venice and its surroundings 45
Ages, of a genuine concern about pollution.57 Regarding the history of
the lagoons, made through constant development, it shows the absolute
necessity of also studying the landscape in the evolution of its relation-
ship to man.
Take the example of the northern basin. Until the second half of the
11th century, the salt pans were mainly concentrated in this area.58 The
decline and the gradual reorganization of salt production, in the south,
around Chioggia, caused radical economic restructuring.59 From the
late 13th century on, an impressive infrastructure for fishing was imple-
mented, and the iconography, even belated, is not sufficient to account
either for the importance of fishing in these waters or for the landscape,
transformed by man, which was that of the northern lagoon at the end of
the Middle Ages.60 Thus everything attests from the 15th century on to an
overexploitation of natural resources that resulted from the post-plague
demographic recovery, also explained by heavy investment in the sector
of fishing valli. The changing, fragile environment is rendered even more
unstable and fragile by over-exploitation.
There is one last factor that came to magnify the impact of human
activity on the lagoon environment. The works on the site, whether
hydrographic interventions or operations to preserve the shorelines, were
not neutral. Any attempt to contain or divert rivers, any decision to close
or reopen a coastal inlet, effectively acted on the ensemble of delicate
balances, without otherwise affording the actors of these changes little
more than the awareness of their existence. Hence this notation of which
we should not lose sight: industrial societies had no exclusive monop-
oly on environmental transformation,61 and it was the very existence of
Venetian urban life that was a driving force for the transformation of the
lagoon ecosystem, well before the environmental impact of contemporary
civilization.
In this connected history of a living place and of the vision of it that the
community that had established itself there possessed, three observations,
57 Crouzet-Pavan, Villes vivantes, pp. 201–07.
58 ASV, Piovego, B. 3 Codex Publicorum (Codice del Piovego; B. Lanfranchi Strina,
Codex Publicorum, Fonti per la storia di Venezia, sez. 1. Archivi pubblici (Venice, 1985).
59 J. C. Hocquet, Chioggia capitale del sale nel Medioevo (Sottomarina, 1991), pp. 33–34,
50–52.
60 Crouzet-Pavan, La mort lente de Torcello, pp. 180–83.
61 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and J. P. Poussou, “L’histoire de l’environnement: un retour
à la macro-histoire (Economie et écologie: ennemies ou alliées?),” XVIIIe Congrès des sci-
ences historiques (Montreal, 1995), pp. 369–96.