VENICE: The City the Sea Is Slowly Taking Back | 4K Travel Documentary

Venice should not exist. It is built on nothing, no bedrock, no island of solid stone, no firm ground of any kind. It stands in the middle of a salt lagoon, on more than a hundred low scraps of land, raised out of the mud by hand more than a thousand years ago. To build it, they drove a forest into the seabed. Millions of wooden trunks, hammered down through the water into the soft clay below, packed so close together that a city could stand on their tips. The trees are still down there. The whole of Venice rests on a buried woodland that no living person has ever seen. And the sea is taking it back. Every year, the water reaches a little further into the streets. The most famous square in the city floods more than 60 times a year now. A century ago, it flooded fewer than ten. The stone is sinking. The tide is rising. The two are closing on each other from opposite directions, slowly, like a door being pushed shut. Both of these things are true at the same time. This is the only city on Earth built entirely on water, a feat so improbable that for centuries, travellers refused to believe a human hand had done it. And it is a city being quietly unmade by the same water that holds it up, dissolving at the edges, emptying of the people who raised it. Venice beat the sea to be born. Now the sea is winning. The city was built against the water. The city is being taken by the water. Both sentences describe the same place. In the same century. How long can a city stand on a promise it made to the sea before the sea comes to collect? This is Venice. From above, it looks like a fish. A long, curved body of stone laid across the lagoon, split down the middle by a single great waterway that bends through the centre like a spine. Around it, 117 smaller islands, stitched together by 400 bridges and threaded by canals where the streets should be. There are no cars here. They never have been. In a city built on water, the road is water, and the only way through is by boat or on foot, a cross stone worn smooth by 12 centuries of footsteps. And the water is not just around Venice. It is inside it. It rises up through the drains. It seeps into the foundations. When the tide is high and the wind is wrong, it comes up through the floor of the basilica itself, and the people who live here pull on rubber boots and raise their furniture onto bricks and wait for it to go down again. They have a name for it. Aqua alta. High water. And they have lived with it for as long as there has been a Venice to flood. But something has changed. The water is not behaving the way it used to. The floods are more frequent, and they are higher, and the city beneath them is lower than it was. And the people are leaving. In the years after the war, more than 170,000 people lived in the old city. Today, fewer than 50,000 remain. There is a pharmacy near the Rialto Bridge that keeps a running count in its window, the number of residents still living in the historic center. For decades, that number has only fallen. To understand how Venice came to be taken by the sea, you have to understand how it came to be built on the sea in the first place. Because nobody chooses to live in a lagoon. You only do it if the alternative is worse. The year is the 5th century. The Roman Empire in the west is collapsing, and across the plains of northern Italy come the armies that will finish it. First the Goths, then the Huns under Attila, then the Lombards. Town after town on the mainland is burned, and the people who survive run for the only place the horsemen cannot follow them. They run into the marshes. The lagoon is no one's idea of a home. It is a shallow, brackish maze of mudflats and channels, neither land nor sea, that floods and drains twice a day with the tide. Nothing grows there worth eating. There is no fresh water. But the same things that make it useless make it safe. A cavalry charge cannot cross a marsh. An army cannot besiege a city it cannot reach. The mud that keeps everyone out keeps the refugees alive. So they stay. They learn the channels. They fish. And they make salt by letting the lagoon water dry in shallow pans. And they trade that salt to the mainland for the grain they cannot grow. And slowly, over generations, the refugee camp becomes a town. And the town decides it is going to build something permanent on ground that was never meant to hold weight. The problem is the mud. Lay a stone foundation directly on the lagoon floor, and the building sinks into it, slowly and unevenly, until it cracks and falls. The Venetians solve this in a way that should not work. They go to the forests of the mainland and the mountains beyond, alder, oak, larch, pine, and they cut them down by the hundreds of thousands. They sharpen each trunk to a point, and then, working from boats and platforms, they drive the trunks down through the water and the soft upper mud until the tips bite into a denser, firmer layer of clay deep below. Pole after pole, packed tight, until the seabed bristles with a