Venice’s Marriage to the Sea: Ritual, Representation, and Environmental Transformation

The Marriage to the Sea is the annual ritual through which the “Maritime Republic” of Venice (F. C. Lane) represented its particular position in the Mediterranean Sea. For hundreds of years, until the end of the Republic as an independent state in 1797, at the threshold of the summer of every year, precisely in the day of the Ascension of Christ, the doge, the head of state, left the Ducal Palace in his golden vessel, the Bucintoro, to reach the place of the Two Fortresses where the lagoon confines to the open Adriatic Sea, accompanied by the most prominent political and religious authorities, and a long procession of ships. There, he threw a golden ring into the water to sanction the unique relation of the city with the aquatic element, uttering the propitiating words in Latin: “Desponsamus te Mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini”, that is, “We marry you, o sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion” .