ABSTRACT
Venice is both archetypal and exceptional. Its battle for survival and transfiguration has transformed it into an icon of both the victory and fragility of culture. Constructed on low-lying land in a lagoon, its imposing stone buildings rest on a base of petrified wooden piles driven into the ground and hardened with time. The city has frequently been seen by its visitors as both magical and as a metaphor for the human work of sublimation which can transform raw materials into complex and awe-inspiring works of culture. One consequence of the transformations and juxtapositions which have generated the city is that its meaning has become secured in the ambivalent logic of the unconscious where opposites co-exist with only oblique reference to the real.
