Section 3 Summary (Chapter 5 Salting it Away in the Adriatic, Chapter 6, Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between) Summary and Analysis

Chapter 5 begins after the fall of the Roman Empire. In Europe there is no clear successor to Rome's power and many smaller countries begin to flourish. One of these is the city-state of Venice. Venice was built on islands in a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea. Originally, vacationing Roman tourists used the lidi or sand dunes in the lagoon as getaway location. When Germans invaded the nearby town of Veneto, however, the townspeople fled to the sand dunes for refuge and build the city of Venice there. Salt, extracted from the lagoon became, over the next couple of hundred years, the foundation of a commercial empire in Venice. In...