Venice Pure city

Peter Ackroyd, 1949-

Book - 2009

A glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice, the ultimate city, embracing facts and romance, history and artists, carnival masks and leper colonies, wars and sieges, and scandals and seductions.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday c2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Peter Ackroyd, 1949- (-)
Edition
1st U.S. ed
Item Description
"Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London, in 2009"--T.p. verso.
Physical Description
403 p., [32] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.), ports. ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 381-386) and index.
ISBN
9780385531528
  • City from the sea : Origins
  • Water, water everywhere
  • Mirror, mirror
  • The city of St. Mark : The saint comes
  • Refuge
  • Against nature
  • Stones of Venice
  • Ship of state : "Let it be everlasting"
  • The chosen people
  • The prison house
  • Secrets
  • Chronicles
  • Republic of commerce : The merchants of Venice
  • The endless drama
  • Wheels within wheels
  • Empire of trade : The lion city
  • Cities in collision
  • A call to arms
  • Timeless city : Bells and gondolas
  • Iustitia
  • Against the Turks
  • The living city : The body and the building
  • Learning and language
  • Colour and light
  • Pilgrims and tourists
  • The art of life :Hurrah for Carnival
  • A divine art
  • The eternal feminine
  • What to eat?
  • Sacred city : Divine and infernal
  • Of belief
  • The shadows of history : Decline and fall?
  • Death in Venice
  • City of myth : The map unrolls
  • The huddled family
  • Moon and night
  • While the music lasts.
Review by New York Times Review

THIS season's pack of travel writers are all over the map - both transcontinental ramblers and more sedentary souls who find their inspiration within the confines of a few square miles. There are urban adventurers in Italy and India, American road warriors and a nomad who pursues every form of transportation imaginable to follow Africa's longest river from source to mouth. "Delhi, you see, . . . is a brutal city," a young woman in a cybercafe tells Sam Miller, a former BBC correspondent who was first based in the Indian capital in the early 1990s, then settled there permanently with his Indian wife a decade later. In DELHI: Adventures in a Megacity (St. Martin's, $25.99), Miller seems to wander through every hidden corner of this megalopolis, now grown to roughly 18 million people, and (no surprise) finds a globalized 21st-century capital existing alongside scenes of abject poverty and almost medieval squalor. Miller's walks through Delhi take him from the warrens of the walled city laid out by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to the bowels of the ultramodern Metro system, from a backpackers' seedy cafe to the grand edifices of the Raj. Oddities confront him at every turn: a museum containing the shredded remains of the shirt Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was wearing when he was blown up by a suicide bomber in 1991, and perhaps "the only Jewish cemetery in the world where the presence of a swastika," which was a Hindu symbol long before the Nazis appropriated it, "would not be considered an act of desecration." He writes with relish of his frightening encounter with knife-wielding butchers in a back-alley slaughterhouse, and of an electric-powered crematorium whose owner laments Indians' attachment to traditional woodfire ceremonies. The Yamuna River, "Delhi's shameful, rancid secret," shadows Miller's journey, serving as home to the city's unbridled growth as well as its vestiges of rustic splendor. "From close up, it is as black as pitch," Miller observes, "with a gray-green scum where its viscous waters lap stodgily against the river bank, and a fog of minuscule midges flutter and hover above the filth." But "with a little imagination, and if you don't look too close" - and when the wind blows the stench in the other direction - "the place seems, momentarily, to have been transformed into an unlikely pre-urban pastoral idyll." Peter Ackroyd's VENICE: Pure City (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $37.50) examines a more aesthetically coherent metropolis, yet one with its own dark recesses and unsavory past. From its ancient origins as a settlement of 117 islands bordering the "remote and secluded waters" of a lagoon, Venice's rise to its onetime status as Europe's richest, most powerful city-state is authoritatively (if sometimes long-windedly) traced. Here an autocratic Council of 10, led by the doge, built Venice's great fleet of commercial vessels and armed galleys, extended its influence as far as Constantinople and dealt out ruthless punishment to those who challenged its authority. Ackroyd describes a Renaissance metropolis pulsating with wealth and luxury, yet swimming in sewage and periodically besieged by the plague. (Pope Pius II called the Venetians "traders," "barbarians" and "hypocrites," declaring that they "never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy.") Ackroyd also captures Venice's bewitching effect on the artists, writers and musicians who flocked there over the centuries, long after its decline in the face of a surging Ottoman