View from the lagoon, Part 1

By Robert Veel, Limelight Arts Travel director

In the study of Venice’s much-loved beauty, history, art and architecture, literally no stone has been left unturned. Every corner, square, building and monument of the city has a story to tell, and over the centuries it seems all these stories have been told through prose, poetry, painting, sculpture and music. Such is the weight of this admiration that the modern traveller to Venice can sometimes feel deprived of that joy that comes with the ‘ah ha’ moment of personal discovery, which for many of us is a key emotional aspect of travel.

AN ALTERNATIVE WAY OF EXPLORING VENICE’S HERITAGE

Yet there is another, only partially discovered Venice that awaits you. It sits just off the 80 or so islands which make up the ‘historic centre’ of Venice. The Venetian lagoon stretches some 60km from the town of Jesolo in the north to Chioggia in the south. It’s Italy’s largest wetland and is dotted with sites of historic, cultural and natural interest. While some spots on the lagoon, such as the glass-manufacturing islands of Murano, have become sadly overrun with tourists, others are just waiting for the inquisitive and informed traveller to discover them.

IN THE BEGINNING… LE BARENE

For a city that’s long been praised for its outstanding beauty, its lagoon setting at first glance may seem uninteresting and uninviting. It’s numbingly flat, cold and grey in the winter, hazy, humid and mosquito-ridden in the summer.  You need a decidedly romantic disposition to recognise the beauty that lies behind the rather stark vista. Rising out of the shallow lagoon are countless sandbanks, or ‘barene’ in Venetian dialect. It was on top of such sandbanks that the architectural glories of Venice arose, something that gives the city an almost miraculous quality. (Indeed, the early Venetians were convinced they enjoyed the special favour of both St Mark and the Virgin Mary – how else could such a wealthy and powerful city have arisen in such an unprepossessing place?) Over centuries, embankments were built around the barene to protect them from erosion and countless thousands of wooden piles were driven into the sand to support layers of stone and brick, the foundations of the built city.

Barene are complex ecosystems with brackish streams running through the grass-topped sandbanks, filtered by the sand. Protected and calm, they are the perfect breeding environment for marine life, and the lagoon is home to countless critters, many of them delicious in the hands of a Venetian cook. With an abundance of sea creatures come birds, and herein lies a tale of ecological success. Currently about 9,000 hectares of the lagoon is given over to fish farming. Since 1993 environmental laws have made the lagoon’s fish farms more sustainable and at the same time the number of bird hunter permits has been limited to 1,500 per season. As a result the bird population, both resident and migratory, has grown fourfold since 1993, to an estimated 400,000+.  Species include ducks, herons, gabbiani (a kind of Venetian mega-seagull, and quite scary), waders and shorebirds. There are even 4,000 flamingos, which once migrated from Tunisia to France via Sardinia, now stably residing in the lagoon, while cormorants reach Venice from Poland and Scandinavia. 

The barene can be explored in several ways. Catch the number 14 vaporetto from San Zaccaria to Burano and, leaving civilisation behind as you cross the entrance to the Adriatic, you’ll soon be cruising past dozens of barene. Or from the Fondamente Nove you can take the number 13 vaporetto to sparsely populated islands like Vignole and Sant’Erasmo, where many of Venice’s green vegetables are grown. Cycling through the asparagus and endive fields of Sant’Erasmo you come face to face with the ecology of the lagoon as you cross channels, canals and streams. Or you can undertake a simple one kilometre walk through barene as part of your visit to the New Lazzaretto island (see below).  There are also a number of small boat operators who run private day trips focussing on the ecology of the lagoon, such as Sestante di Venezia, Vivo Venetia or Terra e acqua.

BYZANTINE BOONDOCKS

When leading a group to Venice, one of my favourite things to do, a few days into the trip, is to stand at the ferry landing on the island of Torcello, looking across to the mainland and wondering what this place would have signified to its occupants in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the time the lagoon, and therefore Torcello, was a remote corner of the Byzantine Empire, ruled by a military commander (a ‘dux’, later becoming a Doge) who took his orders from the imperial court in Constantinople. Torcello was the end of the road for traders from the East, an emporion. A few kilometres away, over there on the mainland, was Italy, a chaotic and dangerous place, where for centuries Goths, Lombards and Franks had relegated any sense of the ancient Roman world to the dustbin of history as they slugged it out for control.

