Preliim Research Topics

Topic #1 Venice Italy

I went to Venice this summer on a vacation. It is the most unique city that I have ever been to. While there I learned a lot about the general history but not a lot about specifics. They say that the city is built in the lagoon in order to make it easier to defend attacks. Is there not a better place than the lagoon? The water presents all sorts of problems, for example we learned about how the sewer backs up into the town squares during high tide, I would also think that there is a lot of rot, mold and mildew growing everywhere. How did the builder account for the rot and things, how did they account for the movement and sinking of the ground. A lot of the buildings have been standing for hundreds of years so whatever they did must have worked pretty well. How can the tiny islands support the huge buildings and bell towers? Is that water really as dirty as it looks? Venice was a lot of fun and I hope to go back someday but I would like to know a lot more about its history and find out why exactly they thought it would be best to build the city in a lagoon. While my fiancée says they wanted it to be the most romantic city in the world I don't think that was the builder intension, however it only happened much more recently by accident.

Topic #2 Machu Picchu

After doing a little research, mainly to find out how to spell the name I found out that Machu Picchu is a city that was built by the Inca empire approximately 1400AD. I think this is interesting because it is this city that was built on a mountain 8000 feet above sea level. While locals knew about the site it was not known to the western world until the early 1900's. How did this stay a secret for so long? Why did the locals want to keep it under wraps? This topic could branch out into a much wider one with the addition on the Inca Empire, who were they, where did they come from, what happened to them, why did they build this magnificent city on a mountain top? I really like the photos that I see of Machu Picchu with the stone ruins sticking out of the green vegetation surrounded by beautiful mountains. I am sure that I have seen pictures of the city in text books ad such but I was never really interested in it because I really didn't know what it was. I saw a little thing about it on a National Geographic show, it was not about Machu Picchu but about something else entirely with just a short blurb about the mountain top city. I would like to know if the drug cartels make this a dangerous area to visit, more about the local economy and just how do you get to the top? Maybe you have to ride one of the scary looking South American buses with too many people stuffed in there driven by a crazy manic on roads that are way too small and narrow to handle such a vehicle. I hope not, we had some bus rides of terror while in Italy and I don't want to do