Empire. The city in which Titian and Tiepolo were born and Browning and Wagner came to die is above all, Ackroyd writes, "the city of masks," its fantastically ornamented facades hiding decaying brickwork and evoking "the artifice and outwardness of the theater." In THE BLACK NILE: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River (Viking, $26.95), the American freelance journalist Dan Morrison buys a plank-board boat outside Kampala, Uganda, and starts paddling down the White Nile in the company of his bartender buddy, Schon. But the title of Morrison's memoir, inspired by Alan Moorehead's classic books "The White Nile" and "The Blue Nile," is somewhat misleading. Pummeled by the heat, fearful of attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army and discouraged by the difficulty of navigating the river's cataracts, the pair ditch their boat before they reach the Sudanese border. When Schon drops out in the southern Sudanese town of Juba - "a spread-out, starved and broken-down colonial construct straining under the weight of thousands of returning refugees and newly arrived aid workers" - Morrison continues alone, mostly by bus and truck. Minus the sour complaints of his companion, the adventure becomes an evocative piece of reporting from little-visited corners of a country lurching fitfully toward reconciliation after a decades-long civil war between the Islamic north and the mostly Christian and animist south. Morrison hitches a fide down river on a barge - "a diesel-powered dormitory" - through the swampy region known as the Sudd, then travels on to the torpid river port of Malakal, where he finds a "raft of gunmen" from the northern government's army, the former southern rebels and various tribal militias: "Aid workers were getting robbed at night, and minor barroom dustups threatened to become major battles because every aggrieved illiterate drunk had an army to back him up." (Shortly after Morrison's departure, the place erupted in a clash that left hundreds dead.) He also tries to investigate the stories of villagers displaced from their homes at gunpoint to make way for the multinational corporations set to exploit the region's oil reserves. By the time he takes the ferry into Egypt at the Aswan High Dam (Gamal Abdel Nasser's "act of creation to rival the pyramids"), Morrison has sketched a portrait of a fractured country just one spark away from a renewal of hostilities. Bill Barich opts for a more prosaic means of transportation in LONG WAY HOME: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America (Walker, $26). An expat who has lived in Ireland for the last decade, Barich rents a "humble Ford Focus" at Kennedy Airport and, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, sets out on a transcontinental journey loosely modeled on Steinbeck's 1962 classic, "Travels With Charley in Search of America." With his fly-fishing rod in his trunk and a paperback copy of Steinbeck's book in his duffel bag, be heads down the New Jersey Turnpike, detours into the back roads of Delaware and Virginia, then veers west for the Great Plains and, ultimately, California. The book gets off to a slow start, marked by brief, unedifying conversations with the locals about politics and overly familiar riffs on bad buffet breakfasts at roadside motels: "rock-hard bagels, calorie-rich muffins, anachronistic slabs of Wonder Bread and syrupy fruit salad from a can." Gradually, however, the journey builds momentum. In the twilight of the Bush era, Barich encounters an anxious nation buffeted by recession, seeking solace in religion, given to patriotic displays that sometimes "smacked of aggression or defiance." "The streets were like palimpsests," he writes of near-deserted Parkersburg, W. Va., one of a string of economically depleted towns, "a faded sketch of an earlier and more vital form." In fact, Barich finds that "a sense of loss seemed to haunt much of the country, although its precise nature wasn't easy to define. It manifested itself as a vague anxiety rooted, perhaps, in the discrepancy between the idealized America of schoolbooks and the present reality." In French Lick, Ind., he visits a gaudy casino populated by "bikers in club leathers, skeletal chain smokers, guys with ZZ Top beards, plus-sized matrons, and a coterie of small-town players, ardently indulging in the vices they kept under wraps at home." Luckily, Barich's depressing encounters are leavened by glimpses of American ingenuity, the surprisingly heterogeneous populations of towns like Dodge City, Kan., and the spectacular vistas of the Rockies. "The West fosters an easy intimacy," he writes, breathing in the crisp air in Ouray, Colo. "People don't seem as defensive, nor as inhibited by their mistakes and defeats. The idea that you can always start over still motivates behavior. If you fail to strike gold, it's time to head on." Matt Dellinger's INTERSTATE 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway (Scribner, $26), is a ramble along a road that exists mostly in the mind. Dellinger, a former editor at the New Yorker, sets off to unravel the story behind "the most significant new highway construction since the original Interstate system," a proposed 1,800-mile-long, $27 billion Interstate that would run from Port