City
Altino
Quarto di Altino
Listen to the story
Altinum, beside today's village of Quarto di Altino in Italy, was the chief town of the Veneti, a rich trading place in the marshes, linked by lagoon waterways to Ravenna. It lay on the road from Padua to Aquileia, and here began the Via Claudia Augusta, which an inscription of AD 46 measures at three hundred and fifty Roman miles across the Alps to the Danube. The copyist gave its towers oddly diamond-shaped roofs, more medieval than Roman. After Attila destroyed the town in 452, its people fled to the lagoon islands, from whose settlements Venice arose.