A Short History of Venice (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SHORT HISTORY OF VENICE CHAPTER I THE BEGINNINGS, 421-810 At the beginning of the Christian Era, the northwestern shore of the Adriatic, from the mouth of the Piave on the north, to the mouth of the Bac- chiglione in the south, some fifty miles' distance, was formed by long, narrow strips of sand. They enclosed a lagoon, twelve miles across in its broadest part, dotted with innumerable islets, and threaded by channels, sinuous and variable, through which the silfc-burdened streams of the mainland wound slowly to the sea. At low tide, the shallows of the Lagoon. lay bare. Sometimes, after the great rains, the rivers rose and flooded all but the highest of the islands; or the southwest gale, blowing long and furiously up the Adriatic, drove the heaped water through the four openings of the sandy coast-rim, to startle the marsh fowl in their reedy haunts. But ordinarily, so placid was the bosom of the Lagoon, that the incessant making and unmaking of soil below the surface would not have been suspected. The land-locked islands, covered with verdure, hadthen no habitations, unless perhaps here and there a flimsy hut offered precarious shelter to some fisherman more venturesome than his fellows. On the outer islands, or lidi, there may have been, even then, small settlements; especially on the southernmost, which commanded the waterway to Padua. But the first impression produced on a visitor to the Lagoon, and the last, must have been of solitude, of sluggish waters and shifting lands, ? waters through which the boats of men could with difficulty find a passage, lands on which men themselves could hardly hope to build firmly or to get a meagre subsistence. Passing to the continent, however, one entered the luxuriant plain watered by the Po and fifty smaller rivers. Then, a...