An inscription near the high altar of the beautiful, mosaic-filled eleventh-century church of Santa Maria Assunta, dating from 639CE, records how Bishop Heliodorus from the nearby mainland town of Altino led his flock to Torcello. It is the first documented migration of mainlanders to the lagoon, something that later becomes a trope in Venetian history. No doubt Bishop Heliodorus’s flock felt a lot safer on their island home. It must have been good for business too. In the following centuries Torcello’s population rose to some 20,000, larger than the Rialto islands of Venice itself, and the architectural splendour of Torcello’s remaining churches attests to this small island’s wealth.

A visit to Torcello is the best way of getting a sense of Venice’s Byzantine past. But be warned, although difficult to get to and uncrowded compared to St Mark’s Square, Torcello is far from undiscovered. Everyone from Ernest Hemingway, Princess Diana and Elton John has visited. It’s best to visit on a Monday or Tuesday, arriving early to beat the afternoon crowds.

ISLAND HERMITAGES

In the Middle Ages it was not just townsfolk from the mainland that sought refuge from the chaos of the European Dark Ages. Communities of men and women withdrew from the cities, choosing a life of manual labour and religious contemplation in the monasteries that sprang up in the hills and fields. Removing oneself from quotidian life was a defining characteristic of cenobitic monasticism, and we should not be surprised that the islands of the lagoon, separated by water but nonetheless close to a major population centre, attracted many religious communities.

There are dozens of monasteries to be discovered in the lagoon. One of the most peaceful and beautiful must certainly be the island of San Francesco del Deserto, founded in the 1220s on a small island not far from Burano in the northern lagoon. According to tradition, St Francis himself stayed on the island after a period of missionary work in north Africa. Today a handful of monks tend to the gardens and the church.

MEDICAL MIRACLES

As a port city, Venice was always more susceptible to the deadly epidemics that swept medieval and early modern Europe. From 1348 onwards, successive waves of bubonic plague decimated Europe’s population, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Venice’s lack of adequate drinking water and sewerage led to major outbreaks of cholera. Today, when looking back at the plague in Venice, one tends to focus on the catastrophic nature of the four major outbreaks that reached Venice in the years between 1348 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797 – and forget about the remarkable success Venice had in keeping the plague at bay for the other 445 years. 

Venice was a world leader in practical steps to both prevent and manage outbreaks of the plague, and government officials came from far and wide to report on how the Venetians managed things. Key to Venice’s defences were the lazzaretti, quarantine stations located close to the main entrance of the lagoon. Once again Venice’s unique setting was harnessed to its advantage. Any ship arriving in Venice where there had been disease on board was required to stay at a lazzaretto for around forty days (‘quarantina’ in Italian). This isolation period – surely derived from the biblical reference to Christ’s exile in the wilderness, rather than any rigorous scientific understanding – was deemed sufficient to extinguish any remaining traces of disease in either people or goods that were entering Venice.

Both the lazzaretto vecchio (established in 1423) and the lazzaretto nuovo (established in 1469) survive as archaeological sites. While the lazzaretto vecchio is at present closed, Venice’s archaeological club runs tours of the lazzaretto nuovo, usually on Saturdays. A morning or afternoon at the lazzaretto nuovo opens a unique window on Venice’s past and is a refreshing change from Venice’s more conventional museums and galleries. You need to plan and book ahead, catching the number 13 vaporetto from the Fondamenta Nove, asking the captain to make a special stop at the lazzaretto nuovo.

An archaeologist guide will explain the history of the plague in Venice and show you around the tezon grande, a large warehouse where travellers and their goods spent their isolation period. Clearly with time on their hands, the travellers left often vividly illustrated graffiti telling us who they were, where they came from and what goods they carried. It’s fascinating to hear the voices of ordinary people of the past, rather than aristocrats and officials. The tezon grande also houses a museum of archaeological finds from the lagoonm and in 15 minutes you can walk around the entire island at the end of the tour.

Robert Veel has taught about Venice’s history, architecture and art for nearly three decades. He has led numerous cultural tours to the city and spends about four month a year there, in his apartment in the San Polo district.