On the Magistrates and Republic of Venice

the water is deeper (this indeed changes and varies almost every day with the tide of the sea), they finally arrive at the city. That shore which rises after the shallows extends for nearly sixty thousand paces and encloses the inner estuaries. It is not, however, so continuous that it does not offer, in seven places broken by the sea, an approach to the internal station. It is six thousand paces distant from the mainland. Therefore, in this way, the estuaries of the Venetian city are enclosed partly by the mainland, partly by the shore and the shallows, in the middle of which, in that region which was called Rivoaltus by our ancestors and has kept that name to this very day, the Venetian city was founded: at the time when the Huns, led by Attila, were devastating with fire and slaughter the entire Venetian coast, a distinguished province of Italy, which is adjacent to these estuaries. In this calamity, the citizens of the illustrious cities of Venice—Padua, Aquileia, Opitergium, Concordia, and Altinum—who excelled others in nobility and wealth, first took refuge with their families in some islands, or rather mounds, which in those estuaries emerged a little from the sea: there