VENICE
Venice, and the drift
The institution must be described at its worst, and not only at its best, because the way it fails is precisely what one buys a guarantee against.
German merchants held the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal from the thirteenth century, and Ottoman merchants the Fondaco dei Turchi from 1621. In the usual account this is a sign of commercial openness, and for a long stretch it really was: Venice regarded these buildings not as a concession to foreigners but as the ordinary way of dealing with people whose law was not its own.
How the conditions tightened
Residence in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was compulsory, and a German merchant in Venice was not free to lodge elsewhere. All his transactions passed through Venetian brokers, and officials of the Republic recorded the traffic. At the Fondaco dei Turchi the windows onto the canal were walled up and a single guarded entrance was left, avowedly for the safety of those inside; the doors were closed at night from the outside.
None of these measures was introduced as a hostile act, and each had a reasonable justification at the moment it was taken: fiscal control, professional brokerage, the safety of the guests. The overall outcome, however, is the profile of an enclosure under compulsion, and it appeared wherever the agreement stopped being reciprocal. Where one side could impose and the other only accept, the house became an instrument of control within a generation.
The operational lesson
What the Venetian case teaches anyone who wants to remake the thing today is not to avoid the institution, but to know in which direction it slides and to make the slide structurally expensive. The three conditions that deteriorated in Venice are the residence requirement, the forced brokerage of relations with the outside and free exit. Two of them have here a clause that can be amended only unanimously — the absence of a residence requirement and free withdrawal — and that is why their amendment figures among the conditions that would count as a negative verdict on the project. The third has none, and for a precise reason: forced brokerage arose in Venice because the Republic granted the seat and in exchange passed the trade through its own brokers. Here there is no authority granting the seat, since the house buys its own building and sells on commission to whom it wishes; the condition that produced that drift in Venice does not arise, and a clause forbidding it would forbid something nobody is in a position to impose.
The fourth condition, reciprocity, has no Venetian counterpart because it is precisely the one that was missing. An institution that is not reciprocal is bound to become an enclosure, and the clauses of the statutes serve to prevent the first from becoming the second.