If you ever took a flight from or to Venice’s Marco Polo airport, you’d likely be familiar with the typical view of small islets and irregular strips of land, surrounded by waters and fragmented by curly channels, that presents to you once you’ve taken off over the Venetian lagoon.
The barene—how locals call Venice’s salt marshes—formed 6,000 years ago, which sounds like a lot but is an incredibly short time in geological standards. Five major rivers used to flow into the lagoon during the Serenissima era. They brought along sediments that, thanks to the contrasting currents, accumulated into these amphibious formations of sand and silt, regularly flooded and constantly reshaped by the waters.
In the spring, one can see the barene turning green. Salicornia—a succulent halophytic plant, meaning it grows on salty soil—covers large areas of the wetlands. When aster, limonium, and inula blossom, small daisies in yellow, purple, and mauve appear here and there. As winter approaches and the salicornia turns red, the barene become brownish and arid. The marshes serve as nurseries for fish and are home to a variety of insects, invertebrates, and birds. Last year, 24,000 pink flamingos were seen feeding in the northern lagoon.
One hot morning in July, I took off from Venice with my colleagues and Francesco Pannoli, the captain of Laguna~B’s boat, who ferried us to visit the barene of the central and southern lagoon. It’s here that the team of Vital—our most important environmental project—works to monitor, preserve, and restore these peculiar ecosystems and their natural capital.
Vital was born in 2020 when Marcantonio and Jane Da Mosto—an environmental scientist and executive director of We are here Venice, a nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of Venice and its lagoon—began brainstorming over Zoom about what Laguna~B could do for the place it inhabited. “Marcantonio was concerned about the environmental impact of glass production and asked me if I could recommend any carbon-offset projects,” Da Mosto recalls. “That question came just after I had started thinking: how can we demonstrate that the lagoon is more than just a natural heritage that needs to be protected?” Every week, with Italy in full lockdown at first, the two teams discussed both “Laguna~B’s footprint and We are here Venice’s scientific questions, looking for valid and meaningful ways to bring these two worlds together.”
The barene offer significant benefits to Venice and the surrounding lagoon. They mitigate tides, filter waters, and store large amounts of CO₂—a quality that, Da Mosto and Marcantonio realized, would offer Laguna~B and other local companies the opportunity to counterbalance their environmental impacts where they operate.
It took approximately 30 minutes to arrive at Vital’s pilot site, Piovego Buora. Our boat passed by abandoned islets with fairy tale names: San Giorgio in Alga (St. George of algae), San Giacomo in Paludo (St. James of the swamp), or Sant’Angelo in Polvere (Holy Angel of powders—from the gunpowder that was stored there). Shrouded in vegetation, the ruins they accommodate have turned into birds’ nests. Cormorants flew nearby, skimming the water’s surface. We saw terns scampering on occasional sand strips; and sacred ibises–a species originally from Egypt that now populates the local wetlands and even the dumps of Sacca Fisola.
From there, Venice was no more than a remote presence, barely visible at the edges of the visual field, its monuments completely out of sight and the roaming of its boats imperceptible. Yet its existence directly depends on these muddy, endangered ecosystems. “The lagoon is more important for Venice even than its monuments,” Jane Da Mosto explained. “Protecting the salt marshes isn’t like protecting a building from being knocked down. It means protecting Venice along with its cultural heritage.”
These strips of land depend on sediment to grow and even exist in the first place. But with no major rivers left flowing into the basin since they were diverted in the 16th century, and the MOSE flood barriers blocking the waters— thus limiting the sediments supply–the salt marshes constantly lack their food and are vulnerable to erosion. In five hundred years, the barene have gone from covering 40% of the lagoon to less than 10% as of the present day. The first public efforts to restore the marshes date back to the late 1990s, when the construction of MOSE began and Europe required Italy to implement compensation measures. The Italian government thus began funding the creation of artificial barene, hoping they could make up for the habitats that were lost with the infrastructure. By that time, the wetlands had already largely disappeared, a trend that has since relentlessly continued.
Piovego Buora, an artificial salt marsh whose restoration works began in 2021, presents as a sloping sand beach covered in salicornia, separated from the waters by a perimeter of wooden poles and geotextile—a synthetic fabric typically used in landscaping and civil engineering, allowing water to flow without letting the precious sediments go. Here, Vital’s environmental engineers, botanists, and ecologists carry out weekly inspections monitoring parameters and trends like water saturation and composition of the soil, plant cover, and erosion. “We use the data to assess the barena’s environmental performance. The frequency with which tides flood the area, for example, determines how the vegetation grows. If a barena is constantly underwater, only algae would be found,” Leonardo Serafini, an environmental engineer and researcher who accompanied us during the trip, told me. His tasks include installing sensors and other devices to collect the data, analyzing it, and building digital geomechanical models to predict and inform how the barena will evolve.
