Venice begins with a paradox: a great city built where no city should be, on the mudbanks of a lagoon at the head of the Adriatic. Everything follows from that choice — the wooden piles driven into the silt, the Istrian stone laid at water level, the palaces whose façades open onto canals rather than streets, the absence of wheels. This first part of a three-part portrait takes the city's foundations as its subject: the lagoon and its tides, the early communities that took refuge there, the shipbuilding and the salt and spice trades that gave the place its wealth, and the extraordinary urban form that resulted — a network of canals, campi and bridges, ordered around the Grand Canal and the basin of St Mark's. Filmed in 4K, with aerial and water-level photography, the programme offers both the celebrated views and the structural logic that lies beneath them.