submerged forest. On top of the poles, they lay timber platforms. On the platforms, stone. And on the stone, a city. Beneath the great church of Santa Maria della Salute alone, there are more than a million wooden piles. Multiply that across every palace, every bell tower, every bridge and warehouse and house, and the count runs into the millions. An entire forest, inverted, buried, holding a city above the waves on its shoulders. And here is the part that should not be possible. Wood left in water rots. Anyone who has watched a fence post dissolve at the waterline knows this. By every ordinary rule, those millions of submerged trunks should have crumbled to nothing within a generation, and Venice should have sunk into the lagoon 800 years ago. It did not. The piles are still down there, and many of them are harder now than the day they were cut. The reason is the mud itself. Driven deep into the lagoon floor, the wood sits in a layer with almost no oxygen, and the fungi and the creatures that rot timber need oxygen to live. Without it, they cannot do their work. The wood does not decay. Instead, minerals from the water slowly seep into its grain, and over the centuries, it hardens, turning towards stone. The Venetians had stumbled onto a kind of accidental preservation. They had buried their forest in the one place on earth where it could not die. But the lagoon is not empty. It is alive. And not everything that lives in the water is on the city's side. There is a creature in the lagoon called the shipworm. It is not a worm at all, but a long, pale mollusk, and it does one thing. It eats wood that sits in seawater. A ship left too long at anchor, a wooden pier, a hull, the shipworm bores into it in tunnels until the timber is honeycombed and gives way. For a maritime city built on a buried forest, it is the perfect enemy. And yet the piles beneath Venice survived even this, because the shipworm, too, needs oxygen, and the deep mud has none. The same airless clay that stops the wood from rotting also keeps the one creature that could devour the city out of reach of its foundations. For a thousand years, that arrangement held. Remember it. Because the day the city's relationship with that mud begins to change is the day the trouble truly starts. But that is centuries away. For now, the city on the poles is rising, and it is about to become something the refugees in the marsh could never have imagined. Not a hiding place, a power. Out in the shallows, where the channels open into reed beds and salt marsh, the lagoon keeps its older life. At dawn, a grey heron stands motionless in the mud at the edge of a barain, one of the low marsh islands that appear and vanish with the tide. It does not move for minutes at a time. Then, faster than the eye can follow, it strikes and comes up with a fish. Beside it, white egrets pick their way through the shallows on thin black legs, and further out, where the mud meets open water, wading birds probe the silt for the small creatures the tide leaves behind. These marshes are the lagoon's lungs. They filter the water, they break the force of the waves, and they have done so since long before the first refugee arrived. The herons were fishing this lagoon when Venice was nothing but mud. They are fishing it still. The Venetians understood early that they would never be a nation of farmers. They had no fields. What they had was salt and boats and a position, a city facing east at the top of the Adriatic, exactly where the trade of Europe wanted to meet the trade of Asia. So they became a nation of the sea. And to rule the sea, you need ships. Venice built them in a place called the Arsenale, a walled shipyard so large it became a small city of its own, ringed by towers, its gates guarded like a fortress. Inside, the Venetians did something that would not be seen again in the world for another 500 years. They built ships on an assembly line. A galley would move down a channel of water through the yard. At each station along the way, a different team waited with their part of the work ready. The hull, the masts, the rigging, the oars, the sails, the weapons. The ship passed from hand to hand, and each crew added their piece and sent it on. By the time it reached the far gate, a finished warship slid out onto the lagoon, fully fitted, ready to fight. At the height of its power, the Arsenale could turn out a complete galley in a single day. When a foreign king visited, the Venetians is said to have laid the keel of a ship in the morning and presented him with the finished vessel, armed and afloat, before the feast that evening was over. A shipyard that could build a fleet faster than any rival could sink one. That was the engine. From it came everything else. The galleys carried Venetian merchants to every port in the eastern Mediterranean. The merchants carried home wealth. The wealth bought more ships, and the ships took more ports. And within a few centuries, a refugee town in a marsh had become the richest city in Europe and the master of a sea empire that stretched from the lagoon to