Venice rewards morning people. In the early hours, away from the multitude of gazes that will soon flock to and fill its vital centres, the city rebuilds itself anew. It’s as if the traces of the day before have been wiped clean, and the show of life begins again—the teeming, industrious back-and-forth of the forces that bring the building blocks of this articulate, astonishing existence to the stage. Venice at the break of dawn reveals to its eyewitnesses that it is, at its core, profoundly human-made.

A stroll along its waterways is like stepping into a time machine, a focused vision of how the brightest civilisations of the past built cities and empires using only human traction. It’s brutal, unimaginable—and yet. This parade of wheels and carts, of bodies pushing and pulling anything and everything, the high and the low—furniture, boxes of wine, rubbish, works of art, online orders—from the barge moored on the canal to their final destination. The smell of oil fuel and fatigue. The sounds of an ancient form of logistics, dependent on water tides and muscle energy. The pops of colour from high-visibility uniforms and the tenderness and mundanity of a teddy bear tied to a rubbish cart, of a packed lunch. It’s all here, a procession with prayers and curses, for the early riser to see.

Shaping Spaces is a series investigating the ever-elusive idea of space and the concept of enoughness in relation to life in Venice. By observing how we exist within it—we, all of us: locals and visitors, young and old, individuals and the collective, fast- and slow-moving bodies and objects—we can, on one hand, begin to grasp its underlying paradigms, the silent rules that govern it; and on the other, shift our perception and, perhaps, our way of inhabiting it. Read more.

Words by Valeria Necchio | Photos by Giacomo Gandola