How Venice was built?

The city of Venice is made up of 118 small islands connected by numerous canals and bridges.

However, the buildings of Venice were not built directly on the islands.

They were built, instead, on wooden platforms that were supported by wooden poles driven into the ground.

History of Venice

It begins in the 5th century AD and after the Western Roman Empire fell when barbarians from the north were raiding the ancient territories of Rome.

To escape these raids, the Venetian population of the mainland fled to the nearby marshes.

They found refuge on the sandy islands of Torcello, Iesolo and Malamocco.

Although the settlements were initially temporary in nature, the Venetians gradually inhabited the islands permanently.

In order to have their buildings on solid foundations, the Venetians first drove wooden stakes into the sandy soil.

A seventeenth-century book detailing the construction procedure in Venice shows the amount of wood needed for the poles alone.

According to this book, when the church of Santa Maria della Salute was built, 1,106,657 wooden poles, each 4 meters long, were driven underwater.

Thus, one can imagine the magnitude of this feat.

How Venice was built?

Wooden foundations of Venice

The city of Venice: built on wooden foundations

The use of wood as a load-bearing structure may come as a surprise, since wood is relatively less durable than stone or metal.

The wooden support in Venice is submerged underwater, so they don’t have oxygen, one of the elements needed by microorganisms to survive.

Canals of venice

In addition, the constant flow of salt water around and through the wood petrifies the wood over time, turning it into a hardened stone-like structure.

To this day, the lagoon that has protected Venice from countless foreign invaders is the greatest threat to its survival.

For local Venetians, flooding of the city seems to be a normal phenomenon as the water level rises about a dozen times a year.

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