Yes, Venice is full of byzantine loot, like the famous horses on the st Marks cathedral for example.
Constantinople was Venice’s main competitor int the eastern mediterranean. They originally started out as a vassal state of Constantinople until they won their independence.
This is IMO the main reason Venice is so beautiful. It’s architecture is heavily inspired on the Byzantine architecture. More or less a perfect mix of the eastern and western styles.
It’s those damn Chinese Italians right!
“reliable” is relative - Venice has been there for 1,600 years (i.e., 1,200 years longer than America has existed), so they must have been doing something right.
The buildings of Venice are constructed on closely spaced wooden piles. Most of these piles are still intact after centuries of submersion. The foundations rest on plates of Istrian limestone placed on top of the piles, and buildings of brick or stone sit above these footings. The piles penetrate a softer layer of sand and mud until they reach a much harder layer of compressed clay. Submerged by water, in oxygen-poor conditions, wood does not decay as rapidly as on the surface. Most of these piles were made from trunks of alder trees, a wood noted for its water resistance.
If it’s stupid, but it works … maybe it’s not stupid?
They’ve been standing since the 16th Century or so, though; no worse than the typical English church tower (which tend to be rather shorter).
As others have said, platforms of wooden pilings are suited to the anaerobic environment, and are as good as you’re likely to get in the Lagoon.
The old city is also a world heritage site so you’re probably not even allowed to replace them with more modern materials.
Centuries of massive and sustained investment also play a role. It isn’t the sort of thing you can just retrofit at the last minute, and it isn’t the sort of thing that global south nations can afford on their own.
I’ve been reading the last batch of reports of the Delta Commission that look far into the future. The picture is not pretty, climate change has the potential to render our whole system outdated. You have to remember that what we’re doing today is a modern version of a very old idea. Water boards have existed since medieval times and they were doing then what we’re doing now, building walls around things and draining the water from the enclosed area. This principle is still used today, although with modern technology.
But just a handful of meters of sea level rise will make it all largely pointless. Sea water will seep in underneath the walls, this already happens but gets worse when the difference between water levels increases. And higher walls also need to be wider or they will collapse. If you want build a wall to hold back say 10 meters of sea level rise it would need to be hundreds of meters wide, essentially forcing you to rebuild whole cities to accommodate them. At some point just walking away is a better idea.
The most worrying part is the flow-on effects. For example:
There are 160,000,000 Bangladeshis. The entire country of Bangladesh lies within spitting distance of sea level.
Look at how apeshit crazy the USA is currently going over a handful of Honduran refugees. Look at how bad Australia has been over recent decades due to a tiny trickle of Afghans/Sri Lankans/Sudanese arriving by boat.
What do you think Pakistan and China are going to do whan 160,000,000 refugees land on their doorstep?
Yes a scarily large part of the world population live in coastal areas at risk of sea level rise.
If I had a lot of money to invest (I don’t, sadly) I’d put it in floating buildings. Demand will rise…
I wonder if decommissioned military vessels or outdated cruise ships could be re-purposed for housing displaced people?
160,000,000 of them?
This is the sort of stuff that makes Peter Watts say he’s an optimist (although apparently getting a little less so).
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433
People have noticed.
I got it in Lviv. I got it in an epic email interview with BiFrost. I get it in pubs and emails, and from one disapproving professor at Concordia who— clearly regretting having invited me into her classroom— asked “So why do you even get out of bed in the morning?”
“You once described yourself as an angry optimist ,” Erwann Perchoc asked me a few weeks ago. “Is that still true?”
As a temporary measure, yes maybe. Rebuilding the city further inland will always be cheaper than maintaining a floating city indefinitely though.
It will be (already is) a major shitshow and I’m very (egotistically) glad I live in a rich country.
As much as I hate those huge ships the cruise lines keep building, we’re apparently going to need bigger boats - and lots more of them. Unfortunately, the number needing housing will probably be lower, because too many are not going to make it (based on how disaster survivors and refugees have been treated in the past). There’s also the issue of the fight over the future coastline, like what is happening in Florida now:
In fairness to Venice, while precisely the features it accentuates to keep those tourists coming help disguise the fact, it’s in the unenviable position (for infrastructure, among a variety of other important things) of being on the wrong side of a historical zenith.
Being the strategically located heart of a powerful merchant empire can pay for a lot of maintenance in ways that being a tourist attraction just can’t.
Even back then, the artist knew to include two executives and a lawyer standing on the load, making it heavier, and enjoying the ride.
Erm…
[However, modern historians tend to regard the Vandals during the transitional period from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages as perpetuators, not destroyers, of Roman culture.](Vandals - Wikipedia)
Just FTR, according to my vague recollection of a secondary source summarising relatively current historical research, the Vandals were a) not an homogeneous ethnic group, especially over time (the name had continuity while the group which it was applied to had not), b) the Vandals weren’t driven towards the Mediterranean by hardship, hunger and the huns but started to move preemptively towards a region which promised a better way of living, and c) were cultured and highly skilled artists. Their bad name comes from Roman and partially from faux-roman medieval source, if I remember correctly.
Propaganda, if you will.
BTW, some sources identified the Vandals with the Wends. Another case of propaganda: the term was already racists (literally: the others) in Germanic languages and was used to describe Slavic people. The toxicity of this should not be underestimated. “Modern” times build on the old racist cultural stereotypes when the Nazis described the Slavic people as Untermenschen.
So, you were saying about the Huns and the Vandals?
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