On Persian influence: Demons are probably more directly Babylonian than Persian. Judah got that exposure during the Exile itself, not under Persian rule. Lilith (Isaiah 34:14) is the Mesopotamian Lilitu, and Babylonian demonology (Lamashtu, Pazuzu, the utukku) was already rich on its own. Where Zoroastrian influence is a stronger case is angels as named individuals with defined roles (Michael, Gabriel, hierarchies), which show up for the first time in post-exilic texts like Daniel, plausibly modeled on the Amesha Spentas and Yazatas after contact with Achaemenid Persia. Same goes for full cosmic dualism, a Satan as an independent adversarial being rather than a role in the divine court (as in Job or Zechariah, where "satan" is a title, not a name).
It's a big topic on its own, deserving separate treatment. I deliberately scoped this piece to the older, pre-exilic layer (the El/YHWH merger through Josiah's reform).
For what it's worth, the piece isn't arguing for a single external source anyway: Canaanite (El, Baal, Asherah), Mesopotamian (the Flood mirrors Atrahasis/Gilgamesh, the creation account echoes the Enuma Elish, plus the exile-era demonology above), Egyptian, and later Persian and Hellenistic layers all leave fingerprints at different points. Judaism's formation looks less like one merger and more like several centuries of absorbing and reworking whatever was around.
You are describing the island, but the Comune of Venice is around the 12th most populous municipality in Italy (roughly 250,000 people). Most of that population does not live on the island at all, it lives on the mainland: Mestre and Marghera are part of the Comune di Venezia too. The 49,000 figure is only the historic centre. So "with its population Venice does not even qualify as medium" is measuring the wrong thing.
The mainland side is not a tourism monoculture. Porto Marghera is one of the country's historic industrial and port districts and there are medium and large firms of national relevance. I work for a medium-sized company in Mestre myself, and my commute from the island is under 10 minutes by car (the island is tiny, and the car parks are easy to reach, especially from a residential neighbourhood).
Venice is not a generic "medium town", so comparing it to one is off. It is a regional capital (of the Veneto), a metropolitan city, a major university and cultural hub, and a port. The public sector here is not "artificial", it is regional and metropolitan government, the port authority, real administrative functions. If you want a fair benchmark, compare it to Florence or Bologna, not to a provincial town where you park on your doorstep.
You do not need a car on the island because the water public transport runs across the whole city all day and through the night, and the place is small enough to cross on foot. For anyone working on the mainland, the parking, the train station and the jobs are minutes away. A car-free historic city is something most cities are now trying to engineer on purpose. It is a feature, not only a trade-off.
And here is the key point that flips your framing: people are not leaving the centre because there are no jobs. They are leaving because owners can make far more converting a flat into a short-term rental than renting it long term, so even someone with a solid job in the metro area cannot find a home in the centre. It is not weak demand for living there, it is demand being outbid by tourism. That is exactly why the lever is housing regulation, not the entry ticket. The university, the culture, the port and the administration already give the city an economic base. What is missing is keeping the homes available to the people who would happily live and work here.
Reducing tourist numbers was never my point, and you are right that you cannot.
The point is not letting tourism turn every home into a short-term rental and push residents out: in the historic centre tourist beds have passed 50,000 while residents fell below 49,000. That is a housing and land-use problem a city is fully allowed to regulate, and it has nothing to do with borders or free movement.
Keep homes as homes, and people can visit all they want.
There are a lot of misconceptions and biases in that statement. What exactly is meant by a 'modern city'? Venice is both a provincial and a regional capital. It has one of the largest international airports in Italy, as well as a major train station. It has public transportation to get you from one side of the city to the other. Surprisingly, it also lends itself very well to infrastructure upgrades: for example, because laying cables is so straightforward here, it was one of the very first cities in Italy to get fiber-optic internet straight to the home.
People often tell me, 'You don’t have a car.' I do have a car, it’s just not parked right outside my door. But in how many other major Italian cities can you actually park right outside your building? Practically none. The difference is that in those cities you deal with 24/7 traffic congestion, whereas here it is absolutely peaceful.
The city is built on a human scale, not for cars, and that is a massive advantage. How can you say it is impractical to live in if you have never actually lived here? You should try it. I was born and lived outside the city for years, but now that I live here, I would never go back.
There are countless people actively looking for housing. A neighbor of mine, who relocated from another part of Italy, sold his home with the strict stipulation that it could only go to residents and not be turned into a tourist rental. It sold within three days of being listed.
My partner and I pay about 1,000€ a month for our mortgage. Meanwhile, an apartment in a nearby building which is worth far less than ours, being smaller and having fewer amenities is constantly booked solid at over 150€ a night.
Regarding the supposed lack of jobs, that completely ignores reality. The historic center itself has a major hospital, courthouses, government offices, police forces, and countless local businesses. Furthermore, you don't necessarily have to work right on your doorstep. The island is small, but right across the bridge, Mestre is full of job opportunities. That is actually where I work, and I commute there easily by car, bus, or train. All these workers need housing. To answer your question about who can't find a home, just do the math on my previous example: at 150€ a night, a landlord surpasses a standard 1,000€ monthly rent in just seven days. That is exactly why apartments are rented out to tourists instead of residents.
I'm a Venetian resident; I wrote this. Happy to answer questions. The short version: the day-tripper "access fee" is often framed as a fix for overtourism, but the data from the 2024–2025 trials shows arrivals still rising: it filters visitors by income rather than reducing them. Meanwhile the real driver of the city emptying out is housing: short-term rentals now outnumber residents. I also sketch a concrete policy proposal (time-limited rental licences) based on a recent Constitutional Court ruling.
Yesterday I released version 0.7.17 of Serverino, my HTTP server written in D
Serverino is a small, fast, and dependency-free HTTP server implemented in D. A minimal app with serverino can handle on my laptop ~150k reqs/s and it uses just a few mb of ram.
Well, you might have searched for GitHub or got there from some page where serverino was mentioned (forum, ...) or maybe someone suggested it to you in the community. Once a program of mine was mentioned in a telegram channel and I started seeing a lot of stars on github and I didn't understand why.
I'm trying to run a self-contained webserver executable without any external dependency. It starts but daemon <-> workers communication doesn't seem working (it is done via unix socket)
It works fine with bubblewrap or inside a scratch docker container.
On Persian influence: Demons are probably more directly Babylonian than Persian. Judah got that exposure during the Exile itself, not under Persian rule. Lilith (Isaiah 34:14) is the Mesopotamian Lilitu, and Babylonian demonology (Lamashtu, Pazuzu, the utukku) was already rich on its own. Where Zoroastrian influence is a stronger case is angels as named individuals with defined roles (Michael, Gabriel, hierarchies), which show up for the first time in post-exilic texts like Daniel, plausibly modeled on the Amesha Spentas and Yazatas after contact with Achaemenid Persia. Same goes for full cosmic dualism, a Satan as an independent adversarial being rather than a role in the divine court (as in Job or Zechariah, where "satan" is a title, not a name).
It's a big topic on its own, deserving separate treatment. I deliberately scoped this piece to the older, pre-exilic layer (the El/YHWH merger through Josiah's reform).
For what it's worth, the piece isn't arguing for a single external source anyway: Canaanite (El, Baal, Asherah), Mesopotamian (the Flood mirrors Atrahasis/Gilgamesh, the creation account echoes the Enuma Elish, plus the exile-era demonology above), Egyptian, and later Persian and Hellenistic layers all leave fingerprints at different points. Judaism's formation looks less like one merger and more like several centuries of absorbing and reworking whatever was around.