g to fall in many parts, and by the advice of Fra
Giocondo, Raffaello, and Giuliano, the foundations were in great measure
renewed; in which work persons who were present and are still living
declare that those masters adopted the following method. They excavated
below the foundations many large pits after the manner of wells, but
square, at a proper distance one from another, which they filled with
masonry; and between every two of these piers, or rather pits filled
with masonry, they threw very strong arches across the space below,
insomuch that the whole building came to be placed on new foundations
without suffering any shock, and was secured for ever from the danger of
showing any more cracks.

But the work for which it seems to me that Fra Giocondo deserves the
greatest praise is one on account of which an everlasting gratitude is
due to him not only from the Venetians, but from the whole world as
well. For he reflected that the life of the Republic of Venice depended
in great measure on the preservation of its impregnable position on the
lagoons on which that city, as it were by a miracle, is built; and that,
whenever those lagoons silted up with earth, the air would become
infected and pestilential, and the city consequently uninhabitable, or
at the least exposed to all the dangers that threaten cities on the
mainland. He set himself, therefore, to think in what way it might be
possible to provide for the preservation of the lagoons and of the site
on which the city had been built in the beginning. And having found a
way, Fra Giocondo told the Signori that, if they did not quickly come to
some resolution about preventing such an evil, in a few years, to judge
by that which could be seen to have happened in part, they would become
aware of their error, without being in time to be able to retrieve it.
Roused by this warning, and hearing the powerful arguments of Fra
Giocondo, the Signori summoned an assembly of the best engineers and
architects that there were in Italy, at which many opinions were given
and many designs made; but that of Fra Giocondo was held to be the best,
and was put into execution. They made a beginning, therefore, with
excavating a great canal, which was to divert two-thirds or at least
one-half of the water brought down by the River Brenta, and to conduct
that water by a long detour so as to debouch into the lagoons of
Chioggia; and thus that river, no longer flowing into the lagoons at
Veni