Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Life During Wartime
Glamorous Venice gradually took on a workaday aspect in the 19th century, with factories
springing up on Giudecca and around Mestre and Padua, and textile industries setting up
shop around Vicenza and Treviso. As an increasingly strategic industrial area, Venice began
to seem like a port worth reclaiming. But when Austro-Hungarian forces advanced on
Venice, they were confronted by Italy's naval marines. Two days after Italy declared war on
Austria in 1915, air raids on the city began, and would continue intermittently throughout
WWI until 1918. Venice was lucky: the bombardments caused little damage or loss of life.
When Mussolini rose to power after WWI, he was determined to turn the Veneto into a
modern industrial powerhouse and a model Fascist society - despite Venice's famously
laissez-faire outlook. Mussolini constructed a roadway from the mainland to Venice, liter-
ally bringing the free-wheeling city into line with the rest of Italy. While Italy's largest Fas-
cist rallies were held in the boulevards of Padua, with up to 300,000 participants, Italian
Resistance leaders met in Padua's parks to plot uprisings throughout northern Italy. When
Mussolini's grip on the region began to weaken, partisans joined Allied troops to wrest the
Veneto from Fascist control.
Venice emerged relatively unscathed from Allied bombing campaigns that targeted
mainland industrial sites, and was liberated by New Zealand troops in 1945 - but the mass
deportation of Venice's historic Jewish population in 1943 shook Venice to its very moor-
ings. When the Veneto began to rebound after the war, many Venetians left for the main-
land, Milan and other postwar economic centres. The legendary lagoon city seemed mired
in the mud, unable to reconcile its recent history with its past grandeur, and unsure of its fu-
ture.
