Venice

The book

Venice 1983, the first title in Make Books Australia’s timeSnaps series, presents a photo-essay snapshot of key locations and structures within the Laguna di Venezia at a point in time. 

The book contains 98 photos of Venice taken between 13 and 23 September 1983. Images selected from a photo archive created during a three-month round-the-world trip, and captured using an Olympus point-and shoot camera, loaded with colour-slide film. 

Readers can access image captions via interactive pop-up panels on each picture.

The book’s thirty-thousand plus words cover an introduction to the timeSnaps series, and fifteen essays providing context for each group of chapter images.

The first chapter provides an overview of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, with the other 14 chapters addressing specific areas within the Laguna di Venezia, or key institutions that shaped the Repubblica. 

Captions and essays are written as if it is 1983.

The book also contains two maps of the Laguna di Venezia.

A second series of pop-up panels dotted through the book, accessed via a San Marco silhouette symbol, outline major changes in the four decades since the photos were taken. Much of this change is around restoration and reuse – particularly of institutional and industrial buildings. 


The Repubblica

The Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia’s rise and fall is a rich and fascinating story.  

From the early 400s, as the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Germanic barbarians swept through north-east Italy, sacking Roman towns and cities across the Veneto region. Seeking sanctuary, many Veneti retreated to islands within the Laguna di Venezia. The initial Veneti settlement within the laguna, from 452 on Torcello island, was the parent community of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia. 

Early Veneti settlers supported themselves by fishing and harvesting salt. Gradually, trading salt, then other merchandise, generated increasing wealth. In extending its areas of political control, and building the volume and range of goods flowing through its ports and warehouses, the Repubblica grew into an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful trading state. 

By 1489, the Venetian empire was at its peak – stretching from Cyprus to Dalmatia, and from Istria (Croatia) to the Alps. With a population of some 180,000, Venice was the third-largest city, and largest financial centre, in Europe.

Changing global trade routes, devastating plague epidemics during the 1500s and 1600s, and ongoing battles with the Turks, forced Venice to concentrate its diminishing resources on defending its home territory. 

While the 1700s saw the Repubblica at its cultural zenith, it was a political and military shadow of its former self. 

Confronted by Napoleon, on 12 May 1797, the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia capitulated without resistance. Doge Ludovico Manin’s last act was to formally abolish the 1,100-year-old Repubblica.

Venice 1983 aims to capture a sense of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia through images of a rich legacy recorded in stone, brick and plaster – in decoration, furniture and art – and in fabric and paper. 

The book also touches on two critical issues to be addressed to ensure a future for Venice: environmental challenges, particularly around rising sea levels, and growing pressures from ever-increasing tourist numbers.

Venice 1983 presents timeSnaps of the surviving fabric of this unique city – glimpses realised during a slower, kinder, time.