Tra fiumi, lagune e delta. Pattern topografici e narrative intorno ai monasteri altomedievali veneziani

Early medieval Venetian monastery played a critical role in shaping the new coastal settlements in a rather peculiar landscape: a watery area, not yet a lagoon, characterized by rivers’ mouths and deltas, where the Adriatic/Mediterranean Sea roads met the inland waterways and roads. The monasteries are known chiefly for quite rare archival records, and their early stories have been affected mainly by medieval and postmedieval narratives celebrating Venice and its origins’ myth. It is possible to re-narrate them and propose different interpretative models using recent archaeological records, geomorphological data, and updated geo-locations. The phenomenon appears an essential component of the coastal communities’ economic and social transformations between the 8th and the 10th cent AD. The analysis of their systemic locations and assessing the environmental changes help us redefine their role. Monasteries appear to have had a crucial economic and political function (salt, fishery and trade routes): profoundly entwined with local Lombard/Frankish elites and the emerging communities at the edges of what – soon – will become Venice.