Libreria Acqua Alta Historical Timeline

Origins

The bookseller Luigi Frizzo opened Libreria Acqua Alta in 2002, near Santa Maria Formosa, naming it after acqua alta, the seasonal high water that regularly floods low-lying parts of Venice, including this shop's own premises.

Turning points

Rather than fight the flooding directly, Frizzo built his storage around it: books are kept in bathtubs, a full-size gondola, and other watertight containers raised off the floor, so that a flood can rise through the shop without necessarily destroying the stock inside.

Influential people

The shop's famous staircase came about almost by accident. Frizzo needed somewhere to store a large stock of old encyclopedias, and began stacking them in a small enclosed courtyard behind the shop where two windows had been permanently walled up; over time, the stacked books grew into a genuine staircase, now one of the most photographed corners of the store.

Cultural evolution

In November 2019, Venice suffered its worst flooding in more than 50 years, with water in the city reaching 1.87 meters in places; Libreria Acqua Alta lost somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books to the flood, a stark demonstration of the same acqua alta the shop had spent years planning around.

Present-day significance

Despite the damage, the shop reopened and today holds roughly 400,000 books, drawing between 2,000 and 5,000 visitors a day -- making it one of the single busiest independent bookshops anywhere, driven in large part by its reputation as one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, a title the BBC has echoed in its own list of ten.