Venice's story in fifteen places

In a nutshell: every era of the Republic left a landmark you can still visit - from Torcello, where the refugees landed, to the Biennale gardens where Napoleon razed a district. Fifteen places, plus the cast of characters who made the story. Start from the history overview.

Venice's story in fifteen places

The story begins on Torcello, a flat island in the northern lagoon. After the Huns led by Attila wiped out the mainland city of Altinum in 452 CE, people fleeing the mainland poured into the wetlands; Torcello, where a few people had already lived in Roman times, became their first foothold and later a thriving city, though today only its Byzantine basilica and a small museum of everyday objects survive.

By 466 the settlements had spread across the nearby islands, and in 540 the whole lagoon was absorbed into the Byzantine Empire. When Byzantine authority faltered in 726, the islanders chose Orso Ipato as their first self-elected doge; his son Teodato then relocated the seat of power to Malamocco, on the Lido, which remained the capital between 742 and 811 - a sleepy backwater nowadays.

The centre of gravity shifted in 809, when Frankish forces arrived. Agnello Partecipazio led the resistance from the shallow waters around the riva alto - the 'high bank' that gave the Rialto its name - and his success earned him the dogeship. The islets around Rialto now became the heart of the new capital: ground was reclaimed, long wooden piles were hammered into the soft mud, and the city gradually lifted itself out of the marsh.

Less than two decades later, in 828, Venice acquired a patron saint: traders smuggled the evangelist's remains out of Alexandria, disguising the cargo beneath cuts of pork so that Muslim customs officials would not inspect it. The Basilica di San Marco raised to shelter the relics drew on the finest artisans Byzantium could provide.

Pietro II Orseolo, doge from 991, kept Venice neutral, trading freely with both Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire - and even in the early Crusades the Republic went on doing business with Muslim leaders. Shipbuilding powered this balancing act: inside the Arsenale an early assembly line could launch a warship a day, an industrial advantage that kept Venice ahead of Genoa.

All of it was steered from the Palazzo Ducale, the doge's residence since the 10th century and the hatching ground of the republic's most self-serving schemes - above all the deal that redirected the Fourth Crusade to plunder Zadar and Constantinople, both Christian cities.

Around the middle of the 15th century the city gleamed with golden mosaics, but beneath the velvet of its ruling class sat an iron fist. The shadowy Council of Ten posted agents across Europe to break conspiracies, kept watch on Venice's own citizens, and conducted secret trials in which torture and execution were routine. Ordinary people were roped in too: stone lion's mouths set into walls around the city - one survives beside the entrance of the church of San Martino in Castello - served as letterboxes for denunciations of wrongdoers.

The Renaissance reached Venice's public architecture in 1460, when the ceremonial gateway of the Arsenale was raised in the new classical style; a plaque above the gateway commemorates the naval triumph of 1571, when a Holy League fleet - largely Venetian - crushed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto after the Turks had seized Cyprus.

The city never shied from boasting, even in church: when the church of Santa Maria del Giglio took its present form in the 1600s, the facade carried a statue of a Venetian admiral and carved maps of the empire's conquests - Padua, Zadar, Split, Heraklion and Corfu - all beneath the wings of the lion of St. Mark.

As Atlantic nations opened sea lanes to the Americas, Venice's trading importance faded and it set about winning Europe over with pleasure - art, music and decadent living. In the 1700s the upper classes gambled in frescoed casini, thousands of licensed sex workers plied the streets, and well-off single women kept lovers with society's knowledge.

The party ended abruptly in 1797: when Napoleon made clear he would destroy the city rather than accept defiance, the Great Council voted the republic out of existence. Enraged citizens rose up, French troops quickly put down the insurrection and set about looting the city's treasures, and one whole district was razed to lay out the public gardens that are now the Giardini della Biennale.

Napoleon lost Venice to Austria in 1814, and within two years a quarter of the population was destitute. Austrian improvements were financed by special Venetian taxes and Venetian labour: a railway bridge - the city's first-ever fixed connection to dry land - went up in the 1840s, churches and palaces were pulled down to clear space for the station, and canals were filled in to open a broad avenue between the station and San Marco.

In 1848 a lawyer in his thirties, Daniele Manin, was thrown in jail for suggesting reforms; his arrest sparked a popular revolt that held out for 17 months, until a blockade, roughly 23,000 shells, famine and cholera compelled Manin to give up the fight. The resentment lingered, and in 1866 the Venetians chose by referendum to become part of the new Kingdom of Italy.

The 20th century brought darker chapters. The film festival on the Lido was founded in the 1930s by Mussolini's finance minister, whose regime also oversaw the mainland motor causeway. The Lido's Palazzo del Cinema dates from those years. In late 1943, 256 of the city's Jewish residents were arrested and shipped to concentration camps.

As the war turned, partisans fought alongside Allied troops to reclaim the Veneto, and New Zealand forces liberated Venice - the bombing that scarred mainland industry largely spared the lagoon. Although it predates the conflicts, the Biennale, with its gardens as a principal venue, came to embody the city's reinvention as an international centre of art and tourism.