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Updated: June 21, 2025
Their city even materially passed with them. The new houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral. Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name.
They had put out for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the flight.
The animals they convoyed had come overland from Aquileia to Altinum and from there to Ravenna by sea. In this way had come the crocodiles, hippopotami and rhinoceroses. More teamsters were from Aquileia itself.
Concordia was destroyed, and only an insignificant little village now remains to show where it once stood. At another interval of thirty-one miles stood Altinum, with its white villas clustering round the curves of its lagoons, and rivalling Baiæ in its luxurious charms. Altinum was effaced as Concordia and as Aquileia.
Fra Paolo never gave the people many words, but sometimes they were strong and beautiful, like an old poem, and in their own Venetian not in the Latin which had been made for the great ones. "It was a wonderful book, written long ago," he told them; "before the Bishop of Altinum fled with his people to Torcello and built the old Duomo; before Venice began to be."
Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities, as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant still.
While they expected, in sullen silence, that the Barbarians would evacuate the confines of Italy, Alaric, with bold and rapid marches, passed the Alps and the Po; hastily pillaged the cities of Aquileia, Altinum, Concordia, and Cremona, which yielded to his arms; increased his forces by the accession of thirty thousand auxiliaries; and, without meeting a single enemy in the field, advanced as far as the edge of the morass which protected the impregnable residence of the emperor of the West.
The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello. The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the mercantile activity of the State from its beginning.
Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the islands around.
And in the following year, 590, pope Pelagius II. died, and Gregory the Great was chosen to succeed him. With the advent of the new exarch a brighter prospect seemed for a moment to open for Italy. In the first year of Romanus's appointment the imperialists regained the greater part of the cities of the plain; they re-occupied Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Altinum, and Mantua.
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