Huron, Mich., to Brownsville and Laredo, Tex., and connect "the busiest trade crossings on the Canadian border to the busiest trade crossings on the Mexican border." Traveling to Texas from his native Indiana, where a portion of the highway has already been laid down. Dellinger meets some of the grass-roots organizers, politicians and lobbyists who are trying to stitch together this staggeringly complicated project. He also encounters environmental activists equally determined to block it: ''Democrats and. Republicans, young and old, hippies and hicks alike have come together to insist that the area's lack of Interstate is more of a lucky break than a curse." Dellinger captures the essential nature of the conflict, which pits 1-69 advocates in economically depressed areas of the Midwest and South, who see the highway as "a last best chance for prosperity." against congressmen "whose constituents live on ihe coasts . . . or in the Great Plains or Rocky Mountains," for whom "rescuing fading towns in Middle America is not necessarily a high priority." In the end, though, he fails to locate the Robert Moses character who might have tied the strands of the story together. And his officebound encounters with an endless procession of small-town politicos eventually have the reader yearning for the exit ramp. ALL OVER THE MAP (Harmony, $24), by Laura Fraser, unfolds over the course of nearly a decade as the globe-trotting magazine writer advances through her 40s and tries to balance her wanderlust with her yearning for domesticity and love. The book picks up where her previous memoir, "An Italian Affair," left off: with the breakup of a relationship with the Paris-based Italian professor who'd helped her recover from her divorce. Unattached and lonely, Fraser jets off to Samoa on assignment for a women's magazine, but an alcohol-fueled flirtation with a surfer on a beach ends in rape. "I am nervous on my own," she writes in the aftermath, "even walking in the evening around the Haight-Ashbury, where I have lived, safely, without incident for 20 years." Trying to recover, Fraser embarks on a series of adventures that could be called "Eat, Pray, Love Lite": tango lessons in Argentina, meditation in Marin County, even a brief affair with a lusty Brazilian. Yet nothing seems to alleviate her crushing feeling of failure. "I'm 45. Game over, time's up," she writes after another relationship bites the dust. "My boyfriend - my last hope for some conventional semblance of adult life - has just broken up with me. I don't know if I'll ever have another relationship - or sex, for that matter - again." The book's achingly confessional tone can be embarrassing at times, but Fraser's honesty keeps you rooting for her. Lying in bed at night, she imagines her preadolescent self, gazing into the future. "She would've been thrilled to know that one day she would indeed travel to many countries and be awed by so many sights, tastes, and people," Fraser writes, though she might be saddened by the "reality of herself at middle age: no husband, kids or house, not even an international affair with some mysterious Basil St. John with his dark eye patch and orchid serum, like Brenda Starr." By the time Fraser comes to terms with her disappointments and finds companionship and stability - and a beautiful new home - in the expatriate community of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, we're more than ready to wish her buena suerte. Almost a century ago. Rosita Forbes, the bride of an adulterous Scottish army officer, pawned her wedding ring, bought a horse, a revolver and a camera and embarked on what would be a long, adventurous career as a travel writer. In FROM THE SAHARA TO SAMARKAND: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937 (Axios, paper, $15), Margaret Bald provides a taste of some of Forbes's forays into the Libyan desert, Iraq, Afghanistan and a disintegrating, post-World War I China. Her attitude toward the locals can seem patronizing at times, and her piles of descriptive detail can bog the reader down. But the book is redeemed by a memorable account of her journey through the hermetic Kingdom of Abyssinia, a land offering "every contrast of mountain and valley, desert, river and forest, of walled medieval town and thatched mushroom village, of troglodytes and hillmen, priests, courtesans and savages, of courteous simple hospitality and the glamour of ancient violences." Best, though, is the story of her attempted pilgrimage to Mecca in August 1922. Swathed in a shapeless black abaya, she identifies herself as half Turk, half Egyptian and sets out with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims on a boat sailing across the Red Sea from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. "There were fat, pale merchants from the cities and graybearded blacks from the South," she writes. "Tattooed Bedouin women, brown and lean, rubbed shoulders with unwieldy, untidy dames who looked as if they had never walked an inch in their lives. . . . The young men, plump and pale, intoned quick passages from sacred books, each one attempting to read quicker and louder than his fellows." In Jidda, Forbes is unmasked by representatives of King Hussein after an acquaintance recognizes her as an Englishwoman - but not before she's rubbed shoulders with T. E. Lawrence, "demure and neat and very hot under his yellow kaffiyeh." A funeral gondola from "Venice" and, top, Rosita Forbes on the Khyber Pass, in "From the Sahara to Samarkand." Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 5, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review