the coast of the Holy Land. They called their state La Serenissima, the most serene republic, and it would last, in one form or another, for more than a thousand years. Stand in the middle of Venice today and you can still feel where that wealth went. It went into the water, or rather, into a single ribbon of water that runs through the heart of the city. The Grand Canal is the main street of Venice, and it is lined, bank to bank, for more than three kilometres with palaces. Not a few, hundreds. Marble facades in white and rose and pale gold, their windows shaped in pointed Gothic arches and delicate stone tracery, their feet standing directly in the green water. Each one was built by a merchant family to announce to everyone who passed by boat exactly how rich they had become. But there is a quiet contradiction holding those palaces up. Lean close to the waterline of an old Venetian house and you will see the stone is dark and pitted, eaten by the tide. The marble above is for show, below the surface the whole magnificent street rests on the same thing the fishermen's huts rested on, timber poles driven into mud and platforms of wood laid across them. The most opulent address in the medieval world stands on a foundation of rotting forest and lagoon silt. It has always been a kind of bargain, beauty on top, decay below, and a daily, patient war against the water that wants both. To find the centre of that beauty you follow the Grand Canal until it opens onto the sea and there, at the mouth of the city, you find the place where Venice kept its heart. Piazza San Marco, St Mark's Square. A vast, open rectangle of pale stone framed on three sides by arcaded buildings and closed on the fourth by a church unlike any other in the West. The Basilica of San Marco does not look European. Its domes are round and swelling, its arches are eastern and its whole front glitters with gold mosaic that throws light back at the sun. It looks like something carried home from another world, which, in a way, it is. Inside, the walls and ceilings are covered, not painted, covered, in more than 8,000 square metres of mosaic, tiny squares of gold-backed glass set by hand over the course of 700 years. When the candles are lit, the whole ceiling seems to be made of light. Pilgrims and rulers and merchants have stood beneath it for a thousand years and the gold has not dimmed. Above the main doors of the basilica, looking out over the square, stand four great horses, cast in bronze, frozen mid-stride, harnessed as if about to break into a gallop. They are among the most famous statues in the world and almost no one who photographs them realises they are looking at copies. The horses on the front of San Marco are reproductions. The originals are kept inside, out of the weather, and they did not begin their life in Venice at all. Hold that thought. Where those horses came from is a story the Republic was never entirely proud of. But first, the strangest thing about St Mark's Square. It is the most sacred, most celebrated, most photographed place in Venice. And it is the lowest. When the acqua alta comes, the square is the first part of the city to drown. The water rises through the ancient drains in the very centre of the stone and the basilica, the gold, the mosaics, the heart of the Republic, stands in a spreading lake, its marble floor under the tide, while tourists walk across raised wooden planks to keep their feet dry. The Venetians built their holiest place at the point where the sea could most easily reach it. Or perhaps the sea simply found the heart first. The Republic that built all this was not gentle. It became the richest city in Europe by being, when it needed to be, ruthless. And the proof of that is standing on the front of its own cathedral. The year is 1204. A crusade has set out from Europe meant for Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It has run out of money, and it has made a bargain with Venice, which has the ships to carry it. At the head of the Venetian state is the Doge, the elected ruler of the Republic, and his name is Enrico Dandolo. He is well past 80 years old, and he is blind. But Enrico Dandolo is not finished. He sees more clearly than men with their eyes what this stranded, indebted army can be used for. He turns the crusade. Instead of sailing for the Holy Land, the fleet sails for Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, the greatest city in the Christian world, and Venice's chief rival in the trade of the East. In April, the crusaders break through the walls. What follows is one of the great catastrophes of the medieval world. For three days, the army sacks Constantinople, a Christian city taken by a Christian army that had sworn to fight in the name of the same faith. They strip the churches. They burn libraries. They melt down bronze statues that had stood for a thousand years. The plunder is so vast that it reshapes the wealth of Europe. And among the treasures, the blind doge ships home to Venice, are four bronze horses taken from the great racetrack of Constantinople, where