What was the purpose of the bricola in the Venetian Lagoon?

Question

What was the purpose of the bricola in the Venetian Lagoon?

Answer 1

Navigation amid the mud:

With the lagoon being so shallow, vaporetti and other larger boats must travel in dredged navigation channels to avoid run-ins with mudflats and sandbanks. These channels are marked with clusters of pilings such as the bricola and dama.   All are numbered and marked on nautical charts, and some have lights to make the channel boundaries visible at night. Jan Morris, travel writer and author of The World of Venice, warns:

"If you keep very close to the bricole, you are usually safe; but not always, for sometimes their positioning is disconcertingly precise, and if you are a few inches on the wrong side--splosh, there you are again, up to your knees in mud, and pushing from the stern. There are said to be 20,000 bricole in the Venetian lagoon. Some are precariously rotting, and look as though generations of water-rats have nibbled their woodwork. One or two have little shrines upone them, dear to the artists and poets of the nineteenth century ('Around her shrine no eartly blossoms blow, No footsteps frent the pathway to and fro'). Many are used by lovers, anglers and bathing boys as mooring piles for their boats: and one of the most curious sights of the lagoon is offered by those gondoliers who, to while away a blazing holiday, run their gondolas upon a convenient mud-bank and take their families paddling, leaving their q***r-prowed craft gasping and stranded on the mud, fenced by the gaunt stockade of the bricole."