Venice and It’s Relationship with the Elements
What happens when Venice’s ancient marriage with the sea gets into trouble?
Venice has always depended on maintaining a good relationship with the elements. We might call it a fight against wind and water today, but that banalises a much stranger history. For centuries, practical engineering existed alongside prayers, rituals and magical operations intended to establish a workable relationship with the forces surrounding the city. Venice did not merely defend itself from wind and water. It had to find relationships and ways to exist among them.
For centuries, Venice celebrated the Sposalizio del Mare, the Marriage of the Sea. Every year, the Doge sailed out onto the water and threw a ring into it, symbolically marrying Venice to the sea.
It was a beautiful ritual, but behind it stood a rather serious reality. Venice depended on the sea for almost everything: protection, transport, trade, food, wealth and ultimately its existence. The city had built its life on water.
And marriages, especially very old ones, occasionally get into trouble.
On 12 November 2019, that trouble became spectacular. The water in Venice reached 187 centimetres, the second-highest level recorded in modern times. It had entered houses, shops and churches and damaged boats. Along the Zattere by the canal, the storm was violent enough to rip a heavy steel news kiosk from its foundations and send it into the bottom of the Giudecca Canal.
But the sea had not simply decided to rise. It was the Wind who had riled it up.
A powerful Sirocco had been driving the waters of the Adriatic northwards towards Venice. Atmospheric pressure was falling while above the city hung a full Moon. 12 November 2019 was the peak of a syzygy tide, when the gravitational pull of Moon and Sun combined to strengthen the astronomical tide. Everything seemed to arrive at once. Air drove Water towards the city, while Moon and Sun pulled upon it from above. This created the dire situation of a crisis.
Today we can describe all of these circumstances meteorologically. In the ancient world, however, these forces were not merely measurements on a chart. They had personalities, powers and powerful gods attached to them. The Moon affected not only the tides but, in the human imagination, bodies, moods and minds. Winds had names and faces just as much as the sea was inhabited by ancient creatures that could be generous, treacherous or furious. People lived much more directly exposed to these forces, without the technological buffers through which we experience them today.
Seen through those older eyes, a night like 12 November would have looked almost like a gathering of angry gods: Wind riling up the Sea, the full Moon pulling at the waters, the elements converging upon Venezia at once. And when the forces upon which your entire existence depends appear to turn against you, it is not difficult to understand why people prayed, performed rituals, sought protection and tried to restore peace between the human world and the elemental one.
If we allow ourselves to describe this in the language of an older Venice for a moment, the ancient marriage between Venice and the sea was having a serious crisis – and another element, a “Third party” had become involved.
This “Marriage crisis” was nothing new for the city on the lagoon.
Venetian history contains repeated accounts of extraordinary combinations of wind, water and weather. Not with the regularity of a clock as they were sometimes decades apart, sometimes much closer together, but often enough that Venice accumulated a very long memory of what the elements could do.
There were destructive floods in 1102, 1410, 1442, 1559 and 1600, among others. And in 1535 – coincidentally the year Doge Andrea Gritti died – a Venetian official was already describing a disastrous flood through the interaction of Sirocco and an exceptionally strong lunar tide.
The Venetians understood much more about their environment than the usual division between “superstitious past” and “scientific present” would suggest.
They watched the winds and studied the currents. They altered the course of rivers to make things saver and developed an extraordinary system for managing their lagoon.
But they also prayed and performed magical rituals. They asked for protection from the moody elements and gave them names and faces. The sea itself was something Venice ceremonially married, as, typical Venetian mentality, the practical and the sacred did not necessarily contradict one another.
This all makes a lot of sense when your survival depends so directly on forces you can understand, communicate with, but never completely control. The relationship had to be maintained: through observation and practical knowledge, but also through communication, ritual, offerings and bargaining with the powers on which life depended. Long before weather satellites, sophisticated forecasting and enormous mechanical barriers, keeping the elements favourable and restoring peace when they turned hostile, was not just a poetic idea. It was a matter of survival.
Then came the modern age .
The worst measured flood arrived on 4 November 1966, when the water reached 194 centimetres. November 2019 came frighteningly close at 187.
