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Recognising historic landscapes
The idea that there was no pre-existing Roman settlement on the site of medieval Venice is hard to credit when you realise that the Italian peninsula was heavily populated under the Roman Empire
The Roman roots of Venice
Every guidebook and history of Venice begins by assuring you that the city was founded in AD 421 by refugees fleeing to the 118 uninhabited islands set around a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea to escape the warlike ‘barbarians’ pouring into northern Italy – a bewildering array of tribal groups known to historians (but probably not to themselves) as Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Lombards, Saxons, Gepids, Bulgars, and Thuringians, all seeking new lands to settle in the dying days of the declining Roman Empire.
The idea that there was no pre-existing Roman settlement on the site of medieval Venice is hard to credit when you realise that the Italian peninsula was
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