Even during the dominance of the Roman Empire, Venice and Venetians were regarded as distinct by their neighbors. They spoke Latin, and later Italian, in an unusual dialect. Their geographic position as an island in a lagoon contributed to their fierce spirit of independence, but it also positioned them to control trade routes to and from the East. Ackroyd, the novelist, biographer, and writer of tributes to great urban centers (London), has captured the rich tradition, beauty, and vibrancy of this magnificent city in a survey that combines political and artistic history with aspects of a travelogue. Ackroyd moves back and forth in time as he examines the growth of Venice, from prehistoric settlement to its place in both the Roman and Byzantine empires to the present time. As he describes the development of the art and architectural treasures, he includes informative and charming diversions on various traditions, events, and personalities. For those who have visited or hope to visit the Pearl of the Adriatic, this work will be a treasure.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Canterbury Tales) provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself. Structured and organized with a fluidity that reflects its many-faceted subject, he launches his tour de force with the basics of Venetian geography, hydrology, and climate before turning to history and architecture. The narrative continues to develop around themes both usual and unexpected such as trade and gossip or subjects such as the city's fabled churches, its love of sexuality, and theater. As it glides along, it gracefully incorporates tidbits about such traditions as the cabins on gondolas and the masks worn during Carnival. How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city's real and literary tropes and touchstones is itself a kind of tribute to La Serenissima, as Venice is called, and his seductive voice is elegant and elegiac. The resulting book is, like Venice, something rich, labyrinthine and unique that makes itself and its subject both new and necessary. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Italo Calvino once wrote, "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." Maybe that's why Ackroyd's new book is more enjoyable than his recent Thames: The Biography. Nonetheless, it's more a string of essays than one coherent book. Ackroyd interweaves history with impressions (some quite apposite) on a host of topics about living in Venice: the light and color, Carnival, prisons, prostitutes, death, the Venetian republic's extraordinarily long existence, artists, and the claustrophobic life of the city. He writes exceptionally well at points: he's always been a master of the apercu, and his comments on Venetian art and architecture in particular are perceptive though by no means original. His sources are often vague or missing altogether. He errs twice, calling Philippe de Commynes "an ambassador from fifteenth-century Flanders" and "a traveler from the court of Burgundy," when, by 1495, the year Commynes visited Venice, Commynes had served France, not Burgundy, for 23 years. Perhaps it's a minor error, but it leads one to wonder what others lie hidden in this largely undocumented description and history of Venice. VERDICT This is a pleasant read but too formless for anything more serious. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The indefatigable chronicler of his native England's culture looks overseas to the magical Italian city on a lagoon.In this impressionistic appreciation of Venice, Ackroyd (The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 2009, etc.) opens with a haunting evocation of the site as it appeared to fifth-century mainlanders fleeing barbarian invasions: "a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea and the sound of the wind soughing in the rushes." But the city would not remain silent for long. It was a center of trade for more than 1,000 years, as its ships brought the spices of the East to Europe and carried manufactured items in the opposite direction. Its position at the economic forefront faltered after the 16th century, when city authorities refused to compromise the standards of the luxury goods for which Venice was famous and lost out to the merchants of England and Holland, able to offer cloths and metals for less. But Venice reinvented itself as a playground for foreigners, trading on its dazzling art and architecture and its seductive music and theater to attract the hordes of visitors that still clog the Piazza San Marco today. Yet Ackroyd reminds us that this city of brilliant surfaces has always also been a place of mystery, of secrets and crimes concealed behind opaque facades. Mosaics and glass are its characteristic products; its greatest painters (Titian, Tintoretto) excel in color and drama, not psychological complexity; ditto the music of native son Vivaldi and the beloved comedies of Goldoni. The author