Venice's modern story is a fight for survival - against the rising sea, and against its own fame. From the 1966 flood to the MOSE barriers and the 49,000 Venetians who still call the islands home, this is Venice today.
Last updated August 6, 2026
In a nutshell: the sea is slowly winning - but Venice is fighting back with the MOSE barriers, and 49,000 Venetians still call the islands home. The floods, the barriers, the museums and the people: all here. Start from the history overview.
The city has fought rising water since the fifth century, and the sea is slowly winning. Venice stands on sediments deposited by the ancient Po, which continue to compact; early harbour projects, from offshore jetties to the railway causeway, disturbed the natural rhythm of the tides, and twentieth-century industry pumped groundwater from under the lagoon for close to fifty years before the practice was banned in the 1970s.
The city has sunk about nine inches over the past century. Flooding - the acqua alta - strikes when an exceptional high tide, hard sirocco winds plus a storm front all arrive at once; the shallow Adriatic has a tidal range of about three feet, and climate change raises the baseline higher. The worst inundation on record came in November 1966, when the same storm that flooded Florence pushed the water to over six feet above the usual level.
Hemmed in by salt water and hit by regular flooding, the city possessed no natural supply of fresh water at all. In the ninth century residents devised a catchment system: paved, gently sloped squares funnelled rainwater through limestone grates into underground clay cisterns, and the wells fed the population until an aqueduct arrived in 1884, carrying mountain water beside the railway bridge.
The modern defence is the MOSE project, a system of movable gates, retractable below the surface, at the three inlets through which the Adriatic enters the lagoon. Construction began in 2003, a corruption scandal stalled the works for years, and the gates were first raised for real in October 2020 - since then they go up whenever tides are forecast above 1.3 metres, which in the first two years alone meant 49 activations. Whether the barriers can keep pace with rising seas remains an open question.
After Waterloo the allies handed Venice to Austria, and sophisticated locals chafed under Viennese rule; still the city stayed a fixture of the aristocratic Grand Tour. In 1866 Prussia humbled Austria, and Venetian patriots grabbed the chance to join the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.
The Industrial Revolution arrived reluctantly: the Austrians built the two-mile railway causeway in 1846, a road bridge for cars followed in 1932, and mainland factories - heavy on sulfuric acid - began eating at Venice's stone. In 1996 fire gutted the city's great opera house, the Fenice, and it was rebuilt faithfully from photographic archives; cruise ships have been pushed away from the historic centre, and a day-visitor access fee was trialled in 2024 before being dropped in July 2026.
Through it all the city has kept its time-warp character: little has been built within the old walls for centuries, and the city still feels like a historic wonderland.
Fewer than 49,000 people now live on the islands, and the number keeps falling as residents move to the mainland in search of affordable homes and the conveniences of an ordinary city. You can pick locals out of the crowd: they walk fast, with purpose, and many commute by boat. In the local dialect they greet each other with oi or bea and call friends zorma.
Whether born here or arrived by choice, Venetians stay for love. Mass tourism makes some of them gruff and guarded - they can feel like extras in a theme park of their own home. Scratch the surface, though, and you find cosmopolitan, tolerant people who carry the republic's legacy inside them; they warm to visitors who show genuine curiosity and respect, and their teasing is good-natured.
They also close ranks when it matters: neighbours turn out together against tidal floods, and summer sagre - parish festivals in the squares - draw the whole community out. When evening falls and the day-trippers have drained away, the canals and campi fill with Venetians again, meeting friends over an aperitivo. Two universities keep the city young with students from across Italy and abroad, a reminder that Venice remains a living, working place, not a museum.