The Venetian Riviera historical timeline

Origins

The lagoons east of Venice held early medieval settlements -- Equilio (Jesolo) and Heraclea among them -- that were rivals of the rising Venice and were centres of the lagoon world before it consolidated. Both declined as their waters silted and the population moved.

Turning points

Under the Republic the coast was strategic rather than settled: the lagoon entrances were fortified, and the sandbars kept as a defensive outwork of Venice itself.

Influential people

The Piave front of 1917-18 ran to this coast, and the fortifications on the Cavallino peninsula -- coastal batteries built to defend the lagoon -- survive from that period.

Cultural evolution

Reclamation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drained the marshes behind the beaches and made the land habitable and farmable, which is the precondition for everything that followed.

Present-day significance

Beach tourism arrived in earnest in the 1950s and 1960s, and grew to a scale few places match: Jesolo, Cavallino, Caorle and Bibione together take tens of millions of overnight stays a year, most of them Italian, German and Austrian.