Abstract

When I began to reflect on the ways of how I might begin this article, I remembered that, a little while ago, I had annotated a small book that I had found all the more interesting because it did not have the slightest scholarly pretensions. I had opened it more or less mechanically and found in it a passage, already underlined in pencil by myself, that seemed to me to offer an almost perfect approach for developing what was in my mind: “ … i Veneziani, sopra i pali di larice, hanno edificato chiese e palazzi.” In fact, I could hardly have dreamed up a better metaphor, and in any case a more than adequate one, than that of those larches. They were produced in an Alpine environment and now, sunken into the lagoon, they served as the foundation of one of the most astonishing urban cultures that men ever conceived and built.