By then Venice and it’s scientists had spent decades researching and designing a very different kind of protection.
Seventy-eight enormous movable gates now lie at the three entrances connecting the Venetian Lagoon with the Adriatic. When a dangerous tide is forecast, they rise from the seabed and temporarily hold the sea outside.
Get Taika Tori Times & the Digestible Modern Victorian’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It is an extraordinary piece of modern engineering and showed to be a saving grace for the lagoon.
Its name is MOSE – Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico.
But Mosè is also Italian for Moses.
The man who parted the waters.
So obviously we haven’t moved quite as far from the old language as we think.
Today Venice no longer has to rely only on prayers, rituals and negotiations with the elements. It has meteorology, sensors, hydraulic engineering and 78 enormous steel gates.
THE OLD POWERS HAVE NOT LEFT
And yet, there is something important about modern Venice that would be easy to miss if we told this story simply as a triumph of technology.
Venetians are understandably happy to have MOSE. When the forecasts become dangerous, the barriers rise, the lagoon is temporarily separated from the Adriatic, and a city that has spent centuries at the mercy of exceptional tides gains a form of protection its ancestors could hardly have imagined.
But MOSE is very young while the sea is ancient.
Ancient are the winds, the Moon, the tides, and the relationship Venice has built with them over more than a thousand years. The machines that now measure, predict and restrain these forces have been here for only a moment compared with the forces themselves. And this is one reason why Venice, even after acquiring one of the most extraordinary hydraulic defence systems in the world, has not simply abandoned its older forms of protection, the mystical rites.
The vows are still remembered as the candles are still carried through the city. Processions still cross the water in every November, for the Festa della Madonna della Salute. A temporary votive bridge is laid across the Grand Canal and Venetians make their way towards the great basilica built from a promise made during the plague of 1630. The city had appealed to the Madonna for protection, and when the epidemic finally loosened its grip, Venice kept its side of the bargain. Almost four centuries later, the promise is still renewed.
What makes this especially interesting is that these rites have not been relegated to some picturesque corner of Venetian folklore. The modern city participates in them. Religious, civic and military authorities still take part in the ceremonies and boats still carry votive offerings over the same water that is watched by tide gauges and satellites. Candles are blessed and lit while, elsewhere in the lagoon, engineers and technicians maintain the enormous steel gates designed to hold the Adriatic back.
There is no contradiction in this, unless we insist on creating one.
Venice has always been extraordinarily practical about survival. It studied its tides and currents, diverted rivers, reinforced its shores, regulated the lagoon and learned the temperaments of the winds. Today it uses meteorological models, warning sirens, mobile phones, sensors and MOSE. Of course it does. If you have found another way of protecting the city, you use it.
But practical knowledge never required Venice to forget that it was living among powers vastly older than itself.
This is where the modern mind has become too confident in its own categories. We like to separate engineering from ritual, medicine from alchemy, meteorology from mythology, the measurable from the sacred. Venice grew out of a world in which those borders were far less absolute. A wind could be understood as a physical force capable of driving water up the Adriatic and still possess a name, a face and a temperament. The Moon could govern the tides and belong simultaneously to another realm of meaning. Water could be measured, channelled and engineered while remaining something with which Venice maintained a ceremonial relationship.
The Marriage of the Sea may be the most magnificent expression of this understanding. A ring was offered to the water and a relationship was declared. However we interpret that ritual today, its language is unmistakable: if your existence depends upon a power you can never completely command, you establish terms with it.
Modern Venice has added MOSE to those terms.
And I find something wonderfully intelligent in the fact that the arrival of the machines did not require the extinguishing of the candles. One protects the city through everything human beings have learned about pressure, tides, winds, engineering and steel. The other belongs to a much older conversation about dependence, gratitude, promises, protection and the limits of human control.
After so many centuries on the lagoon, Venetians know better than to discard either.
When the forecast says the water is coming, raise the barriers. Trust the engineers and use every instrument modern knowledge has given you.
But remember that MOSE has been here for only a moment.
The sea was here first. And it still rules.
