Fiber optic cable is no newcomer to Venice — we’ve had it at home for years now.  But clearly our neighborhood is on track for extreme upgrading to intergalactic ultra-fast ultra-wide broadband.  Venice might give the impression (briefly, from afar, with your eyes half-closed) of a city left adrift in the backwash of the Renaissance.  Yet men have been hard at work these past few days making Venice ever more modern.  And I say thanks, but Venice has always been modern.

Today progress in Venice takes so many forms, though by now they’re not what you might call surprising or original.  But over the centuries Venice became rich and powerful in large part because it was alert to innovation of many different sorts.

On the social side, the Venetian government passed a law in 1258 requiring doctors, even the most illustrious, to treat poor patients for free.  Shocking then, perhaps still somewhat startling.  In 1443 the government guaranteed the services of a lawyer to poor defendants at no charge; the lawyer would be chosen by a judge from among the best lawyers in Venice (no fobbing the case off on your newest recruit) and was required to follow the case with maximum care or risk a large fine.  That’s become normal, I think, in concept if not in practice.  I don’t know about fines today, though.

On the commercial side, the Venetians established the Patent Statute on March 19, 1474, now considered the earliest codified patent system in the world.  These patents were granted for “any new and ingenious device, not previously made,” provided it was useful.

However “useful” may have been defined, suddenly useful was everywhere: Between 1500 and 1600 Venice granted 593 patents.  (In the same period the Kingdom of France granted 100.)  By 1788, Venice had certified 1896 patents.

Speaking of useful, pharmacists were forbidden to sell their medicines without a doctor’s prescription.  If this is normal now, credit goes to the old Venetians to whom quality control was an obsession.  Maybe they loved quality for itself, but control ensured that their myriad products were not only good, but reliable, hence valuable.  It was always all about money.

No, they didn’t invent money.  But the Venetian gold ducat, later called the zecchino, became arguably the closest thing to what you might call a monetary “gold standard” for 500 years.  The coin maintained a consistent weight (approximately 24 carats) and high gold purity (99.7 percent) from 1284 to 1797.  Venice’s strong trading network ensured the zecchino’s circulation throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, from the Netherlands to India.  It is the only coin in the world that retained, for the over five centuries of its uninterrupted existence, the same images, the same epigraphs, the same weight and the same purity of the metal.  I sometimes complain that in Venice money is king, but that’s freaking impressive.

Back to fiber optic cables.  Ninety percent of Venice and its satellite towns and hamlets are served by FTTC connections, while 79 percent has FTTH and the by-now quaint but still serviceable ADSL covers 99 percent.  If you’d like to know more, here’s Open Fiber.

So progress jackhammers on.  The bridge has been left with scars from the intervention, because there are rectangles of cement where stone used to be and I cannot understand it.  We have ultra-fast broadband, but we also still have people who just carry things off, things that aren’t even theirs.  Doesn’t feel like progress to me.

I started this post with glowing eyes looking toward the future, and I indulged myself by recalling a smattering of examples of Venetian greatness.  But here we are today.  You’ve got your interstellar communications cables, and you’ve got steps now made of concrete where a week ago there was stone.