Water World – A Different Way To Live 452 A.D.

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It is the barbarians that the world has to thank for the birth and the creating of a legendary city of the world.

It was a scene of rape and pillage.  Houses torched, crops stolen or burned, and hasty graves for bloody corpses scratched out of the earth.  This was the legacy of Attila’s Huns, sweeping across northern Italy and wreaking havoc and destruction on the remnants  of the Roman Empire.  But they unintentionally left another, more positive legacy as well. 

Refugees fled from burning cities, desperate to find safe refuge.  Some literally took to the swamps, finding sanctuary in a desolate group of islands in a marshy lagoon off the northern Adriatic Sea.  When the Huns were followed by other invading tribes, more Roman citizens streamed to the swamps to avoid the carnage and destruction on the mainland.

Over the next few centuries the inhabitants transformed the inhospitable surroundings into an architectural wonder: Venice!  With more than 400 bridges and almost 200 different canals, it became a center of trade and a seafaring power.  Venice was completely built out of misfortune, but it eventually turned into one of the richest and most beautiful cities in the world.

Harsh necessity can be the Mother of Glorious Invention.

The City of Venice, Italy was built on 118 islands two and a half miles from the mainland.  Its streets are a precarious few inches above sea level, and are currently sinking at a frightening rate, about one inch every ten years.  Efforts are under way to protect the city from being overcome by the ocean.

The gondolas that dot the waterways of Venice have been around for at least a thousand years, with the first known mention of them coming in 1094.  They evolved over the centuries, and it wasn’t until the 1700s that they finally assumed the form familiar today.

The most famous of all bridges within the city of Venice is called the Rialto Bridge.  It is a high arching covered bridge always packed with people and lined on both sides of the walkway with vendors of all types and kinds.

Venice is a romantic city, where many Hollywood movies have been made and where even today many young newly weds honeymoon.  Most all of these new marrieds have had their picture taken by a passer by holding each other in their arms while standing on the peak of the Rialto Bridge’s arch.

The great Roman Statesman, Cassiodorus asserted in a letter to the officials of the City of Venice circa 537 A.D.  “You people live like sea birds.”

And now you know more about how an old swamp land turned into a world class trade center.

Learn More, Know More, and Become More……………..

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