they had stood for centuries before that. Those are the horses on the front of San Marco. They were not made in Venice. They were carried there as spoils from the wreck of a city Venice helped destroy. The Republic put them up over the door of its cathedral and let everyone admire them. It is worth remembering, when you look at the beauty of Venice, that a great deal of it arrived this way. The gold and the marble and the bronze did not grow in the lagoon. They were earned and taken across a sea the Venetians had learned to rule without mercy. One Venetian, more than any other, became the face of that long-reach East. He was a merchant's son, and his name was Marco Polo. In the late 13th century, Marco Polo left Venice as a teenager and did not return for 24 years. He travelled the length of the known world, across Persia, over the mountains of Central Asia, along the old caravan roads to the court of Kublai Khan in China, where, by his own account, he served the Khan for years and saw cities and wealth and customs that no Venetian had ever described. When at last he came home, neighbours are said to have barely recognised the weathered man who claimed to be the boy who had vanished decades before. His account of those travels became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. For generations of Europeans, what they knew of China and the East, they knew through the eyes of a Venetian. Marco Polo did not just trade between worlds, he connected them in the imagination. And that, more than any single cargo, was Venice's true business, standing in the doorway between East and West and taking a cut of everything that passed through. So how did a city with no land, no farms, no army to speak of, become for a time the wealthiest place in Europe? The answer is that Venice never tried to grow anything or make very much of its own. It moved things. It connected. Salt was the beginning. Venice controlled the salt of the upper Adriatic and in a world with no refrigeration, salt was how you kept food through winter, which made it as valuable as money. From salt, the Venetians moved to spice, the pepper and cinnamon and nutmeg that came overland from Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean, where Venetian galleys were waiting to carry it on to Europe at enormous profit. They moved silk and glass and grain and silver and slaves. They invented systems of banking and credit and insurance to make the trade flow faster. The city produced almost nothing the rest of Europe wanted and it grew rich beyond reckoning by being the place where everything changed hands. But trade flows both ways and the same ships that carried home the wealth of the East carried home something else. In 1348, a fleet returns to the lagoon carrying a sickness that has been moving along the trade routes from the East. It comes ashore with the cargo in the bodies of sailors and the rats in the holds. Within months, the Black Death has Venice in its grip. By the time it passes, the city has lost, by some accounts, well over half its people. Streets stand empty. Whole families are gone. The bodies are carried out to islands in the lagoon and buried in pits. It is the first of many. The plague returns again and again over the centuries that follow. In the great outbreak of 1575 and again in 1630, the sickness sweeps the city and kills tens of thousands more. A third of the population in a single visitation. After the plague of 1630 finally lifts, the survivors build a church to give thanks for being spared. They choose the very mouth of the Grand Canal where it meets the open water and there they raise Santa Maria della Salute, Saint Mary of Health, a vast, white-domed church standing on more than a million wooden piles. Every year, on a single day in November, the Venetians still build a temporary bridge of boats across the canal and walk to the church to remember the dead. They have done it without fail for nearly 400 years. Death and the lagoon have always been close in Venice. The city even gave its dead their own islands. Travel out into the lagoon and you pass low islands that hold the city's harder memories. San Michele, walled and planted with dark cypress trees, is the cemetery island. For two centuries, Venice has buried its dead there, ferrying coffins across the water by boat. And beyond it lies a smaller island the boatman will tell you to avoid. Poveglia. In the time of the plagues, it was a quarantine station where the sick and the dying were sent so they could not infect the living. And where, it is said, the dead were burned in numbers no one wanted to count. Today, it stands abandoned, locked, its buildings sinking into the brush. The lagoon keeps its secrets the way it keeps everything else. Quietly, under the water, out of sight. Not all of Venice's separations were about death. Some were about keeping a secret. And one of those secrets built an entire island. In the year 1291, the rulers of Venice made a decision about the city's glassmakers. Venetian glass was already famous, the finest in Europe, and the furnaces