How Venice was built
This much-loved Italian city was constructed on top of marshland
Despite Venice being frequently voted the world’s most beautiful city, on paper it appears to be a logistical and constructional nightmare. It is largely built on marshland - a lagoon which is just eight per cent land - and one that contains some of the largest and heaviest religious and administrative buildings in Italy. And that’s not even accounting for the dwellings of an estimated 60,000 residents and the risk - a very real risk as shown by history - of cataclysmic flooding. So how exactly does Venice, ‘the floating city’, keep above the water?