Howdy! I am a part of the Italy Business program and we just traveled to Venice for the day to learn about the history of Venice and explore the unique city!
Here are just a few of the many things I learned about Venice:
- Due to the swamps and marshy lagoons, the Venetians imported over 10 million logs from countries, like Croatia, to stake into the ground and build on top of. The logs that you see today are the original logs that were placed hundreds of years ago. The reason they don’t need to be replaced is because once they were put into the ground, they were deprived of oxygen, petrifying them into very stable and strong pieces of wood.
- St. Mark’s Basilica looks very different than St. Peter’s Basilica because there is a lot of eastern influence from the Byzantine Empire. During the fall of the Roman Empire, Venice rose to become a world trade center. Having access to the Adriatic Sea allowed Venice to have access to the whole world. Instead of conquering Venice, the Byzantine Empire viewed the Venetians as independent but was still under the rule of the Byzantine Empire. In fact, Venice was allowed to have free trade because they were building wealth off trade.
- Venice was able to go strong for 1000 years because of their unique political structure. Their elected heads of state were called Doges, and they were elected for life with some strict restrictions. The wealth was evenly distributed to all of the community and the laws applied to everyone. Venetians believed in the good of the community…until new trade routes were established. There was increasing competition, Venice wasn’t the center of the world anymore, there was less money coming in, so corruption arose. This was a large contributing factor to the fall of Venice.
Venice is such a fascinating city with such rich history, and I can’t wait to visit it again!