that made it burned day and night at enormous heat. In a city built almost entirely of wood and packed tightly together, those furnaces were a constant danger. One stray fire could take whole districts. So the Republic ordered every glassmaker to move their furnaces off the main islands and out to a separate island in the lagoon, Murano. But there was a second reason, never spoken so plainly. On Murano, the glassmakers could be watched. Their art was a state treasure, and Venice meant to keep its monopoly. The masters of Murano were given high status and good lives, and they were forbidden, on pain of death, from leaving the Republic and carrying the secret of their craft abroad. To know how Venetian glass was made was to belong to Venice, whether you wished to or not. They are still there. Walk into a workshop on Murano today, and you can watch a glassblower gather a glowing ball of molten glass on the end of an iron pipe, turning it, breathing into it, shaping a vase or a horse or a chandelier out of light and heat with movements passed down through more than 700 years. The furnaces have never gone cold. Nearby, on another island, a different craft kept a different kind of fire alive. Murano is a fishing island, and its houses are painted in bright, defiant colours. Deep red, cobalt, yellow, green. Every wall a different shade, so that, the islanders say, a fisherman could find his own home through the lagoon fog. For centuries, the women of Murano were famous for lace, working impossibly fine patterns by hand with needle and thread, lace so prized it was worn at the courts of Europe. The trade has nearly faded now. A handful of older women still know the stitches. When they are gone, some of those patterns may go with them. But the coloured houses remain, burning against the grey water as bright as they ever were. For all its wealth and beauty, Venice did not extend its grace to everyone within its walls. There is a quiet corner of the city whose name has travelled further than almost any other Venetian word. And it was not a gift. In 1516, the Republic ordered the Jews of Venice to live in one place and one place only, a small island in the north of the city, on the site of an old foundry. The Venetian word for the casting of metal at that foundry was ghetto, and so the place became known by that name, the ghetto. It is the first place in the world to carry the word, and from that small island of Venice, the term spread across Europe and across the centuries until it meant any place where a people is confined and set apart. The gates were locked at night. The Jews of Venice were shut inside from dusk until dawn, watched, restricted in the work they could do and the places they could go. The island was small, and the community grew, so they did the only thing they could. They built upward, floor upon floor, until the ghetto held some of the tallest buildings in the whole of Venice, a vertical city forced into being by walls that could not move outward. And inside those walls, against every pressure, a culture lived. Synagogues were built, hidden in the upper floors of ordinary-looking buildings, their interiors quietly magnificent. Scholars wrote, families raised children, music and learning and trade went on behind the locked gates, and a people the city tried to keep at arm's length made, inside that confinement, a community that endured for centuries. Its end, when it came, came from outside Venice. In the years of the Second World War, the Jews of the ghetto were rounded up and deported to the death camps of the North. Of those taken, almost none returned. Today, the ghetto is quiet. A small community remains. Plaques on the walls carry the names. The synagogues still stand in the upper floors, and the empty square below holds the weight of what was done there, and of everything that was built before it. By the 18th century, the great age of Venetian power was already behind it. The trade routes the Republic had ruled were being bypassed by ships sailing around Africa to reach the East directly, and the wealth that had made Venice was draining away to the new ocean powers of the Atlantic. But as its power faded, Venice became something else, a city of pleasure, of music, of carnival, the place the rest of Europe came to lose itself. In a church-run orphanage for girls called the Pietà, a red-haired priest taught music to the foundlings in his care. His name was Antonio Vivaldi, and the orchestra of orphaned girls he trained became famous across Europe, performing his concertos from behind screens so that visitors heard the music without seeing the players. Vivaldi wrote hundreds of works in those rooms by the water. Long after the Republic that gave him his stage had vanished, the music he made in a Venetian orphanage would still be played in every concert hall in the world. This was the Venice of masks. During Carnival, the whole city put on the disguise, white masks and black cloaks that erased rank and name so that for a season a servant and a senator could not be told apart. It was a city of secrets and