affectionately portrays Venetians as intensely social and deeply conservative, creators of an oligarchic democracy that endured for centuries. Public life was as theatrical as the opera; little was at stake because nothing ever changed. There's no need to lament the city's contemporary role as a tourist attraction, writes Ackroyd, because "the tourist Venice is the essential, quintessential, Venice."A loving yet clear-eyed celebration of the enigmatic icon on the Adriatic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 Origins They voyaged into the remote and secluded waters. They came in flat-bottomed boats, moving over the shallows. They were exiles, far from their own cities or farms, fleeing from the marauding tribes of the North and the East. And they had come to this wild place, a wide and flat lagoon in which fresh water from the rivers on the mainland and salt water from the Adriatic mingled. At low tide there were mud-flats all around, cut through with streams and rivulets and small channels; at high tide there were small islands of silt and marsh-grass. There were shoals covered with reeds and wild grasses, rising just a little way above the waters. There were patches of land that were generally submerged but, at certain low tides, rose above the water. There were desolate marshes that the water only rarely covered. The salt marshes and the shore seemed from a distance to make up the same wide expanse, marked with ponds and islets. There were swamps here, too, as dark and uninviting as the waters that the tide did not reach. A line of islands, made up of sand and river debris, helped to protect the lagoon from the sea; these were covered with pine woods. Although the lagoon was not far from the once great centres of Roman civilisation, it was remote and secluded. This was a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of the seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea and the sound of the wind soughing in the rushes. At night it was the setting of a vast darkness, except in those patches where the moon illumined the restless waters. Yet in the daylight of the exiles' approach the silver sea stretched out into a line of mist, and the cloudy sky seemed to reflect the silvery motions of the water. They were drawn into a womb of light. They found an island. And a voice, like the sound of many waters, told them to build a church on the ground they had found. This is one of the stories of origin that the Venetians told. The lagoon itself is an ambiguous area that is neither land nor sea. It is approximately thirty-five miles (56 km) in length and seven miles (11 km) in width, taking a crescent shape along part of the coast of north-eastern Italy. It was created some six thousand years ago, emerging from the mud and silt and debris that came down into the Adriatic from seven rivers. The principal among them--the rivers Brenta, Sile and Piave--carried material from the Alps and the Apennines; a city of stone would one day rise on the minute debris of mountains. The swamps and marshes and mud-flats are protected from the sea by a long and narrow bank of sand, divided into islands by several channels; the longest of those islands is now known as the Lido. The channels make openings in the barrier, entrances known as porti, through which the sea rushes into the lagoon. There are now three such porti at the Lido, at Malamocco and at Chioggia. These tides breathe life into Venice. It is a continually various and unsettled scene, part mud and part sand and part clay; it is changed by tides, always shifting and unstable. There is a current in the Adriatic that flows up and down from the Mediterranean, and each of the porti creates its own distinct basin or force of water. That is why the appearance of the lagoon has altered over the centuries. There is one theory that, as late as the sixth and seventh centuries, the lagoon was essentially a marsh covered by water at high tide. In the nineteenth century, according to John Ruskin, there were times at low tide when it seemed that Venice was marooned on a vast plain of dark green seaweed. The whole lagoon in fact would have become dry land five hundred years ago, were it not for the intervention of the Venetians themselves. The lagoon is now simply another part of Venice, another quarter that happens to be neither land nor sea. But it is slowly returning to the sea. The waters are growing deeper, and more salty. It is a precarious place. Saint Christopher, carrying the infant Christ across the water, was once a popular saint of the city. There have always been inhabitants of the lagoon. The wilderness could, after all, be fruitful. From the earliest times there were small pockets of people--fishermen and fowlers ready to take advantage of the abundance of wildfowl and marine life as well as the autumnal migration of the fish from the rivers to the sea. The marshes are also a natural place for the harvesting of salt. Salt was a valuable commodity. The Venetians were always known as a mercantile people, but the first stirrings of trade in this area began even before their ancestors had arrived. The earliest tribes are lost in the darkness of prehistory. But the first recognisable ancestors of the Venetians inhabited the region surrounding the lagoon