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.