intrigues, of gambling houses and assignations watched over by a state that kept a vast network of informers. Across a narrow canal near the Doge's Palace runs a small covered bridge of white stone, the Bridge of Sighs, built to carry prisoners from the courtroom to the cells. The name comes from the idea that a condemned prisoner crossing it would catch through its small windows a last glimpse of the lagoon and the open sky and sigh. From those same prisons, the most famous Venetian of the age, the adventurer Casanova, once made a daring escape across the rooftops, one more legend in a city that was by then half made of them. And once a year, the Republic renewed the strangest vow in Europe. On a great gilded ceremonial barge called the Buccintoro, the Doge would be rowed out to the mouth of the lagoon where it opens to the Adriatic. There, before the assembled city, he would take a ring of gold and cast it into the water and speak the words that bound Venice to the sea. We wed thee, O sea, in token of true and everlasting dominion. It was called the Marriage of the Sea. Year after year, century after century, the ruler of Venice married the Adriatic and claimed mastery over it. The sea was the bride, the city was the groom. Remember that vow, because the sea has a long memory and one day it would come to the wedding to claim what it was owed. The end of the Republic, when it finally came, was almost gentle. There was no great battle. In 1797, a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte marched his armies into northern Italy and faced with his power the most serene Republic, more than a thousand years old, simply voted itself out of existence. The last Doge took off his ceremonial cap and handed it to a servant. After more than a millennium, Venice surrendered without a fight. Napoleon took the four bronze horses from the front of San Marco and carried them off to Paris to stand atop a monument to his own victories. They had been looted from Constantinople by the Venetians 600 years before. Now they were looted again. Years later, after Napoleon fell, the horses were returned to Venice and lifted back into place above the Basilica doors where their copies stand today. They have been stolen and stolen back and stolen again and brought home across more than 2,000 years. They have outlasted every empire that ever claimed them. The Republic was gone, but the city remained and it found a new role, no longer a power, but a wonder, a place people came simply to see. And for the next two centuries, that is what Venice mainly was, a museum of itself, a honeymoon, a dream you could walk through. The trouble was that all the while beneath the dream, the old bargain with the water was quietly going wrong. In the marshes at the edge of the lagoon, something returned that had been gone for a long time. Greater flamingos, tall, pink, improbable birds, began appearing in the shallows of the Venetian lagoon in numbers no one had seen for generations. For most of the 20th century, they were absent. Then, in recent decades, they came back, wading in long lines through the same waters where the first refugees once made their salt, filtering the shallow water through their strange, curved bills. Their return is one of the few hopeful things in the lagoon's recent story. Proof that the water, given a chance, can still bring life back, as well as take it away. The flamingos do not know the city is in trouble. They have simply found the lagoon and stayed. But the flamingos came back to a lagoon that was changing in ways no bird could see. To understand what is happening to Venice now, you have to go back, one last time, to the mud. For a thousand years, the city sat in a kind of balance. The wooden piles held, preserved in their airless clay. The lagoon flooded and drained with the tides, and the high waters came and went. Venice was always a little lower than it wanted to be, but it sat at a level it could live with. Two things broke that balance in the last hundred years, and they broke it from both directions at once. The first is that Venice has been sinking, and for a while, in the 20th century, it sank faster than it ever had naturally. The cause was on the mainland, in the industrial zone built across the water at Marghera, where factories and the growing city pumped vast amounts of fresh water out of the ground beneath the lagoon. As the water was drawn out, the ground above it compacted and settled, and the whole lagoon floor, Venice included, sank lower into the sea. By the time anyone understood what was happening and stopped the pumping in the 1970s, the city had lost precious centimeters it could not get back. The sinking slowed. It did not reverse. The second thing is the sea itself. Across the whole world, the oceans are rising as the planet warms, and the Adriatic is rising with them. So Venice now faces the two trends that the hook of its own story always promised. The land is going down. The water is coming up. Over the last century, the sea has gained more than 20 centimeters on the city, the sum of a