Venice's Nissology. Reframing the Lagoon City as an Archipelago: A Model for Spatial and Temporal Urban Analysis (16th-21st centuries)

Project Information

VeNiss

Grant agreement ID: 101040474

DOI

10.3030/101040474

EC signature date 15 February 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 877,50

EU contribution

€ 1 499 877,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VeNiss (Venice's Nissology. Reframing the Lagoon City as an Archipelago: A Model for Spatial and Temporal Urban Analysis (16th-21st centuries))

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In historical tradition, Venice is regarded as a city without walls and gates and, hence, lacking suburbs. The VeNiss project challenges this trope by exploring the enduring historical and urban connections between the ancient capital and the network of over sixty islands constituting its lagoon fringes. More than a mere decorative backdrop, the Venetian domestic archipelago functioned from the early modern period as an integrated system of strategically orchestrated political, socio-economic, and cultural interactions. Like pieces on a chessboard skilfully manoeuvred by the Venetian Republic, these water-bound settlements served as capillary structures for the city’s supply, defence, and healthcare as well as civic rituals.
The long-standing prosperity of the capital fostered a Venice-centric vision that obscured the significance of its aquatic periphery, a knowledge gap further exacerbated by the severe disrepair of lagoon settlements. After the Republic’s dissolution in 1797, many islands were either razed or extensively remodelled, and today, they lie abandoned at the mercy of the lagoon’s capricious waters or await imminent reconversion. Geo-political and architectural changes have not only irrevocably erased their visual memory but also disrupted the very notion of Venice as an interconnected archipelago.
VeNiss addresses this historiographical and conceptual gap by examining the urban, political, and cultural patterns linking the city’s core to its aquascape from the 16th century onwards through a holistic and transdisciplinary approach combining social history, architecture, art and literary studies with advanced digital technologies. Coupling close archival analysis with cutting-edge digital tools—including surveys, HGIS mapping, HBIM modelling, and semantic technologies—VeNiss pioneers a 3D semantic, geospatial, and time-based infrastructure. This innovative web platform interweaves historical sources, architectural evidence, and research findings with 2D and 3D digital reconstructions, offering, for the first time, an interactive means to explore Venice’s historic lagoon in both its past form and socio-urban dynamics.
In reassessing the city’s liquid margins, VeNiss pursues key objectives: 1) digitally reconstructing nearly lost lagoon heritage over five centuries, covering both tangible and intangible aspects; 2) reinterpreting Venice’s governance as an archipelagic system, mapping islands’ functions, uses, and social practices over time; 3) reassessing Venice’s major socio-economic events, political actions, and European exchanges through the archipelago lens, illustrating how the lagoon islands absorbed or mitigated the effect of religious turmoil, health crisis and international instability; 4) retrieving islands as artistic and architectural innovation centres, exploring their agency in disseminating architectural and artistic solutions across Venice and Europe. By pursuing these objectives, VeNiss provides crucial historical insights into the mechanisms through which Venice shaped its composite urban landscape and cultivated its archipelagic identity, demonstrating that the capital’s prosperity was deeply tied to its aquatic periphery.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the past 26 months, the VeNiss team—comprising researchers from the University of Padua (UNIPD) and project partners from the University of Florence (UNIFI) and Harvard University (I TATTI)—has developed structured methodological approaches to integrate into the 3D geospatial and semantic infrastructure.
At UNIPD, urban, architectural, and art historians have collected and analysed an extensive corpus of documentary, iconographic, and archival sources on ten selected islands. These include religious and secular community archives, treatises, guidebooks, chronicles, books of islands, administrative records, and government documentation. Through agreements with the Archivio di Stato di Venezia and the Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia, all collected materials have been digitised and over 4,000 records are now available on the VeNiss platform.
Concurrently, digital survey campaigns have been conducted using photogrammetric and topographic methods, laser scanner and SLAM technologies, drones, and a submarine robot. These surveys documented the current morphodimensional state of nine previously unrecorded islands and historic structures from the Certosa of Venice, now integrated into Berlin’s Klosterhof at Glienike Palace (UNIFI team). New survey data and third-party records have been used as a basis for georeferencing and vectorising historical cartography within a GIS environment. Building on these 2D reconstructions and extensive historical documentation, the HBIM team at UNIPD has developed interoperable 3D models of eight islands, visualising their transformations over time.
Team members from I TATTI are developing the 3D geospatial semantic infrastructure. Initial work has included creating the semantic data model and standard descriptors for the platform’s entities (sources, events, actors, and built works). This has been accompanied by the development of advanced visualisation features to display 2D and 3D reconstructions on base maps. Additional functionalities have also been introduced to overlay georeferenced historical maps and generate thematic maps to facilitate spatial analysis.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The holistic, time- and geography-based methodological approach adopted by VeNiss is proving effective in addressing critical issues within both Venice’s historiography and broader urban and architectural studies. On a local scale, the philological reconstruction of lagoon islands’ transformations—through an integrated infrastructure that visualises and maps their morphologies and functions over time—is redefining the archipelago’s pivotal role in the Venice-making process. By demonstrating their long-term cultural, socio-political, and economic contributions to the capital, this research challenges the traditional ‘centre-to-periphery’ paradigm, positioning the Venetian archipelago within the broader discourse of island studies.
On a wider level, as highlighted in a series of VeNiss seminars and conference sessions, the project’s interpretative framework on water margins prompts a reassessment of urban borderlines. It fosters a nuanced understanding of aquascapes as dynamic crossroads for exchange between diverse architectural and artistic traditions.
From a scholarly perspective, VeNiss provides researchers with an essential interoperable tool to contextualise their findings and interpretation within physical settings. The ability to visualise altered or lost buildings, their spatial relationships, and transformations over time through 2D plans and 3D models—while simultaneously linking them to historical information—enhances critical investigations and facilitates cross-disciplinary dialogue. The project also enables scholars to comprehensively reconstruct lost sites’ layered histories, blending tangible and intangible elements within a unified digital environment. This approach deepens public understanding of forces shaping urban transformation while avoiding rigid, predetermined narratives.
Beyond academia, VeNiss holds significant practical implications. By drawing attention to a critically endangered environment, the platform equips institutions and practitioners with essential scientific tools to safeguard cultural heritage sites at risk of both physical decay and conceptual erasure.

VeNiss platform