Eight things
people get wrong
about Venice.

Venice was built on millions of wooden piles driven into the alluvial clay beneath the lagoon's surface — but the piles were not toothpick-thin. They were larch and oak logs, typically twenty centimetres in diameter and three to four metres long, driven in dense clusters beneath the foundations of every substantial building. The clusters were then capped with horizontal larch timbers, and the masonry rose on top of those. The piles are still there, perfectly preserved by the anaerobic conditions of saturated clay.

The myth that the wood is preserved because it has "petrified" is also wrong. It is preserved because submerged wood, deprived of oxygen, does not rot. If you exposed the piles to air they would decay within decades. This is why the only serious threat to Venetian foundations is, paradoxically, the lowering of the water table beneath the city.

The bridge — built in 1602 to connect the Doge's Palace with the new state prison across the canal — was simply called the Ponte di Palazzo for two centuries. The name Ponte dei Sospiri ("Bridge of Sighs") was coined by Lord Byron in 1812 in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs / A palace and a prison on each hand." Byron was inventing a romantic backstory. By the time he wrote, the Venetian state had been abolished for fifteen years and almost no prisoners had ever crossed the bridge; the prisoners who used it had been petty criminals and debtors, not the political martyrs of Byron's imagination, and they emphatically did not sigh as they crossed it. The name stuck because of the poem.

The Council of Ten was an open body of seventeen members — the ten elected councillors, the six ducal counsellors and the doge himself, all of whom appear by name in the public records of the republic. They met publicly. They issued written rulings. Their identities were known to everyone. The Ten did exercise summary jurisdiction over state security, often in camera, and they did delegate routine surveillance to the three State Inquisitors — but the inquisitors themselves were also publicly named senior magistrates, not anonymous. The image of masked judges in red and black robes comes substantially from a 1953 Italian film, I tre corsari.

Venice did trade in human beings on the medieval Mediterranean — primarily Tartar and Circassian slaves from the Crimea and the Black Sea coast, sold in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere — but on a smaller scale than the Genoese, who dominated the route. The trade was substantial enough to be regulated by Venetian statute (slave traders had to swear oaths, slaves had to be baptised before transit, the trade in Christian slaves was technically banned), but it was not, even at its peak in the late thirteenth century, more than perhaps fifteen percent of Venetian commercial value. Sugar plantations in Venetian Cyprus did use enslaved labour. By the sixteenth century the trade in unfree people had largely shifted to the Ottoman corsair economy of the western Mediterranean, in which Venice was a victim rather than a participant.

The doge was elected for life, but he was elected — by an electoral cascade specifically designed to defeat family dynastic politics — and he was constrained in office by a written constitutional document (the promissione ducale) of more than two hundred and fifty clauses that he had to swear to obey, and by a Council of Ten that could and did remove or punish him for breaches. Doges were not allowed to leave the city without permission, could not correspond with foreign powers without supervision, could not appoint their own kin to office, and were prohibited from a long list of activities monarchs elsewhere took for granted. The most powerful doges of the republic — Enrico Dandolo, Francesco Foscari, Leonardo Loredan — were far less powerful in their domestic constitutional position than any contemporary king of France or England.

Pasta predates Marco Polo's travels in Italy by at least a century. Twelfth-century Sicilian sources describe dried wheat noodles being produced commercially in Trabia, near Palermo, and exported to the Italian mainland by ship. The myth that Polo brought pasta to Italy from China was invented in a 1929 American trade publication, the Macaroni Journal, in support of a domestic marketing campaign. The myth has been comprehensively debunked by food historians since the 1950s and yet survives in tourist guides because it is convenient.

Polo's actual contribution to Italian cuisine, if any, is impossible to establish; his book mentions various Chinese noodle dishes in passing, in a way that suggests both he and his Italian audience were already familiar with the concept.

Venice was an extensive maritime colonial empire from 1204 to 1797, with possessions in modern Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Cyprus and Crete, and trading colonies in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Black Sea coast and Constantinople. The administration of the Stato da Mar was extractive: governors were appointed from the Venetian patriciate, served fixed terms, were prohibited from local marriage, were audited on return, and were measured by the surplus revenue they returned to the lagoon. There were periodic rebellions — most notably on Crete in 1364 — that were suppressed by force. The myth of peaceful Venice arose in the nineteenth century, when British romantic writers needed an Italian counter-example to the Spanish and Portuguese empires; it is not supported by the Venetian state archive.

Venice has been slowly losing relative elevation for centuries — partly because of subsidence (the lagoon's compacted alluvial sediments settle under the weight of the buildings) and more recently because of sea-level rise. The combined effect is about 23 centimetres of relative loss over the twentieth century. Climate-model projections suggest a further 30 to 80 centimetres by 2100, depending on emissions scenarios. The MOSE flood-barriers, activated in 2020, can hold off acqua alta events up to about three metres, and engineering modifications to the barrier-control system are extending this. Venice is in genuine trouble, but the city will not be uniformly underwater in 2070. The most likely scenario is that the historic centre survives as a heavily-engineered island within a fluctuating lagoon, with the lower-elevation peripheral areas (San Pietro di Castello, parts of the Cannaregio) becoming progressively less habitable. The lagoon, on the other hand, is in real trouble: the increased water exchange with the open Adriatic, exacerbated by climate change and the deep-water shipping channels, is accelerating the erosion of the lidi, the destruction of the salt marshes, and the loss of the lagoon's distinctive ecology.