sinking city and a rising sea meeting in the middle, exactly as that closing door always meant they would. And so, the old wooden piles, preserved so perfectly in their airless mud, now hold up a city that the water reaches more easily every year. The forest beneath Venice did its job. It held. The problem was never going to be the wood. The problem was always going to be the sea. For most of its history, the high water was an inconvenience. Then came a night that turned it into a warning. November the 4th, 1966. A powerful storm drives down the Adriatic. A strong wind from the south, the Scirocco, pushes the sea straight into the lagoon, and it cannot drain. The water rises and rises and does not stop. By the time it crests, the tide stands at 194 centimeters above its normal level, almost two meters of seawater standing in the streets of Venice. It is the highest flood ever recorded in the city's history. For a full day, Venice is submerged. The water reaches the upper steps of the Basilica. Heating oil floats out of flooded tanks and coats the walls and the artworks in black film. Whole ground floors are ruined. Tens of thousands of priceless objects are damaged, and when the water finally retreats, it leaves behind a question that Venice has been trying to answer ever since. If this can happen, the city is not safe. And if the sea keeps rising, it will happen again, higher and more often, until one day the water comes in and does not leave. The answer the Italian state eventually settled on lies at the bottom of the lagoon, at the three inlets where the open sea pours in and out with the tide. It is called Moser, and it is one of the largest, most expensive and most troubled engineering projects in modern Europe. The idea is simple to describe and enormous to build. At each of the three inlets, a long row of huge, hollow gates lies flat on the seabed, hidden, filled with water, doing nothing. 78 of them in all. They are invisible from the surface. The lagoon breathes in and out over them, day after day, as if they were not there. But when a dangerous tide is forecast, compressed air is pumped into the gates, forcing the water out. They become buoyant, and one by one, they rise up out of the seabed and tilt to the surface, until they stand shoulder to shoulder across the inlets, a wall of steel rising out of the water to shut the Adriatic out of the lagoon. When the tide passes, the gates are flooded again, and they sink back down to the bottom and vanish, a barrier that hides on the seabed and rises only when the sea attacks. On paper, it is the thing that could save Venice. But Moser took decades. Construction dragged on far longer than promised, and the cost climbed past five billion euros, and the money attracted exactly what that much money attracts. In 2014, a vast corruption scandal broke open. Officials had been taking bribes. Funds meant for the barrier had been skimmed off through a network of kickbacks. Arrests reached to the very top of the city's government, and the mayor of Venice himself resigned. For years, the project that was supposed to hold back the sea became a symbol of everything broken in the way Italy built things. Late, over budget, and rotten at the core. And all the while, the barrier sat on the seabed, unfinished, while the tides kept coming. Then, in November 2019, the sea did not wait for it to be ready. The night of November the 12th, a tide of 187 centimetres strikes Venice, the second highest flood in the city's recorded history, just short of 1966. The barrier is built, but not yet working. There is nothing to stop the water. It pours into St Mark's Square and through the Basilica, the worst flooding of San Marco in living memory. Shops and homes are ruined across the city. Two people die. The mayor stands in the flooded square and says the words out loud. This is the consequence of climate change. The city that married the sea is once again underwater, and this time the whole world is watching. Less than a year later, in October 2020, the barrier finally rose. For the first time with a high tide forecast, compressed air drove the 78 gates up out of the lagoon floor, and they locked into place across the three inlets, and they held. Outside, the Adriatic rose. Inside, the lagoon stayed calm. St Mark's Square, for once, stayed dry. After more than 50 years and billions of euros and a scandal that brought down a government, the wall against the sea worked. So Venice is saved. That is the easy story. It is also not quite true. Moser holds back the highest tides, but it cannot be raised every day or the lagoon would die. Cut off from the sea, the water inside would stagnate, and the whole living system would collapse. So it is used only for the dangerous floods. The ordinary creeping high water still comes, and as the sea keeps rising, the barrier will have to close more and more often, until one day it may have to stay shut so long that the lagoon itself begins to suffocate behind it. Moser does not stop the sea from rising. It only buys time against it, and no one is sure how much