History of Venice

Various things make Venice a place of interest: the fact that it was built on waters and marshy lands; the way its inhabitants shaped the Lagoon and managed the environment; the relationship with Byzantium and the East; the way it became the capital of a merchant empire; its role as a center of the printing industry, art production and Humanism; its development into a city of pleasure; the sudden loss of independence; the 19th Century cultural myth of its death; its rebirth with the Risorgimento of Italy; the creation of a new urban order, from the industrial port of Marghera to the beach resort at the Lido; the great social transformation of the 1950′s-1970′s, which produced a crisis of Greater Venice; the development into a “theme-park”; the way the city still presents an alternative notion of urban space.