News (History) Traces of Submerged Roman Road Found Beneath Venetian Lagoon

 

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Researchers in Italy have found the remains of a Roman road and dock at the bottom of a Venetian lagoon.

“We believe that what we found is a part of a road that connected the southern and the northern part of the Venice lagoon,” Fantina Madricardo, a geophysicist at the ISMAR-Marine Science Institute in Venice, tells the Art Newspaper’s Garry Shaw.
The pathway would have allowed people to travel to and from the ancient Roman city of Altinum, located at the north end of the lagoon.
As Madricardo and her colleagues write in the journal Scientific Reports, their findings suggest the area that became the lagoon was home to extensive Roman settlements long before the founding of Venice in the fifth century C.E. At the time, far more of what is now underwater would have been dry land.
“The Venice lagoon formed from the main sea-level rise after the last glaciation, so it's a long-term process,” Madricardo tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. “We know that since Roman times—about 2,000 years—that the sea level there rose” up to eight feet.

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