars to the city's edge but also tripled the volume of mainland commuter pressure on the historic centre. The two World Wars treated the city relatively gently: the campanile of St Mark's, which had collapsed of natural causes in 1902, was rebuilt by 1912; Allied bombing in 1944 caused minor damage; the principal cultural casualty of the wars was the secondary church of Santa Maria del Giglio, partially damaged in 1944.
The depopulation of the historic centre, by contrast, has been catastrophic. In 1951 the population of the six sestieri (the historical Venetian municipality, excluding the lagoon mainland) was 175,000. In 1971 it was 110,000. In 1991 it was 78,000. As of 2024 it is approximately 49,000. The reasons are well-documented: rising real-estate prices driven by short-term tourist rentals, the difficulty of normal urban services (no road traffic, slow water-bus transport, expensive logistics), and the structural transfer of employment to the mainland. Almost no Venetian-born resident under 40 still lives in the centre. The native dialect of the city is, by any technical linguistic measure, endangered.
The MOSE barriers
The flood barriers of the MOSE project (an Italian acronym for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) were proposed in 1984, contracted in 2003, repeatedly delayed by corruption scandals (the project's chief engineer and three commissioners were arrested in 2014 on charges of large-scale embezzlement), and finally activated for the first time on the 3rd of October 2020. The system consists of seventy-eight hinged steel gates lying flat on the lagoon floor at the three deep-water inlets — Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia — which can be raised by injecting compressed air into their interior pontoons to close the lagoon off from the Adriatic during exceptional high-tide events. The system, when working, prevents the most damaging acqua alta floods. It has been raised more than seventy times since 2020. Its long-term reliability, in a sea-level-rise scenario that the engineering models did not fully anticipate, is uncertain.
The MOSE represents one possible answer to the question of what to do with a city that is sinking, depopulating, and dependent on a tourist economy that — both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic — periodically overwhelms its capacity. Other answers, of varying realism, include a hard cap on tourist numbers (proposed in 2018, partially implemented in 2024 with a five-euro day-visitor fee), incentives for permanent residents to remain, the reopening of historic buildings as university and research space, the renegotiation of cruise-ship routes (large cruise ships were finally banned from the Bacino di San Marco in 2021), and the long-term repurposing of historic palaces from short-term tourist rentals to long-term residential leases. All of these are politically contested, and none of them have the scale to reverse the structural depopulation alone.
What survives
What survives of the republic itself is the city, the constitution as a historical record, the dialect (still spoken by an aging population of natives), the artistic heritage (substantially intact in situ, though almost everything portable went to Paris in 1797 and only some of it returned), and the diplomatic archive. The Venetian state archive on the Frari island contains some 70 kilometres of shelf records — ambassadors' relations, council minutes, judicial proceedings, diplomatic correspondence — covering eight centuries continuously. It is, by a substantial margin, the largest pre-modern political archive in the world. Most of it has never been edited. Some of it has never been read since it was deposited.
Almost everything else the republic produced — the galleys, the Arsenal's industrial culture, the muda trade system, the inquisitorial police, the patrician class, the Bucintoro itself (burnt by Bonaparte in 1798 for its gold leaf), the Stato da Mar, the salt monopoly, the lion-of-St-Mark flag on the harbour fortresses — is gone. The historic centre alone is what remains, and the historic centre is doing the work, every day, of being a country that no longer exists.
Volume XIII ends here. The travel guide, the routes and the mythbusters now follow.
End of Chapter X · End of the Book