from the eighth century bc. These were the people who dwelled in the north-eastern part of Italy as well as along the coasts of what are now Slovenia and Croatia. They were known as the Veneti or the Venetkens; Homer refers to them as the "Enetoi," because there is no "v" sound in classical Greek. They were primarily merchants, as the Venetians would become, trading in amber and wax, honey and cheese. They set up great markets, like those which the Venetians eventually established. They traded with Greece, just as Venice would one day trade with Byzantium and the East. They specialised in the extraction of salt from coastal areas, in a way that anticipates the Venetian monopoly of salt production. They dressed in black, which became the colour characteristically worn by patrician Venetian males. Hercules was the tribal hero of the Veneti, and became a legendary protector of Venice; he is the demi-god who acquires by labour what others claim by right. The Veneti traced their descent from Antenor, who led them from the ruined city of Troy. They were well known for their skill in seamanship, and were essentially a maritime people. They submitted, in marital and familial matters, to the authority of the state. These were the people who inhabited cities such as Padua and Altino, Aquileia and Grado. These were the exiles who came for safety to the waters of the lagoon. Before the time of flight, the Veneti were thoroughly Romanised. By the second century ad they had made a pact with the powers of Rome. In the reign of Augustus the area of the lagoon was part of the Tenth District of Italy and then in the fourth century it became part of the eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. The lagoon was already partly settled. On one of the islands, S. Francesco del Deserto, have been found the remains of a Roman port with pottery from the first century and wall plaster of the third century. The port was no doubt used by those vessels sailing between Aquileia and Ravenna, bearing grain from Pannonia as well as goods and supplies from more distant shores. Amphorae have been discovered here, for the carriage of wine and olive oil that had come from the eastern Mediterranean. The larger ships would dock on the island, their goods then transported to smaller ships for the shallows of the lagoon. There must have been local pilots, therefore, to guide the craft through these exiguous waters. A walkway, dating to the second century ad, has been found beneath the nave of the basilica of S. Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello. Roman remains have been found at a great depth on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore, and material from the first and second centuries has been discovered on smaller islands. Other finds, on other islands, can be dated from the fourth to the seventh centuries. It has been suggested that the outer islands of the lagoon could have been used as a station for the Roman fleet; it is conceivable, to say no more, that villas were constructed here. Yet there was a fundamental change in the nature of the lagoon when the exiles from the mainland began to arrive in larger and larger numbers. There was no central exodus, but rather successive waves of migration that culminated in the late sixth century. The Veneti were escaping from invaders. In 403 Alaric the Visigoth descended upon the province of Venetia; in the words of Claudian, the historian of Rome, "fame proclaimed the march of the barbarian, and filled the land with terror." Aquileia and Verona fell, with many of their inhabitants fleeing to the safety of the islands. When the threat of Alaric had passed, some returned home. But others stayed, making a new life in the lagoon. In 446 Attila gained Roman provinces from the Danube to the Balkans and then, six years later, took Aquileia; Altino and Padua were also sacked. Once more the refugees from these disasters fled to the lagoon. There was a pattern to their movement. The people of Altino migrated to Torcello and Burano, for example, while those from Treviso went to Rialto and Malamocco. The inhabitants of Padua sailed to Chioggia. The citizens of Aquileia moved to Grado, which was itself protected by marshes. They came with craftsmen and builders, with farmers and labourers, with patricians and plebeians; they came with the sacred vessels from their churches, and even with the stones of their public buildings so that they might build anew. But how could they build on such shifting ground? How could they build upon mud and water? It was possible, however, for wooden poles of from ten to a dozen feet in length to be sunk into the mud before reaching a layer of harder clay and dense sand that acted as a firm foundation. This was the "boundary" at the bottom of the lagoon. So there sprang up small houses known as casoni made from the wood of poles and boards, with pitched roofs of wattle and reed. New towns, such as Heraclea and Equilio (Jesolo), were founded by the edge of the lagoon. On the islands were established village communities, with leaders consulting assemblies of the people. The Veneti may also have set up fortified encampments, in the event that the Huns or Goths decided to move against them. But the islanders were fractious and competitive; there