Fascinating as it may be, it is not the task of this Atlas to present or recycle historic maps of Venice, except where this is necessary to illustrate certain transformations, certain logical stages between the Lagoon of the past and the Lagoon of today¹⁷. Other books and exhibitions have already done this, including the most recent systematic work on this subject, the series of monographs edited by Magrini under the general title of La Laguna di Venezia¹⁸. dating back to the 1930s. Many years later, in 1970, the catalogue of the exhibition entitled Mostra storica della Laguna Veneta¹⁹, was published, followed, in the 1990s, by the volume containing some of the results of the UNESCO project, called Ecosistema lagunare veneziano, which included over 600 colour plates of the Lagoon of Venice²⁰. Lastly, in 2003, a volume was published containing the complete catalogue of all the maps concerning the Lagoon of Venice conserved in the Correr Museum²¹. This Atlas is not intended to serve as a “Technical Map”, updated to show every feature of the Lagoon; this task we leave to others, far more qualified than ourselves. The place of the Atlas in the tradition of Lagoon cartography is not that of an anthology, but a collection of thematic environmental maps. For some maps in this Atlas, reference was made to historic maps in order to subdivide the Lagoon into historically valid geographical and ecological units, i.e., areas with clear-cut common characteristics, used both for comparison with research conducted in the past and for new surveys and interpretations. The Atlas seeks to be more than a neutral cartographic support, aiming rather to be a prism which breaks up the environment into its component parts, showing all of its colours, its facets. Obviously, it also shows the facets seen in traditional topographical maps, such as bathymetries – and it uses them to make comparisons with past situations – but it also contains maps of all kinds, ranging from biodiversity and sedimentology to speed limits and specially protected areas. Comparing the environmental features of a given area with those of another, readers are able to reflect on the appropriate planning choices to be made, the restrictions to be applied, and the responsibility of the authorities. However, comparison with the past remains one of the objectives of the Atlas: its very creation testifies to a status quo, enabling this to be compared with future situations. Before this volume is even completed, work is already being done on new situations and future developments. One of these is the comparative analysis of territorial transformations. Another is the reconstruction of the use of the territory by toponomastics. A well-known, rather poetic place name like Palude della Ròsa (palude = marsh) is actually a corruption of Palude della Róza (the name still shown on Austrian maps and still reflected in the pronunciation of the local inhabitants), and Boerio²² tells us that Roza means roggia, or “the canal that brings water to the mill”. The presence of ancient watermills in the area is confirmed by other toponyms such as Dosso dei Molini (mulini = mills) and Rame de la Farina (farina = flour), names which now exist only in the memory of the fishermen, but which the Osservatorio Naturalistico della Laguna is attempting to recover, using the Atlas. The presence of watermills not only tells us about a past custom, a technology perhaps wrongly now considered obsolete, but also speaks of past environmental conditions which may be quite unexpected. We shall again quote Farinelli, from his essay²³ included in the Atlante dei tipi geografici of the Italian Military Geographic Institute, agreeing that, if the task of an Atlas was once “to analyse thematically the ‘topographical traces’ of mankind and nature in the search for their meaning”, today it is necessary to reverse this situation and “to study the cartographic images from the past in order to discover the ideological traces that they have left in our minds and in our way of looking at reality”.

[17] “And despite my great love of Venice, the Venetian Lagoon would have remained for me a curiosity, alien, peculiar, incomprehensible, if once, tired of staring at it like an idiot, I had not shared for eight days and eight nights the boat, bread and bed of a fisherman from Torcello. I rowed beside the islands; I waded across the brown mudflats with a fishing net in my hand; I got to know the water, flora and fauna of the Lagoon; I breathed and observed its special atmosphere; and since then it has been familiar and a friend”. (Hermann Hesse, Über das Reisen, 1904, our translation). ritorna
[18] Magrini G., 1933. ritorna
[19] AA.VV., 1970. ritorna
[20] Caniato G., Turri E., Zanetti M., 1995. ritorna
[21] Baso G., Scarso M., Tonini C., 2003. ritorna
[22] Boerio G., 1998. ritorna
[23] Farinelli F., 2004, (our traslation). ritorna