The Sea That Made Venice, and the Shore Sicily Watches

The Guardian reported this week that scientists have uncovered ancient hills and swamps that disappeared as sea levels rose across the northern Adriatic, and that the land Venice stands on once lay many miles inland. Over some 10,000 years, the paper said, dramatic changes in sea level reshaped the coastline of the northern Adriatic.

Read from the lagoon, the research reverses the usual order of things. Venice is habitually described as a city sinking into the sea; the Guardian's account describes a sea that arrived and made the city's ground what it now is. On this reading the lagoon is a recent and provisional piece of geography, assembled by water.

For a Sicilian desk the item is not local news, and the Guardian's report offers no figures for this century and no comparison with other Mediterranean coasts. It is useful instead as a measure of scale: a shallow sea, given time, can redraw a shoreline that whole economies are built upon.