Why Venice is Europe’s Worst Placed City

Side note: Venice itself (the islands) only has 55k inhabitants. The other 200k live in the mainland (which counts as the same municipality), where tourists don't go

What a lot of people don’t realize is Venice was one of the largest cities in Europe up until the start of he 19th Century. It’s not just a tony tourist destination but the capital of one of Europe’s greatest Republics and Empires in history. It lasted for a thousand years until Napoleon.

I "love" how in every single "italian/greek related" videos from abroad there's always the same "totally unrelated" to the whole culture theme song with lute/mandolin.

7:59 Correction: Vasco da Gama didn't discover the Cape of good hope. It was discovered long ago and a main obstacle for the Portuguese for some time. It was known as the Cape of torments. Eventually Bartolomeu Dias managed to cross it and it became the Cape of Good Hope, opening the way for Vasco da Gama who was the first european to reach India by boat.

“Why Venice’s geography sucks” Becomes wealthiest city on the continent due to geography

When you spawn on an island with a single tree

I recently visited Venice. The current population is around 50k while the rest lives in mainland. A lot of families are leaving Venice due to rising rents. One tourist guide even told me that seeing kids playing on the streets of Venice is very rare.

In fact, Venice is brilliantly placed, which is the reason why it became a major naval power and one of the richtest countries in Europe. During the Age of Migration, Germanic tribes pillaged the Italian cities many times. Thanks to its location within a swamp, Venice was easy to defend and was never sacked.

Still waiting for the "Why Prague is the most normal city in the world" video

Actually, the 260k population figure is quite misleading. It represents the population of the whole Venice metropolitan area, much of which is actually built on the mainland, with regular streets and cars (source: I live there). The population of the historic city is less than 60k people, ever decreasing because of insanely high rents and the difficulties of living in such a peculiar place. Even people who would like to continue living there are often forced to move on the mainland because they just cannot afford otherwise. So all the percentages quoted in the videos are 4x higher, which is even more impressive.

Hello from New Orleans! I can certainly sympathize with chronic flooding. My childhood subdivision was built on "reclaimed" land and as time progressed the pumps would be more frequently out-paced and the roads were getting more prone to turning into a shallow river. The swamp reclaims all.

I was in Venice during those 4 of the worst 10 floods ever in November 2019. It was really tragic watching the local stores loosing their stock and cleaning out their shops four times in a week.

The irony: Venice used to actually raise its buildings every few decades, but about 400 years ago the buildings became "culturally significant" and so that process stopped. Once the buildings were no longer being lifted, it sealed the cycle of flooding that was then made worse by other factors/decisions.

It's ironic how Venice was once great at keeping people who didn't live there out for strategic reasons but now one of its biggest problems is too many foreign visitors coming in at a time

Venice became rich because of its monopoly for Silk Road trade. That's why Portugal and Spain tried to bypass that monopoly by finding alternative trade routes with India and China.

La Sereníssima was supremely well positioned to be at the western end of the Silk Road & bring luxury goods into the center of Europe. Another plus was that Venice was the cleanest city in Europe because its sewerage was flushed out to sea twice a day with the tides. They did suffer harshly from being the natural entry point of the plagues.

New Orleans : "Finally a worthy opponent, our battle will be legendary"

"Except for moving it somewhere else" "Hi, is this Reallifelore?" "No, this is Patrick."

Been learning so much from this Youtube. Thank you sir

I live close to Venice, after the first lockdown in March 2020 i decided to visit the city. It was all empty, not even a single boat on Canal Grande. A bit sad but magical! I will never see Venice like that again.