The city built on a lagoon in the northern Adriatic — which organized the medieval Mediterranean trade in spices, silk, and slaves; developed the commercial and legal institutions that prefigure modern capitalism; ruled an overseas empire for four centuries; and now faces drowning while receiving thirty million tourists a year.
Venice was built where it should not have been — on islands in a tidal lagoon, a location chosen not for beauty but for defensibility. No army could easily cross the lagoon to reach it. That defensive logic produced a city that became the wealthiest in Europe, the master of Mediterranean trade, and the inventor of institutions — the bank, the bond market, double-entry bookkeeping, the ghetto — that organized commercial life for the next five centuries. The city that built itself to survive is now slowly sinking into the sea it mastered.