Vital’s work starts only after state agencies have completed the site’s reconstruction. These infills—as the artificial marshes are officially called—are made of sediments obtained from dredging the navigation canals, transported to specific areas (often where a natural barena once stood), and then pumped into the wood-fenced perimeter. The sediments are first tested—a process that can take years—and only if labeled uncontaminated and safe can they be employed in the new salt marsh. “We’re trying to influence how these infills are designed, to make sure they’re ecologically functional,” Da Mosto told me. To do so, her team is also studying a natural barena not far from Piovego Buora. Natural marshes have different substrates, with softer, more porous sediments. They show “multiple inner channels, a varying topography with lower and higher areas, and more diversity in terms of vegetation.”
Plants are essential for the preservation of the wetlands. “Without them, the barene are vulnerable to erosion. Plants send oxygen to the soil, slow the water speed, and keep the sediment together, allowing it to deposit and the salt marshes to increase.” Alvise Maria Gastaldi, a plant ecologist, showed me a branch of Spartina anglica, an invasive grass that’s been replacing its local equivalents. But native or not, it doesn’t matter, he explained, as long as its roots and rhizomes help consolidate the sediments. “Spartina acts like reinforced concrete.” Last spring, Vital’s team sowed 5,000 plants on a newly-reconstructed barena, including juncus, limonium, and aster.
As our boat approached the natural marsh’s irregular edge, we were advised to stay on board: without ciaspole—a type of snowshoe for mud—it would be impossible to carry out a single step and not sink into the soil. Not that it mattered much to me—I already did. I was covered in gray silt up to my knees, my feet bare and encrusted, and I was enjoying it.
The incident occurred a couple of hours prior, while visiting a second demonstration site, Lago Bastia 2, which Da Mosto’s team has followed since 2022. She was telling us to be careful, urging the group to walk fast to avoid getting stuck. She was such a queen in her pristine white outfit, linen hat, and charms. She looked excited and unbothered by the dirt, from which her plastic boots seemed to shield her entirely. Seconds after her warning, I fell on my knees, mud entered my rubber boots, and there I left them, too heavy to be extracted, sinking slowly into the soil. Leonardo Serafini, with the calm of someone who has seen this before, recovered and secured them into a plastic bag. My socks were soaked and soon I got rid of them: I walked barefoot for the entire day, the wet soil enveloping my toes like a massage, and a vast, soft moquette of algae tickling my soles.
In this state of bliss and dirt I followed the group heading towards a low construction made of bundled branches and wooden poles, developing horizontally at the southwest side of Lago Bastia 2. Jane Da Mosto called it maxifascina and she said it was “built to protect the infill from further erosion, while promoting sediment retention and expansion of the vegetated areas.” It looked more like an art installation than an engineered system, and soon I understood why. “Everything about its construction is artisanal,” Da Mosto said. “The chestnut poles were sourced from forests in the hills near Vicenza, as were the thin branches used to make the fascines. The poles were hammered manually into the mud, one by one, using a traditional, handmade borer operated by three people.” Here, the heavy machinery on large pontoons would do more damage than good, “threatening the environmental quality of the area we are working to revive.”
This wasn’t the first time that scientists at Vital tapped into indigenous and artisanal knowledge to carry out their work. The NEC stations—the metallic antennas Vital has designed and placed in another of its sites to monitor the marshland’s elevation and sediment consolidation—were handcrafted by a local blacksmith and individually installed by a team of researchers.
Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) is integral to nature restoration practices, even though not yet entirely recognized by the scientific community. “Vital is a multi-disciplinary initiative that takes the best available science and the most sophisticated innovations in topographical surveys, but we also spend a lot of time collecting local knowledge. It’s integrated in how we work,” Jane Da Mosto explained. Her team of 15 currently works on five sites of the lagoon, with an increasing number of external collaborations that she refers to as “green jobs.” Only in the area we visited, she said, there are 60 marshes yet to be repaired. “And that’s not even enough. There should be much more.”
Vital’s core mission is to enforce the conditions allowing the barene to grow and morph spontaneously without human intervention. Doing so is an exercise of patience and resilience in chasing precarious balances. “Salt marshes are not like gardens where you plant roses and trees and they just stay where they’re put. They’re always changing.” Yet, Da Mosto says, their efforts are paying off. “Thanks to our partnership with WaterLANDS—a project dedicated to the restoration of endangered wetlands across Europe—Vital has obtained significant support from the European Commission’s Horizon Programme to demonstrate how marshes can sustain themselves.”
The salt marshes force you to pay attention. To notice every slight variation of the soil, to listen, and wait to hear for the next sign. To recognize the birds coming and going; to notice the next seed sprouting, the tide rising, and the shore losing grains to the water. Last but not least, to be careful where you put your feet.
Heading back felt like returning from another planet. The landscape had changed, the water had risen, and most barene weren’t visible anymore. I was leaving behind another type of Venice, so different from the one I’ve known, yet so crucial to the city’s existence. After all, it’s here, in this seemingly inhospitable lagoon, that almost 2,000 years ago the first Venetians established the foundations of the city we now know in all its splendor. Maybe, at the beginning, they were just having fun walking barefoot in the mud.