Why Venice is sinking?
There is this tower in Venice named tower of Santo Stefano, you can see
it the image. Do you notice anything unusual about this tower? Yes, it's very much leaning. Let's
talk about why this is so. Remember we are on top of a lake so the soil it's going to be muddy
and hard to build anything on top. So, how did Venetians set the foundations of their buildings?
Well, they buried wooden trunks in the soil to make it more stable and built their houses on top
of those trunks. Since the trunks were buried, there is no oxygen to rotten the wood making them
a very reliable solution. Anyway, this solution is not perfect and makes Venice sink 2
millimeters every year.
So what happened on the canal in the image below is somebody decided to build a 63 meters tall tower right at the
edge of one of those natural canals. Then, the tides eroded the shore and
made the tower lean year after year. The solution they found was to build the buttress you can
see going from the middle of the tower right into the water. This buttress was built in 1904 to
prevent the tower from leaning even more.
Does the Santo Stefano tower look dangerous to you?
Well, this tower is one of the safest church towers in Venice as it counts with two different safety systems, besides the buttress there is a cable you can see hanging from the tower. This is an alarm which is triggered whenever the tower moves so the firefighters come and check everything is ok with it. You can see this alarm system in all towers in Venice.
This is one stops of our WalkingTours App. If you want to take the whole historic tour of Venice download our iOS or Android app
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