time it has bought. Because there is a second flood, and the barriers cannot touch it. The people are leaving. That pharmacy near the Rialto, with the running count of residents in its window, that number has not stopped falling. The city that held more than 170,000 people after the war, now holds fewer than 50,000 in its historic heart. And the line keeps dropping. The young cannot afford to stay. The apartments where Venetian families lived for generations are turned into holiday rentals for the 20-some million visitors who come each year. The schools close for want of children. The shops that sold bread and shoes and hardware become shops that sell glass trinkets and carnival masks made far away. A city is not its stones. It is its people. And the people are going. In 2009, a group of Venetians carried a coffin in a funeral procession down the Grand Canal. It was a protest, and it was a kind of grief. They were marking the moment the population of the old city had fallen below 60,000, a number they treated as a death. A city, they were saying, can be drowned by emptiness as surely as by water. That was years ago. The number is far lower now. And out at the edge of the lagoon, Torcello waits, with its ten remaining residents and its empty bell tower. The first island anyone settled. And a glimpse of what the last one might become. The thing Venice fears is not only the flood. It is becoming Torcello. A perfect, beautiful, visited ruin, full of everything except the people who made it a home. There is an old vow to remember here. For a thousand years, the doge of Venice rode out to the mouth of the lagoon and married the sea and cast a gold ring into the water and claimed everlasting dominion over it. We wed thee, O sea. It was always a strange thing to say to the Adriatic. A boast, a hope, a marriage of equals where the city pretended it was the stronger partner. The sea said nothing back. It simply waited. And now, slowly, across the centuries, it is coming to the wedding to claim what it was promised. Everlasting dominion. The bride is coming for the groom, and the city that married the water for a thousand years is finding out at last who truly held dominion over whom. And yet, the city does not simply lie down. Near one of the canals, there is a bookshop that has become a small legend. It is called The Library of High Water. Libreria Acqua Alta. And its owner keeps his books not on ordinary shelves, but inside bathtubs, inside barrels, and inside a full-sized gondola that sits in the middle of the shop. When the floods come, the books float instead of drowning. It is a small, stubborn, very Venetian answer to the sea. You cannot stop the water. So you put your treasures in a boat, and you let it rise. That, in the end, is what Venetians have always done. Not defeated the water, lived with it. Raised the furniture, pulled on the boots, put the books in the boat, and waited for the tide to fall. The way the herons wait in the marsh, patient and still there. So will Venice survive? The honest answer is that no one knows. The barriers may hold the sea back for decades, or the sea may rise faster than anyone planned, until the gates must close so often that the lagoon dies behind them. The city may find a way to keep its people, to make itself a home again, and not only a postcard. Or the last families may quietly leave, the lights may go out in the old apartments one by one, and Venice may become the most beautiful empty city in the world. A Torcello, the size of a metropolis, visited by millions, and lived in by almost no one. We like to tell Venice as a love story. The honeymoon city, the most romantic place on earth. But it was never really a romance. It was always an argument with the water. A thousand years of people insisting against all sense that they could build a permanent thing on a temporary place, and the sea patiently disagreeing. The strange truth is that Venice has been ending almost since it began. It survived the plagues that took half its people. It survived the loss of its empire and the end of its republic. It survived the night in 1966 when the sea stood two meters deep in its streets. Every generation has watched the water rise a little higher and the city sink a little lower, and feared they were the last. And every generation so far has been wrong. Out in the lagoon, the tide turns, the way it has turned twice a day for longer than there has been a Venice to flood. In the marsh, a white egret stands in the black legs, perfectly still, waiting. The water rises around it as it always does. The bird does not move. It has fished this lagoon since before the city was built, and it will fish it after, whatever comes. The water is patient. The city is stubborn. And for now, against the odds, against the sea, against the long arithmetic of a sinking city and a rising tide, Venice is still here. Thank you for spending this time in the lagoon with us. If you would like to keep travelling to the places where the world is at its most improbable, subscribe and stay a while. Until the next journey.