was no unity in the lagoons. So in 466, just twenty years after the appearance of Attila, a meeting of all the Veneti of the lagoon was held at Grado. It was decided that each island would be represented by a tribune, and that the tribunes would then work together for the common good. They were, after all, facing the same dangers and difficulties--not least from the depredations of the sea. This was the first sign of the public and communal spirit that would one day manifest itself so clearly in Venice itself. The Veneti were by the sixth century a defined presence in the region. They were paid to ferry people and goods between the ports and harbours of the mainland. They transported the soldiers of Byzantium from Grado to the river Brenta. They carried officials and merchants to Byzantium itself. Already they were known for their maritime skills. Their boats travelled up the rivers of northern Italy, trading salt and fish to the cities and villages en route. The first description of these island people comes in a letter sent in 523 to their tribunes by a legate from the Ostrogoth kingdom then prevailing in northern Italy. Cassiodorus was asking them to transport wine and oil across the waters to Ravenna. "For you live like seabirds," he wrote, "with your homes dispersed, like the Cyclades, across the surface of the water. The solidity of the earth on which they rest is secured only by osier and wattle; yet you do not hesitate to oppose so frail a bulwark to the wildness of the sea." He was not quite accurate in his description; there were already some houses constructed from the stone and brick of the mainland. He went on to say that the Veneti "have one great wealth--the fish which suffices for you all. Among you there is no difference between rich and poor; your food is the same, your houses are all alike." Again, this was not quite true. Extant testimonials suggest that, even at an early stage in the development of the lagoon, there were rich as well as poor families. Cassiodorus then added that "your energies are spent on your salt fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity." In this, at least, he was right. And he added the significant detail of "your boats--which like horses you keep tied up at the doors of your dwellings." By good fortune one of these boats has emerged from the mud of the lagoon. Part of a rib of oak, and a hull of lime, have been found on the island of S. Francesco del Deserto; the boat itself dates to the fifth century. It was lying at a level that, in this period, would have been submerged except at times of low tide. Yet Venice itself was not yet born. It is not shown in a fourth-century map of the region, in which the lagoon is depicted as a sea route without people. Venetian historians claimed, however, that the city was established at midday on 25 March 421, by a poor fisherman known as Giovanni Bono or John the Good. There are advantages to this theory, since the same date has been given to the vernal equinox, the Annunciation and the supposed date of the foundation of Rome. The triple coincidence, as well as the provident arrival of John the Good, is too good to be true; but it is part of the extraordinary Venetian ability to supplant history with myth. As the German poet, Rilke, said on a visit to the city in 1920, "as with mirrors one grasps nothing but is only drawn into the secret of its elusiveness. One is filled with images all day long, but could not substantiate a single one of them. Venice is a matter of faith." In fact Venice emerged over a century later, after a series of invasions by the Lombards in the late 560s and early 570s. Once more the province of Venetia was overcome by alien tribes. Unlike the Huns, however, they did not wish to plunder and depart. They intended to stay and to settle. They overran what is now called in their name the region of Lombardy. Their arrival prompted a mass exodus of the Veneti. The bishop of Aquileia moved his see to the edge of the lagoon at Grado. The bishop of Padua removed himself to Malamocco, and the bishop of Oderzo sailed to Heraclea. These men were secular as well as religious leaders; they took citizens as well as congregations, ready to create new communities on the water. Burano and Murano were extensively settled, as well as smaller islands such as Ammiana and Constanziaca; these last two disappeared beneath the waves in the thirteenth century, swallowed up by the main enemy of the island people. They have never rested in their battle against the sea. Venice was born in this flight from the Lombards. The most recent archaeological investigations have dated the first signs of human habitation to the second half of the sixth century and to the seventh century; these remains were situated in the neighbourhood of Castello, in the east of the city, and beneath Saint Mark's Square. There is evidence, too, that in these early years work had already begun on raising the surface of the land and reclaiming earth from water. The settlers fenced the soil with planks and poles; they drained the water; they laid down building rubble, or sediment, or sand from the dunes; they erected wooden palisades to resist the sea. It is the beginning of the city. Excerpted from Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.