How Was The Venetian Riviera Built

The dominant fabric is post-war: hotel blocks, apartment buildings and campsites laid out in a regular grid between the beach and the main road, built quickly from the 1950s onward and rebuilt continuously since.

Jesolo has the coast's only real skyline -- a handful of contemporary residential towers, including work by Carlos Ferrater, that stand out on a coast otherwise built to four or five storeys.

The campsites of Cavallino are an architecture of their own, permanent holiday villages of pitches, mobile homes and pine shade, laid out with the precision of small towns.

What survives from before is defensive and hydraulic: the coastal batteries of the Cavallino peninsula, built to defend the lagoon and used in the First World War, and the embankments, canals and pumping stations of the reclamation, which are why any of this is dry land.