34 elisabeth crouzet-pavan
“Sopra le Acque Salse”In the words of chronicles, by maps, and through successive represen-
tations, an image of Venice was imposed. According to this representa-
tion, the city—a harmonious structure of stone, wood, and brick—reigns
over the various elements of the lagoon. A triumph of human industry,
the city would dominate the elements and an orderly and peaceful envi-
ronment, the asylum that was offered to her at the very beginning of her
history. To read the chronicles, like that of Lorenzo de Monaci (early
15th century), once the seat of the duchy was installed at Rialto, the
agglomeration would soon develop: “Bridges are built to connect the sixty
islands that surround the small island of Rialto. And with God’s help, this
new form of city grew in the midst of the marshes and marine waters, with
no pastures, no fields, no vineyards.”28 The Abbot Laugier and Sismondi
say the same: “Since that time, Rialto has become the capital of the new
state; bridges have been used to link this first island to the sixty islands
surrounding it, over which the city of Venice now spreads”;29 “Bridges
have been used to link this first island to the sixty islands surrounding it,
over which the city of Venice now spreads. The ducal palace was raised
on the very spot where it still exists today.”30 The image is drawn and
redrawn. The power of its sway explains why the morphological evolution
of the Venetian agglomeration was for a long time left unscrutinized by
historical analysis, as if the city had always been wonderfully suspended
between land and water, as if the forma urbis had been acquired at the
birth of Rialto.
The pervasiveness of this image explains secondarily why the lagoon
environment was consistently ignored by the general histories of Venice.
As has been noted, monographs were certainly devoted to the geogra-
phy of the lagoons and to the progress of the human footprint on the
environment. But until recent contributions, they constituted a particular
historiographical sector whose eventual contributions had not been inte-
grated in any overall reflection.31 The originality of the ecosystem was, of
course, stressed.32 The particularities of the site were among the various
parameters capable of determining the longevity of a republic which had
28 Laurentii de Monacis, Chronicon de rebus venetis (Venice, 1758), pp. 13–15, 27.
29 Abbé Laugier, Histoire de la République de Venise, p. 176.
30 Sismonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques, 1:316–17.
31 Crouzet-Pavan, Venise triomphante, pp. 61, 368.
32 Daru, Histoire de la république, 1:1.