Eraclea

Until 4 November 1950 this town was called Grisolera, after the grixiòłe, the marsh reeds with the grey plume. On that day a decree of president Einaudi changed its name to Eraclea, which was however the name of another city: the Roman-Byzantine Heraclia, for a time the capital of the Duchy of Venice, whose remains lie at the edge of the municipal territory. Heraclia had been abandoned in the twelfth century, when a flood shifted the mouth of the Piave and the area turned to malarial marsh. Eight hundred years later, a town born in those same marshes took its name.

Water, after all, there was too much of here: before the reclamation, 82% of the municipal territory was taken up by pools, canals, reed beds and marsh. The works began in earnest after the Great War, and not by chance: from 1917 the front had settled on the very embankment of the Piave, along the western boundary, and as it withdrew the Italian army blew up all the dykes and banks of the barely begun reclamation, flooding everything again. The beach and the pinewood came afterwards: in the nineteen-twenties Marco Aurelio Pasti and the owners of the nearby Valle Ossi planted thousands of pines on the dunes to hold the sand against the wind and the storms. That pinewood is today what sets this coast apart.