V enice is famed for being a floating city, but research shows the land it sits on once lay many miles inland. Dramatic changes in sea level over 10,000 years have reshaped the northern Adriatic coastline, with much of the land that our ancestors roamed now lying beneath the waves.

Samuele Ongaro, at the University of Southampton, and colleagues combined seismic data with sedimentary cores from the coastal basins of northern Italy , Slovenia and northern Croatia to model changes in sea level across the region and reconstruct past landscapes over the past 10,000 years.

Picturesque canals and colourful rooftops in Murano, a historic old town in Venice.…