VENICE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
Elisabeth Crouzet-PavanWhen used in its plural form, the term “Venice” long referred to two dis-
tinct geographical realities between Grado and Cavarzere. It first referred
to the city which became the capital following the transfer of the ducal
seat to Rialto, a populated and lively agglomeration located in the middle
of the lagoons, the head of a state and an empire. But it also referred
to the administrative duchy established during Byzantine Italy, the lands
and waters, islands and barrier spits on which the capital city imposed
its domination. This semantic singularity does not reflect lexical poverty.
Quite the contrary, it embedded the reality of the city’s origins, the disper-
sion of communities over the lands and waters of the lagoon refuge as the
first Venice—maritime Venice—was born. With time, however, things
changed. In the 15th century, in the texts adopted by the various city
councils, occurrences of the word “Rialto” were not uncommon. Yet when
designating the capital city, that term tended to be supplanted by another,
“Venice,” a word that, in the singular, lost its ambivalence, captured as it
were by reference only to the city of the lagoon. The first meaning, how-
ever, disappeared only gradually, and its long survival speaks volumes.
Venice dominated the lagoon basin but continued to associate its trium-
phal history with the small societies that survived in the space of its origi-
nal jurisdiction, the territory of the duchy. Stripped of any autonomous
destiny, these societies still reflect some of the luster of Venice’s name,
and its history remains their history. Where the old meaning did survive,
it served to preserve a memory, to show that the small communities of
the lagoon continued to exist, at least symbolically, on several levels at
the same time. First on a local scale, and second on an expanded scale
which in some cases saw the union of their history with that of Venice.
Eventually, the former meaning disappeared and memory transformed,
becoming the matrix of a historical memory in that it is the “guardian
of the problematic of the representative relationship of the present to
the past.”1
1 P. Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), p. 306.