venice and its surroundings 33
power, was reconstructed and the official memory—due to its increasing
tendency to make Rialto-Venice a predestined island, the shelter prom-
ised by God in his benevolence toward his children—was for the rest of
the lagoon synonymous with oblivion.21
This memory was so strongly established that for a long time it weighed
heavily on scholarly history. Of course, revisions were made gradually.
In the 15th century, the medieval legend of St. Mark dreaming that the
lagoons would be the place of his eternal rest is no longer recounted.22
And the contention made by Paduan consuls in 421 regarding the founda-
tion of Rialto-Venice is sometimes refuted. Nevertheless, the idea would
not die so easily. In his Principi di Storia della Repubblica di Venezia, pub-
lished in 1755, Vettor Sandi, for instance, takes it up again.23 The Abbot
Laugier (1713–69) follows suit. He reminds us of the “antiquity of the town
of Rialta, a colony that is independent of the magistrates of Padua.”24
Count Daru,25 like Sismondi,26 does not miss this necessary passage. This
also explains the reading of J. Ruskin (1819–1900). “421: In that year, and
on the very day—(little foolish Venice used to say, when she was a very
child),—in which, once upon a time, the world was made; and, once upon
another time—the Ave Maria first said,—the first stone of Venice was laid
on the sea sand, in the name of St. James the fisher.”27
Thus history has produced fiction, and for a very long time. Following
the effect of gravity and the fascination exerted by the sources, fiction
has conditioned the writing of history, and the entire questioning of the
relationship of the capital city to its environment is wrapped in the strait-
jacket of primitive narrative schemas. It is thus necessary for that fiction
to become an object of history so that the Venetian environment can be
seen in its completeness. Let us now turn our attention to the first of
the Venetian environments, the waters that surround the city.
dalle origini al 1275, ed. A. Limentani (Florence, 1972), p. 6; Cronaca di Marco, B. N. Marci-
ana, It. cl. XI, cod. 124, f° 37r. Crouzet-Pavan, La mort lente, p. 369.
21 Crouzet-Pavan, La mort lente, pp. 60–65, 72–73.
22 Da Canale, Les estoires, p. 340, Cronaca di Marco, f°5v; Andrea Dandolo, Chronica
per extensum descripta: aa 46–1280 d.c., ed. E. Pastorello, Rerum Italicorum scriptores 12,
Part 1 (Bologna, 1942), p. 9.
23 Principi di storia civile della Repubblica di Venezia dalla sua fondazione sino all’anno
di n. s. 1700 scritte da Vettor Sandi, nobile veneto (Venice, 1755), p. 25.
24 Vettor Sandi, Histoire de la République de Venise depuis sa fondation jusqu’à présent
par Monsieur l’abbé Laugier, 12 vols (Paris, 1759), 1:132.
25 Daru, Histoire de la république, 1:21.
26 Sismonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques, 1:304, 306–08.
27 John Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest (New York, 1877), p. 25.