AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan

When used in its plural form, the term “Venice” long referred to two dis- tinct geographical realities between Grado and Cavarzere. It first referred to the city which became the capital following the transfer of the ducal seat to Rialto, a populated and lively agglomeration located in the middle of the lagoons, the head of a state and an empire. But it also referred to the administrative duchy established during Byzantine , the lands and waters, islands and barrier spits on which the capital city imposed its domination. This semantic singularity does not reflect lexical poverty. Quite the contrary, it embedded the reality of the city’s origins, the disper- sion of communities over the lands and waters of the lagoon refuge as the first Venice—maritime Venice—was born. With time, however, things changed. In the 15th century, in the texts adopted by the various city councils, occurrences of the word “Rialto” were not uncommon. Yet when designating the capital city, that term tended to be supplanted by another, “Venice,” a word that, in the singular, lost its ambivalence, captured as it were by reference only to the city of the lagoon. The first meaning, how- ever, disappeared only gradually, and its long survival speaks volumes. Venice dominated the lagoon basin but continued to associate its trium- phal history with the small societies that survived in the space of its origi- nal jurisdiction, the territory of the duchy. Stripped of any autonomous destiny, these societies still reflect some of the luster of Venice’s name, and its history remains their history. Where the old meaning did survive, it served to preserve a memory, to show that the small communities of the lagoon continued to exist, at least symbolically, on several levels at the same time. First on a local scale, and second on an expanded scale which in some cases saw the union of their history with that of Venice. Eventually, the former meaning disappeared and memory transformed, becoming the matrix of a historical memory in that it is the “guardian of the problematic of the representative relationship of the present to the past.”1

1 P. Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), p. 306. 26 elisabeth crouzet-pavan 10 Miles R. Piave

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